Maybe you can go home again

    We don’t talk about it much but, at some point, most of us fall prey to the loneliest of sorrows — not the kind of loneliness that comes from not being around people but the kind that stems from feeling the past evaporate and with it, everything and everyone we once knew. 

   Now a grown screenwriter, Adam (Andrew Scott) was 11 when his father (Jamie Bell) and mother (Claire Foy) died in a car crash, the unseen event that allows the quietly haunting All of Us Strangers to find its emotional bearings.

   Adam, a screenwriter who’s struggling with a screenplay about his upbringing, travels from London to his family’s suburban home, a normal enough activity for a writer. 

   But when he arrives, he discovers that his mother and father still seem to be living in the home where he grew up. They haven't aged, but look exactly as they did on the day they perished.

   Strange as it seems, Adam has a chance to connect with his departed parents, to update them on the part of his life they never knew, to give them a chance to see him as a gay man. He wants them to love and accept him as he is.

   Director Andrew Haig plays Adam’s relationship with his parents against a relationship he begins with Harry (Paul Mescal), an equally lonely but more convivial neighbor.

   Deep feelings of isolation pervade nearly every scene, particularly in the early going. The two men live in a London high rise where they seem to be the only tenants, a clue that we’ve entered a moment of unsettling indeterminacy. 

   The relationship begins when Mescal’s Harry knocks on Adam’s door. He’s holding a bottle of liquor and wants to come in for a drink. Adam demurs. But the two eventually begin an affair.

   At first, Mom isn’t happy to hear the news about her son's sexual identity; her view of gay life never left the 1980s, a time when the AIDS crisis raged.

   Dad, a heavy smoker, has a different attitude, he's not harshly judgmental, although at one point, he admits that he could have been one of the guys who bullied Adam at school. 

   Loosely based on a 1987 novel by Taichi Yamada, All of Us Strangers sounds some of the same mournful notes you might expect find in a movie by the late Terrence Davies -- The Long Day Closes, for example.

   Haig treats Adam’s encounters with his parents as if they were real and leaves it for us to decide what they mean for Adam. Perhaps All of Us Strangers is mostly about Adam’s imaginative life — and the purposes it serves for him. 

   The relationship between Adam and Harry also involves elements that stretch realism. Clearly, though, Adam can’t move on until he buries his grief.

   All of Us Strangers draws us into Adam’s interior life, which means distinctions between the real and the illusory fade in and out, like chalk slowly being wiped from a blackboard and then suddenly reappearing again.

   What’s unquestionably real, though, is Adam’s pain, grief, and need for solace. In the end, Haig, whom I judge to be a director of generous spirit, doesn't deny him his comfort.

'Rocketman': a blast of pop energy

Taron Egerton delivers a major performance in this Elton John biopic.

A simple description of Rocketman makes the movie sound like one more celebrity biopic. Here's how such a summation might go: A boy who feels unloved establishes himself in the world of music, attains international celebrity as a rock star, almost loses himself to sex and drugs, enters rehab in the nick of time and emerges whole.

All true, but of little help in understanding what director Dexter Fletcher achieves with Rocketman, a movie about Elton John, one of rock's most successful artists. Fletcher refreshes genre cliches with storytelling strategies that turn Rocketman into an infectiously energetic look at the life of a rock star.

To begin the story, John -- in a red costume with wings and devil's horns -- marches down a hallway. We suppose that this man in red plumage is about to burst onto a stage, which -- of course -- would be the cliched way to begin a rock 'n' roll biopic. The star emerges. The crowd goes wild. The music begins.

But when John pushes through a set of doors, he's not putting himself on display for adoring fans. He's entering a rehab therapy session where he confesses to a multitude of failings. Among them: alcohol, drug and sex addictions, anger-management problems and shopping issues.

Without wearing it out, Fletcher uses the therapy format to take us back to the childhood John spent in a London neighborhood of British council homes. His mom's mind seems to be elsewhere and his unloving martinet of a father shows no appreciation for the talent of a son who wins a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music.

