The lights dim on a Broadway legend

 

 Blue Moon takes a tightly focused look at a humiliating final chapter in the life of Lorenz Hart, the fabled lyricist whose 20-year collaboration with composer Richard Rogers produced such hit tunes as Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, I Didn’t Know What Time It Was, Thou Swell, My Funny Valentine, and Blue Moon. 

  An alcoholic who became a prominent figure in the history of Broadway musicals, Hart died in 1943 at the age of 48. By then his partnership with Rogers, who owed his career to Hart, had deteriorated, and Rogers had begun collaborating with a new partner, Oscar Hammerstein.

   Set on the opening night of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, Blue Moon takes place in Sardi’s, a renowned Theater District restaurant where Rogers, Hammerstein. and other luminaries gather for a post-opening party.

   Embittered wit makes fine fuel for a drama, and Ethan Hawke makes the most of it, continuing a series of movies he has made with director Richard Linklater, notably Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2024), Before Midnight (2013), and the masterwork Boyhood (2014). 

    His hairline pushed to drastic levels of recession, Hawke turns Hart into a witty, talkative, and at times, movingly vulnerable figure who despises Oklahoma!. Hart expresses disdain for any title that requires an exclamation point to assert itself, deriding the show’s romanticized serving of middle-American corn.

     Hawke owns most of the movie’s dialogue, and, in some ways, Blue Moon can be viewed as a monologue with supporting characters, notably the bartender (Bobby Cannavale), who treats Hart’s claims at newfound sobriety with gentle derision. Andrew Scott signs on as Rogers, a composer who makes it clear that Hart’s drunken unreliability ruined their collaboration; and Simon Delaney plays Hammerstein as a man trying his best to be deferential toward a contemptuous Hart.

      But the key supporting role belongs to Margaret Qualley, who appears as Elizabeth Weiland, a 20-year-old Yale student who becomes an intoxicating love interest for the bisexual Hart, who — in this telling — turns her into a kind of redemptive presence who could love him in a way that no one else ever had. That's what he wants.

       Qualley’s performance reveals a student who  appreciates Hart’s genius, but also sees him as a stepping stone for a career in the theater. In a lengthy confession to Hart about how she spent the night of her 20th birthday, Elizabeth rejects the lyricist in a way that’s devastating to him, all the worse because her dismissal is couched in admiration and respect.

        Like many of the moments in Blue Moon, the scene brings Hart's humiliation into painful focus.   Hawke makes us understand that despite his self-aggrandizing pronouncements, Hart realizes the pathetic state into which he had fallen.

       Considering Hart’s theatrical background and the movie’s narrow focus, I wondered whether Blue Moon might not have worked better as a play. Linklater and cinematographer Shane F. Kelly mostly defeat the limitations of a single-setting story dominated by a character whose ability to annoy others sometimes spills off the screen, irritating us.

      Still, Blue Moon showcases a memorable Hawke performance as Hart marinates his talent in bitterness and rue. Hart, by the way, says he hates Blue Moon -- the song, not the movie -- which became one of his most popular creations.

        

  

Pedro Almodovar visits the Old West

 It's hardly a surprise that director Pedro Almodovar, once regarded as the gifted and undisputed bad boy of Spanish cinema, has decided to make a film about gay gunslingers in the Old American West. Surprisingly, though, Strange Way of Life, a  31-minute, English-language short doesn't  go much of anywhere. Those familiar with Almodovar's work know him as a visual master whose films brilliantly  meld design and meaning. He’s an ardent proponent of entertaining the eye in ways that serve both the worlds and the characters he creates. You'll see some of that in Strange Way of Life, but there's not much more to consider about the movie. Ethan Hawke stars as a bitter, tormented sheriff who reunites with a former lover (Pedro Pascal) after 25 years. Jake (Hawke) has a sexual reunion with Pascal's Silva, but resists taking things further. A strained subplot revolves around Jake's duty to track his sister-in-law's killer (George Steane). The killer happens to be Silva's son. Silva argues that Jake should allow the young man to flee to Mexico. Almodovar includes a flashback to the Wild Bunch days Jake and Silva once shared. Viewers may have seen the subject of gay men in macho worlds better developed in Brokeback Mountain and more recently in The Power of the Dog.  Hawke, however, brings the force of severity to the lawman role Jack feels compelled to play. Strange Way of Life tries for the poignance that stems from recognizing roads not taken. But the movie might be confused with the sizzle reel for a feature-length movie that never materialized.

Strange Way of Life is being released theatrically on a double bill with The Human Voice, another short film by Almodovar. First released in 2020, The Human Voice stars Tilda Swinton in an adaptation of a play by Jean Cocteau. I haven’t seen it.

A kid tires to outwit a serial killer

    A small point but ...

    The Black Phone takes place in North Denver in 1978. In an early scene, we see an abusive father reading a copy of The Rocky Mountain News, the now-defunct newspaper where I worked as a film critic for 27 years. 

     Nice touch, I thought. Setting the movie in 1978 allowed The Rocky, as those of us who worked at the paper fondly referred to it, to live again.

     But wait. In The Black Phone, the paper appears as a broadsheet. The Rocky was a tabloid. 

     Few will care or even notice but I wish the filmmakers had provided the full satisfaction of seeing the paper fully exhumed on screen.

    Now that I've gotten that out of my system, the rest of the  movie:

    Director Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Deliver Us From Evil, and two Dr. Strange movies) tells the story of 13-year-old Finney (Mason Thames), a kid who's kidnapped by a serial killer (Ethan Hawke) who imprisons the boy in a dingy basement. 

