Hugh Grant takes a turn at horror

 

   Two young Mormon women on a mission knock on the door of a man who seems amenable to hearing their pitch. Acting the kindly older gentleman, the bespectacled fellow invites the evangelizing duo into his home for talk and a piece of freshly baked blueberry pie. 

 You needn't know much about movies or have seen the trailer for Heretic to guess that a downward spiral awaits.

  Notable for allowing Hugh Grant to display a smug, intellectualized form of evil.  Grant's Mr. Reed almost immediately begins challenging the faith of his visitors (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East), missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

    Mr. Reed revels in his well-honed mental agility. He claims to have spent years searching for the one true religion. He delights in debunking every religious idea he assumes the young missionaries take for granted. Mr. Reed even references Mormon material in his attempt to undermine the women's faith. 

    Grant seems to be having as much wicked fun as Mr. Reed. He delivers lengthy monologues, one of which is based on the idea that the game Monopoly qualifies as an apt metaphor for religion. He references Radio Head's music and speculates on how popular culture might one day evolve into religion. Could Jar Jar Binks be a holy figure in the future?

     All of this unfolds with an irreverence that's more witty than outrageous, and as Mr. Reed declaims, the personalities of the two women begin to clarify. Thatcher portrays Sister Barnes, who wasn't raised as a Mormon, smartly parries with Mr. Reed. Sister Paxton seems more reluctant to engage.

    Both women, of course, are terrified when they realize they’re locked in a house where Mr. Reed slowly reveals his sinister intentions. Oh, and by the way, no shy wife putters around the kitchen, as Mr. Reed initially claims, a ploy to calm any rising anxiety the women are sure to feel.

     Directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, co-writers with John Krasinski of A Quiet Place,  deftly set things in motion as we wait for the movie to bare its horror fangs. When we learn that Mr. Reed’s isolated home contains secret chambers, the aroma of conventional horror becomes too prominent to ignore.

     No fair telling more. Know, though, that Heretic stands a cut above typical Hollywood helpings of blood and guts. Too bad a wobbly third act feels like a betrayal of the  unease created of earlier scenes, which -- at least by horror standards -- prove refreshing. Heretic is at its creepy best when Mr. Reed wields his most powerful weapons: verbal assaults on his prey's sense of security.

The world of Merchant and Ivory

   The documentary Merchant Ivory may not be the place to look for definitive critical analysis of the work of Ismail Merchant (producer) and James Ivory (director, the duo that made a staggering 43 films between 1961 and 2007.

   Instead, director Stephen Soucy gives us an intimate look at a team composed of the meticulous, Oregon-bred Ivory and the audacious Merchant, born in India and raised as a Muslim. Soucy takes us on an informative, often revealing journey into Merchant/Ivory world. 

 Merchant and Ivory were best known for highly regarded costume dramas based on literary works such as A Room With A View (1986), Howards End (1992), and Remains of the Day (1993).  They brought a sense of literacy to art house audiences, as well as to a larger public that found the team's work beautiful and edifying. 

   Although the movie contains interviews with both Ivory and Merchant, who died in 2005 at the age of 68, it also brings insights from what could be called the Merchant/Ivory repertory company: Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves, Simon Callow, Vanessa Redgrave, Hugh Grant, Anthony Hopkins, and more.

  Packed with detail, Merchant Ivory's accomplishments are twofold: to serve as a reminder of the scope of what some regarded as prestige cinema. The documentary also reveals how two men -- often working with writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and composer Richard Robbins --  struggled to bring their pictures to the screen. 

   Not surprisingly, Merchant emerges as the dominant personality. He's described as a lovable rascal and conman with the nerve and faith required to begin productions before the money to complete them had been raised. Merchant charmed actors who hadn't been paid, and cooked for casts and crews as an act of endearment meant to convince them they were part of a family.

      Merchant and Ivory lived together as a gay couple. Few talked about their gayness, but it was understood by those who traveled in their sphere.

