An overloaded 'Knives Out' mystery

  A somber Catholic church in upstate New York provides a gloomy backdrop for writer/director Rian Johnson's third Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man.

   Johnson, who also wrote the screenplay, immediately distinguishes his movie from its predecessors, introducing an unexpected character, a freshly ordained priest who's in trouble with his superiors.

  Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor) has anger-management issues. As punishment for socking a deacon, Father Jud is sentenced to clerical exile at the remote Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude parish.

    It's immediately clear that Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude has taken a bizarre turn. The church's crucifix has been removed from behind the altar, and its priest, Monsignor Jeffrey Wicks (Josh Brolin), quickly asserts himself as a power-hungry nut job.  Obsessive about confession, Wicks can't talk enough about his feverish bouts of masturbation.

   Wicks also preaches a gospel of fear. In his weekly sermons, he selects one parishioner for chastisement, gauging the success of his remarks by how quickly his intimidated victim heads for the door. 

    Although Wake Up Dead Man hosts strains of mordant comedy, it's also a mystery in which the characters become pawns in a game Johnson plays, one involving a tangled plot, excessive complications, and enough red herrings to stock a fishery.

    The parishioners, of course, become suspects after the mystery’s obligatory murder, which precedes the arrival of series savior Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), an ace sleuth who speaks with the lilting intonations of a southern gentleman.

     By the time Blanc arrives, a typically large gallery of actors has already elbowed its way into the proceedings: These include a doctor (Jeremy Renner), an attorney (Kerry Washington), a cellist (Cailee Spaeny) who no longer plays, a local politician (Daryl McCormack), and a struggling sci-fi author (Andrew Scott).

     We also meet the administrator (Glenn Close) in charge of the church’s business and the caretaker (Thomas Haden Church) who has pledged his devotion to her.

     In case the cast weren’t stuffed with enough names, Mila Kunis eventually turns up as a local sheriff who’s skeptical about Blanc’s deductive methods. 

      Fair to say, Johnson’s screenplay offers laughs throughout, and an able cast knows how to mine them, even when the targets loom large. 

      In a semi-serious turn, Johnson also gets some mileage out of the faith vs. reason tensions that develop between Jud and Blanc, who begin investigating the murder together.

     As the movie's most developed character, Jud valiantly tries to conquer his anger with love and compassion. He also struggles with guilt. A former boxer, he once killed a man in the ring.

      O’Connor gives a standout performance, although Johnson wisely provides Craig with a spotlight speech  during the movie’s finale. Blanc calls it his Damascus moment.

     Watching Wake Up Dead Man, you needn't go very far before bumping into another plot point. All of this rests on a foundation filled with plot and backstory, some of it involving a valuable jewel. 

      Call it a matter of taste, but I found some of the maneuvering tiresome, and the gaggle of idiosyncratic characters can become little more than pawns in a mystery game.

     Early on, Jeffrey Wright turns up as the sensible priest who assigns Father Jud to obscurity. Wright's appearance at the end reminded me how much I missed his presence and the character he plays.

     Johnson, who's often compared to Agatha Christie, clearly has mastered the form he has employed in a trilogy that began with Knives Out (2019) and continued with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022).

     But clever as it can be, Johnson's latest sometimes drags through its two-hour and 24-minute run time, fighting headwinds created by the story's storm of complications.

    

      

       

      

Running a too-familiar race

 

  A quarter of the way through The Running Man, a remake of an action-stuffed 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, I had to pinch myself. "Wait," I thought, "Isn't this November, and if so, why am I watching a movie that looks as if it should have been part of the summer action sweepstakes.

  This second adaptation of a 1982 Stephen King novel -- published under the name of Richard Bachman -- moves quickly, but not quickly enough to make us forget we've already seen movies about deadly game shows run by authoritarians interested in controlling the masses and reaping profits. Need I mention The Hunger Games?

   Director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver, Last Day in Soho) tells the story of a reality-based show broadcast by an evil corporation called The Network. If any of the movie's contestants survive the hunt, they win $1 billion, a sum purportedly worth risking one's life for in a society in which few are privileged.

    A buffed Glen Powell plays a husband and father with anger-management problems. Powell's Ben Richards keeps losing jobs because he flies off the handle while sticking up for underdogs at work. 

    Desperate to find care for his sick infant daughter and financial relief for his overworked wife (Jayme Lawson), Richards auditions for non-lethal TV game shows. He plans to avoid The Running Man, but Network head Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) talks him into competing in the deadly competition.

     From that point on, the movie is off and running, racing through one set piece after another while dragging along some overpacked thematic baggage behind it. 

     Let's get the message out of the way: All the Network cares about is ratings. If it needs killings to up the dramatic ante, it doesn't hesitate. The Network also uses doctored videos to turn the contestants into menaces who purportedly threaten the common good. The masses buy in.

      Set in a dystopian near future, The Running Man relies heavily on Powell, who may not have been the ideal choice for this kind of action movie. I don't mean that as insult. Powell was great in Top Gun: Maverick and in the dark comedy Hit Man, but a kick-ass star? I suppose the box-office will decide.

      In all, three contestants (Powell, Katy O'Brian and Martin Herlihy) compete, but it's hardly surprising that only the top-billed Powell remains standing through the escalating mayhem. McCone (Lee Pace), a masked Hunter, remains in dogged pursuit throughout.

    The move can feel pretty dogged itself. I'm talking structure, not pace. As he moves from New York to Boston, Richards receives help from friends and sympathizers. William H. Macy plays Molie, a guy who outfits Ben with armaments. Daniel Ezra portrays Bradley, a savvy guy who facilitates Richards' travels, and Michael Cera appears as a  well-equipped rebel with plans to fight the Hunters.

    Toward the end of the movie, Ben hijacks the car of a realtor (Emilia Jones), who believes he's the villainous fiend the Network claims him to be.

    It's tough to avoid cliches in this kind of movie. Colman Domingo portrays Bobby Thompson, the amped-up host of The Running Man, a showy role that doesn't offer much for Domingo to chew on.

      Aiming for the big finish, Wright concocts a dizzying  airborne showdown. By that time, I was wondering whether the movie hadn't fallen into a trap. If you don't have anything novel to say, try saying it louder.

      None of this is bad enough to condemn Running Man or good enough to praise it. The Running Man has the all-too-familiar markings of a movie that wants to be a summer blockbuster. But, as I said at the outset, this is November.

'Soldado' bathes in cynicism

Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro reunite in Sicario: Day of the Soldado

The first few minutes of Sicario: Day of the Soldado conflate Mexican border crossings with acts of Islamic terror in the US. The picture wasn't five minutes old before I found myself wondering whether Stephen Miller, considered the hardest of the Trump administration’s immigration hardliners, hadn’t served as a script consultant.

