'The Bride!' celebrates its excesses

  It's unlikely anyone will accuse Maggie Gyllenhaal of stinting on ambition in The Bride!,  a wild farrago of a movie that resists classification. 

  Is The Bride! a horror movie or a Gothic romance? Is it a feminist reimagining of movies of the 1930s, particularly James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein? Is it a comedy that pays homage to Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein with a rousing rendition of Puttin' on the Ritz?

  Or, is it a showcase for an uninhibited display of ferocity from Jessie Buckley in another fearless performance?

  As it turns out, The Bride! is all those things, a movie that makes no bones about celebrating its excesses, of which there are too many.

   Gyllenhaal's big-screen gamble doesn't entirely, but her  approach yields intermittent payoffs. Perhaps the genre it mostly resembles is one in which two crazy outcasts tear across the American landscape, eventually finding love.

    Buckley appears in two roles, occasionally interrupting the narrative for portentous speeches delivered by Frankenstein's 19th-century author, Mary Shelley, who inspires a manic outburst by Ida, also Buckley, a Chicago moll who winds up dead in the movie's prologue.

    Enter Christian Bale's Frankenstein, a.k.a. "Frank," who visits Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), a scientist who has been experimenting with reanimating the dead. Poor Frank. He's lonely and craves the companionship of a woman who, like him, was created, not born. He yearns for a soulmate.

     Though she expresses reservations, Euphronious helps Frank dig up the recently deceased  Ida. Employing whizzing, flashing equipment that's heavy on old-fashioned dials and gauges, Euphronious jolts Ida back to life. 

     Initially, Ida, who can't remember her past, hardly seems an ideal partner for Frankenstein, played by Bale with a mixture of sincerity and goofiness, punctuated by occasional bursts of violence, mostly to protect Ida.

    Nothing if not loyal, Frank sticks to his lovelorn mission. He and Ida wend their way across the country, making stops at a roaring Chicago party, a sophisticated New York City black-tie event, and a rural drive-in theater.

    The wandering duo frequently attends movies, all of which star romantic lead Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). As we all once did, Frank learned about romance from the movies.

    Irate Chicago mobsters and a detective duo (Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz) pursue the fleeing renegades, as images of Bonnie and Clyde flash through our collective heads.

   Despite efforts to mask his appearance, Frankenstein can't always hide his stitched-together face, and Ida's tousled blonde hair and blood-red lips are accompanied by an ever-present stain on her right cheek, a souvenir from her reanimation. When it's popularized on tabloid front pages, her look turns into a fashion statement.

      I can't say that Gyllenhaal blends the movie's cornucopia of ingredients into a satisfying whole. She creates a mixed-bag of a movie that dashes across the screen, dazzling with its theatricality, amusing with its satiric fillips, and repelling with splashes of body horror. 

    Eclectic to the max, The Bride! practically drowns itself in movie love as it tries to match Buckley's expressions of unrestrained wildness. Say this, though: The Bride! earns the exclamation point in its title.

       

       

     

A cop tries to save a woman and her kids

 

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a Los Angels cop in a remake of The Guilty, a 2018 Danish movie. The premise of the two movies is the same: A police officer who has been taken off street duty has been assigned to answering 911 calls. The story centers on a call that Gyllenhaal's Joe receives from a harried woman (Riley Keough) who says that she's been kidnapped by her disturbed former husband. The couple's two kids -- a six-year-old girl and an infant boy -- have been left home alone. The movie consists mostly of Joe's attempts to locate the white van in which he believes the woman is being held. He also  wants to ensure the safety of two kids too young to be without an adult presence. Because he's facing a court hearing the next day (we don't learn the reason for the hearing until near the movie's end), Joe receives intermittent calls from an aggressive Los Angeles Times reporter (Edi Patterson) who tries to convince him that she wants to hear his side of the story. Aside from a few colleagues at the LAPD call center, the other characters are unseen: They’re voices on the other end of Joe's calls. Perhaps to give the movie a topical boost, raging fires engulf LA and the police are so overwhelmed that they can't give Joe the instantaneous attention he feels his call deserves. Director Antoine Fuqua basically splits this narrowly defined movie into two related parts: The search for the purported hijacker and a character study of a tightly wound cop. Fuqua makes a movie out of what could have been a radio play and remaking The Guilty may have made sense in light of current US preoccupations with police behavior. But The Guilty suffers from lapses in credibility that didn't seem to plague the original. You may want to think of The Guilty as one big contrivance sparked by the simmering rage and regret Gyllenhaal brings to the screen.

This "Spirit' need to be more untamed

 Middle-of-the-road live-action movies seldom delight. Same goes for middle-of-the-road animated features,  and that's the category in which the new movie Spirit Untamed lands. A predecessor movie -- Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron -- debuted in 2002. Now comes another helping that tries to touch as many bases as possible, mixing a multicultural cast of characters with lots of action and a girl-power pep talk. A wild horse befriends Lucky Prescott, (voice by Isabela Merced), a 12-year-old girl who travels west with her aunt (Julianne Moore). Lucky is supposed-to visit her father (Jake Gyllenhaal), a decent but broken man who hasn't recovered from the loss of Lucky's mom,   a trick-rider who was killed in an accident. Lucky quickly makes friends with two girls (Mckenna Grace and Marsai Martin) in the small town where she lands. She also defies her dad, who warns her to avoid Spirit, a wild horse that winds up in the town corral. Lucky's mastery of riding goes from zero to highly skilled within an improbable few minutes. The plot takes an adventure turn when Lucky sets out to rescue Spirit from a rustler (Walton Goggins) and his dastardly gang.  Little about the animation feels particularly special. Even with some mild ecological concerns, Spirit Untamed feels like multiplex filler. In the absence of any other kid-fare, Spirit might suffice, but it's mostly a negligible hunk of family oriented entertainment.

Spider-Man takes a European vacation

Can Peter Parker grow beyond his Queens neighborhood? Far From Home answers the question in passable fashion.

Whatever emotional kick you’ll find in Spider-Man: Far From Home comes from Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man. Don't get me wrong. Downey’s character isn't present. But Iron Man’s absence adds poignancy to a story in which 16-year-old Peter Parker wonders whether he’s capable of filling Iron Man’s shoes.

Riding the emotional wave that Marvel set off in Avengers: End Game, Spider-Man: Far From Home turns out to be a serviceable entry into the Marvel repertoire: a collection of less-than-impressively realized action, a surfeit of good-natured humor, and an appealing young cast headed by stand-out Tom Holland as Spider-Man.

This edition takes Spider-Man abroad. Peter Parker (Holland) joins his high-school class on a trip to Europe. Stops include Venice, Prague, and London as the story hop-scotches across cities that are threatened with destruction by creatures called Elementals: i.e., earth, water, and fire monsters that wreak havoc. Can any Marvel movie be considered complete without reducing some part of a major city to rubble?