Fletcher turns this "flashback'' into a beautifully staged musical number, thus tipping his hand. He's not going to allow his filmmaking to be shackled by convention. The movie will stake its claim as a quasi-musical.

I won't say more about Rocketman’s stylistic flourishes. Fletcher includes enough of them to turn the movie into a heady tribute to the pop-cultural energy that's embodied in Taron Egerton's terrific performance as Elton John.

Of course, when a movie runs on so much high energy, it can't help but create a few spaces where the pace lags. Overall, though, Rocketman should appeal to those who enjoy cinema with a creative kick, as well as those who count themselves as Elton John fans.

Key songs are included. They're sung by Egerton who so thoroughly inhabits his character that his performance proves exhaustive and exhausting. I mean that in a good way. Egerton rides the wave of energy that elevates John’s stage presence even as it smashes his off-stage life into walls of pain. What Egerton does qualifies both as an amazing feat of talent and will.

Fletcher doesn't flinch from John's gayness. As his career begins to take hold, the singer falls for John Reid, a music manager (Richard Madden). A self-possessed operator, Reid eventually makes it clear that his approach to John has a cruel business edge. And Elton himself isn't always likable. He flies into rages or submerges himself in drug-induced stupors.

At one point, John tells his longtime collaborator Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell) that musical ideas pop into his head so quickly he hardly can keep up with them. And that, I suppose, is the key to understanding John's pre-rehab years. He's surfing the waves of his talent, never entirely safe from the big breaker he won't be able to ride. The movie charts John's ascendance quickly, almost a biography in shorthand.

Amid all this, Fletcher tells the story of an unloved child who seems to be appreciated only by his grandmother (Gemma Jones). Matthew Illsley and Kit Connor play John as a boy and an adolescent. The name -- Elton John -- is an invention. The movie shows how the young man born Reginald Dwight -- hit on the name he'd make famous.

Essentially, Rocketman consists of three acts. The first covers John's childhood. The second deals with his meteoric rise to success. In the third, John feeds his ravenous audience -- touring, performing and indulging his addictions. A fourth act -- John's recovery, marriage, and journey into fatherhood -- appears only in information and photos that accompany the end credits.

The supporting performances are all good. Bell creates a loyal friend in Bernie Taupin, a lyricist who eventually must step outside the tornadic spiral of John's success. Handsome and self-assured, Madden’s Reid wins John's heart before the relationship with his client/lover turns sour.

As John's mother, Dallas Bryce Howard paints a telling portrait of a woman whose refusal to be corralled by a stifling marriage leads her down a path that’s not likely to win any mother-of-the-year awards.

Elton John, who's now 72, served as one of the movie's executive producers, so it's fair to wonder what has been elided or omitted entirely. Still, it would be unfair to think of Rocketman as an act of cinematic hagiography. The movie is in love with John's music, but how could a biopic about Elton John be otherwise?

Rocketman includes an attempted suicide and plenty of despair. That's why it feels strange to say that the movie generates a feel-good vibe that follows you out of the theater. Maybe that's because even in the turbulence of John's rollercoaster life, the joy of music and performance can't be denied.

The final years of actress Gloria Grahame

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool but the movie, alas, does.

Peter Turner was a 26-year-old aspiring actor when he met Gloria Grahame in 1979. At the time, Grahame was a 55-year-old fading movie star appearing in a London production of Rain. The two began an affair that became the subject of a book by Turner, who, as a young man, was holding things together by working in a second-hand furniture store.

Grahame, who won a best-supporting-actress Oscar for her work in The Bad and The Beautiful (1952), was known mostly for playing the femme fatale in a variety of film noir movies. She died of cancer in 1981.

Of all the chapters in Grahame's life, the final one -- the subject of Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool -- struck me as the least interesting. I took a quick trip to Wikipedia to refresh see if I might be right.

I think I was. Grahame was married four times. Her marriage to director Nicolas Ray fell apart when Ray caught Grahame in bed with Anthony Ray, his 13-year-old son from a former marriage. Grahame later married the young man, who by the time of the wedding had arrived in his 20s. When her third husband, Cy Howard, discovered she had secretly married the younger Ray, he sued her for custody of their daughter.