   As it turns out Finney's fierce younger sister Gwen  (Madeleine McGraw) can dream things that are real. She ardently prays to Jesus, requesting that he grant her the dreams that will enable her to locate her brother.

    If you're a Hawke fan like me, you'll probably want to know that Hawke spends most of the movie behind a grotesque horned mask with interchangeable parts: A leering rictus of a smile can be replaced by a scowling frown.

    Hawke plays The Grabber, a fiend who has been abducting North Denver boys and killing them. Posing as a magician, Grabber cruises the neighborhood in a black van filled with black balloons. 

    Before he's abducted, Finney has trouble with bullies at school. We'll learn that the movie will teach Finney to stand up for himself. Excuse me, but there had to be an easier way. Maybe a karate class.

    The soundproof basement where Finney is kept has one defining feature, a black rotary phone that, according to The Grabber, doesn't work. When the wall phone starts ringing, Derrickson creates mystery about exactly who's calling poor Finney. And how can he be getting calls from a long disconnected phone?

     The situation breeds a fair amount of suspense. We never know when The Grabber will unlock the cellar door and confront his prisoner, even as Finney searches for a way to escape.

    No fair telling more but the movie, based on a story by Joe Hill, makes sketchy work of an alcoholic dad (Jeremy Davies) who beats Gwen with a belt because she's starting to act like her mother, a troubled woman with clairvoyant powers who killed herself.

   The mixture of the supernatural (Gwen's dreams and those callers on the phone) and old-fashioned serial killing don’t totally mesh and the movie sometimes squanders credibility.

   No slouch when it comes to horror, Derrickson knows how to create a tension-breeding mood of menace. But jump scares, a couple of attempts at humor, and intermittent helpings of Hawke can't quite push the movie over the top.

   The movie, by the way, was filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina.

 

Bob's Cinema Diary 8/21/'20 -- 'Tesla' and 'African Violet'

Tesla

     For most Americans, the name Tesla refers to an electric vehicle that was brought to the market by Elon Musk. It’s also true that Nikola Tesla was an inventor who did pioneering work in the field of electricity. In Tesla,  a distractingly artsy offering from director Michael Almereyda, Ethan Hawke plays the reticent genius who got crosswise with Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan). Tesla's inventing life also intersected with both George Westinghouse (Jim Gaffigan) and J.P. Morgan (Donnie Keshawarz). Morgan’s daughter Anne (Eve Hewson) provides narration for a film that includes bold theatrical strokes and touches on Tesla’s relationship with actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan). Almereyda pushes the film's artifice to the forefront: Such cinematic sleight of hand can be entertaining but also can distance us from both the characters and the story. Hawke turns Tesla into an oddball genius while Almereyda adds anachronisms (Anne using a MacBook) and visual jests (Tesla and Edison shoving ice cream cones into each other’s faces). Not willing to settle for a standard biopic, Almereyda tries for ... well ... I'm not sure what he's trying for. The lighting is dim and so is the movie’s overall impact. Put another way, I'd rather have the car or maybe I'll take another look at The Current War (2017), a movie that deals with some of the same characters. Or maybe I'll just move on.

African Violet

        If you’re looking for a film that piles complication on complication, the Iranian import African Violet more than fills the bill. Director Mona Zandi Haghighi tells the story of a family in which conflict begins when Shokoo (Fatemeh Motamed-Aria) travels to a nursing home to retrieve her aging former husband (Reza Babak) and bring him to her home. The twist: Shokoo already has remarried and her current husband (Saeed Aghakhani) isn’t especially happy about having a house guest, particularly because he and Shokoo’s first husband once were best friends. Although African Violet flirts with both sitcom and soap opera, the movie manages to tell a convincing story that touches on issues of mortality, loyalty, obligation, and jealousy. To make a living, Shokoo dyes yarn, which allows Haghighi to add some color but African Violet hardly qualifies as a triumph of style. And because the movie takes place away from Tehran, it has a slightly remote feeling. No matter.  Haghighi's obvious respect and affection for her characters carry the day.  

Deneuve goes full diva in 'The Truth'

Director Hirokazu Koreeda leaves Japan to direct The Truth, a movie about the relationship between an aging actress (Catherine Deneuve) and her grown daughter (Juliette Binoche).  Setting his story in Paris, Koreeda focuses on characters struggling to live with years of lies and resentments — all while simply trying to survive a family visit.

The story centers on Deneuve’s Fabienne Dangeville, a celebrated French actress who’s no longer landing the great roles. It seems as if Fabienne was written for Deneuve who takes over the part with easy command and flashes of callous wit. Accustomed to getting her way, Fabienne refuses to be anything less than the center of attention, even when she’s playing a supporting role in a movie featuring an up-and-coming new actress (Manon Clavel).

Koreeda embeds the story's familial tensions in a typical scenario. Binoche’s Lumir, her American husband Hank (Ethan Hawke), and their young daughter (Clementine Grenier) arrive from the US to help celebrate the publication of Fabienne’s memoir. 

By trade, daughter and son-in-law instantly find themselves in competition with Fabienne. Lumir writes screenplays: Hank acts — although his career seems to be going nowhere and his battles with the bottle have made trips to rehab a regular feature on his calendar.

Lumir regards her mother’s autobiography as a self-aggrandizing work of fiction. Lumir finds Fabienne's attempts to portray herself as a devoted mother laughable. Fabienne never cared as much about her daughter as she did about her career.

Fabienne clearly expresses the priorities that govern her life; i.e., the truths that never made it into her book, which ironically she has entitled The Truth. Fabienne would rather be regarded as a good actress than a good mother, for example. She doesn’t allow for the possibility that one might be both.