But this sequel to 2015's Sicario eventually broadens its outlook to encompass a kind of inclusive nihilism in which the US government will advance its ambitions by fomenting war, in which CIA agents fight battles in which there are no rules and in which violence, cynicism, and wavering loyalties upset any semblance of international order.

This teeming doomy pile of hopelessness should have made Soldado feel like a keen-eyed movie of the moment, yet this edition of Sicario feels oddly out of touch, a movie in which events seem to be taking place in a world divorced from all other possible realities.

From the start, Soldado accepts its brand of amoral realism without question, perhaps establishing itself as another movie that expects us to admire the way it pushes violent efficiency to harsh extremes.

This time, the story centers on the way a hard-core CIA operative (Josh Brolin) enlists the help of a professional assassin (Benicio del Toro) in trying to start a war among Mexican drug cartels, groups of ruthless mobsters that have recognized a new economic reality: People -- namely immigrants who wish to be smuggled across the border between the US and Mexico -- have become the new cocaine, an abundant source of profit.

Emily Blunt, who appeared in the first movie as a novice who picked her way through thickets of moral corruption, has been replaced by Catherine Keener, a more credible hardass but one who has been given much less to do than Blunt.

Brolin reprises his role as a CIA agent who, for the most part, operates without principles. If there’s a dirty job, Brolin’s character does it with matter-of-fact efficiency. As the movie’s assassin, del Toro manages to do what he does best, bring unexpected flavor to his line readings, sort of Christopher Walker without the impish humor. I’m not criticizing del Toro for this; for me, his quietly off-kilter performance was the best thing about the movie.

The plot contrives to have del Toro’s Alejandro escort a teenage girl (Isabela Moner) out of Mexico. The daughter of a major drug lord, Isabella's kidnapping is part of a complicated scheme to pit rival gangs against each other. It's part of an ill-defined effort to stop Islamic terrorists from joining immigrants as they cross the border.

You probably needn’t have seen the first movie to follow this one, which tries up its ante of dread with Hildur Guonadottir's monotonously ominous score, which — I imagine — is what fog horns would sound like if they were able to mourn.

I still have enough appreciation of B-movie pleasures to have enjoyed parts of Soldado, although it’s difficult to say which without spoilers.

Overall, though, Soldado takes us into dismal emotionally parched terrain where morals have been strip-mined, decency has been eroded and most values have been discarded. The movie follows characters who are accustomed to doing society’s dirty work for bureaucrats —- Matthew Modine portrays the US Secretary of Defense -- who are committed to covering their own asses no matter what their decisions may cost others.

Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, who wrote the first movie and followed with Hell or High Water and Wind River, hasn't imagined the same movie twice but doesn't do much to expand the second helping's thematic reach. And in taking the reins from director Denis Villeneuve, Italian director Stefano Sollima has made a movie that, like many of its characters, seems to lack conviction about the corrupted world into which it pumps a fair measure of bullets.

Those who find Soldado realistic may want to consider the near-miraculous recovery made one of its characters after ... I'll say no more. Check it out for yourself and tell me if you bought it.

Get your snide on with 'Deadpool 2'

Ryan Reynolds proves that he's still got plenty of life as Deadpool.

Deadpool 2 was shown at a preview screening with a caution to critics to avoid spoilers. I'm not sure that anything you could know in advance would ruin the experience of watching Deadpool 2, a sequel to the snidely effective first installment of a Marvel Comics series that seemed perfectly matched to Ryan Reynolds' mocking awareness of comic-book movie tropes.

The movie also made a ton of money.

But about those spoilers. I'll demure by telling you that there are sight gags, a surfeit of action, a sequence in which Deadpool finds himself in prison with a mystery mutant kid (Julian Dennison) who can spew flames from his fists, and more -- much more. Like most comic-book movies, Deadpool 2 subscribes to the more is more school of filmmaking.

The movie also makes room for a bit of pathos in the form of shared feelings of guilt that touch both Deadpool and Cable (Josh Brolin), a cyborg with a bionic arm and a perpetual scowl.

The story includes the amusing addition of some wannabe superheroes who meet with tragic/comic fates and various X-Men who drop in at various points in the story. Why not? Everybody needs a team.

In the hands of director David Leitch (Atomic Blonde), Deadpool 2 devolves into a series of mini-movies that finally are hammered into a more or less unified whole that includes a fakeout about who the movie's real villain might be.

In addition to Reynolds, I enjoyed the work of Zazie Beetz (as Domino) and Stefan Kapicic (as the voice of the strait-laced Colossus). Plenty of other characters careen through the movie, cropping up like kernels of corn bouncing in a popper.

True to form, Deadpool 2 doesn't skimp on one-liners and visual gags, many of them referencing signature moments in other movies: Basic Instinct (yes, that movie again) comes to mind, but there are enough to suggest that viewers bring a scorecard.

The basic trick of the Deadpool movies remains the same: Reynolds delivers a running commentary on the movie's characters and various plot developments, a strategy that can amuse even as it attempts to insulate the movie from criticism. In a way, Deadpool 2 doesn't try to speak to the audience; it is the audience.

That's why Deadpool can be viewed as a big movie for a large but narrowly focused audience, one that's in on the joke, which includes non-stop tongue-in-cheek references that turn the movie into a perpetual wiseass machine. If you don't share the movie's attitudes -- at least for a couple of hours -- Deadpool may seem dumb and pointless: The movie’s smarts are rooted in pop culture and the abundant Marvel Universe.

So, a concluding comment: Leitch and Reynolds have delivered a movie that meets and occasionally exceeds expectations for a second helping but has little to offer those who aren't steeped in Marvel culture.

I chuckled enough to say that Deadpool 2 can be fun and that Reynolds hasn't worn out his welcome as the foul-mouthed superhero who's at his best when he doesn't give a damn about saving the world and who kicks butt while making fun of whatever passes for a story in these comic-book extravaganzas.

Deadpool 2 even tries to add some heart to all its carnage and clangor. Fair enough, but I doubt whether this edition will cause many lumps to form in many throats. But let's be real: No one goes to a Deadpool movie expecting to reach for a hankie.

'Avengers' long march toward the finish

A lengthy Avengers bobs and weaves its way through a penultimate chapter that sometimes falters but does offer some rewards.

It's intended to knock your socks off and, in the end, it finally attains a stirring, if slightly morose, grandeur. We're talking about Avengers: Infinity War, the penultimate chapter in a series that thus far has spawned 18 movies, Infinity being the 19th.

This edition gathers all the Avengers -- from Thor to Spiderman to Iron Man to Black Panther to the Hulk and more -- into a single movie. It also expands the geographical scope of its concerns, taking us to New York, to Scotland, to the far reaches of the cosmos and to Wakanda.