And I haven't even mentioned Grahame's screen life, which placed her opposite Humphrey Bogart in the great but somewhat overlooked In a Lonely Place. She also worked with in director Fritz Lang's The Big Heat and a variety of other movies. Grahame eventually drifted into a career in episodic television. When things really collapsed, she headed to England. She became Turner's lover and friends with his Liverpool-based family; they took her in when she was dying from cancer.

In director Paul McGuigan's movie, Annette Bening plays Grahame. Jamie Bell portrays the devoted Turner, who at one point accompanies Grahame to Los Angeles and later to New York, but returns to England when Grahame gives him the cold shoulder. The actress had learned that her breast cancer had returned. As the movie has it, she didn’t want to involve Turner in a relationship. that had nowhere to go.

Bell does his best to convey a smitten young man whose patience eventually gives way to frustration, but who still spends time with Grahame when she takes up a brief residence with his parents (Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham) in Liverpool.

McGuigan employs flashbacks as he moves from Grahame's cancerous languor in Liverpool to the story of Grahame's relationship with Turner. But by dwelling on this May/December romance and Grahame's illness, McGuigan doesn't really do justice to Grahame's life.

The movie manages to spit some welcome venom when we meet Grahame's mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and her sister (Frances Barber). It's not enough to save the movie.

Bening doesn't look like Grahame but conveys some of the grit and resilience of a star who has lost her luster. Still, the mournful, sentimental Film Stars misfires, perhaps because -- in focusing on Turner's book -- it slices too much meat off the bone of Grahame's tumultuous life.

Trip to Planet Zero amounts to nothing

Fantastic Four, a bland attempt to stoke the Marvel fires.

The title of Fantastic Four is half true. There are four inadvertent superheroes in this latest offering to roll off the Marvel assembly line. Fantastic? Not so much.

Bland and dimly realized, this fourth Fantastic Four film stumbles through an origins story that begins well enough but quickly dissolves into heaps of uninspired exposition.

A negligible and familiar story launched when nerdy Reed Richards (Miles Teller) wins a scholarship to the Baxter Institute, a scientific think tank run by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey).

Dr. Storm understands that Reed, though not exactly the star of his high school science fair, has invented a device that can transport objects (and maybe people) to another dimension.

Because it contains abundant supplies of energy, this other dimension -- dubbed Planet Zero -- may hold the key to mankind's future. Perhaps humanity will have a chance to undue the damage it already has done to its home planet.

Once the story arrives at the Institute, Teller teams with Kate Mara, Toby Kebbell and Michael B. Jordan, an able enough cast, but one that's stuck in a movie that sometimes feels like a throwback to '50s sci-fi -- only without the trashy fun.

The young researchers acquire their powers when they use the teleportation machine to journey to Planet Zero, some sort of alternate reality where canyons, mountains and energy flows are depicted with a singular lack of creativity.

Marvel fans already know that each of the researchers at the Baxter Institute eventually morphs into a superhero with one power, so there's little element of surprise here.

Teller's Reed develops a rubbery body that expands his reach; Mara's Sue Storm can make herself disappear; Jordan acquires the ability to turn himself into a fiery missile.

Reed's less-than-brilliant pal Ben (Jamie Bell) joins the brainiac adventure: He becomes The Thing, a massive creature composed entirely of rock. Bell so quickly vanishes from the picture, I found myself hoping that he wasn't being paid by the minute.

One of the teleportation travelers -- Kebbell's Victor Von Doom -- doesn't make the return trip from Planet Zero. He eventually turns into the movie's arch villain, Dr. Doom.

Trank did a far better job with Chronicle (2012), a refreshing movie in which a trio of high school pals acquired super powers. Stuck serving the Marvel machine, he founders.

As a result, Fantastic Four comes and goes without even making a dent in the pop-cultural imagination.

All aboard for a compelling ride

A wild, weird dystopian journey that demands to be seen.

Lately, I've been wondering why we can't seem to get enough of dystopia? I don't need to recount all the ways in which the world's a mess, but it's intriguing that just about every tentpole movie (from Edge of Tomorrow to Transformers: Age of Extinction to The Hunger Games) mires itself in the gloomiest possible vision of a future we once saw as endlessly bright -- or at least that's the story we tell ourselves about the past.