The atmosphere isn't venomous, but no one escapes Fabienne's tendency to regard others as instruments of her will. Fabienne's long-time agent and adviser (Alain Libolt) must suffer the shame of never being mentioned in his client's book, for example.

To add a mirror-like twist, Koreeda takes us to the set of the new sci-fi movie on which Fabienne has begun work. She's playing the daughter of a mother who travels into space to avoid dying from a terminal disease. Fabienne portrays the daughter when she’s old, near death, and still dealing with a youthful mother who’s only able to visit Earth periodically. The neglectful mother is playing the neglected daughter.

A running theme of accusation also emerges. Fabienne once out-maneuvered a close friend — now deceased — out of a part that brought Fabienne a coveted Cesar Award. Lumir presses her mother to feel something akin to guilt. Fabienne will have none of it. For her, the world and its occupants exist primarily as source material for her work.

Those familiar with Koreeda’s movies (Shoplifters, After Life) know that he favors an unhurried style that allows an audience to get to know his characters. I wouldn’t say that The Truth represents Koreeda’s best work, but Koreeda knows how to put teeth into a drama that seldom erupts, bleeds, or screams. He may not go for the kill, but that doesn't mean he doesn't know where the wounds are.

More cinema diary: 4/24/19 -- Little Woods and Stockholm

Some weeks, the number of movies challenges even those of us who tend to review as much as possible. This is one of those weeks. As a result, I'm trying something a bit different; i.e., I'm going to write about as much as possible in the most efficient way. If it works, you may see this approach again. I'm calling it a "diary" even though it reflects nothing about my life -- other than the fact that much of it has been measured in movies. Make what you will of that.

Little Woods

With Tessa Thompson in a starring role, Little Woods takes a grim but clear-eyed look at the difficulties of surviving in a small North Dakota town where the oil workers use opioids to stave off pain and just about everyone struggles to make ends meet. Thompson's Ollie is just finishing a stint on probation after being jailed for transporting drugs across the Canadian border. She's committed to building a new life and hopes to move to surroundings that are less conducive to the kind of dead-end living that trapped her in the first place. But Ollie's efforts are thwarted by her half-sister (Lily James), a young mother with a talent for trouble. Threated with losing the house where her late mother lived and worried about her sister's second pregnancy, Ollie does the one thing she pledged to avoid: Sell drugs. Little Woods hardly qualifies as a festival of joy: James's Deb barely scrapes by. She lives in a trailer in a parking lot; we know it's only a matter of time until that situation goes bad. The best reason to see Little Woods stems from Thompson's performance, which finds her branching out from previous work in movies such as Thor: Ragnarok and Sorry to Bother You. Little Woods adds tension to the proceedings by giving Ollie a week to raise enough money to save her mother's house from foreclosure. Some stretches of director Nia DaCosta's feature debut tend to drag. Still, Little Woods stands as a serious attempt to explore lives that seldom find their way to the screen, and Thompson's performance keeps the wheels turning.

Stockholm

Regular readers of my reviews know that I think Ethan Hawke was robbed of an Oscar. The injustice began when Hawke wasn't even nominated for a 2019 Academy Award for his performance as a guilt-ridden pastor in First Reformed. Awards or no, Hawke makes interesting choices about the movies in which he appears. In Stockholm, the story of a real-life bank heist that took place in Sweden in 1973, Hawke plays Lars Nystrom, a jacked-up criminal who invades a bank where he holds a couple of employees hostage. Lars wants $1 million and insists on obtaining the release of his bank-robbing pal Gunnar Sorensson (Mark Strong). The movie is meant to illustrate something about Stockholm syndrome, the way hostages can come to sympathize with their captors. To that end, Stockholm builds a relationship between Lars and Bianca (Noomi Repace), one of his hostages, a vulnerable but savvy bank employee. Director Robert Budreau, who worked with Hawke on Born to Be Blue, treats the robbery as an example of bumbling lunacy on the part of the thieves, Stockholm's stolid chief of police (Christopher Heyerdahl) and the Swedish prime minister (Shanti Roney) who refuses to let Lars leave with the hostages. The supporting cast acquits itself well, but Stockholm belongs to Hawke, who creates a portrait of a self-dramatizing felon with a limited capacity for planning and a tendency to panic. Lars even wears a costume to his criminal outing, entering the bank in a leather suit, cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat. If you've been reading this and thinking about 1975's Dog Day Afternoon, I don't blame you. It's difficult to watch Stockholm without remembering director Sidney Lumet's look at a bank hostage situation in New York. In that movie, Al Pacino played a thief with an agenda. Here, Hawke follows suit, capturing the chaotic pathos in Lars' misguided fever dream of a heist.

He sang, drank and died young

Ethan Hawke directs a movie about country singer Blaze Foley, a man who may not have gotten his due..

Some musicians play the blues. Some live the blues. Some do both.

I guess you could say that Blaze Foley falls into the latter category. Foley, who acquired an admiring reputation among country music aficionados, probably would have drunk himself into an early grave had he not been shot by the son of one of his friends. He died in 1989 at the age of 40.

An actor of estimable intelligence and wide-ranging interests, Ethan Hawke has directed a film about Foley's life and music, both of which find ample expression in Blaze.

Played by singer Ben Dickey, Foley comes off as a bearish man of contradictions: shy, belligerent, gifted and funny. He can wring laughs out of a folksy story or sell the sadness in a song. Foley was known for tunes such as If I Could Fly and Clay Pigeons; his tunes were recorded by artists such as Merle Haggard, Lyle Lovett and John Prine.