In this edition, Spider-Man's classmates graduate to slightly larger roles. Zendaya portrays MJ, the girl who has stolen Peter Parker’s heart. Jacob Batalon plays Ned, Peter's best friend, a nerdy kid who this times winds up with a girlfriend (Angourie Rice).

Marisa Tomei returns as Aunt May; Jon Favreau appears as Happy, Tony Stark's former bodyguard and chauffeur; and Samuel L. Jackson, looking less than enthusiastic, reprises his role as Nick Fury, the head of the outfit that runs the Avengers.

Added to the mix is Mysterio, a superhero portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal. Mysterio wears a helmet that looks like a some dropped a fishbowl on his head; he also has an alter ego. Out of uniform, he's Quentin Beck.

Super-sensitive about spoilers, Columbia Pictures has encouraged critics not to ruin the movie’s surprises. I won’t say more, except to note that not all of them have the hoped-for kick.

Holland works hard to be the energetic and conflicted, the not entirely mature Spider-Man that we’ve come to expect, and, yes, his naïveté and sincerity prove engaging.

All in all, this edition of Spider-Man is not only far from home, but it’s also far from being a disaster. Far From Home unfolds without giving offense or ascending into the upper ranks of Marvel's unending list of movies. Put another way: Far From Home passes muster.

But, know this, as well, Far From Home hardly lays a glove on the much more imaginative, Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2019’s Oscar winner for best-animated feature.

A satire tries to give the art world its due

Velvet Buzzsaw aims at an easy target -- the commodification of art -- but the movie's cast produces enjoyable results.

If you think that the Los Angeles art world is ripe for satire, director Dan Gilroy's Velvet Buzzsaw won't disappoint. It's not that Velvet Buzzsaw lands a mortal hit. How could it? It's based on an obvious conceit about the obscene invasion of major money into a corrupted art world. It may not be a thematic powerhouse, but Velvet Buzzsaw makes some dead-on observations. Better yet, its cast of characters -- some bordering on art-world caricatures -- proves consistently amusing.

Reunited with his Nightcrawler star Jake Gyllenhaal, Gilroy introduces flashes of horror into a story in which the characters are precisely and wickedly drawn. Gyllenhaal's Morf, for example, is an art critic who regards his taste as nothing less than definitive. He's also in tip-top shape, a devotee of Peloton and Pilates. Sporting bangs and glasses, Morf evidently is one of those critics who can make or break a career. He's bisexual and so taste-conscious that he feels no compunction about expressing his displeasure with at the color of the coffin at a gallerist's funeral.

Rhodora Haze (Renee Russo) runs a top-drawer Los Angeles gallery. Rhodora has a keen eye for money and an attitude of superiority that flirts with bitchery. Oh well, forget flirts. Russo, who also worked in Gilroy's Nightcrawler, takes her character all the way. It's a pleasure to watch her.

Zawe Ashton works for Rhodora who claims to be grooming her charge for better things. Toni Collette has a sharply funny turn as a museum curator turned art consultant. Rhodora's main competition arrives in the form of another dealer Tom Sturridge's Jon Dondon.

The movie pushes us into the art world with style and wit before introducing its plot. The story gathers steam when Ashton's Josephina discovers a dead body in her apartment building. She enters the apartment of the deceased and discovers a collection of paintings done by the dead man, an unknown artist named Vetril Dease. Some of Dease's portraits evoke terror and torment. All his paintings, even those with wholesome subjects, have an eerie aura.

Josephina shows Dease's work to Morf. He immediately confirms her sense that she's stumbled onto a trove of original and highly marketable work. Eyes light up because Dease evidently is the next big thing. Even better, he's dead: His body of work never will expand.

No one seems particularly shaken by the fact that Dease wanted all of his paintings destroyed. As the movie unfolds, we discover why. People start getting murdered in horror-movie fashion.

But the resolution is less important than the way that Gilroy uses the plot to bring the characters into money-grubbing conflict.

John Malkovich sounds an almost sane note in a small role as an art star whose reputation has begun to fade.

Gilroy's satirical eye extends to the various high-fashion art uniforms worn by a chic-conscious cast of characters: Trends rather than trenchancy dominate.

The pretensions of the art world make for an easy target and Gilroy's overall insight -- greed motivates the sale and purchase of art -- can't be called fresh. But he invents a movie full of characters that provide a fair measure of entertainment. I'd say that the cast members were having one hell of a good time, even if some of their characters are brutally (and often creatively) knocked off.

A family caught in a moment of crisis

Actor Paul Dano moves behind the camera to direct Wildlife, a big-screen adaptation of a Richard Ford novel set in Great Falls, Montana, a lonely outpost where a mother (Carey Mulligan) and her son (Ed Oxenbould) have been moved by Dad (Jake Gyllenhaal), a guy who can't seem to settle into anything. The town of Great Falls marks Dad's latest stop on what seems to have been a road to nowhere. Gyllenhaal's Jerry ignites the drama, which begins in 1960, when he's fired from his job tending the greens at a local golf club. The club offers him his job back, but Jerry -- stuck in a rut created by what seem to be obscure but irrevocable principles -- refuses. Instead, he's off to fight forest fires, putting his life in danger for very little money and leaving his wife to tend to their teenage son Joe. Joe, played with just the right degree of quiet confusion by Oxenbould, tries his best to cope, taking on the uneasy role of man of the house. With Jerry off fighting fires, Mulligan's Jeanette begins what seems a willed unravelment. She takes up a relationship with Warren Miller (Bill Camp), an unlikely love interest who owns the local car dealership and whose friendliness toward young Joe wavers between sincerity and calculation. Oddly, Jeanette drags her son into the whole business, taking him to dinner at Miller's house. Could anything be more uncomfortable for a kid? The fires raging away from the town suggest a looming conflagration but the fire that rages in Mulligan's performance pushes the movie toward its sad final shot. Not always easy to read, Wildlife nonetheless entangles us in the lives of characters who defy easy definition.

The wild and strange west

The Sisters Brothers tells the story of hitmen siblings.

Some Westerns aim to uphold frontier mythology; others want to drag that mythology into the muddy grit of reality. And some don't necessarily want to do either. The Sisters Brothers seems to fit into that latter category; it's a strangely entertaining, slightly off-kilter take on the American West during a time of transition.

The Sisters Brothers (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly) are hitmen who work for a ruthless character known as the Commodore (Rutger Hauer). But these two gunmen are not like other gunfighters you've seen before. They're more brutal than slick and they banter and argue as only siblings can.

Based on a novel by Patrick deWitt, The Sister's Brothers takes French director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, Dheepan and The Prophet) to the northwestern US -- Oregon mostly -- to follow the twisted adventures of brothers who have developed a proud level of expertise in their chosen occupation.

Not surprisingly, the brothers aren't always on the same page. Brother Eli (Reilly) has grown weary of killing people. He longs for the tenderness of home and hearth. He wants to retire. Brother Charlie sees no reason to quit, so long as the Commodore keeps giving them lucrative assignments.