TV, of course, has joined the vigorous march toward doom. This week, I watched the opening episode of HBO's The Leftovers, which (happily) is not another cooking show. The jury may be out on the show's merits, but it brings dystopian flavor to a present in which a third of the population has vanished -- for no apparent reason. The great disappearance seems to have resulted in a thorough demoralization of those who remain, the leftovers of the title.

That shows airs at the same time as The Last Ship, a TNT production about the lone surviving naval ship in a world vanquished by a plague-like virus.

As a culture, we seem to be wallowing in mass depression -- and even if the box office has flagged a bit -- we seem to be enjoying our gloom immensely.

Me? I've grown weary of the dystopian thinking that has burdened the artistic imagination. But maybe even that attitude reflects the general malaise. What the hell's wrong with me? I'm having trouble enjoying mass destruction.

Now comes Snowpiercer, an international hybrid of a movie from Korean director Bong Joon-ho (The Host), and it may help restore my faith in hopelessness.

Perhaps because its director is Korean and perhaps because Bong bases his movie on a French graphic novel called Le Transperceneige, Snowpiercer has become an art-house offering.

Don't be misled. Snowpiercer is an action movie wrapped in an iron-clad vision of a society in which survival depends on brutally enforced class divisions that may have resulted from an intense competition for limited resources.

Bong's refreshingly preposterous movie takes place on a train that circles the globe. The lives of those on board are maintained, but the train goes nowhere. The whole idea of destinations seem to have vanished.

How did this happen? Global warming was heating the planet to intolerable levels. Someone figured out how to cool the planet, but the solution went too far, turning the entire Earth into a snow-covered wasteland. The only survivors are on the train to nowhere, lurching endlessly through sub-zero temperatures.

As can happen when a group is totally suppressed, the lower classes who occupy the rear of the train are becoming restless. Curtis (Chris Evans) and his friend Edgar (Jamie Bell) decide it's time for a revolt.

This means organizing their fellow sufferers and fighting their way to the front of the train, where people haven't been reduced to living in squalor and eating nothing but protein bars that look as if they're made from a combination of recycled rubber and Gummy Bears. They're not.

A mysterious figure we don't see until the film's final act presides over the train and its regimented inhabitants.

Bong creates plenty of excitement as the rebels attempt to traverse the train's length, exposing the train's social structure as they go, and pouring on plenty of revolutionary violence.

Bong obtains fine performances from a cast that includes Octavia Spencer as the mother of a boy who's taken to the front of the train for unknown reasons, and John Hurt, as a sagacious old man who became a peon when he was banished from the front of the train.

We also meet Mason (an unrecognizable Tilda Swinton), a bureaucrat who travels the length of the train making announcements for the purportedly revered leader and doling out punishments to those who express dissatisfaction.

Alison Pill has a wonderfully exuberant turn as a school teacher who instructs young people and who also leads them in insanely cheerful devotions to the unseen leader.

Korean actors Kang-ho Song and Ah-sung Ko, play a father/daughter team of drug addicts who join the fray.

Intricately realized and totally unhinged, Snowpierecer can't be watched without feeling a bit of trepidation, probably because much depends on what happens when our revolutionaries finally reach the front of the train, where actor Ed Harris becomes a presence.

It pains me to say that the finale is a bit of a letdown. How could it not be? Harris doles out a bits of expositional and philosophical dialogue that don't quite deliver the hoped-for payoff.

But don't let that stop you from seeing one of the most creative, strange and propulsive movie's of the year. Flaws and all, Snowpiercer -- like its perpetually moving train -- takes us on one hell of a trip.

Nymphomanic: Volume II, the punishment

Lars Von Trier continues the torment.

Not content with one sexually explicit movie, Danish director Lars von Trier has issued the provocatively titled Nymphomaniac in two volumes.

Volume 1 dealt with a nymphomaniacal woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who told her story to an older man (Stellan Skarsgard) who adopted an Olympian view of her sexual history.