As a kind of framing device, Hawke shows singer Townes Van Zandt (played by Charlie Sexton) during a radio interview. The interviewer (a barely seen Hawke) receives an unexpected lesson in the history of Blaze Foley, a singer he's never heard of. Then again, lots of people haven't heard of Foley, who never really occupied country music's center stage.

In some ways, then, Blaze becomes the story of a gifted singer/songwriter who could be as charming as he was off-putting. Just about everything Foley did was accompanied by his three most reliable companions: liquor, cigarettes, and pot.

Hawke also spends time on Foley's relationship with Sybil Rosen (Alia Shawkat), an actress who wrote a memoir about her life with Blaze. It would take quite a woman to keep up with Blaze and Sybil was that woman -- at least until the relationship fell apart. Early on, the two share their romance while living in a Georgia tree house. They met at a Georgia artists colony.

In one of the movie's funniest scenes, Sybil and Blaze visit her Jewish parents, a couple that's not accustomed to people such as Blaze. Worried about having non-Jewish grandchildren, Dad questions Blaze about his commitment to Christianity. Let's just say Blaze's answer wouldn't have evoked cheers from evangelicals.

The real Rosen plays her mother in this scene as an accommodating Blaze and an assertive Sybil deal with a moment that's awkward under the best of circumstances. If you want to stretch your mind a bit try to imagine Thanksgiving dinner at the Rosen household.

Foley's hardscrabble childhood comes into view when he and Sybil visit Blaze's father, a once-feared man who has slipped into senescence in a nursing home. Kris Kristofferson makes an impact in a small role as Foley's father. Age seems to have taken all the mean out of the man.

The best parts of the movie involve music or plain old hanging out. When they're not playing, the musicians talk, telling stories in colorful fashion. It's a pleasure to listen to these guys.

I wish I could say that I didn't get a little tired of all the movie's meandering but Hawke shows no interest in grabbing us by the collar and pulling us through a movie composed mostly of side trips. In one of them, Richard Linklater, Steve Zahn, and Sam Rockwell play Texans who want to push Foley toward stardom. You don't need to be a fortune teller to know that their plan won't work. Foley will find a way to mess things up.

At one point, Foley says that he's not interested in being a star; he wants to be a legend. I don't know if he became either, but for the length of Hawke's film, he's the center of a sauntering look at the life of a man who other musicians respected, who left the world a few songs and a ton of stories -- many of them quite entertaining.

A doc about The King and his kingdom

If you are unable to see Elvis Presley as a symbol of everything that's both right and wrong with America, you may not get much out of The King, director Eugene Jarecki's far-reaching and often incisive documentary. Although Jarecki includes biographical information about Presley's rocket-ride of a life, he also uses Elvis as a launch point for larger observations about cultural appropriation, American bloat and other matters that, in sum, paint a portrait of American life on the downswing. Some of the interviews in The King take place in the back seat of Elvis's 1963 Rolls-Royce, a car that breaks down during Jarecki's travels, resulting in a bit of unplanned irony. Among the people Jarecki interviews, Ethan Hawke stands out as both knowledgeable and insightful. We also get music, including a show-stopping performance from EmiSunshine and the Rain. Jarecki bites off so much that he almost tears the film apart as we try — not always successfully — to digest its broad array of thematic elements. And, of course, it's all supported by the familiar arc of Elvis's story, a tale that follows him from dirt-poor beginnings in Tupelo, Miss. to the glitz and indulgence of Las Vegas. Rapper and producer Chuck D sounds one of the movie's strongest notes, noting that he’s not about to jump on the Elvis train. Elvis found his style by listening to black music, and many feel he never acknowledged the debt. These days, I'm up for some serious pessimism, so The King hooked me with its sweeping observations and culturual criticisms. Watching The King is a bit like sitting at the end of the bar while a slightly tipsy man rails about everything under the sun. The difference: Much of The King proves interesting and some it, even salient. That's because The King is as much about the kingdom as it is about Elvis’s pop-cultural royalty.

A cleric caught in a web of torment

Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, a movie with which to reckon.

In director Paul Schrader's First Reformed, Ethan Hawke plays a minister who presides over the First Reformed Church, a once-proud but diminished church in upstate New York. Hawke's Reverend Toller wears a constricting clerical collar that seems more of a choice than a requirement. When he's outside of the church a long black overcoat gives him an ominous look, as if he's wrapped himself in a cloud of heavy gloom.

Toller stands on an altar built from personal guilt. As a former military chaplain, he sold family tradition to his son, urging him to enlist in the military. The young man followed his father's advice and was killed in Iraq. Toller's wife subsequently left him. From the look of things, Toller has spent the ensuing years turning his life into a form of punishing penance.

Toller's church is part of a larger organization run by a minister (Cedric Kyles, a.k.a. Cedric the Entertainer) who understands the business of operating a mega church and wants to create a successful event as First Reformed approaches its 250th anniversary, an occasion that's to be celebrated with a reconsecration ceremony.

Worried about Toller's obvious depression, Kyles' Pastor Jeffers cautions that even Jesus didn't spend all his time in the Garden of Gethsemane. He thinks Toller should lighten up.

Both Toller and his church seem to be stuck in a harsh spiritual winter. Once a stop on the Underground Railroad and a bastion of fiery abolitionist morality, First Reformed now tries to get by with a depleted gift shop. It has become a minor tourist attraction.

Schrader broadens the movie's thematic reach by linking the future of the church to ecological plunder. Jeffers and Toller are supported by Balq Industries, a company run by Edward Balq (Michael Gaston), a businessman who represents a more-or-less American attitude about separating business practices from religious dictates that might -- if taken too seriously -- interfere with those same practices. Balq is one of the country’s major polluters.