And, yes, I'm omitting some of the movie's superheroes and super-places, but a two hour and 40-minute extravaganza creates far too many bases to touch for all but the most obsessive reviewers.

At the same time as the movie has enlarged, it also seems to have shrunk. Black Panther transcended the Marvel Universe with its irresistibly mythic celebration of Afro-centric culture. Infinity War marks a return to the Marvel universe.

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo (Captain America, Winter Soldier and Captain America, Civil War) seem to have decided that more is more as they pit dozens of superheroes against Thanos (Josh Brolin), a massive, rock-jawed warrior committed to gathering the Infinity Gems, six stones that will give him power over the entire universe and which also will result in massive amounts of death.

Thanos, a CGI motion capture warrior capable of pathos, believes his cause is just. He wants to rid an overpopulated universe of some of its inhabitants in order to save the rest. Brolin infuses the evil Thanos with genuine character, sometimes even approaching doubt about the choices he must make in order to fulfill his malign destiny.

In their quest to stop Thanos, various superheroes turn up on various planets and have various adventures as the movie punctuates its longueurs with the obligatory spasms of action. I'd be lying if I told you I cared about the outcome of all this battling, but when it comes to Marvel movies, we know precisely where our rooting interests are meant to lodge.

As expected, touches of humor (much of it paying homage to popular culture) also can found as the Russos navigate the choppy waters in which characters and storylines bob and weaver toward a finale.

Did I get lost? Not really.

The Russos manage to keep the characters distinct (no small feat), but I wish that instead of title cards announcing on which planet the movie had arrived, Disney had substituted title cards telling us which of the various characters we were watching. Who exactly is Vision, the character played with welcome elegance by Paul Bettany? And it took me a while to recall exactly what superpower Elizabeth Olsen's Scarlet Witch wields.

Honestly, I leave all that to the fanboys or those willing to revisit the 18 previous Avenger movies.

Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr. Strange) and Robert Downey Jr. (Ironman), by the way, carry on a reasonably entertaining intramural rivalry, and although Disney warned critics against revealing spoilers, I will tell you that some of the characters display touching affection for one another and that the Guardians of the Galaxy characters reprise their comic antics to mixed results.

As you probably already know, not all of the characters make it out of Infinity alive. I'm obviously not going to tell you who progresses to the final movie, but the fact that Infinity dispenses with favorite characters stands as a bold move when it comes to a long-running series. (Note: Many believe that the shocking impact of the deaths in Infinity will be undone in the next installment. In comic-book universes death often lacks finality.)

The best thing about Infinity War? I'd say the ending -- not just because this extended conclusion signals that we can move on to other pursuits (not to mention the nearest bathroom) but because the finale brims with large-scale spectacle, some of them overwhelming in the right ways.

A final note: I wish to express my gratitude to Disney for insisting that critics avoid spoilers; compliance with the request not only allows audiences to discover the movie's surprises on their own but allows for brevity in writing about a movie that can't count conciseness among its virtues.

Maybe story-telling economy would have been impossible with a roster full of actors -- all with fans -- playing so many superheroes. I’m looking forward to the next and purportedly final installment. I’m ready to bid the Avengers farewell before it's time for Iron Man to shed his high-tech armor for a walker -- or at least a cane.

The Coens take on '50s Hollywood

Great cast, but Hail, Caesar! is enjoyable only in bits and pieces. Fortunately, some of those bits are inspired.

Despite the exclamation point in its title, the new Coen brothers film, Hail, Caesar!, isn't the sharpest or most emphatic of their many amazing efforts. A collection of sketches that both satirize and celebrate Hollywood of the 1950s, Hail, Caesar! lands the Coens in what for them is strange terrain: They've come up with a middle-ground addition to their idiosyncratic oeuvre with -- and this deserves underlining -- touches of entertaining brilliance.

There's a whisper of a story here: Fictional Capitol Studios finds itself in the midst of a major production. The movie is called Hail, Caesar!, and it carries the same heavily freighted subtitle as Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ. The plot, which offers echoes of The Robe focuses on a hardened Roman officer who eventually sees the light, rapturously submitting to a new faith when he encounters Christ on the cross.

Capitol's mega-buck epic stars Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), a slightly dissolute movie star who is also slightly dim.

During the filming of a scene, Whitlock is drugged and spirited away by extras who demand a $100,000 ransom. As it turns out, they are rebels with a cause, leftist screenwriters enamored of the Soviet Union who meet regularly to be lectured by Professor Marcuse (John Bluthal), an unveiled reference to Herbert Marcuse, a hero of the New Left during the 1960s.

It falls to Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the studio's tough but perpetually burdened mogul, to return Whitlock to the set so that his mega-production can wrap. Eddie's part businessman and part fixer, a guy who's accustomed to covering the tracks of the studio's frequently wayward stars.

Eddie Mannix is modeled on a real-life MGM studio fixer of the same name. Here, Mannix is treated as decent but beleaguered man who's trying to keep the studio from running aground -- not an easy task when its stars have a penchant for landing themselves in embarrassing positions.

As Eddie puts out one Hollywood fire after another, he also entertains an offer from Lockheed, which wants to give him a high paying job that would allow for a more regular and presumably respectable life.

Now, very little about the plot matters. What makes the movie palatable are several winningly ludicrous snippets from Capitol's movies. Think of them as footnotes that are more interesting than the main body of the work.

One of the best involves a bone-headed decision to turn the studio's acrobatic cowboy star into a romantic lead, jamming him into comedy in which characters dress to the nines and speak in the kind of faux British -- or British-ish -- accents that were popular in some movies during the '30s and '40s.

Director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) is stuck with this egregious piece of miscasting. The scene in which Laurentz tries to prepare cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) for sophisticated patter might be enough to justify the price of admission.

The same goes for brief appearances by Tilda Swinton, who plays two roles -- gossip pedaling, twin columnists Thora and Thessaly Thacker. Listen to the way Swinton says Eddie's name, giving it a twist that evokes the pleasures of a whole era of studio filmmaking.

And if you don't smile during a production number featuring Channing Tatum as a tap-dancing sailor who, along with his shipmates, contemplates life at sea without "dames," you're in an even worse mood than I usually find myself in.

And then there's a broadly comic bit involving Frances McDormand as C.C. Calhoun, a chain-smoking film editor.

For me, those were highpoint to be savored, along with numerous small touches.

Alas (to be as stilted as some of the dialogue in Capitol Studio's productions), not all of the sketches work so well. Though beautifully produced, an Esther Williams' style swimming number featuring Scarlett Johannson might have been included just to show that the Coens could do it.

Johansson plays DeeAnna Moran, a pregnant movie star who forces the studio to find ways to cover the fact that she's not married. Her story eventually leads to Jonah Hill, whose role amounts to little more than a forgettable cameo. Hill plays Joseph Silverman, a man who specializes in "personhood," a joke that's not really worth the trouble of explaining.

