'Black Bag': a tense tale about trust

  

   Director Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag uses the threatened meltdown of a nuclear plant to add an element of global peril to a movie that, despite such ominous stakes, plays an intriguing game of small ball. 

  Collaborating with screenwriter David Koepp, Soderbergh focuses on the increasingly tense relationships between a group of British intelligence agents, one of whom plans to sell the meltdown malware that could trigger mass casualties and which the British have deemed too dangerous to employ.

  Playing married spies, Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett lead a strong cast that keeps the movie percolating. Everyone's behavior becomes suspect.

   The set-up immediately raises the personal stakes for Fassbender's George. Early on, George learns that his wife's name has appeared on a list of five agents who might be traitors. If she's the culprit, he's going to have to kill her. Will George be more loyal to his wife than to his job? We're not sure. Maybe he's not sure either.

    Blanchett's Katherine seems cagey and intelligent, and it's clear that she and George have carefully worked out the calculus that allows their marriage to continue, even though they sometimes have to reply to each other’s questions by saying "black bag." That means the answer is too secret to divulge.

     Fassbender makes George into a tightly wound professional who keeps us off balance.  To begin his investigation, George stages a dinner party at which the suspected agents (Regé-Jean Page, Tom Burke, and Marisa Abela) and a member of the agency's psych team (Naomie Harris) wind up spilling tea on one another. They reveal enough to bring out festering animosities, but not enough to allow George to identify the culprit. 

    Pierce Brosnan has a nice turn as the head of the agency. He and the rest of the cast embody a drama that bristles with small and large betrayals.

   At times, the movie's many intricate turns get ahead of the audience, but it's not necessary to follow the characters into every cranny Soderbergh explores. A smart screenplay encourages confidence that a satisfying conclusion will be reached. 

    Black Bag includes a skillfully edited polygraph scene that reminds us that truth is difficult to come by in an environment where nearly every one lies. How can they not? It's part of the job.

   

Rapping for the Irish language

     

  The Irish rap group Kneecap anchors its message in language. The group’s three members — Naoise O Caireallain, aka Moglai Bap; Liam Og O hAnnaidh; aka Mo Chara, and JJ O Dochartaigh, aka DJ Provai— portray themselves in Kneecap, a movie that uses Irish Gaelic as a free-spirited emblem of independence.

   Writer/director Rich Pappiatt creates a fictionalized portrait of the group. Staunch advocates of all things Irish, the Belfast-based rappers come off as a new generation of revolutionaries, drawing their energy from a potent blend of irreverence and defiance.

   Two of the group’s members are introduced as drug dealers, giving the movie a decidedly bad-boy vibe. DJ Povai, who handles the group's beats, plays an Irish language and music teacher who discovers his calling in rap.

   Provai frequently appears wearing an orange-green-and-white balaclava, colors of the Irish flag and an expression of hope for Irish unification. 

   In a brief but ultimately affecting performance, Michael Fassbender portrays Moglai Bap's dad, a member of the IRA who we're led to believe was killed by the British during the Troubles. A persistent cop (Josie Walker) believes Fassbender's Arlo has gone into hiding.

   You may not agree with every item on the group's political agenda, but much of the film has been tailored to speak to disaffected young people -- in this case, Irish Republicans who want unity between the north and south.

  Seasoned with a hip-hop version of a Romeo-and-Juliet style romance (Catholic and Protestant) and dark currents provided by an Irish liberation organization that opposes the group's shameless drug use, Kneecap's creative flourishes include English versions of the lyrics splashed across the screen, as well as a bit of animation. 

   I'll let others judge the music, but the rappers turn in credible, often funny, performances that are rooted in the culture they ardently represent and which, in a way, they're helping to invent.

   I don't know whether Kneecap, which had its premiere at last January's Sundance Film Festival, will appeal to American audiences.

    For the most part, I saw it as a sharply irreverent portrait of young Irishmen fighting their war with words and hard-core attitudes rather than bullets. I suppose we should view that as a form of progress.

David Fincher's brutal, efficient thriller

     

     It's not easy to make a movie about a man whose survival depends on anonymity and obsessive attention to detail, so much so that he's constantly replaying a manual of instructions in his head. "Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don't improvise." 

      That's the profile of the nameless character who occupies the center of David Fincher's The Killer, a plunge into the life of a high-paid assassin who plies his lethal trade with exactitude and indifference to anyone else's causes or concerns.

      A major irony triggers Fincher's movie. 

      After a tense and artfully shot opening scene in which the killer (a trim Michael Fassbender) waits for his prey, he misses. Having botched the job, the killer flees the empty Parisian office he'd been occupying as he prepared to shoot someone in the apartment across the street.

      Once he misses his mark and the movie finishes some wily flirtation with Rear Window voyeurism, the killer embarks on a globe-hopping trip spurred by the story's core mystery.

      Fincher has made terrific real life crime movies (Zodiac) and movies that rely on a mixture of fantasy and bristling cynicism (Se7en and Fight Club). He's never made a movie that wasn't steeped in style and directorial competence. 

      Put another way, Fincher knows what he's doing and we feel his confidence.

       Post his assassination attempt, the killer heads to a retreat he keeps in the Dominican Republic. When he arrives home -- a very nice place, by the way -- he learns that his lover (Sophie Charlotte) has been a badly beaten. 