Sparse and austere, First Reformed does have a plot of sorts. Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a young pregnant wife turns up at First Reformed to talk to Toller. It turns out Mary's husband (Philip Ettinger) does not want her to bring a baby into a world that he believes is headed toward an irrevocable environmental catastrophe. Mary wants Toller to convince her husband to support her pregnancy.

Toller visits Ettinger’s Michael to see what he can do to persuade the young man that all hope is not lost. Schrader then does something truly rare in movies: He allows two characters -- Toller and Michael -- to engage in an extended philosophical conversation, the kind with consequences. If the world is bleak, diminished and joyless, can survival still have any meaning?

Michael soon answers the question for himself by blowing his brains out with a rifle.

Michael, who has flirted with ecoterrorism, serves as a kind of catalyst that pushes Toller deeper into a torment that's expressed in a journal that he keeps and which serves as the movie's narration. Toller, by the way, already is suffering from a serious but unspecified illness that he insists on ignoring. He urinates blood, the life leaking out of him.

Toller apparently has had a fleeting affair with a choir director (Victoria Hill) who clearly cares about him and fears that he’s unraveling. In a moment of swift and perhaps unforgivable cruelty, Toller rejects her.

The increasingly distraught Toller begins to wonder whether Michael may have been right. Perhaps an act of terror, namely a suicide bombing, is the only way to draw attention to the monstrous crimes that are being committed against God's creation.

Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver, is no stranger to compelling but tormented characters. Although all the actors in First Reformed are good, Schrader puts the movie squarely on Hawke's shoulders. It's no easy job. Hawke plays a character who lives on a fault line of irreconcilable contradictions.

At one point, Toller even offers a version of the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald definition of a first-rate intelligence: "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

In Toller's case, those contradictory ideas involve pain and pleasure, love and the futility, guilt and redemption. Schrader pushes those ideas to extremes that result in an ending which is both unforgettable and which surely will puzzle many viewers. I won't describe it here but I believe it is intended as a moment in which Toller's fragmented soul achieves its unity.

The movie's images are spartan and purposefully depleted -- right up until the point when Schrader includes a fantasy scene in which Toller and Mary float over the world, a visual precis of the movie’s diagnosis of the material world that begins with a natural idyll and ends with ecological catastrophe.

For those who are new to Schrader's work, it's worth knowing that when he as a young film critic, he wrote an important book: Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dryer. Those familiar with that book and with the work of the aforementioned directors will note the way their influences play out in First Reformed. (The book has been republished with a new forward and with Schrader's observations about additional directors.)

The style to which Schrader refers has to do with holding images until they teeter on the edge of boredom, of not providing a lot of visual cues but demanding that viewers explore the images that are put in front of them, of limiting the use of music so that when it’s heard, its impact is heightened, of providing eventual release for emotions that have been tamped down throughout.

Schrader, a man of serious concerns, has managed to spend a life in film. He has written for Scorsese -- not only Taxi Driver, but Raging Bull (as co-writer), The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead. His own movies include American Gigolo, Blue Collar, a remake of Cat People, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, and Affliction.

Schrader can be a confounding figure who both understands Hollywood and who follows an auteur's lonely path. I'd be lying if I told you that I totally "get" Schrader, but I will tell you that First Reformed stands as a stark work that resounds with cinematic echoes (Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, for example) and yet feels rooted in the present moment of threat, disunity and unbridgeable moral gaps. It is a work that isn't' afraid to look at something most movies try their best to avoid: deep despair.

More tales from New York City

Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan finds amusement in its characters' pretensions.

Watching writer/director Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan, I wondered whether something magical hadn'toccurred. Had Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach merged into an entirely new third person?

You all know Allen, and are familiar with his New York state of mind. The Baumbach connection requires only a little more explanation. Baumbach (Frances Ha and Mistress America) has worked with Greta Gerwig on several films, and Gerwig plays a pivotal role in Maggie's Plan, a New York-based movie in which the dialogue sometimes sounds as if it's standing on Allen's shoulders.

But Miller has her own view, one that sees characters as trapped by their pretensions and by relationships that are swamped by ego and need. As such, Maggie's Plan is a mostly pleasing seriocomic take on contemporary relationships.

Gerwig portrays Maggie, a young woman who has created one of those fuzzy, new-economy livelihoods: She tries to link artists with the commercial world.

Though single, Maggie wants a child. She arranges to acquire the seed of a sperm donor, a fellow named Guy (Travis Fimmel) who's carving out a career as a Brooklyn pickle maker. The Bavarian, he says, qualifies as one of his best.

Maggie's best pals (Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph) are a cynical couple who already have a child and seem immune to the massive child-centeredness of so many new parents.

Of course, Maggie's path to motherhood can't be simple. Just before she begins negotiating the tricky procedure of self-impregnation, she meets John (Ethan Hawke), a "ficto-anthropology" professor who's working on a novel.

John has needs that aren't being satisfied by his wife (Julianne Moore), a Columbia professor with a major academic career. He also has two kids.

John asks Maggie to read the first chapter of his novel. She does. Because she seems to understand his authorial intentions, he falls for her. She falls for him, probably because she's buoyed by his reliance on her. She's needed.

Miller skips John's break-up, and moves ahead several years. Now married, John and Maggie have a daughter of their own, and Maggie often finds herself caring for John's kids from his previous marriage.

Nothing like marriage, kids and family entanglements to take the bloom off the romantic rose.