In A Serious Man, the Coens took on religion; their attempts to do the same here aren't nearly as rich. The movie opens with Mannix in a confessional booth where he establishes himself as a serious Catholic who's addicted to confession. Mannix feels guilty because he lies to his wife about having quit smoking, but his real guilt comes from working so hard to support a morally dubious and often lunatic enterprise.

Stretches of Hail, Caesar! proves only mildly amusing and some of the humor built around the Hail, Caesar epic struck me as more obvious than we expect from the Coens who've taken swipes at Hollywood before, notably in the feverishly brilliant Barton Fink.

Hail Caesar! may not rank at the top of Coen's impressive list, but it should do nothing to sour anyone on their work. My advice: Treat the movie as a smorgasbord. Pick what you like; forget the rest.

A hard-core look at the drug war

French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve's Sicario is a dense, complicated and deeply pessimistic movie about the drug war and, quite possibly, the collapse of just about all civilized values.

If you're looking for a diverting night at the movies, look elsewhere. In Villeneuve's supremely caustic drama, even triumph tends to feel bad.

So there's your warning.

If, on the other hand, you're ready for a dark thriller that pulls no punches, you may want to give Sicario a try. Watching Sicario -- the word means hit man -- I half wondered whether Villeneuve (Prisoners and Incendies) felt that Steven Soderbergh's Traffic was a little too light-hearted and needed a corrective.

The story introduces us to FBI agent Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt), an agent who's recruited by shadowy forces to participate in an anti-drug task force that's led by a swaggering Matt Graver (Josh Brolin).

We're not sure whether Brolin's Graver is a CIA agent or a DEA agent, but whoever writes his checks seems willing to let him play by his own rules. When we first see him, he's at a meeting wearing flip flops, an obvious clue that this is no ordinary cop.

In addition to the cops who work with Brolin, we meet Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), a mysterious fellow whose role in the proceedings remains vague. It's a safe bet, though, that the taciturn Alejandro isn't handling human relations.

It takes a while for the plot to clarify, a smart decision on Villeneuve's part. He keeps us at Kate's meager level of understanding; she's thrown into a chaotic situation she doesn't comprehend. Neither do we.

Slowly we learn that the mission of this drug-fighting force involves undermining the stability of the Sonora cartel so that law enforcement officials can locate the guy who heads it.

Set in Chandler, Ariz., the movie's opening raid makes it clear that the cartel isn't playing around. Blunt's Mercer joins agents who find a house full of mutilated bodies hidden behind its walls, one of the more macabre sights you'll see in a movie this year.

Villeneuve's depiction of Juarez, site of a mid-picture raid, will do nothing to boost tourism in that town, except maybe for those who want to see what a city looks like when bodies are left hanging from overpasses.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins (No Country for Old Men) gives Villeneuve images to match his foray into a world without clear moral boundaries.

A late-picture swerve into revenge territory may be a bit too pat, but Villeneuve gives most of this down-and-dirty drama an undertow of dread that's augmented by Del Toro's unnerving performance. Brolin's smug savvy seems right for a character who wants people to think that only he truly understands what's happening.

Blunt may be a bit too soft for this kind of role, but if you don't entirely buy her performance, you may not entirely reject it either, and it does nothing to undermine the corrosive atmosphere Villeneuve creates.

A insistent score by Johann Johannsson comes as close as you'll want to get to an aural equivalent for what it feels like to experience pure dread. That score has its softer moments, but it also includes sounds that could pass for the agonized groans of hell.

Violent and harsh, Sicario is the kind of movie that leaves tread marks on the psyche.


The

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.

Inherent confusion in 'Inherent Vice'

Paul Thomas Anderson tackles a Thomas Pynchon novel and ... well ... er ... that is ...

Director Paul Thomas Anderson has gone where no director has gone before; i.e., he has attempted to bring a novel by the reclusive Thomas Pynchon to the screen.

Those familiar with Pynchon's work immediately will understand why this is such an audacious endeavor on Anderson's part. Pynchon's novels aren't plot-driven, and frequently veer off into clouds of digression as he watches the social order break into bizarre fragments.

If a Pynchon novel doesn't always make sense in conventional terms, well, look around you. What really does?

When I was in college during the '60s, we were all devouring Pynchon's V., a debut novel that revolved around a character named Benny Profane.

Pynchon provided a counterweight to the formalized rigor of academic reading. We were smitten. We congratulated ourselves for getting "it," whatever "it" was.

In Inherent Vice, Anderson dips into Pynchon's 2009 neo-noir fantasy, an LA-based story that introduces us to a character named Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix). Doc's 1970s life unfolds in a pot-induced haze that keeps him wandering through post-Manson, hippie detritus in a fictional town called Gordita Beach.

If the private eye was staple of 1940s Hollywood, he's reduced to blood-shot eye by Anderson, less a savvy guy with his own moral code than a bemused idler.

The movie opens when Sportello is visited by a former girlfriend, the elusive Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston). It seems Shasta Fay has become the lover of real-estate magnate Michael Z. Wolfmann (Eric Roberts).

Wolfmann has disappeared and Shasta Fay wants Sportello's help to locate him, presumably to save him from those who would put him in a sanitarium -- or something like that.

At this point, I'm going to let the ship that's carrying the Anderson/Pynchon plot sink. No more attempts to recount what can't be recounted. The plot is a blur of dodges, gestures and noir mimicry. Trying to follow it is a bit like getting lost in a new town without benefit of a map or GPS. You either panic and scream or you decide to enjoy the strange sights.

For me, these sights are embodied in the form of characters who enter the movie like figures from a pop-up book.

A sampling:

-- Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro). He's Sportello's lawyer, a guy who seems like a refugee from a Hunter Thompson story.

-- Lt. Detective Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), an LA cop who specializes in civil rights violations.
-- Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short), a dentist who wears purple suits and heads a mysterious ring called Golden Fang.

-- Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), a saxophone player who's presumed to have died, but whose wife (Jena Malone) thinks he's still alive.

You can tell by the character names that Pynchon's universe is one of broad comedy carved with a satirist's knife.

I'm putting off my assessment for a bit because (as a matter of public service) I want to share with you the way that I watched the movie.

I tended to drift in and out of the various episodes. While each was unfolding, it held my attention, but as Anderson shifted from one bit to the next, I had difficulty remembering exactly where I'd been.

I enjoyed the music -- both Jonny Greenwood's score and the tunes selected by Anderson to accompany various segments. I chuckled. My mind wandered. I chuckled some more. My mind wandered some more.

When Reese Witherspoon showed up as Deputy DA Penny Kimball, I was amused to see her. She's one of Sportello's sexual companions and informed sources.

I felt a sense of alienated indifference as the characters exchanged information that seemed important to them, but left me shrugging.