     It's a bit of a stretch, but when we contrast Ivory with  Merchant, we might say that skill (Ivory) makes interesting things; flamboyance (Merchant), on the other hand, tends to be interesting in and of itself.

   Soucy assembles impressive clips from the Merchant/Ivory catalog, snippets of a varied filmography that should encourage viewers to revisit favorites or discover movies they may have missed.

    It's possible that the Merchant/Ivory names no longer speak to younger audiences, but Ivory, now 95, still works. In 2018, he won an Oscar for adapting the screenplay of Call Me By Your Name, and the body of Merchant Ivory work remains impressive.

     Whatever you think about the Merchant/Ivory movies -- some saw them as stodgy, conservative throwbacks -- the two were responsible for some of the most impeccably cast and best-acted movies of the 1980s and 1990s. That’s quite an achievement.

Surprise! 'Wonka' exceeds expectations

   

  I can’t say I approached Wonka with enthusiasm.I had no pressing desire to hear Timothee Chalamet sing in a musical, and revisiting Roald Dahl-inspired material had no special appeal for me, either.

  Imagine my surprise when it turned out that Wonka   exceeded my expectations, serving up an entertainment I didn't mind sampling.

  Director Paul King bolsters his movie with a strong supporting cast. (More about that later.) King also  refuses to wink at the audience as a way of demonstrating superiority to the material at hand.

  Look, if you’re going to make a movie such as Wonka, you better go all in -- particularly in a version that strips away some of Dahl's wickedness.

  Chalamet approaches the role of Willy with a cheerleader’s gusto, never embarrassing himself by singing in a role played by Gene Wilder 1971. Jim Carrey offered his version of Wonka in 1995, followed by Johnny Depp, who starred in director Tim Burton’s 2005 version.

  Chalamet keeps the movie on track with help from an old-pro cast that includes Hugh Grant as the eight-inch tall Oompa-Loompa, Sally Hawkins as Willy's mother, and Olivia Colman as the devious Mrs. Scrubbit. 

   It’s a relief to see Colman in a role that doesn’t  demand that she turn herself inside out. She has fun, even if she’s playing a warmed-over version of a character Dickens might have written, an ogre of a woman who uses faux kindness to lure and exploit the vulnerable. 

  The story begins when Willy arrives by ship to start a chocolate business in a city in which chocolate seems to serve as one of its currencies.  Willy quickly goes broke and falls under the sway of Mrs. Scrubbit and her gap-toothed henchman (Tom Davis). 

  Promising food and lodging, Mrs. Scrubitt connives to force Willy to spend 15 years working in her laundry, her way of making him pay off a ludicrously inflated debt. 

   In the laundry, Willy meets Abacus Crunch (Jim Carter), another of Scrubbit's indentured servants and, most importantly, Noodle (Calah Lane), a girl who'll help Wonka achieve his chocolate dream.

   King's origin story also pits Wonka against the town's chocolate cartel led by Slugworth (Joseph Paterson). A happily corrupt police chief (Keegan-Michael Key) helps to upend Wonka's goal: to make the world's best chocolate.

   Early on, we learn that Wonka’s chocolate has exceptional kick; in some versions, it even makes people levitate, floating into the air like helium-filled balloons in a holiday parade. 

   I don't know if you'll be humming any of the songs on the way out of the theater, but this unashamedly corny Wonka surpassed my hopes. I ask for no more.

   King (who directed the Paddington movies) has made an old-fashioned entertainment that, at least for me, warded off bad vibes and didn't give me tooth decay. Consistent with a fanciful approach, the subject never arises, despite Wonka's copious flow of candy.

   An addendum: Sporting a green wig and orange skin, Grant scores as the tiny Oompa Loompa. Grant turns himself into a kind of special effect. Say what you will,  it’s better than another romcom.

All dressed up with nowhere new to go

 

   In Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, Jason Statham joins director Guy Ritchie for a spy/caper movie that feels as if a lot of ingredients were thrown into a blender in the hope that a movie would emerge. It didn’t. Not really.