Maggie begins to see that she has turned herself into a capable (her word) helpmate who nurtures John's ego and tends to his domestic needs.

The rest of the plot should be discovered in a theater, but know that it's not the story that makes Maggie's Plan appealing. Rather, the actors and a collection of amusing small moments create a welcome sense that Maggie's Plan is as much a comedy of manners as a rom-com that revolves around another indeterminate Millennial woman.

Gerwig plays Maggie as an apparently guileless woman who might be the most unprovocative dresser (long skirts or dresses, sweaters and loafers) to appear in a movie for some time. Maggie looks like a woman who's doing a Diane Keaton impersonation, but can't get it right.

As an insecure academic with literary aspirations, Hawke is funny and credible. Hawke's John never seems to know where he's going, unless its on a journey into his own head.

But it falls to Moore to deliver a comic masterpiece of a performance as Georgette, a Danish woman with a bizarre European accent and a personality composed of acute angles. Massively stilted, Georgette probably sounds like she's giving a lecture even when she's brushing her teeth.

Miller explores what it's like to fall in and out love in what many aptly have described as a mash-up of stylistic contexts: from screwball comedy to personal drama.

Whatever it is, Maggie's Plan shows us something about the way the omelettes of contemporary lives are made -- by, as the saying goes, breaking lots of eggs.

In Miller's case, many of those eggs are cracked directly over the characters' heads.

Ethan Hawke excels as Chet Baker

A jazzy rendition of a musician's life.

Jazz musician and singer Chet Baker was 58 when he passed away in 1988. He was high, and apparently fell out of the window of his Paris hotel. Baker's tumultuous life helped invent what has become a nearly cliched profile: A hard-living, heroin-addicted musician can't seem to separate self-expression from self-destruction.

Director Robert Budreau's Born to Be Blue tries to freshen the story by mixing scenes of a movie Baker is making about himself (the film never happened) with scenes that reflect Baker's artistically rich but dissolute life.

I don't know enough about Baker's life to tell you how close Budreau has gotten in terms of detail, but he certainly gives us a strong feeling for the kind of person Baker was, a task that receives a mighty boost Ethan Hawke's appropriately elusive performance as Baker.

Hawke plays Baker as a trumpet player of wavering confidence and staggering vulnerabilities, a man who was difficult for others to grasp. Maybe he wanted it that way.

Baker, of course, did plenty of hard living, and his approach to women wasn't exactly monastic. Budreau focuses on one woman.

Baker begins a relationship with Jane (Carmen Ejogo), an actress he meets while shooting the movie about his life. Ejogo, who played Loretta Scott King in Selma, is a wonder as the woman who tolerates Baker's addiction and immaturity -- until she no longer can.

The movie also suggests the tension between black and white musicians that sometimes surfaced in the jazz world. Early on, Miles Davis (Kedar Brown) refuses to acknowledge Baker as anything more than a musician who plays "sweet." Davis didn't mean it as a compliment.

But if Baker's music was sweet, whatever was happening inside his head wasn't quite so placid: Baker founders throughout much of Born to Be Blue.

At one point, he has his front teeth knocked out by a drug dealer to whom he owes money: He then must learn to learn to play his trumpet with false teeth, no easy task.

Hawke hits all the right notes, and he and Ejogo play a tipsy, sometimes fractious duet in a semi-successful movie whose best moments stand out like memorable solos in a long and somewhat scattered set.

A brilliant piano teacher at work

Actor Ethan Hawke moves behind the camera for Seymour: An Introduction, a documentary about a great piano teacher. Seymour Bernstein, now in his 80s, quit playing piano in public at the age of 50. Bernstein was talented and his performances were well-received, but he had grown tired of the commercial trappings that surround even the world of classical music. Bernstein, who also suffered from stage fright, wanted to play because he loved music and because he believed that getting deeper into music was a way of getting deeper into life. Bernstein left the stage and turned to teaching, which he clearly loves. When Hawke, who appears briefly in the film, met Bernstein, he shared some of his concerns about acting and life. Hawke says Bernstein was more helpful to him than anyone in his own field. That's not surprising because Bernstein seems to be an exceptional sort, instructing both at the technical (craft) and artistic (life) levels required by those who want to push themselves musically. Hawke watches Bernstein teach and arranges for the pianist to play in public at Steinway Hall, but it's Bernstein's reflections that give the movie its life -- not only because he's a master teacher, but because he enhances our understanding and appreciation both of music and of what might be called "a musical life."

An amazing portrait of boyhood

Boyhood -- director Richard Linklater's 12-year portrait of contemporary childhood -- stands as a time-capsule-worthy movie about the kind of fragmented family lives that have become increasingly common.

Linklater's movie may not be flawless, but it's brave and thorough, and it may make you realize just how difficult growing up has become. I don't know if Boyhood describes a new normal, but it's an eminently credible look at the realities that confront an awful lot of today's kids.

The story focuses on Mason, following him from the age of six to the age of 18. Mason's the son of parents who married too early and subsequently divorced. He lives with his mother, who has notably bad judgment when it comes to men, eventually entangling herself in a second marriage to an abusive drunk.

During his young life, Mason is forced to change residences and schools. He must also navigate a relationship with his biological father, a good-hearted guy who hasn't really grown up himself.

Linklater shot his movie in 39 days over the course of 12 years, employing the same cast throughout the entire project. As a result, we get to watch the young people in the movie grow and mature, a process that takes them through stages of cuteness and ungainliness and finally deposits them on the cusp of adulthood.

We feel as if we really know these youngsters, and as they get older, we're constantly looking for traces of the children they once were. We live with these characters.