The movie's narration -- delivered by Joanna Newsom as a character named Sortilege -- sometimes approaches Pynchon's eloquence, but doesn't necessarily clarify much of anything.

Two performances are of special note. Phoenix, who appeared in Anderson's The Master, brings stoned integrity and his own level of confusion to the role of Sportello.

He's best in scenes in which he squares off with Brolin's Bigfoot, a character who becomes a bold parody of a quintessentially starched Los Angeles detective. Bigfoot has a crew-cut and a fondness for phallus-shaped popsicles. Unashamedly brutal and a man of porcine appetites (he's always eating), Bigfoot stands as a kind of one-man satire of law enforcement at its worst.

Now, what to make of all this?

You can probably tell from the tone of this review that I'm not ready to rip into Anderson's movie. I hope you also can tell that it's an experience to which not everyone will take. The old adage -- it helps if you're stoned -- may be applicable here, an observation I offer not as an encouragement for pot smoking, but as a guidepost to the experience that awaits you.

I enjoyed some of the movie's asides, watching Bigfoot in a non-speaking role in Adam 12, for example. On top of everything else, the guy wants to be on TV. Martin Short made me smile, as did Sportello's visit to a massage parlor in the middle of nowhere.

I'm sure I'm leaving something out. The neo-Nazis who guard Wolfmann perhaps? I'm not sure it matters.

Was a time when I might have gotten more pleasure from this meander through a lost moment in the counterculture moors. I suppose in the end, Anderson didn't totally convince me that Pynchon's work should be brought to the screen, even with the help of the gifted cinematographer Robert Elswit who coats each scene with downside lacquer.

If you're an Anderson fan (and I mostly am), you probably owe it to yourself to give this one a try. If you're a Pynchon fan, you're already used to plots that leave you scratching your head.

Everyone else? I'd say that the movie unfolds as a series of digressions from ... well ... let's talk.

Did I feel hostility toward Inherent Vice? Not really.

Did I like it? Sometimes.

Was I bored by it? Occasionally.

Would I watch it again? Not immediately. Probably someday. Who knows?

A return trip to 'Sin City'

It's lurid and creative, but what's the point?

It's rare that one's expectations are entirely met by a movie -- and it's not always a good thing when it happens.

Case in point: Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Prior to the movie's preview screening, I imagined that this follow-up to Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's 2005 Sin City would be another stylish immersion in a fantasy world composed of pulp impulses, noir gestures, brutal violence and fan-boy prurience.

Miller is a graphic novelist and sometime moviemaker. Rodriguez is a director of variable achievement. Together, they again serve up a movie that feels as if one is leafing through the pages of a graphic novel, entering a purportedly forbidden world where politicians are murderous, women are dressed for sex and half the male characters look as if they're mutants from an another planet.

And, yes, the movie is precisely what you expect.

Rodriguez and Miller create a world of uber-shlock that seems to derive from an exaggerated reading of noir ingredients and second-rate pulp fiction.

Noir, of course, had a socially critical dimension that completely eludes this second helping of Sin City. Besides, in combining several of Miller's stories, the movie challenges one's ability to sustain interest.

This helping of Sin City -- in which occasional splashes of color intrude on the heightened black-and-white imagery -- features a scorecard cast of names, some recognizable on screen, some not.

Among those who stand out are Josh Brolin, who takes over the role that Clive Owen played in the original; Eva Green, who plays the movie's sexy, deadly femme fatale; and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who stars in what ultimately feels like a satellite story about a young man who's lucky in cards and not so lucky at everything else.

Powers Boothe portrays the brutally smooth Senator Roark, a politician for whom the word "corrupt" would be a euphemism. Mickey Rourke returns as Marv, the freakish looking, motor-cycle riding avenger.

Some of the actors have extended roles, some (Ray Liotta as a lecherous businessman who's caught with his pants down) have cameos.

In the movie's best story, Brolin's character is irresistibly drawn to the duplicitous Ava. No matter what his brain tells him, he can't resist her siren call.

Miller and Rodriguez can't seamlessly blend the movie's several stories, and when the primary tale -- the one involving Green's Ava ends -- the movie essentially is over.

The rest feels like a death rattle, an obligatory advancement of loose ends that march zombie-like through what remains of the movie's 102-minute running time.

Devotees of Miller's work probably will be won over by the snide humor and outre violence. At one point, one of the character's eyes is plucked out.

But Sin City: A Dame to Kill For seems like a lot of work devoted to building a fantasy edifice that may tell us more about the sensibilities of those who dreamed up the fantasy than about the world it purports to describe.

To get back to where I started: Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is exactly what I thought it would be: creative, lurid, immature, and, perhaps, a bit pointless.

'Labor Day' asks us to take a big leap

It might be the most congenial hostage situation ever.

I'm talking about the premise of director Jason Reitman's Labor Day, a movie about an escaped convict and the mother and son he takes as hostages.

Reitman isn't interested in a situation that grows increasingly bizarre, but in one that becomes more ordinary as the movie unfolds. I guess that qualifies as a counter-intuitive approach, but it results in a movie that strains credibility.

Those familiar with Reitman's resume -- Thank You For SmokingJuno, Up in the Air and Young Adult -- will realize that with Labor Day, the director has taken new direction. He has turned his attention to a drama that's cleansed of the kind of quick-witted ironies that have characterized his best work.

Beautifully photographed by cinematographer Eric Steelberg, everything about Labor Day suggests a movie that demands to be taken seriously -- everything that is except a story that derives from Joyce Maynard's 2009 novel.

Reitman, who also wrote the screenplay, takes us to a small New Hampshire town in 1987. There, we meet Henry Wheeler (Gattlin Griffith), a teen-ager who lives with his depressed and isolated mother Adele (Kate Winslet).

During a shopping expedition to a local store, Henry and Adele are confronted by an escaped convict (Josh Brolin).

Brolin's Frank forces himself into the lives of mother and son, insisting that they take him to their home. He needs a place to hide until he can figure out his next move.

But here's the twist that challenges both expectation and perhaps common sense. Nice guy Frank, quickly assumes the role of father figure to Henry, who badly needs one. He also develops a slow simmering relationship with the love-starved and sexually deprived Adele.

The escaped con becomes an idealized savior: handsome, sexy and totally competent at household repairs. Frank even knows how to bake a peach pie. In a sensuously photographed sequence, Frank shares his baking artistry with Adele, who (to borrow a phrase from T.S. Eliot) eventually dares to eat a peach. She falls for Frank.

Movies have a way of creating their own realities, which is to say that they needn't be entirely credible to keep us involved. That's why it's possible to go along with Labor Day, which features an attractive cast and pulls us into the lives of its characters. I guess I'm saying the movie is never less than watchable.