Perhaps to let us know that we're not about to take a customary Western ride, Audiard begins his movie with a gunfight that takes place in the dark. Flashes from fired weapons pop across the screen along with the deep-throated sound of firing revolvers. If you're interested in assigning meaning to this battle, it might have something to do with Charlie and Eli's aimlessness. They're acting out an old script, but they have no real vision about what they might be pursuing. They're dancing in the dark.

The story soon focuses on the task to which Charlie and Eli currently have been assigned. They're supposed to catch up with Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed) and torture him for reasons best discovered in a theater.

For their part, the brothers are task-specific; they've been hired to torture; it's not their job to locate the fleeing Warm. That task falls into the hands of John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) a detective whose impeccable diction couldn't seem more out of place in this environment.

As it turns out, Warm has a large agenda: He wants to found a harmonious, non-violent, egalitarian society in Dallas, Texas, and damn if Morris doesn't catch a bit of utopian fever himself.

The performances are marked by idiosyncratic fervor. Phoenix portrays Charlie as a drunk with a quick temper and a taste for life without regret. Reilly gives Eli a dogged quality with hints of unexpected tenderness. A shawl Eli carries with him serves as a kind of security blanket, a reminder that the comfort of a woman might exist somewhere, although it's probably somewhere where Eli isn't.

One of my favorite moments arrives when Charlie asks Eli why he insists on carrying around a scarf he purportedly was given by a woman. It's not a scarf insists Eli; it's a shawl. To him, the distinction means everything.

Audiard sets all this against the backdrop of the still-evolving west. At one point, Morris -- who keeps a diary -- notes that he's visiting settlements that didn't exist three months ago. In another signal of change, Charlie discovers the toothbrush, a device that he uses awkwardly. Think about it. How would you approach a toothbrush if you'd never seen one before?

Audiard allows what symbolism he employs to crawl out of the natural landscape. On the trail, a sleeping Eli swallows a spider that leaves him sick and poisoned. His face becomes distorted and swollen with bloat. The natural world seems to be turning against Eli.

I won't reveal the movie's ending but I'll tell you that Audiard allows his movie to settle like a pot that has been taken off the fire and has begun to lose its boiling fury. Audiard has given us a half-real, half-fantastical portrait of the West, putting it on the shoulders of two brothers who only seem unconstrained by their torments when their horses are bounding across open terrain. As the movie suggests, the West may not be what we once thought it was, but the image of horse and rider hasn't lost its power to stir.

Learning to survive catastrophe

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Jeff Bauman, a man who lost his legs during the Boston Marathon bombing.

For most of its 116-minute running time, director David Gordon Green's Stronger stakes out a claim to importance. In telling the story of Jeff Bauman (Jake Gyllenhaal), the movie becomes one of the rare entertainments that isn't about graphic displays of violence but about realistic depictions of the effects of violence on those who experience it.

For those who don't recall, Bauman was waiting at the finish line for his girlfriend (Tatiana Maslany) to complete the 2013 Boston Marathon. He lost both his legs when two bombs exploded. Bauman also was able to identify one of the bombers, having stood about a foot away from the perpetrator.

In the climate of "Boston Strong" that followed the bombings, Bauman became a hero. He was honored at a Boston Bruins hockey game and later at a Red Sox game. He was bombarded with public adulation. As a survivor of a cruel tragedy, he became a symbol of triumph over terrorist mayhem.

Green shows us what Bauman's life was like in the post-bombing days. In a wheelchair and reliant on his girlfriend and his mother (a strong Miranda Richardson), this goofy but good-hearted son of Boston faced dual problems: adjusting to a disabled life and also to the attention he never sought.

Gyllenhaal's performance anchors the movie; he mixes moments of humor with moments of self-pity. Gyllenhaal portrays a man who others see as a hero, but who would rather get drunk with pals than pat himself on the back. Who can blame him? For Bauman, using the bathroom has become a physical ordeal.

To play the role, Gyllenhaal lost weight, turning Bauman into a gaunt figure with a crooked, diffident smile. A Costco employee who worked roasting chickens before the bombing, Bauman never seemed to have any great ambitions. Had the Marathon explosion never happened, he might have been content to watch Red Sox games in bars while exchanging stinging insults with friends. He might have been a working-class Peter Pan, a young man who sees no great benefit in entering the adult world.

Bauman doesn't always appreciate the help he gets from Maslany's Erin, the girlfriend who quits her job to help him through his arduous therapy, which includes learning how to use artificial legs.

Green tries for authenticity in his depiction of working-class Bostonians, a little grittier than what we saw in Peter Berg's Patriots Day, another movie about the Boston Marathon bombings.

Bauman's family and friends are tough, profane and not altogether agreeable people who are only too happy to join him at a bar or try to capitalize (emotionally) on what they view as his ascendance. As Patty, Bauman's Mom, Richardson creates a character who's jealous of Erin's potential to replace her as the central figure in Bauman's life.

Richardson's face reflects a mixture of bitterness, fear and occasional hope; she never tries to make us like a character who has difficulty letting go of her son. Bauman lived with his mother at the time of the bombing and remained at her home afterward.

Maslany proves equally determined as Erin, a young woman who goes through hell along with Bauman and is pushed to her breaking point. Like everyone in Stronger, she's not afraid to lose her temper.

Green doesn't dwell on the explosion that took Bauman's legs, although he brings it up in quickly inserted flashbacks that, by the end, of the movie, blossom into a more vivid (and perhaps unnecessary) display of the blast that changed Bauman's life.

Scenes in which Bauman meets Carlos (Carlos Sanz), the bystander who helped him at the site of the bombing, are well played by both Sanz and Gyllenhaal. Carlos lost a son in Iraq. Evidently, many who had relatives who were killed or maimed in America's recent wars looked to Bauman's story to reassure them that life could go on.

Toward the end, Green yields to a temptation that he manages to elude for most of the movie. He allows the movie to join the inspirational chorus in which Bauman, as a person, and Bauman, as a symbol, begin to merge. These final scenes have an unavoidable taint of hagiography that mingles with a genuine thematic attempt to give Bauman moments of reconciliation that allow him once again to be comfortable in his own skin.

Obviously, there will be those who find the film's conclusion more stirring than I did, but Gyllenhaal's strong performance and equally vital contributions from a fine supporting cast keep Stronger on track, making it a powerful look at what happens when ordinary people are damaged by events over which they have no control.

I can't think of a more wrenching scene than the one in which doctors remove the bandages from Bauman's remaining legs. Not only is the removal screamingly painful, but it also serves as a stamp of finality on Bauman's condition.

Green shoots the scene creatively, showing us Bauman's tormented face and the face of his girlfriend in profile; what remains of Brad's legs appears in soft focus between them. Do we want to see? Does he?