  Adopting the seriousness of a man who might have just lost his best friend, Stratham plays Orson Fortune, a mercenary who operates outside official channels. You know the drill. Orson fights the good fight but remains his own man. 

  Ritchie has been creating visual razzle-dazzle ever since his breakthrough with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, some 24 years ago. This time, he offers a less frenzied movie. We’re talking comparatively, of course.

   The story kicks off when (Cary Elwes), as a suave fellow who recruits espionage crews, enlists Orson to locate a weapon that has found its way onto the market.

   British intelligence -- represented by a character played by Eddie Marsan -- doesn't know what the object is. That's the job: Find out what's for sale and make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. 

   Joining Fortune are Aubrey Plaza (as a sexy tech whiz) and Bugzy Malone (as a sharpshooter).  Both are underutilized.

    It doesn't take long for Fortune to encounter Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant), a sleazy arms dealer with tons of money. Sounding as if he's channeling Michael Caine's accent, Grant seems to be having more fun than anyone else in the movie. 

   Josh Hartnett joins in as Danny, a movie star who's supposed to help infiltrate the operation run by the star-struck Simmonds. That could happen, right?

    If you see Operation Fortune, it's probably best to give up on coherence and enjoy Grant's happy scenery chewing in a movie that sometimes plays like an off-the-rack helping of Bond. 

     Ritchie's too skilled totally to hit bottom, even with a movie that slides over what feels like old ground. Ritchie makes good use of luxe locations and (thank goodness) doesn't seem to be taking himself seriously.

     Most of the characters, by the way, are very well dressed.

     Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not recommending Operation Fortune; I’m talking about how to approach the movie if you happen to give it a try — now or in its non-theatrical afterlife.

Cast lifts familiar British gangster movie

Director Guy Ritchie may not be breaking new ground in The Gentlemen, but his actors provide the movie with some juice.

If the year were 1999 instead of 2020, director Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen might have seemed more inventive. Ritchie, you'll recall, made his cinematic bones with 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a fresh-feeling foray into a netherworld occupied by British gangsters.

In this outing, Ritchie again goes gangster but the verve that once defined Ritchie's style now feels a little proforma, something on the order of the difference between an arranged marriage and a spontaneous love affair.

After striking out with King Arthur (2017), it’s not surprising that Ritchie sought comfortable ground — and, to be fair, The Gentlemen derives a fair measure of entertainment from a spot-on cast.

Notable among a large ensemble is Hugh Grant, playing a sleazy, gay private detective with traces of cockney in his accent. Colin Farrell adds more color as Coach, a character who trains boxers and occasionally dips into the dark arts required to settle matters in the criminal world.

Add an unflappable Charlie Hunnam to the mix. Hunnam rides shotgun to Matthew McConaughey, who plays Mickey, a pot czar who pays off fading aristocrats for the privilege of building vast underground grow houses on their property.

Now another American (Jeremy Strong) wants to buy Mickey's vast empire so that he can reap illegal gains and be ready to capitalize when marijuana goes legit. Tired of life in the fast lane, Mickey may be willing to sell.

A Chinese gangster named Dry Eye (Henry Golding) also would like to purchase Mickey’s business, an ambition that sets off fireworks, notably a raid on one of Mickey’s mammoth facilities.

To add structural pizazz, Ritchie frames the story by having Grant’s character try to extort money from Hunnam’s character, using a screenplay to convince Ray to pay up. The screenplay gambit proves a bit much, even in a movie that's not afraid to display its cinematic self-consciousness.

True to its title, The Gentlemen is mostly an all-guys affair, although the dashing Mickey has a greyhound sleek wife (Michelle Dockery) who runs a garage staffed by many female mechanics. Mickey, we're told, relies on her judgment.

It takes time to get all the characters straight and to fully appreciate The Gentlemen, you need a taste for a narrative that hopscotches through the proceedings, sometimes creating confusion. You also may find yourself wondering whether any of these characters possibly could exist outside a Guy Ritchie movie.