To his credit, Linklater doesn't fill the movie's 2 1/2 hours with wall-to-wall confrontation. Although there are a couple of tough emotional outbursts, Linklater mostly allows his characters to live their lives unhurriedly, often struggling to do the best they can.

In that sense, Boyhood is a movie about the ways in which we learn to live with imperfection, to adjust to it as time passes.

Young Ellar Coltrane provides the glue that holds Boyhood together. He gives the movie a strong center as Mason's moves toward young adulthood.

Linklater's daughter Lorelei, who plays Mason's older sister, is equally good, although her character doesn't get equal time with Mason.

In an early scene, Lorelei Linklater and Coltrane battle in the backseat of a car in ways that will be distressingly familiar to any parent who has lived through similar moments with a contentious set of siblings.

The rest of the cast does strong work, particularly Patricia Arquette as Mom and Hawke as Dad. Marco Perella plays another man in Mom's life, a guy who tries to over-control his kids because he can't control himself. His alcoholism eventually turns mean.

Mom later takes up with an Iraq war vet, another guy who's clueless when it comes to women and kids.

It's fair, I think, to regard Boyhood as a collection of telling moments: a kid watching his parents argue and us knowing that the moment is spring-loaded to have later impact, for example.

Late in the movie, we see Mason's first serious relationship with a girl (Zoe Graham).

As I watched Boyhood, I kept wondering when melodrama would strike, when the dramatic chickens would come home to roost. That never really happens.

Yes, circumstances can be difficult, but the characters muddle on. Some fall by the wayside -- or are pushed. Some grow and prosper. Mom, for example, becomes more independent, although she also sees the hollowness in a life that has left her on her own.

Hawke's character finds a second wife and starts a new family. He puts irresponsibility behind him, and trades his beloved GTO for a mini-van.

Throughout, Dad remains in touch with the kids from his first family. A scene in which he takes them to meet his new wife's parents typifies the way Linklater plays against expectations.

Grandma and Grandpa are Bible-toting churchgoers, and Grandpa's a gun enthusiast, but they're also people with a natural sense of generosity.

When Grandpa (Richard Andrew Jones) gives 15-year-old Mason one of this prized shotguns (his father gave it to him), the moment becomes truly touching.

Shifting cultural references pop up as we go. We get scenes during the height of the Harry Potter craze. Cell phones crop up. Musical tastes evolve. Mason changes hair styles, and eventually dons earrings.

But Linklater seems significantly less interested in shifting styles than in the substance of the lives he's observing.

When Mason begins to mature, he becomes interested in pursuing a career in art photography. It's clear that he's dealing with adolescent confusion, but also that he's smart and sensitive.

Besides, there could be a good side to the emotional distance that Mason learns to maintain, a hint of wariness that should serve him well in a world that's not always waiting for us with open arms.

In its later stages, Boyhood begins to feel like a talk-heavy Linklater movie in the Slacker and Waking Life vein: Characters reveal themselves (or not) through conversational riffs. And the movie overstays its welcome with a prolonged final act.

But taken as a whole, Boyhood represents an impressive achievement, a beautifully observed portrait of contemporary life, rooted in Texas but not confined to the peculiarities of the Lone Star state.

For all of its difficult detours, Boyhood qualifies as an optimistic movie, expressing Linklater's belief that most of us survive, get along and do our best keep going. We try.

Jesse and Celine on the rocks?

Talk is the action in director Richard Linklater's gem-like Before Midnight.
Director Richard Linklater's Before Midnight is a welcome rarity, a movie that digs deeply into the core of a relationship that's been going on for almost 20 years. At a time when insipid rom-coms tend to dominate the nation's multiplexes, a smart relationship movie can seem like a cultural antidote: fragile, tentative and absolutely essential.

This third in a series of films about two lovers who first met in Vienna in 1995 (Before Sunrise) and who reunited in Paris in 2004 (Before Sunset) continues and perhaps even strengthens Linklater's talky, introspective inquiry into the nature of love between two people who can't always get out of their own heads.

As those familiar with the previous two movies know, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) have had their problems: However, travel deprivation isn't one of them. This time, Jesse and Celine, now married to each other, find themselves in beautiful Greece with their twin girls.

The movie begins with Jesse feeling blue and a bit guilty because his son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) is about to rejoin his mother in the U.S. Looming separation triggers one of Jesse's nagging issues: Although he and Celine have two beautiful daughters, Jesse hasn't been the father Hank, his offspring from a previous marriage, needs or deserves.

Jesse's talk about moving back to Chicago upsets Celine, who believes she's already sacrificed a lot for the sake of their relationship. A dedicated environmentalist, the French-born Celine just has landed a job that allows her to pursue her career in an ideal European setting. The last thing she wants is to uproot and move to the U.S.

Say this: Jesse and Celine know how to suffer in comfort. They're the guests of a novelist (played by the cinematographer Walter Lassally) who has invited Jesse and his brood to spend time at his very pleasant villa.

Linklater is one of the few directors working today who makes no bones about directing talk-heavy films. Conversations evolve during a meal that Jesse and Celine share with a group of friends. Jesse and Celine stake out more turf, as they stroll about town. A hotel room provides the setting for what begins as an opportunity for romantic renewal but quickly degenerates into a fight.

Jesse and Celine's marriage may be shaky, but Before Midnight isn't a hand-wringing, soul-rending look at a marriage in its death throes. As was the case in the previous two movies, there's an exploratory quality to the conversations between Jesse and Celine, although this time, there's also plenty of anger, particularly on Celine's part.