Together, Green and Gyllenhaal have made a movie that asks us not to look away.

'Okja:' A very big pig movie

Once you know that Okja is a pig the size of a hippopotamus, you'll understand that the movie named after her isn't going to be a typical affair. It's also worth knowing that Korean director Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer and The Host) isn't trying to turn Okja into an updated version of Babe, the endearing Australian charmer from 1995.

Ever ready to expose greed and deception, Bong has made a movie about the ways in which a callous corporation exploits both the pig and the pig's keeper, a quietly determined Korean girl named Mija (An Seo-hyun).

Early on, we learn that the Mirando company has created enormous genetically modified pigs. Wanting to keep the pigs under wraps for a decade, the company sends each animal to a far-flung keeper. The keepers are responsible for raising the pigs. Mija is one of those keepers.

It soon becomes clear that Mija, who lives in the mountains with her grandfather, has developed a strong Bond with Okja. Okja servs as Mija's constant and loyal companion. The two play together, and Mija believes that her grandfather plans to purchase the pig so that Okja can continue her idyllic life in Korea.

But even grandpa can't be trusted: He has no intention of keeping Okja from becoming someone's dinner -- or in the case of this pig, dinner for a multitude of consumers.

The company is represented by its CEO Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton); a fading TV celebrity (Jake Gyllenhaal); and the company's smooth-talking flak (Giancarlo Esposito).

It doesn't take much italicizing by Bong for us to know that this trio -- coupled with Lucy's twin sister (also Swinton) -- represents the soulless evil of contemporary life.

An animal rights group led by the super-sincere but still conniving Jay (Paul Dano) also joins the fray, a group with its own agenda.

I can't say that the giant animated pig looks exactly like an inflated version of the real thing, but it quickly becomes apparent that Okja has a heroic, self-sacrificial streak that makes her even more of a pal to Mija. Only the motives of animal and girl show anything close to unalloyed purity.

A simple plot finds company reps traveling to Korea to bring Okja to New York for a competition to determine which of the company's many genetically modified pigs qualifies as best of the breed, a major PR stunt.

The rest of the movie follows Mija's efforts to reunite with Okja and return to the uncorrupted simplicity of mountain life.

The grown-up, non-pig performances tend toward exaggeration bordering on caricature. Gyllenhaal, for example, speaks in a distractingly odd voice. Always clad in shorts, his character looks like a demented kid who has gone off the rails at summer camp.

Don't mistake Okja for a kids' movie, though. Among other dark moments, Bong includes a harrowing trip to a slaughterhouse where Okja is supposed to meet her terrible fate.

Fat with thematic intentions, Bong's movie never quite scores a bullseye. It should be seen as a kind of irresistible oddity that hammers home its message (or messages) without much finesse but is made watchable by the bond between a girl and a pig that only the cruelest carnivore ever would want to eat.

The point: In a world dominated by commerce and self-interest, the real pigs are all walking on two legs.
Okja bows on Netflix and is available in limited theatrical settings.

More alien dangers from space

Entirely predictable, Life generates tension -- but not much else.

Life arrives in theaters as another Alien clone -- only like most derivative movies, it's not nearly as good as the original.

The best thing about Life may be its depictions of the crew of an international space station floating through extravehicular missions or taking care of daily tasks in the space-station's gravity-free environment. Gliding through the station's narrow corridors looks like it might be fun -- at least for 10 or so minutes.

The story follows a standard alien-on-spacecraft arc. The crew finds carbon-based life in soil samples from Mars -- or something like that. The science officer brings the simple, single-cell creature to life by feeding it glucose. What begins with wonder and awe quickly sours as this simple cellular creature develops into a predatory, octopus-like monster with a face that may remind you of the deep-space monster in Alien.

Once the monster makes its predatory intentions clear, the crew must fight for its life -- and to keep this creature away from Earth. The creature is dubbed Calvin by school children on Earth where the discovery initially is celebrated.

Director Daniel Espinosa ably turns the tension crank as he mixes two marquee names -- Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds -- with a lesser known cast, making Life an ensemble piece in which no single character really stands out. British actor Ariyon Bakari makes a bit of an impression as the station's chief science officer.

Movies such as Life can't really work if we're not repelled by the alien creature's eating habits. The monster's tentacles probe the throats of its victims as it embraces them with a combination of waving tentacles and what appear to be stingray-like wings. Someone describes the creature as a deadly mixture of muscle, brain and eye, which is pretty much what the movie tries to be -- albeit with intermittent success.

Much attention has been given to creating a credible space station, which helps with plausibility. Life offers no wild-eyed futuristic version of space travel, but takes place in the bland near-future.

Don't forget, though, it was the industrial strength cynicism of the original Alien, as well as its hideously vicious creature, that made for such a compelling experience. Life offers tension, but without much of an accompanying vision to elevate it. Gyllenhaal's character voices distaste for life on a conflict-riddled Earth, but that's about it for philosophical musing.

As the story progresses and the fatalities mount, Gyllenhaal's presence increases -- but without creating any special impact. The ship's medical officer (Rebecca Ferguson) also receives more attention.

Terror about making contact with another form of life hardly constitutes a novel story line, and the movie's conclusion proves relatively easy to outguess.

It's possible that Life will turnout to be a placeholder or maybe a warm-up act for Ridley Scott's soon-to-be-released Alien: Covenant. I was hoping for more.

Style can't save 'Nocturnal Animals'

Despite high style and self-conscious stabs at meaning, this one leaves a bad aftertaste.

Director Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals mixes the self-consciously stylish look of art-house cinema (or what some think of as art house cinema) with the substance of a trashy noir thriller. To borrow from the recent presidential campaign, the movie can be viewed as an attempt to go low and high at the same time.

The bulk of Ford's movie centers on Susan (Amy Adams), a Los Angeles art gallery owner who spends most of this overly determined effort either reading or remembering -- and doing very little actual living.

The movie begins with a piece of performance art at Susan's purportedly sophisticated gallery. Wearing only majorette hats and boots, some very heavy women are seen dancing. The piece demands that we look at bodies that normally would remain hidden.

Whether Ford intends this fleshy romp as ironic commentary about the hollowness of the current art scene remains unclear. Maybe it's a bit of visual snark about Hollywood's tyranny of thinness. Your guess is as good as mine.

The most vivid part of the movie involves Ford's presentation of the brutal, exploitative story that Susan spends most of the movie reading.

This story within a story begins when Susan receives a manuscript from her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal), a novelist she hasn't seen since she upended their marriage 19 years earlier.

Dedicated to her, the book tells the story of a West Texas incident in which a hapless husband (also Gyllenhaal), a wife and their teen-age daughter (Isla Fisher and Ellie Bamber) are harassed by redneck creeps on a lonely Texas highway. Mother and daughter don't fare well.

This part of the story eventually becomes a revenge tale in which Gyllenhaal's character joins forces with a local lawman (Michael Shannon) whose rasping cough turns out to be a case of terminal lung cancer.