Still, there’s pleasure in watching actors sink into juicy roles as we wait to see who among these felons will emerge as the king of the gangster jungle. In January, that may as good as we get.

Summer isn't a total loss. A look at a diverse week of movies: reviews of 'Florence-Foster Jenkins,' 'Hell or High Water' and 'Indignation

The movies always have been a kind of crazy quilt of ambition, accomplishment, disappointment and joy, a collection of individual offerings that have little in common other than a desire to encourage audiences to purchase tickets. As an example, consider this week, a movie moment in which offerings range from the bawdy humor of Sausage Party, an animated feature for adults, to the supposedly instructive bromides dispensed by Pete's Dragon, a movie with a dragon that looks like a cuddly stuffed animal. Said dragon saves the life of a boy who's left to his own devices in a forest after his parents die in an automobile accident, the abandoned child syndrome being a Disney common denominator dating back to Bambi.

It's also the week in which Meryl Streep plays the late Florence Foster Jenkins, a New York socialite whose passion for music and performance were indulged by those in the rarified social circles in which she circulated. The only problem: Jenkins had a hideously bad voice.

Jenkins' solicitous and morally frayed husband (Hugh Grant) protected his wife's delusions. Maintaining Jenkin's image of herself became his occupation.

Because Jenkins raised money for a variety of New York musical endeavors, no one had the courage to tell her that her private recitals were so painful, they could have induced the most saintly of innocents to confess to the most heinous of crimes.

Florence Foster Jenkins is the latest film from director Steven Frears, who began his cinematic journey with what now seem like films from some fading Pleistocene age: The Hit (1984), My Beautiful Launderette (1985); Prick Up Your Ears (1987) and Sammie and Rosie Get Laid (also 1987). Those movies -- practically a British New Wave in themselves -- seem like ancient eruptions from a director who hasn't exactly mellowed, but who, in this outing, focuses attention on a woman whose self-created grandeur is beautifully captured by Streep.

In Streep's hands, Jenkins pretensions are delivered with the piercing exactitude of a soprano's high C.

Jenkins' singing becomes both amusing and painful, particularly as she prepares for a 1944 concert at Carnegie Hall. Jenkins readies herself for the big evening with help from her tutor Cosme McMoon, a deliciously bemused Simon Helberg.

Because Jenkins had contracted syphilis from her first husband, her marriage to Grant's St. Clair Bayfield was chaste. To compensate, Bayfield carried on an affair with his mistress (Rebecca Ferguson).

Grant finally has found a perfect role as he ages out of the British prince charming phase that mostly has served him until now. He's playing an honorable cad.

There's little I can say to prepare you for Streep's attempts at operatic singing. Let's just say that she makes Susan Alexander Kane, the woeful opera singer in Citizen Kane, seem like Joan Sutherland. If screeching were an art form, Jenkins would have been its foremost practitioner.

Thankfully, Frears hasn't totally yielded to the temptation to make a feel-good comedy. He charts Jenkins's inevitable march toward disaster -- albeit not without making note of her pluck and fortitude in the face of a monstrous lack of talent.

I suppose one is obligated to say that Florence Foster Jenkins is a small movie enlarged by big talents.
But two other small movies (both enlarged by big concerns) also open this week.

HOW THE WEST WAS LOST

Hell or High Water belongs in a genre that might be dubbed the neo-western. Set in West Texas, the movie spreads bank robbery, sibling loyalty and violence across a Texas landscape that grows its own form of justice, rolling it out like wind-blown tumbleweeds.

Director David Mackenzie, working from a screenplay by the gifted Taylor Sheridan (Sicario), introduces us to Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster), brothers who rob small banks in forgotten towns that seem to shriveling in the Texas heat.

At first, the brothers seem to be another pair of mismatched hoodlums. Toby has a steady hand; Tanner quickly establishes himself as the movie's wild one, an uncontrollable weed sprung from parched Texas soil.

Still most familiar as Captain Kirk in the reborn Star Trek series, Pine gives what might be his best performance yet. As Toby, he must hold things back. Divorced and crippled by a past in which much has gone wrong, Toby is trying to right a very specific wrong.