Some of the credit for that accrues to the actors. Brolin conveys Frank's anxieties as well as his boundless capacity for being a helpmate. Winslet is convincing as Adele, a woman whose pain isolates her from the world, and Griffith makes a credible adolescent, a young man who has become an accomplice in his mother's insistent isolation.

Once Reitman aligns our sympathies with Frank and Adele, the movie's major tension revolves around whether Frank will be caught. Will the couple be able to continue their strange romantic idyll, preferably beyond the reach of the law?

I won't spoil the ending, but there's another sort of tension here: the unease that derives from our knowledge of other films and maybe even from the real world. Suffice it to say that few films could take this kind of scenario and turn it into an affirmation of family, devotion and the power of love.

Reitman rounds out the stories of Adele and Frank with flashbacks that can be a bit confusing, and a couple of side trips turn out to be unimpressive: Henry meets a new girl in town (Brighid Fleming). Trouble arises when a neighbor leaves her handicapped son in Adele's care.

Look, families and other tightly knit groups have a way of manufacturing their own realities. Labor Day understands that, but -- in the end -- I had trouble buying a story about a likable convict and the woman whose emotional life he saves.

When the lights came up, I found myself asking whether what I'd been watching -- though well-crafted -- really made sense.

'Oldboy:' Reworking a cult classic

Spike Lee tries hand at a story that attempts to bring the shock of a South Korean movie to American multiplexes.

I wasn't a major fan of director Chan-Wook Park's Oldboy, but I admired its shocking audacity: Park's revenge saga featured the kind of violence that tends to delight certain genre enthusiasts. Among other things, the movie's main character ate a live octopus and extracted an adversary's teeth with a claw hammer.

Released in 2003, Oldboy was not a movie for the squeamish: It appealed mainly to those who were caught up in Park's revenge trilogy, which included Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005). Personally, I liked Lady Vengeance best.

I have no idea how Spike Lee's remake will play with those who are unfamiliar with the original. But for those of us who know Park's movie, watching Lee's version becomes little more than an exercise in comparative viewing.

Lee doesn't skimp on shock or violence as he brings Mark Protosevich's screenplay to life. The remake offers a mixture of new wrinkles and familiar ploys that should keep fans of the original guessing right up until the finale.

In this version, Joe (Josh Brolin) -- the main character -- is a hopelessly crude advertising executive whose offensive behavior is matched only by his alcoholic intake. After a particularly awful drunken binge, Joe awakens in what appears to be a shabby motel room. He has no idea how he got there. It eventually dawns on Joe that he's being held prisoner, although he has no idea why. He remains in this state -- being fed nothing but dumplings from Chinese takeout -- for 20 years.

While imprisoned, Joe -- whose room has a television set that mostly broadcasts advertisements for exercise equipment -- sees a newscast in which he learns that his estranged wife was murdered. His three-year-old daughter has been placed in the care of others.

Poor Joe: He's the only suspect in the crime.

When Joe's finally released, he dedicates his life to proving his innocence and wreaking vengeance on his captors. Of course, he must first find out who his captors are.

It's difficult to say more without spoilers, but it's worth knowing that Lee and Protosevich (I Am Legend) approach Park's story by offering variations on many of the same issues that concerned Park: namely perverse sex and brutal violence. Like Park, Lee gradually doles out revelations that are intended to rock Joe's already shaky world.

Lee brings an eclectic approach to casting. South Africa's Sharlto Copley (District 9) plays Joe's nemesis; Elizabeth Olsen portrays a social worker and former drug addict who tries to help Joe after his escape; and Michael Imperioli signs on as a bartender who has known Joe since the days when they both attended the same prep school.

Lee also finds a role for Samuel L. Jackson, who plays the man in charge of Joe's imprisonment. He also works in one of his trademark dolly shots lest we forget who's behind the camera.

Fans of the original will want to know that Lee replicates the hammer fight that became a signature of the original. The way Lee tweaks the story may be slightly more preposterous than the way in which Park brought it to its chasenting conclusion. The American version also has a tendency to over-explain things that remained more beneficially murky in the original.

But the main thing missing from this American version is the soulful, agonized performance of Choi Min-shik, who played the imprisoned man in Park's movie. The other actors don't compare as well, either. It's not that they give bad performances; it's more that the raw quality of the original (as difficult to take as the outré violent touches) isn't always in evidence.

What's left is a weird plot and dreary atmospherics as Lee dips into waters that reminded me not only of Park but of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg.

It would be wrong to deem Oldboy a total failure: I was interested in how Lee and Protosevich approached their task, but I never figured out why they wanted to take on the job in the first place.

Heavy gunfire, but 'Gangster Squad' misses

A great cast can't salvage and over-stylized look at LA crime in the late 1940s.

Sitting through Gangster Squad is a bit like watching a bad Brian DePalma movie, maybe a low-grade version of The Untouchables. I felt cheated. If I'm going to watch bad De Palma, I'd prefer that it be directed by De Palma rather than by Ruben Fleischer , best known for 30 Minutes or Less and Zombieland.

Perhaps because he's dealing with so many familiar elements, Fleischer relies heavily on style to spiff up the story of a small squad of LA cops who use rogue methods to take down famed gangster Mickey Cohen. Gangster Squad, we're told at the outset, was inspired by a true story, but the movie's shamelessly enhanced dramatic oomph made me wonder whether inspiration hadn't trumped accuracy.

According to the movie, Cohen attained so much power in post-war LA that he threatened to take control of the city, a feat he accomplished by showering the police and select judges with equal amounts of bribery and threat. In defiance of the Chicago mob, Cohen also attempted to corner the market on all West Coast bookmaking. He might have succeeded, too, had it not been for the Gangster Squad, a group of LA cops who worked deep undercover, never receiving credit for their efforts.

In telling what could have been a rewardingly sleazy LA tale, Fleischer and screenwriter Will Beall put a lot of second-rate dialog in the mouths of many thinly drawn characters. The movie is so pulpy, the Tommy Gun blasts practically scream out for "blam! blam!" exclamation points.

If you've read anything about Gangster Squad, you already know that the movie was scheduled for earlier release, but was delayed because it once contained a shooting scene at the famed Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Not surprisingly, such a scene (now gone) seemed in poor taste after the Aurora multiplex shootings, although I wonder if it would have been in any better taste had that execrable bit of real-life violence never occurred.

Offensive levels of violence aside, Gangster Squad represents a significantly wasted opportunity, mostly because Fleischer has assembled an impressive cast.

A sneering Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen. Josh Brolin leads the Gangster Squad of the title. He's joined by Ryan Gosling, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Pena, Robert Patrick and Anthony Mackie, all of whom play cops recruited to put Cohen out of business.

That's a strong enough roster to make the movie's by-the-numbers script even more distressing. It's like asking a professional all-star team to play pick-up games in the park.