Shannon's Bobby Andes urges the aggrieved husband toward vengeance, as the movie prattles on about whether Gyllenhaal's character has the stomach for taking matters into his own hands. Is he weak or is he a real man?

Other scenes immerse us in Susan's meaning-challenged life, an existence steeped in self-loathing -- albeit in upscale surroundings of a kind few of us ever actually encounter. Oh, how the rich do suffer.

Susan lives with her philandering second husband (Armie Hammer), a businessman who's going through a slump. He conveniently leaves LA for a trip to New York, which makes it possible for Susan to spend most of the movie reading in bed.

Ford's layered approach to narrative also charts the course of Susan's first marriage: Susan wants a life her aspiring novelist husband can't provide, thus proving that her mother (Laura Linney in cameo) was right to suggest that she find a stronger mate.

Shannon gives the movie's best performance, proving that he can be scary even when he's on the right side of the law.

Trapped in a purposeless world of art and glitz, Susan doesn't provide Adams with enough opportunity to vary her performance, and Gyllenhaal does what he can with dual roles, sweating through bouts of grief and existential desperation.

Ford (A Single Man) piles on the style as he traces noir gestures in the air, leaving little but a sour aftertaste as the movie dissolves into a muddled and disconcerting ether.

He destroys, but can he rebuild?

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man gone numb in Demolition.

If Demolition were a novel, I probably wouldn't have finished it.

Although the movie deals with important issues surrounding the devastations of grief, it strains for metaphorical significance at nearly every turn, even as it tries to temper its seriousness with offbeat expressions of humor.

The story centers on Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal), a Wall Street type who loses his wife (Heather Lind) in an automobile accident that opens the movie.

Davis, who works for his father-in-law (Chris Cooper), feels nothing; the day after the funeral, he's back in the office -- much to the consternation of his colleagues.

But as the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Davis isn't simply callous; his emotional numbness touches nearly everything he does. Get it? There's something deeply wrong with Davis' life.

Bryan Sipe's screenplay uses an oddball conceit to emphasize Davis' inability to sustain intimacy. He begins sharing details of his life in letters he writes to the customer service department of a vending machine company.

The correspondence begins because a machine in the hospital where Davis' wife died failed to deliver candy or return his money.

Davis' persistence strikes a chord with customer service rep Karen Moreno (Naomi Watts). The two develop a strange relationship in which Davis takes on the role of mentor -- albeit a slightly twisted one -- to Karen's teen-age son (Judah Lewis), a surly kid who's struggling with his sexual identity.

On some level, Davis understands that he must take his life apart, and he begins to do just that -- all too literally.

He starts by dismantling the refrigerator in the ultra modern home he shared with his late wife, and extends his destructive impulses to his computer at work and to the office's bathroom stalls. He's working much too hard, and so, I'm afraid, is the movie.

Davis' DYI demolition derby remains problematic. Davis destroys the life he apparently never really wanted -- or, at least, never thought much about, but shows little interest in putting it back together.

Gyllenhaal does surprisingly well with a character in whom it's not always easy to believe; the always reliable Cooper grounds his character in credible rage at a son-in-law who appears massively insensitive, and Watts seems a bit stranded as another wobbly character.

The cast handles the movie's tonal shifts easily enough, and Jean-Marc Vallee (Wild and Dallas Buyers Club) directs with commitment and obvious concern for material that's trying to get beyond ordinary multiplex constraints.

But for all its attempts at quirkiness and creativity, Demolition fails to ring true. Before a movie can dig deep, it has to pay a lot more attention to surface details which, in this case, too often leave us scratching our heads.

An adventure that scales major heights

It's people vs. the mountain in a dizzying Everest.

Take a bunch of actors with bushy beards that conceal their identifying features, dress them in bulky snow gear, cover their noses and mouths with oxygen masks and make them wear goggles to reduce glare from the sun. Do that and you'll be making a movie in which it's not always easy to tell one character from another.

That's what happens in Everest, the true story of a guided expedition that tried to scale Everest in 1996. You may have to hang around for the end credits to make sure you've gotten the actors straight.

Normally, that would be grounds for failure, but director Baltasar Kormakur's 3D IMAX adventure into mountainous terrain effectively builds tension around harrowing set pieces and spectacular scenery.

The movie also has a point: Everest can make a mockery of human ambition. You look at the steep precipices, the tangle of ropes and litter left by previous climbers, and rock faces that seem alien to human life, and you wonder whether the mountain isn't the movie's loudest voice: Everything about Everest says that people don't belong there.

Working from a script by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy, Kormakur wastes little time trying to flesh out a story that can be summed up in a few words: Folks climb, the weather turns bad, not everyone survives.

Confusion not withstanding, it's possible to provide a Who's Who in this Himalayan adventure.

Jason Clarke plays Rob Hall, the leader of the expedition and the closest the movie gets to having a main character.

At the outset, Clarke -- who projects good humor and climbing competence -- leaves his pregnant wife (Keira Knightley), and heads to Nepal to join colleagues who also work for a company that helps climbers reach the summit.

Included in the cast are Sam Worthington (as another member of the team); Emily Watson (as the person who holds down operations at the base camp), and Elizabeth Debicki (as the team doctor).

Jake Gyllenhaal portrays Scott Fischer, a tour guide who joins forces with Hall to make the climb a bit easier. Ingvar Sigurdsson portrays a Russian climber who seems to think oxygen is for wimps.

John Hawke appears as one of the climbers, a mailman who wants to prove that an ordinary guy can dream big.

Providing one of the movie's more recognizable faces, Josh Brolin portrays a climber who learns that Texas-style bravado isn't much help under dire, blizzard conditions.

The real-life story of what happened on this expedition was written by Jon Krakauer , who recounted the tale in his book, Into Thin Air. Michael Kelly portrays Krakauer, who joined the expedition to report for Outside Magazine. (The screenplay, by the way, isn't adapted from Krakauer's book.)

To the movie's credit, arrival at the summit occurs about half way through. Everest lets us know that the real accomplishment involves more than reaching the top: The triumph rests in getting back down.

The second half of the movie involves the climbers' descent, a trek that turns into disorganized frenzy with the arrival of a ferocious storm.

The movie leaves you to ponder why anyone would risk life and limb to make this sort of climb, but Kormakur (2 Guns) mostly avoids philosophical musings.

Instead, he makes us feel the sting of blowing snow or the apprehension of climbers traversing a narrow ledge or inching their way across ladders that span impossibly deep crevasses.

But Everest offers more than pure action; it also creates understanding of the teamwork required to accomplish this kind of feat and the pain and loss that accompany failure.

And although Everest hardly qualifies as a character study, it conveys the love that professional climbers have for one another. That feeling helps generate emotion, particularly at the end.