Looking at iMDB, I was surprised to see that Foster already has 51 movies and TV appearances to his credit. You may remember him from The Messenger, a mournful 2009 story about an Army sergeant assigned to deliver the ultimate bad news to spouses and parents of fallen soldiers.

You have to reach the end of Tanner's trail to realize what's driving this irredeemable bad boy, but Foster is one of those rare actors who can scare you just by showing up. He can put a look in his eyes that turns them into bullets just waiting for something to trigger their release.

Jeff Bridges, whose voice has taken on the roughness of weathered leather, plays Marcus, a Texas Ranger who's on the verge of retirement. Marcus hunts the brothers with his Comanche partner, Alberto (Gil Birmingham), a Native American who has learned to live with Marcus' racist taunts.

It's not easy to tell whether Marcus is a racist or just a guy who tries to needle his way under the skin of anyone with whom he feels close.

The story takes us in unexpected directions and gradually builds to a confrontation that's as much about character as it is about violence.

The Scottish-born Mackenzie, who directed the searing prison drama Starred Up, proves that he can handle drama with drawl and something on its mind.

Birmingham's Alberto sounds the chord that plays behind the solos that the rest of the characters deliver. The whites came and took the land from the Indians, and now, in what can be interpreted as a form of karmic retribution, the banks are taking the land from whites.

Mackenzie leads us to a conclusion that feels wise in a way that's far more complex than a movie like this has any right to be.

Like the juice from a wad of sour chewing tobacco, you may to savor the movie's bitterness before you think about spitting it out.

TO BE YOUNG, JEWISH AND BAFFLED BY A SHIKSA
The violence in Hell or High Water doesn't happen without motivation, but there's another kind of violence, the violence of cruelty that's embedded in observation of characters who are pinned to a writer's unforgiving wall. No matter how much they struggle, they'll never be free.

That brings me to Indignation, an adaptation of a small (and some would say "minor") 2008 novel by Philip Roth.

Indignation marks the directorial debut of James Schamus, who has written screenplays for director Ang Lee (Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Brokeback Mountain) and who, as an executive, helped create movies such as Lost in Translation and Milk.

Though presented in straightforward style, Indignation requires contemporary audiences to take an imaginative leap back to 1951, a time when a young woman who'd perform oral sex on a man might be labeled a slut by young men who still kicked around questions about whether they'd marry a woman who wasn't a virgin.

In adopting Roth, Schamus pits the Newark, N.J., of Roth's imagination against life in at small Ohio school called Winesburg College. If you're familiar with Roth, you'll immediately know that part of the story's tension centers on moving from a mostly Jewish world into a less-welcoming WASP society.

Logan Lerman plays Marcus, a young man who wants to break from the stultifications of Newark life, which means living at home and occasionally working in his father's kosher butcher shop.

Marcus is the '50s definition of a good Jewish boy; i.e., he's a straight A student. Academic achievement might be the only thing Marcus fully understands. Once grades no longer serve as a standard, he'll likely be lost.

At the college, Marcus meets Olivia (Sarah Gadon), a troubled young woman who introduces him to hand jobs and fellatio, neither of which Marcus is fully prepared to accept.

The movie's best scene involves an extended confrontation between Marcus and Dean Caudwell. During the course of 18 minutes Lerman and Tracy Letts (as Caudwell) play verbal tennis. In essence, Caudwell attempts to persuade Marcus to aspire to WASPishness. Marcus isn't strong enough to resist for the right reasons; he's indignant, but unformed.

As Marcus' complicated but demanding mother Linda Edmond makes the most of her time on screen. During a visit to Winesburg, she warns Marcus off his emotionally distressed shiksa, who once tried to commit suicide. She's certain no good can come of such a relationship.

To raise the stakes, Marcus' coming-of-age drama plays out against a contrivance, a backdrop in which a false move might expose him to the draft and land him in Korea, an unsafe place for young men in the '50s.