Seen in flashbacks, the young Joe (played by Stacy Martin) learned to express her power through sex, a risky business to be sure.

Together both volumes total more than four hours, making Nymphomaniac a contender for the longest sex movie yet -- if, indeed, it's really about sex.

In Volume II, the adult Joe takes over the story, and von Trier more clearly marks his territory by pushing her toward punishing extremes.

What happens? Joe -- who has lost all sexual sensation -- submits to torment from a sadist (Jamie Bell) who ties her down and beats her up. In the process, Joe proves that she's a careless mom and renounces those who would judge her at a meeting of sex addicts.

She also sleeps with two black men who face each other naked in what looks like a duel of semi-erect penises.

Toward the end, Joe hooks up with an extortionist (Willem DaFoe) and acquires a wily protege (Mia Goth).

All this is recounted in flashbacks as Joe finishes telling Skarsgard's Seligman how she wound up bloodied in an alley, which is how he discovered her at the beginning of Volume I.

In Volume I, Von Trier punished some of the characters: He does so again, but this time, the torment extends to the audience.

The shock of explicitly presented sex having been depleted in the first volume, we're left to watch Gainsbourg's Joe demean herself, take a prideful stance toward her activities and ultimately commit one final act of self-assertion.

Whatever von Trier had to say seems to have been said in the first movie. Volume II doesn't add much, except for those who want to speculate about von Trier's aims with yet another movie that seems designed to provoke without explanation.

As for what motivates Joe: It may be nothing more than von Trier's desire to put her through a variety of degrading situations and then try to defend himself by glossing it all with a feminist veneer.

As my grandmother might have said, "Oy."

'Tintin' made my head spin

Parts of The Adventures of Tintin are as creative as you'd expect from Steven Spielberg, but the movie left me feeling a bit woozy.

With just about everyone climbing on the 3-D bandwagon, it’s hardly surprising that Steven Spielberg – an acknowledged master of popular entertainment – has tried his hand at it.

In the animated The Adventures of Tintin -- from a comic-book series by the Belgian artist who went by the name of Herge -- Spielberg shows off a mixture of motion-capture animation and moving camera work that makes for a dizzying ride. The story is an amalgam of three Tintin stories, consistent, I suppose, with this milkshake of a movie.

The dazzling opening sequences are set in a flea market where the intrepid Tintin (voice by Jamie Bell) purchases a model ship called The Unicorn. Of course, this is no ordinary model, but a vessel that holds a key to the mystery at the movie's heart. That means the bad guy -- one Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (Daniel Craig) -- wants to get his hands of the ship. Sakharine tries politeness before resorting to stronger measures.

The story eventually unites Tintin and Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), an unashamed drunkard, whose rundown ship has been hijacked by Sakharine.

The story sends this unlikely duo in search of lost treasure, and allows Spielberg to put his hero through a variety of action-oriented trials that are bound to remind audiences that Spielberg also directed the Indiana Jones movies.

The action is skillfully mounted, of course, but there’s too much of it, and it culminates in a clash of dueling cranes that's louder than it is exciting. Moreover, the combination of motion-capture (animation just short of photo-realism) and frenzied activity creates the unwelcome sensation of an amusement park ride run amok – at least it did for me.

I wouldn’t say that Tintin is fall-down funny, but there are welcome splashes of humor, the best involving a couple of bumbling police officers voiced by Nick Frost and Simon Pegg.

It’s hardly surprising that Spielberg, who long ago earned his action stripes, knows how to keep a movie moving. And those who grew up with the Tintin series may find the movie satisfying. Personally, I found the opening credits -- which boast an appealing hand-drawn look -- more winsome and winning than almost anything that followed.

For me, Tintin’s adventures felt about as convincing as the look of Tintin’s trusty dog Snowy – which is to say that these adventures felt carefully calibrated to maximize motion capture and 3-D as much as to create any feeling of spontaneously generated pleasure.

I don't know how Tintin might play without the 3-D, but it proved too much for my eyes, which longed for the respite of some quiet exposition, say Tintin tap-tapping on his trusty typewriter.