Not surprisingly, Everest is about courage and stamina, but it also tells us that sometimes these qualities aren't enough. That's not exactly the message one expects from a big-ticket movie that most people will see because it's the closest they'll ever want to get to this kind of experience.

Hard punch, but no knockout

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a boxer who hits the skids in director Antoine Fuqua's Southpaw.

In the realm of boxing movies (Body and Soul and Raging Bull being two of my favorites), Southpaw hardly qualifies as a contender.

Boxing movies tend to punch hard, but that doesn't mean they should be totally lacking in nuance. A predictable story about the rise, fall and ultimate redemption of a boxer played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Southpaw serves up plot points with all the subtlety of a clenched fist pounding a vulnerable face.

A Hip-Hop veneer masks some of the cliches, but director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) creates an in-your-face drama that fails to stake out a claim either as an example of hard-core realism or Rockyesque fantasy.

Brutal and bloody, Southpaw revolves around Gyllenhaal's performance as Billy Hope, a light-heavyweight champion whose rage ignites a dramatic and precipitous fall from grace.

Gyllenhaal effectively communicates Billy's polarity: fury coupled with occasional tenderness. Reticent and emotionally bottled up, Billy mumbles through a mouth that never seems to fully open.

I'd say that Gyllenhaal was better as a rogue TV cameraman in last year's Nightcrawler, but he's never anything less than intense in Fugua's full-bore assault on the senses.

Raised in a New York City orphanage, Billy is married to Maureen (Rachel McAdams), another product of the city's indifferent child-care system. They live in a mansion, want for little and have a loving marriage.

Early on, we learn that Maureen thinks Billy should take a break from boxing; she believes he's only a few steps away from permanent brain damage.

Oona Laurence plays the cute, bespectacled daughter who increasingly figures into the plot.

I'll leave the family drama for you to discover in a theater, but you should know that a terrible calamity results in Billy hitting the skids and being discarded by his self-serving manager (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson).

Billy also takes a Jake LaMotta style beating in the ring, a form of self-inflicted punishment. Billy apparently wants to pay for his sins.

When Billy finally embarks on the comeback trail, he receives help from the tough-minded proprietor of a run-down gym, a worn-looking Forest Whitaker.

Whitaker's Tick Willis, who works with poor kids, teaches Billy the fine art of defense, convincing him that his future depends on controlling his anger -- both in and out of the ring.

Fuqua goes to great lengths to make the audience feel the punches that are thrown in the ring, and he certainly conveys the dizzying excitement that surrounds a major fight, a couple in Madison Square Garden and another in Las Vegas.

But when the final bell sounds, Southpaw stands as a movie steeped in a fatal contradiction: It talks loudly and boldly, but has nothing much to say. It's full of intense close-ups, but almost totally lacking in elevating perspective.

'Nightcrawler' holds us in its sway

He has a camera, but does he have a soul?

We know little about the background of Lou Bloom, the main character in director Dan Gilroy's disquieting new thriller, Nightcrawler.

An apparent loner, Lou lives in a modest Los Angeles apartment, where he spends lots of time on the Internet. His eyes have the unblinking stare of a surveillance camera in a convenience store. He's definitely weird.

Lou -- a gaunt-looking Jake Gyllenhaal in his best screen performance yet -- appears to have acquired his social skills and stilted speech patterns from a manual, something like "How to Talk to a Prospective Employer."

After a misguided attempt at landing a job, Lou happens upon an automobile accident where a freelance news crew is scurrying to obtain graphic footage.

It's love at first sight for Lou, who understands that he has found a calling that may allow him to abandon minor larceny and enter a world where his lack of inhibition will bring him great success.

In a twisted version of bromides such as "follow your bliss," Lou finds something he truly loves, filming other people's misery.

To launch his career, Lou obtains a cheap camera and a police scanner. He begins to ply his new trade -- at first to the derision of established freelancers such as Joe Loder (Bill Paxton). Loder mocks Lou's amateur equipment and general lack of savvy.

But Lou persists, bringing his first footage to Nina Romina (Rene Russo), a news director at a third-tier local station. Nina knows Lou isn't skilled, but she recognizes that he has the stomach to pursue the "money shot," the gory detail others might avoid.

No spring chicken, Nina's been around the TV block. She's entirely committed to the cliche often used to characterize TV news: "If it bleeds, it leads."

When Nina tells Lou how to approach his newfound craft, she offers this bit of gruesome advice: He should try for images that create the feeling of a screaming woman running down a street with her throat cut.

Fortunately, Nightcrawler isn't another lathered-up critique of the media, although it certainly takes its shots at TV's appetite for sensation-driven content.

No, Nightcrawler is more than an anti-media screed: It's a character study of a man who distorts what might normally be regarded as virtues until they disappear into a haze of amorality. Lou has a preternatural ability to focus and a ravenous hunger for absorbing information that he quickly puts to use.

Joining with cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood), Gilroy works from a dark and gleaming palette that avoids most of the usual LA visual cliches. Almost every shot is alive with the city's worst impulses.

Lou's nocturnal adventures -- some quite grisly -- unfold in near-hypnotic fashion: A shooting that leaves gaping holes in a victim, gruesome car wrecks and crime. Lots of crime. Lou specializes in the kind of brutal material customarily presented by news anchors with a caveat: "viewer discretion advised."

Along the way, Lou acquires an assistant (Riz Ahmed), whom he refers to as an employee.

In a bizarre comic scene, Lou promotes Ahmed's Rick from a $30-per-night intern to executive vice-president of what he regards as his burgeoning video news empire. Lou never acts as if he's running anything less than a big-time operation. Lou, of course, believes everything he says. He smiles, but never jokes.

Much of the movie's tension derives from wondering whether Lou is insanely ambitious or simply insane. At one point, he takes Nina to dinner. He's confident enough about his importance to her that he blackmails her into a sexual relationship. The nerd has become a predator.

When you play Nightcrawler back in your head, you may decide that it's guilty of wild exaggeration and that some of Lou's adventures defy plausibility. But when a movie holds you in its sway, as this one does, there's little point complaining.

Honore de Balzac told us that behind every great fortune, there's a great crime. Nightcrawler tells us that crimes great and small are often committed by those who, like Lou, believe in the absolute necessity of their actions.

Lou's a sociopathic creep, all right, but (heaven help us), he's a happy creep. A creep with a destiny.

An eerie drama about look-alikes

Jake Gyllenhaal teams with Canadian director Denis Villeneuve for Enemy, an atmospheric look at troubling issues involving identity.

Gyllenhaal, who worked with Villeneuve on last year's Prisoners, plays two roles: He’s Adam, a psychologically repressed history professor, and Anthony, an actor with a big personality. The professor seems disconnected from things; the actor is more outgoing.

The movie kicks off in earnest when Adam rents a movie called Where There's a Will, There's a Way. While watching this minor cinematic effort, he notices a background character who looks exactly like he does.

Adam then begins an obsessive search to find and meet his doppelganger.