Emma Stone joins this heat-packing boys' club as Cohen's girlfriend, a woman who falls for Gosling's character, a jaded cop who doesn't sign up for the Gangster Squad until he sees an innocent shoe shine boy gunned down in the streets. Hey, even the most cynical cop has his standards.

The Gangster Squad is formed when the LA police chief (a bearish Nick Nolte) decides that the only way to topple Cohen is to fight fire with fire, an idea as unoriginal as the way I've just expressed it. Nolte's William Parker encourages his squad of renegades to step outside the law and wreak havoc on a Cohen empire built on profits from prostitution and gambling. Essentially, this means that they smash a lot of furniture, kick in doors and stuff like that. When they're about to shoot a bunch of bad guys, they say things such as "Light 'em up."

Fleischer seems to have encouraged over-the-top acting, particularly from Penn, who turns in one of his least interesting performances as the rapacious, sadistic Cohen. Fully embracing Cohen's darkest impulses, Penn makes the gangster seem so repulsive, you wonder why his own men don't bump him off.

There's no skimping on violence with the number of bullets almost matching the number of cliches in a script that scrambles film noir and western conceits while making a feeble attempt to raise an embarrassingly obvious moral question: Is it OK for cops to turn to savagery in pursuit of a good cause? Adjustment issues faced by World War II vets -- notably Brolin and Gosling's characters -- receive short, simplistic shrift.

Little about the dialog is subtle or nuanced, so the actors are forced to work awfully close to the surface. Brolin rages; Gosling does cool; Ribisi (as the 1940's-style techno geek) raises issues of conscience; Patrick acts as if he's just wandered in from the set of a B-western; Mackie remains calm under fire; and Pena is stuck in the tag-along role.

Fleischer may have wanted to make a movie in which everything comes across as pure and unadulterated -- a clash of boldly drawn big-screen archetypes. It mostly doesn't work, and Gangster Squad earns its stripes as the year's first disappointment. I suspect it won't be the last.

A palatable reprise of 'Men in Black'

Early in Men in Black 3, Emma Thompson -- who plays Agent 0 -- delivers a eulogy for Zed, a character played in the previous movies by Rip Torn. Claiming that she's paraphrasing an alien, O speaks in a bizarre, screeching language that gives new meaning to the word "shrill." Thompson's offbeat moment marks one of many amusing bits in director Barry Sonnefeld's often imaginative reprise of a series that began in 1997.

Men In Black 3, available in 3-D, boasts a high degree of creativity, a serviceable enough story and the expected bickering between agents K and J (Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith). The movie may not score a bull's-eye, but it's no dud, either.

The first Men in Black movie caught audiences by surprise. Released in 2002, the second didn't do much for me and most other critics, but sold a fair number of tickets. The third is ... well ... a bit of a conundrum.

What I liked about No. 3, I tended to like a lot, but sporadic enjoyment doesn't entirely compensate for the fact that the various pieces that Sonnenfeld has assembled don't always translate into big-time fun.

This edition involves time travel. In brief: Agent J -- part of a black-suited force that monitors alien activity on Earth -- travels back to 1969 to kill Boris the Animal (Jemain Clement), an alien who has a plan for wiping out the Earth or conquering it or something.

J's arrival in 1969 allows Sonnefeld to do a few time-travel jokes, one revolving around J's encounter with a couple of bigoted policeman. Despite such annoyances, J soon meets a younger version of Agent K. Enter Josh Brolin, who seems to have stolen Tommy Lee Jones's voice, mastering Jones's every clipped, sardonic inflection. I don't know if Brolin's giving a performance or a doing an impression. Whatever it is, it's dead-on.

For his part, Jones appears in the opening and closing scenes that bookend the main part of the movie. In short, he's not required to do much heavy lifting, which is fine. I'm betting the always imposing Jones rather would have been elsewhere.

In 1969, J also meets Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), a dithering alien who's able to see a variety of versions of the future. J also learns a secret about himself, which adds a bit of unexpected poignancy to the story, which is credited to five writers. The multiple authorship sometimes shows. Men in Black 3 doesn't seem to know where it's headed.

So be prepared to enjoy Men in Black in bits and pieces:
-- An opening sequence in a Chinese restaurant is funny in a downbeat sort of way. It also assembles an appropriately disgusting collection of alien life forms, including a giant alien fish about the size of a small tugboat.

-- To travel through time, Agent J must leap off the Chrysler Building, a feat that gives Sonnenfeld an opportunity to apply some vertiginously effective 3-D, an opportunity that repeats itself during the movie's finale, which takes place at Cape Canaveral, Fla.

-- A joke involving the late Andy Warhol (Bill Hader) doesn't quite pay off, but the filmmakers deserve credit for advancing a novel explanation for Warhol's strange personality.

You get the idea: Men in Black 3 puts lots of ingredients in its bag and shakes them up to mixed effect.

Smith sometimes works a little too hard to ignite an old spark, and there certainly was no pressing reason for anyone to revisit these characters.

Having said that, Sonnefeld & company deserve mild praise for bringing a palatable version of an old favorite into the summer of 2012, where I hope the franchise finds its eternal rest after patting itself on the back for at least trying to hit some strangely amusing notes.

Woody in rueful form. What else is new?

Naomi Watts and Josh Brolin, not so happy.

It seems like lifetimes ago since we eagerly looked forward to the next Woody Allen movie. By turning out a picture every year, Allen seems to have deflated our expectations. It also hasn’t helped that many of Allen’s recent movies have been less than wonderful. As a result, Allen finds himself in an odd position: His concerns as an artist are universal, but the movies seem to have left him behind.
Allen’s latest -- You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger -- arrives on screen without much feeling of urgency. Although it balances equal amounts of wit and rue, Allen’s new foray into the sea of emotional desperation we sometimes call “life” doesn’t cut very deeply, and, as you reflect on the movie, you may find yourself thinking, “Yeah, yeah, Woody. We know.”

Allen begins by applying Macbeth’s worldview to the proceedings: “It (life) is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Brilliant words, especially when you remember that Shakespeare didn't spend even one evening watching cable news.

After providing us with this incisive view of life’s meaning (or lack thereof), Allen traces a drama that more or less illustrates the point, catching a variety of characters in mid-flight as they flail against the inevitable letdown that's bred by self-serving ambition.

Filled with the usual infidelities, foolish decisions and personal disasters, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger falls somewhere between Allen’s comic and serious mode, which, I suppose, makes it a seriocomic exploration of the ways in which characters can betray themselves, sometimes with the help of unexpected twists of fate.

Tall Dark Stranger returns Allen to London where he introduces a variety of interrelated characters played by a large ensemble of capable actors.