The question with all Roth adaptations involve Roth himself. How do directors compensate for Roth's missing voice? Indignation has finely wrought moments, good performances and demonstrable intelligence, and yet, it doesn't always spring fully to life. It's Roth under glass with Marcus ripe for being quashed like a bug.

There is no transition that can take me from Philip Roth to Pete's Dragon, where I began all of this.

That movie seems aimed at young children, so I'll say only this. When a movie wants to make room for magic, it should feel more magical than Pete's Dragon. Kids probably will respond to this good-natured story about a wild child's circuitous route back to civilization, but it also could appeal to adults who want to compare it to the 1977 original or who've been hankering to see Robert Redford play a character who tells stories to kids, presuming there any adults in either of those two categories.

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

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

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

The end of the word; that kind of thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An epic in bite-sized chunks

The eagerly awaited adaptation of Cloud Atlas boasts a large cast, carloads of make-up, six major stories, nearly three hours worth of visual bravura and a variety of amusements. Transcendence? That's another story.

First, the good news: For a movie that's two hours and 52 minutes long, Cloud Atlas does not present viewers with an endurance test. That's no small accomplishment.

Directed by Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, the movie probably shouldn't work at all. It alternates (not always elegantly) between six stories in six different genres, involves actors playing multiple roles, tests the limits of make-up artistry and tries to wrap things up with a cosmic bang that makes room for a string of woozy ideas about reincarnation, the connectedness of all life, the elasticity of boundaries and more.

By any measure, this lavishly conceived adaptation of David Mitchell's 2004 novel should be breaking out in flop sweat before it hits the 30-minute mark. The fact that it doesn't stands as testimony to the skill, commitment and ambition of the Wachowskis (still best known for their Matrix movies) and to Tykwer, who made his biggest mark with Run Lola Run.

The most enjoyment I got out of Cloud Atlas involved trying to identify the various actors in their multiple guises as the movie fragmented into mini-hunks of narrative spread over a half-a-dozen settings and time periods -- from 1846 to a post-apocalyptic future.

The stories in Cloud Atlas are told by an aged tribesman named Zachry (Tom Hanks) and are presented as a massive campfire tale with mythic and spiritual overtones. All stories are one story -- or something to that effect. You can tell that the two Wachowskis and Tykwer are after something big, but Cloud Atlas seems to work best in small doses, as its many stories unfold.

A brutal comic high point arrives when Hanks (as the lower-class author of a book called Knuckle Sandwich) tosses an imperious British critic off the roof of a skyscraper during a book party.

In fairness to critics, I should point out that there probably are at least as many filmmakers worthy of such treatment as critics, but that's another story.

If you're unfamiliar with the book, a quick idea about a few of its stories. The tale involving the author of Knuckle Sandwich focuses on Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent), a publisher who gets crosswise with a brother who imprisons him in an institution for the aged.

Then there's the futuristic story in which a genetically engineered beauty called a fabricant (Doona Bae) is rescued from a life of servitude by Hav-Joo Chang (Jim Sturgess). Bae's character is then propelled into a leadership position in a revolt against an oppressive regime of elites. The year: 2144. And, yes, it's just here that the movie tips its hat to Soylent Green, the 1973 visit to dystopia starring Charlton Heston.

There's even an appearance by the devil himself (Hugo Weaving), who tries to lure Zachry to the dark side by encouraging his baser instincts and by over-acting.

I won't recount all the stories, but will say that they seem intended to make a point that goes something like this: In the eternal recurrence of everything, reincarnated beings keep playing different roles in different dramas, all of which build toward last-minute escapes that, in this movie, can seem more corny than profound.

Speaking of profundity. The screenplay (also by the movie's directorial trio) takes a long time before advancing a variety of spiritual points that seem to have been sprinkled over the movie's dialog like fairy dust. I don't think it's possible to take them as seriously as the movie seems to want us to take them.