Both men are involved in relationships. Adam occasionally sees a girlfriend (Melanie Laurent). Anthony’s wife (Sarah Gordon) is pregnant.

The movie invites us to play a mind game. Are we really looking at separate lives or at different aspects of the same life?

Did I mention the spiders? Images of spiders crop up throughout, seriously augmenting the movie’s creepiness.

Gyllenhaal handles both roles effectively, and Villeneuve and cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc get plenty of mileage out of the movie’s well-selected Toronto locations: Faceless apartments suggest an alien landscape in which anonymity borders on estrangement.

Enemy sustains interest, but never seems quite trippy enough to be entirely satisfying. Imagine the same material in the hands of a director such as David Cronenberg, and you’ll know what I mean.

As befits such a purposefully ambiguous effort, Villeneuve’s surprising final shot is open to interpretation — perhaps too much so.*
*Enemy has been available on VOD, where I saw it, and is now beginning a theatrical at the Sie FilmCenter.

A thriller under heavy thematic weather

Prisoners is one of the most effectively grim thrillers in a long time.

Denis Villeneuve's new thriller, Prisoners, brings an alarming shiver to the screen, not only because its story generates a dire and escalating sense of creepiness and dread, but because cinematographer Roger Deakins's corroborating imagery tends to be dark, damp and as unforgiving as the hard-driving rains of a Pennsylvania winter.

The French-Canadian Villeneuve (Incendies) has made a movie that sometimes feels as if it's happening in an alternate reality, one in which moral rot has penetrated the heart of a small Pennsylvania city.

That may sound more like the basis for a horror movie than a thriller, and it's worth knowing that Villeneuve -- working from a script by Aaron Guzikowski -- stirs suggestions of horror into the movie's intensely dour mix.

The title is apt in many ways, not the least of which is the way in which Villeneuve and Deakins depict the American landscape as one imprisoned by gloom, almost as if nature has become an accomplice in some ill-defined decline.

The story could have been inspired by any number of real-life crime scenarios. Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover, a struggling carpenter whose life -- and that of his wife (Maria Bello) -- receives a terrifying jolt when his young daughter is kidnapped along with the daughter of a neighboring couple (Viola Davis and Terrence Howard).

Dissatisfied with the work of a local detective (Jake Gyllenhaal), Keller takes matters into his own hands, kidnapping a prime suspect, a young man (Paul Dano) who hasn't progressed beyond the mental age of 10. After being questioned by police, Dano's Alex Jones is released for lack of evidence.

Davis and Howard gradually slip from view as the script concentrates its moral ambiguities in the hands of Jackman (fierce and uncompromising) and Gyllenhaal (a cop with an eye twitch and a bad haircut).

Believing that only Jones can lead him to his daughter, Keller proceeds to imprison and torture the mentally challenged man, and the screenplay begins introducing a near-barrage of red herrings.

The initial disappearance of the children takes place during a Thanksgiving dinner that's being shared by Jackman and Bello and Howard and Davis. It's clear that the two families -- each of which also has an older child -- are accustomed to spending time together, but as the story progresses, it also becomes clear that Jackman's Keller is the most extreme member of this quartet; he's a recovering alcoholic, a hunter and an amateur survivalist who's deeply schooled in the notion that men take care of themselves and that society -- with its wafer-thin veneer of laws -- cannot be trusted.

The screenplay doesn't overemphasize Keller's dissatisfaction, but he's the kind of blue-collar guy who easily could feel that the system -- however he defines it -- might, at any moment, betray him.

Sporting gray hair and the shuffling walk of a woman aged beyond her years, Melissa Leo plays Alex's aunt, the woman who helped raise him.

Of course, we feel the anxiety of parents who aren't sure that their children remain alive. Of course, we feel the brutal effectiveness of torture scenes that take place in an abandoned apartment building that Keller owns but can't afford to renovate. And the film holds our attention through its 2 1/2-hour length.

It's difficult to discuss much more without spoilers, but know that Prisoners -- though encompassing, well-acted and morally ambitious -- includes a bit of overreaching in its finale, perhaps an attempt to underline the movie's thematic seriousness. at times, the screenplay loses credibility amid Villeneuve's thickening applications of tension and mood.

Unlike more traditional thrillers, Prisoners does not offer a totally cathartic sense of relief. It wraps things up, but the physical and moral dampness that pervades everything feels as if it might never dry.

A gut-wrenching LAPD drama

Two cops patrol the hood in tense End of Watch

In End of Watch, director Robert Ayer pours on lots of gritty, convincing resolve as he takes us inside the world of two Los Angeles police officers. This mostly episodic look at patrolling partners (Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena) covers a variety of tensely portrayed situations and makes it clear that these young cops are as hooked on the excitement of the streets as the gang bangers they frequently confront.

With his head shaved and eyes glaring, Gyllenhaal plays Brian Taylor, a former Marine who provides the movie with an opening narration that establishes these cops as guys who brook no nonsense when they put on their uniforms. Meet them in a bar, you'll like them. Meet them in an alley, and you may be sorry.

Pena, a terrific actor who finally gets a major chunk of screen time, plays Mike Savala, a Mexican-American cop whose wife (Natalie Martinez) is pregnant. Pena creates a tough, likable working-class hero.

When Taylor and Savala aren't battling crime or helping people in trouble, they're bantering in their black-and-white. They're comfortable trading ethnic jibes, cops who are more loyal to each other than to any outside group.

At one point, Taylor tells Savala that he finally has met a woman with whom he can talk, something he's been craving. Enter Anna Kendrick as Janet, the woman who steals Taylor's heart.

Ayer doesn't spare us graphic violence, and some scenes in End of Watch are super-tense. When the cops enter houses with their guns drawn, they have no idea what they might be facing. At such times, End of Watch works on the gut.

Perhaps for leavening, Ayer introduces us to a bit of off-duty life when Taylor joins Savala at a quinceanera, and there are obligatory scenes at the station house where the men receive their daily assignments. Taylor and Savala also get crosswise with an older cop (David Harbour).

At some point, Ayer needs to introduce a story line. Dropped into all the action is a tale in which Taylor and Savala stumble into the world of Mexican drug cartels and become targets for a hit.

Some of the action is seen from the viewpoint of a mini-documentary that Taylor is filming. There's also footage supposedly taken by gang members. By now the use of feigned amateur video has become as stale as the average car chase. Ayer just as effectively could have employed an edgy, hand-held style without putting video cameras into the hands of his characters.

The looming presence of the drug cartels leads to a bullet-riddled finale marked by a level of violence that goes way over the top. I don't know if it's realistic, but it feels too much like an attempt to further juice the already juiced proceedings, making us wonder whether Ayer, who wrote the script for Training Day, isn't more interested in visceral excitement than authenticity.