I’ll give you a sampling: Josh Brolin portrays a novelist who’s unable to get his second book off the ground; his wife (Naomi Watts) works in art gallery. Her father (Anthony Hopkins) has left her mother (Gemma Jones) and has taken up with a younger woman (Lucy Punch) who boosts his libido while emptying his wallet.

For her part, Jones’ character seeks solace with a psychic (Pauline Collins), who pretty much tells her clients whatever they want to hear. For good measure, Allen casts Antonio Banderas as the owner of the art gallery where Watts’ character plies her trade.

The men don’t exactly come off as role models. Fearing the limiting encroachments of age, Hopkins' character makes an obvious fool of himself with a younger and entirely inappropriate woman. Fearful of failure, Brolin’s character becomes infatuated with a woman (Freida Pinto) he spies on while gazing across a courtyard into her conveniently open window.

Both Brolin and Hopkins give performances that exemplify a trait common to many Allen male characters, the assumption that a new romance (or maybe just a new bedmate) will provide the necessary courage to continue on life’s hopeless journey. They try to reinvigorate themselves through women.

Allen doesn’t take us anywhere we haven’t been with him before, a familiarity which may not breed contempt, but which may also account for the movie’s slightly washed-out feeling. Or maybe that’s the result of the existential exhaustion that pervades the movie, sort in the way humidity can take over a hot day in muggy climes.

So there you have it: another Allen movie, another case of the big-screen heebie-jeebies.

"Yeah, yeah. We know."

Although...

It probably doesn't hurt to hear it again.

'Wall Street' sequel closes mixed

Michael Douglas and Shia LeBeouf tackle Wall Street.

America's favorite champion of greed is back. Freshly released from prison, Gordon Gekko is ready to use his status as a celebrity criminal to lecture the nation on how Wall Street ravaged the economy, pushing unsuspecting investors over a financial cliff. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps -- director Oliver Stone's follow-up to his 1987 hit -- plays variations on the kind of revenge themes that gave the first installment much of its punch and offers more than a few discourses on how we found ourselves on the brink of financial ruin.

Money Never Sleeps can be likened to a much-heralded initial public offering. The movie begins with high expectations and momentum, but ultimately suffers from a greed of its own: the desire to jam a ton of information and opinion into a story that sometimes loses itself in a tangle of financial maneuvers. And beyond all expectation and perhaps sense, Stone includes an epilogue that tries for (gasp!) a bit of happily-ever-after bliss.

Don't think I'm completely sour on Stone's effort. To begin with, Money Never Sleeps represents one of the few instances when a sequel makes sense. The audacious Gekko is past due for release from prison, and there hardly could be a better time for Stone to aim his cannons of rancor at Wall Street. In all, the idea of a Wall Street sequel seemed like a hanging curve ball, a fat pitch Stone could knock out of the park. I'd say, he's doubled off the left field wall.

The set-up is simple enough. Gekko, ably reprised by Douglas who won an Oscar for his work the first time around, is released from jail after having spent eight years on ice for insider trading. Not one to waste an experience, Gekko writes a best-selling book that goofs on the signature line from the last movie: It's called Is Greed Good? Gekko's ideally positioned to reveal the ways in which Wall Street sold out the country for fun and profit. Gekko, after all, invented the game. The book lands Gekko on the lecture circuit.

But Gekko isn't entirely happy being a prophet at the gates of the crumbling wall of capitalism. He seems to understand that he's hurt others, notably his family. Saddened by the death of a son (from a drug overdose), a remorseful Gekko would like to reconcile with his daughter (Carey Mulligan). Disgusted with her father, Mulligan's Winnie runs a left-leaning Web site. She's also engaged to a "hungry" young investment banker (the always avid Shia LeBeouf.) She hasn't spoken to her father in years.

LeBeouf's Jake Moore - really the movie's main character - embarks on his own vengeful ploy when he realizes that his Wall Street mentor (Frank Langella) has been victimized by the corrupt manipulations of another tycoon, the silky smooth Bretton James (Josh Brolin). Jake meets Gekko at a speaking engagement, and asks for advice. Gekko agrees to play the role of revenge consultant on condition that Jake brokers a meeting between father and daughter. For her part, Winnie has no idea that Jake has been in touch with her father.

That's enough about plot to give you an idea about where the story is headed - or maybe not. The script by Alan Loeb and Stephen Schiff expands its portfolio to include a green energy company that badly needs an infusion of capital, Swiss banks that still know how to hide money, an aging power broker (Eli Wallach) who may be cagier than we think. All this and bailouts, too.

But you know what? The real fun of Stone's movie - and it does have some kick -- involves precisely the things the director may be attempting to condemn. Brolin, in another fine performance, plays a character who's interesting only because he's rich and powerful and has a well-upholstered lifestyle.

And the movie is at its engaging best when the rich are seen flaunting their wealth, power and cunning. A charity ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art drips with alluring opulence. The infighting at a Federal Reserve meeting creates the illusion that we're experiencing an inside look at how the power structure works.

Moreover, Jake's energy has an infectious quality. He may be young, but he's living high on the hog in a fancy Manhattan apartment. LeBeouf conveys the giddy sense of confidence that can come from being certain about one's ability to make big money, something I've observed in others but never experienced personally.

But there's a liability in focusing on Jake's adrenalin-fueled ambition. The movie invests too much of its dramatic capital in LeBeouf's character, a young man who's not the equal of the character Charlie Sheen played in the original. And the relationship between LeBeouf and Mulligan falls short of terrific. It's as much plot contrivance as love affair.

The movie also indulges in a myth, a bit of nostalgia for capitalism past. Time was - or so we're led to believe - when Wall Street was different. Langella's Louis Sabel comes on like a cut-rate version of an Arthur Miller character, a Wall Street trader who longs for the days when companies had substance. Remember when we used to make things? Remember when we didn't accumulate mountains of debt just to stay afloat?

Not content to take shots at Wall Street excess, Stone also drags in murky real-estate practices. Susan Sarandon plays Jake's mother, a Realtor who has to borrow money from her hotshot son in order to hold onto properties that have become increasingly difficult to unload. Chewing on a New York accent thick enough to choke a house cat, Sarandon is fun to watch.

I've previously admired Mulligan's work. Here, though, her most impressive feat involves the way that Winnie cries. On a couple of occasions, a lone tear trickles down Winnie's rounded cheek. Very touching.

I decided to let those solitary tears stand for my feelings at the end of a movie. Money Never Sleeps mostly held my interest, but it lacks the emotional and intellectual that the subject demands. In a key line that I reveal here only because it found its way into the trailer, Gekko instructs Jake about the harsh way of things: "It's not about the money. It's about the game," says Gekko.

In the context of the character, the line makes sense, but try telling that to the people who suffered most from the Wall Street collapse, those with vanquished IRAs, devastated pension funds or lack of gainful employment. For all its pontificating, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps works better as glossy escapism than as a biting social critique.