Meanwhile, Jesse -- who earns his living as a writer -- mulls ideas for a new novel and continues his on-going inner monologue, which occasionally presents itself in the form of conversation with others.

Hawke and Delpy give such impressively naturalistic performances that they leave us hoping that Linklater will check in with Jesse and Celine again -- even though he's running out of times of day to provide these movies with names.

And keep this in mind: Despite the loose and deceptively informal nature of Before Midnight, it takes focus and discipline to keep a movie such as this feeling relaxed, unstudied and real.

'Sinister' falls short of great horror

A crime writer finds a story that's more than he bargained for.

A moderately successful author specializing in true crime books, moves to a small Pennsylvania town to investigate mysterious deaths in a family and the disappearance of their young daughter.

That's the set-up for Sinister, a horror movie that arrives in theaters bolstered by a fair number of positive early reviews. But for my money, Sinister undermines itself in ways that limit the power of its creepiness.

To begin with, it's highly unlikely that an author (played here by an overworked Ethan Hawke) of crime books would bring his wife and two school-aged children on a venture that requires him to deal with a ton of grisly material or that he would knowingly move into the house where the apparent crime occurred. In the movie, he does both.

Of course, that's precisely where Sinister wants to put Hawke's Ellison Oswalt. Why? Because as soon as Oswalt and his family move in, he finds a projector and a box full of Super-8 movies in the attic.

These home movies (another addition to the ever-growing found footage genre) show a variety of gruesome murders, beginning with the hanging of four members of the family that previously occupied the house.

Another movie shows a different family being bound, locked in their car with gas cans and set on fire. You get the idea: Each film provides a record of a horrific crime.

Director Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) has made a haunted house movie in which you may find the ghosts of previous horror. Sinister ends on a satisfactorily creepy note -- in no small part due to Christopher Young's eerie score -- but breaks little new ground either as psychologically-based horror or as a cautionary tale about the dangers of watching carnage on film.

On camera constantly, Hawke does his best to create a character who says he's after justice but who really longs for fame and fortune. Hawke's Oswalt thinks that the footage he's found in the attic will help him achieve his goal. He tells his wife (Juliet Rylance) that he's stumbled onto his In Cold Blood.

Movies such as Sinister require the presence of an expert on the occult. Vincent D'Onofrio portrays Sinister's version of that character, adding one fresh wrinkle. Oswalt and D'Onofrio's character never meet; they communicate via Skype.

James Ransone deserves mention for a nicely understated turn as a slightly goofy deputy who offers to help Oswalt with his research.

Let me tell you why I eventually stopped trying to suspend what was left of my crumbling disbelief. Whenever Oswalt suspects that an intruder has invaded his home during the night, he grabs a baseball bat and wanders around darkened rooms.

I get it. Derrickson obviously wants to make things as scary as possible, but please. The first thing we expect any person to do when investigating a possible intruder is (you guessed it) turn on the lights.

Sinister may be better made than the usual run of horror movies, and you almost can feel it trying to distinguish itself from the saw-and-gore pack. It's not without scares, but it's nothing to scream about, either.

Plenty of grit, but to what end?

Wesley Snipes/Don Cheadle, strong work in a flawed effort.

One cop (Ethan Hawke) needs money to buy a house. Another (Don Cheadle) wants a promotion that he believes will liberate him from the morally murky world of undercover work. A third cop (Richard Gere) maintains a safe distance from conflict because he has only seven days remaining until retirement.

Such is the setup for director Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest, a cop drama that commits a variety of big-screen felonies. Among them: The motivations given each character in a script by Michael C. Martin and Brad Caleb Kane tend to be over simplified, and a farfetched ending – bathed in the expected bloodshed – makes the entire movie feel contrived.

Fuqua, who directed Training Day, would seem the ideal candidate for getting the most out of Brooklyn's Finest, but the movie doesn't feel as if it has an overriding sense of purpose. Brooklyn's Finest doesn't fulfill the demands of either art or entertainment; it explores the down-and-dirty world of cops who've been tempted by corruption and, in some cases, have indulged their least honorable impulses, but it seems more interested in finding pumped-up drama than in unearthing any kind of truth.

A strong cast is supplemented by an appearance by Wesley Snipes, in what's being touted as a comeback performance. Snipes acquits himself well as a gangster who has won his release from prison thanks to an assist from Cheadle's character. Cheadle's Tango owed Snipes' Cas a favor, so he helped his buddy find a slick attorney who knew how to open slammer doors.

Cheadle gives his usually strong performance as a detective who's living with too much moral ambiguity. Hawke pushes himself to jittery extremes as Sal, a detective who's driven to do better by his family. But Gere seems wooden in this context; he's playing a cop with nothing in his life but vague retirement plans, an undistinguished record and a relationship with a hooker (Shannon Kane). (If you want to see Gere really handle the role of “dirty” cop go back to Mike Figgis' Internal Affairs (1990). Maybe Gere's better at police work in Los Angeles than in NYC.)

The supporting cast can't be faulted, although Lili Taylor is largely wasted as Sal's wife, a woman who's pregnant with twins. Will Patton plays the cop who keeps promising Cheadle's character a promotion, but never seems to deliver. And Ellen Barkin shows up in a quasi-comic role as a foul-mouthed federal agent who seems interested only in advancing her own career. Say this: Barkin refuses to get lost in an atmosphere where testosterone is the hormone of choice.

Watching Brooklyn's Finest is like watching lots of urban ingredients boil in a pot without ever figuring out exactly what dish is being cooked. The movie has plenty of hard-core urban dynamism, but – in the end (and especially at the end) – doesn't have much to show for it.