Still, End of Watch holds you in its grip. It does a good job convincing us that the cops who work in gang-dominated neighborhoods aren't all that different from soldiers in a war zone. Had the movie gone a step further and done more to remind us that the same goes for most of the residents of those same neighborhoods, End of Watch would have been even better.

A gripping, if muddled, 'Source Code'

Director Duncan Jones' second feature is vivid and entertaining.

Director Duncan Jones made a splash on the indie film circuit with 2009's Moon, a movie in which Sam Rockwell played an isolated astronaut hoping to return home from a long stint at a moon base. Bigger, sharper and more entertaining than its predecessor, Source Code keeps Jones in the sci-fi realm with a story that can play like a Twilight Zone episode on steroids.

Jake Gyllenhaal portrays Coulter Stevens, a young man who wakes up on a Chicago commuter train. The woman seated across from him (Michelle Monaghan) talks to him as if she knows him. But he doesn't know her. Totally confused, Gyllenhaal's character slips into the restroom to regroup. There, the weirdness gets weirder. When he looks in the mirror, the reflection staring back at him belongs to someone else.

As Source Code progresses, we begin to realize (as does Gyllenhaal's character) what's happening, but it's best not to tell too much more about the movie's plot, except to note that Ben Ripley's screenplay has Gyllenhaal repeating the same scenario a number of times.

We learn what's going on at roughly the same pace as Gyllenhaal's Stevens, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He begins to grasp that he's on a mission that requires him -- with help from some technology, of course -- to keep returning to that train in eight-minute chunks.

With each trip, Stevens gains more knowledge about how high the stakes are. Bombs, domestic terror and terrible urban destruction lurk in the background.

Although I can't say Duncan totally sold me on the movie's time-bending premise, he keeps the story moving with the inexorable speed of the train Stevens revisits. At its best, Source Code comes at us in vivid bursts; its mood becomes increasingly frantic, partly because its hero must work against inflexible deadlines that up the dramatic ante. It's an old contrivance, of course, but Duncan infuses it with fresh energy.

Gyllenhaal acquits himself well, and Monaghan proves exceptionally appealing as a young woman who believes her life has reached a turning point.

The rest of the cast includes Jeffrey Wright, as a brainy scientist, and Vera Farmiga, as Wright's subordinate. Wright, a wonderful actor, seems wasted in a role that just about anyone could have handled. Farmiga, who has more to do, portrays a character that's a bit of a departure for her, but neither Wright nor Farmiga are likely to press this one into their books of indelible acting memories.

Source Code flirts with joining the ranks of paranoia-prone movies that deal with the ways manipulative governments betray their heroes. Too bad the movie's cop-out ending - really an epilogue - pushes Duncan onto less challenging turf. But Duncan knows how to hold an audience's attention, and Source Code's devotion to creating Hitchcock-style suspense keeps us on edge, which (happy to say) is precisely what movies such as this are supposed to do.

Love, sex, drugs and too much else

It starts as if it's going to satirize the highly commercial world of Big Pharma. In the shift to romcom something is lost."

It's got drugs, love and sex, but these obviously volatile ingredients don't mesh especially well in Love & Other Drugs, a romantic comedy starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, both of whom sometimes bare as much body as they do soul. And, by the way, before you call the DEA, we're talking primarily about licit drugs of the prescription variety.

Love & Other Drugs starts out as if it's going to be a lively expose of the ways in which the pharmaceutical industry pressures and coaxes doctors into prescribing one drug over another.

But Big Pharma probably needn't fret. Love & Other Drugs proves too scatter shot to hit any target for long: In addition to romping through the highly commercialized fields of the drug industry, the movie also attempts to refresh a romcom formula, examine self-imposed emotional barriers and toss in a few crass jokes for good measure.

The surprising thing - at least to me - about Love & Other Drugs is that it was directed and co-written by Edward Zwick, who has made fine movies, but who also helped create the landmark TV show thirtysomething, which had plenty to say about relationships, work and young families. It's interesting that this time out, Zwick - whose best big-screen work includes movies such as Glory and Blood Diamond - can't quite find a pulse on which to put his finger.

For all its ambition, Love & Other Drugs may be remembered for a variety of nude scenes between Gyllenhaal and Hathaway, who now officially closes the cover on her Princess Diary days.

Gyllenhaal and Hathaway worked together in Brokeback Mountain, only in that movie his character was a married gay man. This time, Gyllenhaal goes hetero with a vengeance, playing Jamie Randall, a womanizing drug salesman who bribes receptionists and sometimes helps doctors with their ... ahem ... social lives.

The only physician given much attention in the film - an internist portrayed by Hank Azaria - seems a bit of a sleazebag himself. During one telling moment, Azaria's Dr. Knight laments the state of contemporary medicine. We might be have been more sympathetic had he not delivered his analysis at a pajama party that morphs into an upscale orgy.

By now, you're probably wondering what happened to the romantic comedy part of the movie. Let me get you up to speed on that.

During the course of his work, Gyllenhaal's Jamie meets Hathaway's Maggie Murdock, a young woman who has Parkinson's disease. She's interested in sex, not long-term relationships. She's also angry and emotionally defended, not a surprising combination for someone with an incurable disease.

The next two words tell you something very significant about the movie.... They're "of course."

Of course, Jamie and Maggie fall for each other, even though she's ill and he's a committed womanizer who heretofore has shown no interest in stable relationships. And, of course, they get close and then pull apart and then....

Well, you know the drill.

Gyllenhaal's running at high speed here, playing a whip-smart underachiever who dropped out of college. Hathaway's Maggie is an artist, who's brash in ways that emphasize her cleverness and her desire to hold the world at arm's length.

Zwick sets the movie in the 90s, a decade when the economy was on the rise and so were other things. The story takes place during the dawning of the age of Viagra, the drug that catapults Jamie into the financial stratosphere. Oliver Platt appears as Jamie's drug-company mentor.

The movie can be smart, but it's also marred by an unfortunate tendency to dip into Judd Apatow territory. Jamie's brother (Josh Gad), is a dweeby entrepreneur who adds unnecessary gross-out jokes to the proceedings. And there's joke about a drug-induced erection that won't subside; it sticks out like a .... Let's just say it's too cheap for a movie that seems intent on finding some real emotion.

Those emotions can seem genuine, although I sometimes found myself watching performances by Gyllenhaal and Hathaway rather than becoming involved with their characters, young people who were being forced -- albeit kicking and screaming -- into accepting love.

It would be remiss to conclude a review of Love & Other Drugs without mentioning that Jill Clayburgh, who died earlier this month after a prolonged battled with leukemia. She appears briefly as Jamie's mother. She's also slated to appear in a 2011 movie. RIP to a fine actress.

As a thirtysomething fan, I was eager to see Love & Other Drugs, hoping it would successfully take Zwick away from the historical and topical subjects that seem to have dominated his movie career. But Love & Other Drugs wanders all over the place, touching down at a variety of entertaining and successful points without delivering on the high hopes the assembled talent engenders.