If I were going to be a little more arch about it, I'd say that thematically, Cloud Atlas is a bit like climbing the world's highest mountain in search of an ultimate truth only to find a Port A Potty at the summit. The reward isn't nearly as loft as you'd hoped, but why be arch? Could get you thrown off a roof.

The cast is large and, for the most part, effective. If you get bored, you can play a game called, Trying to Spot Hugh Grant, who in several scenes has been made to look nothing like himself.

You also can express gratitude to the movie gods that Halle Berry, in a variety of roles, seems to have subdued her instincts for overdoing things. I'm sure I'm forgetting someone, but the rest of the cast includes Susan Sarandon, James D'Arcy, Ben Whishaw, David Keith and many more actors of varying pay grades.

Credit Weaving for outdoing Louise Fletcher in a Nurse Ratched-like role, part of the segment in which Broadbent's publisher character (remember him?) is confined to an asylum.

Fans of the Matrix should be mollified by the ways in which the Wachowskis have created Neo-Seoul, the city in which the futuristic scenes of 2144 take place.

In a segment set in 1975, you can discover what Hanks looks like with blonde hair, not necessarily a revelation but a minor curiosity nonetheless.

Strictly in movie terms, the trio of talented directors messes up the pacing of the final scenes, which (at least to me) felt as if they should have concluded about 15 minutes before they actually did. But there's no denying the Wachowskis and Tykwer also whip up some magical images. If nothing else, the movie tends toward visual opulence, some of it expressed with wit.(See below).

So what the hell am I saying here? I guess I'm saying that there's plenty to enjoy in this over-stuffed cornucopia of a movie, but if you're looking for transcendent cinema, you may be disappointed. For all its ambition, Cloud Atlas -- like much of life -- is entertaining only in parts. Is it damning with faint praise to say that rather than stirring my emotions or elevating my consciousness, this extra-large helping of movie mostly amused me?

Yo! Ho! Ho! and a bucket of clay

There's comic treasure in this animated feature -- and it's not buried.

The folks at Britain's vaunted Aardman Animations specialize in whimsical animated movies with decidedly mischievous twists. If you don't know the Aardman name, you'll probably recognize some of the studio's work: the Wallace & Gromit films, Chicken Run and Arthur Christmas.

Now comes The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Aardman's most satisfying work to date, a high seas adventure that rides on waves of creativity and humor, most of it generated by characters with teeth the size of giant Chiclets, one of Aardman's more recognizable trademarks.

Aardman, of course, adheres to a laborious process in which carefully molded clay figures are shot a frame at a time to create the illusion of fluid motion -- or at least as fluid a motion as such an insanely demanding process allows.

Technical achievements aside, it's ultimately character and story that count, and Pirates doesn't skimp on either.

Competition and its perils drive the action in Band of Misfits. The Pirate Captain (voice by Hugh Grant) wants to win the highly coveted Pirate of the Year award, an honor that has eluded him for 20 years. As it follows the Pirate Captain's ambitious path, the story introduces us to a conniving Charles Darwin (David Tennant), a bellicose Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) and a bad-ass pirate named Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven).

Directors Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt build their story around an ethical issue: Will the Pirate Captain trade his beloved parrot Polly for a shot at the title? This unlikely opportunity for advancement arises when Darwin informs the Captain that Polly isn't a parrot at all, but the last of a vanishing species, a rare dodo.

Darwin's motives aren't pure, either. He hopes the bird help him win his own prize, a prestigious science award from the Royal Society.

Much of the enjoyment of an Aardman movie is found in detailing, as well as in bolder flashes of imagination. An example of the latter: Black Bellamy makes a splashy entrance at a pirate gathering using the tongue of a whale as his red carpet. Very showy.

The characters also serve as a constant source of amusement: Darwin's pet "manpanzee" BoBo -- who serves as the scientist's butler -- communicates by showing title cards, mostly to wry effect.

The 3-D version of Pirates may offer some viewers a bit of extra kick, but the real fun centers on the way the Aardman folks mix humor and craftsmanship to create a movie that should provide enjoyment for kids. In this case, the adults who accompany those kids to the theater may have an even better time.