       Then it's off again, this time to get to the bottom of what  brought his lover to the brink of death. He travels to Chicago, New Orleans, Illinois, and Beacon, New York.

        Fincher introduces the movie's chapters with title cards based on the characters the killer tracks: The Brute and The Expert, for example.  Sala Baker plays The Brute; Tilda Swinton appears as The Expert.

       Fassbender has been given some amusing dialogue and his character uses a string of fake credit cards issued in the name of TV characters, Archibald Bunker to cite one example.

       It's as if Fincher is inviting us to play a cinematic game that's willing to wink at us from time-to-time.

       But when it comes to the killer's MO, Fincher pulls no punches when the killer confronts the go-between separating clients from killer (Charles Parnell) or his frightened secretary (Kerry O'Malley).

       The performances are crisp but I wouldn't regard The Killer as an actors' showcase; it's a director's movie -- with help from  cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, an edgy score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and tunes from the synth-heavy group, The Smiths.

        Based on a French graphic novel, The Killer slides through a world without either God-given or human morality. But this isn't Dostoevsky, it's a thriller that keeps us in a state of agitation as Fincher displays efficiency void of judgment.

        Oh, and for good measure, he adds a brutally extended fight scene that includes an encounter with a pit bull.

        The Killer may not be Fincher's best work but, within its narrow constraints, it nails its moves.

She wields power. The movie, not so much.

Dark Phoenix may be the final X-Men movie but it falls short of a grand finale.

Billed as the final chapter in the X-Men series, Dark Phoenix doesn't exactly qualify as the fondest of farewells.

By no means awful, Dark Phoenix nonetheless fails to make a major splash with a concluding chapter that revolves around Jean Grey (Sophie Turner of Game of Thrones fame). Although Jean acquires great powers, she never totally dominates a story that becomes the wobbly foundation on which an uneven variety of set pieces and side trips are built.

A mind-reading mutant, the young Jean (Summer Fontana) falls under Charles Xavier's (James McAvoy) protection after her parents are killed in an auto accident in which she was a passenger and also the cause.

The story then leaps ahead. Now-grown, Jean (Turner) is still learning how to navigate the X-world. An early-picture outer-space rescue mission brings Jean into contact with a force that super-charges her powers in ways she isn't prepared to handle. She leaves the X-Men estate to search for background about her pre-X-Men childhood. She also unleashes terrible destructive powers as she morphs into Phoenix.

With Jean on the verge of raging out of control, the movie begins to question Charles' motives. Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) wonders whether Xavier isn't more interested in bolstering his ego than in maintaining the integrity of the X-Men force. Lawrence, whose superhero alter ego goes by the name Mystique, doesn't seem especially engaged, but she's given the movie's best line.

A rebellious Raven tells Charles that the women always seem to be saving the men in these stories. She wonders whether a name change isn't in order: How about X-Women? Good idea.

Nicholas Hoult's Beast also begins to wonder about Charles' motives. Is Charles putting X-Men in danger to maintain his growing status with humans who, at this moment, are happy to rely on X-Men to save them from whatever disaster happens to loom?

Meanwhile, aliens led by Vuk (Jessica Chastain) try to control Jean whose powers are so great they can be life-giving -- or some such. She might help them revive their moribund civilization, hardly the freshest of ideas.

Tye Sheridan portrays Scott Summers/Cyclops, an X-er who's romantically involved with Jean and who can't accept the fact that she might have become a world-threatening menace.

Michael Fassbender turns up as Erik/Magneto, bringing gravitas to the proceedings, which are dotted with action and special effects, some of them well executed by director Simon Kinberg. CGI and physical combat blend nicely in an extended sequence on a speeding train.

Dark Phoenix doesn't come close to the best and most serious of all the X-Men movies, 2017's Logan. You can also throw in X-Men: First Class (2011) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), if you're looking for more of Phoenix's betters.

In general, I've liked the X-Men movies with their devotion to talented outcasts. If Phoenix really marks the end of the series, I'll fondly remember the movies I enjoyed, forget the rest and move on to something else.

Ridley Scott again unleashes monsters

The creator of the original Alien delivers an accomplished helping of sci-fi and horror -- but some of the thrill is gone.

Everyone who's old enough, probably remembers their first viewing of Alien , the Ridley Scott-directed movie that in 1979 landed a direct hit to the pit of the stomach. Besides being a masterclass exercise in generating tension, Alien also helped temper the optimistic buoyancy of movies such as 1977's Close Encounters of a Third Kind. Scott brought cynicism and dread to the galaxy, offering a view of space that was industrialized, gritty and full of terrifying dangers.

James Cameron's Aliens added booming urgency and scale to the groundwork Scott had done. And, of course, there were two additional movies, neither of which found quite the same purchase in the pop-cultural landscape or should we say "spacescape?"

Scott again picks up his creature cudgels with Alien: Covenant, a sequel to his 2012 Prometheus, as well as a prequel to Alien.

In Prometheus, Scott played with big ideas and made his most memorable character an android played by Michael Fassbender, who gave his synthetic creation traces of scalding wit. Unfortunately, the serious talk in Prometheus sometimes clashed with the action Scott may have felt compelled to deliver.

Set in 2104, Alien: Covenant isn't exactly free of ideas, either. They're laid out in the movie's chilly opening -- a conversation between an android (Fassbender) and his maker (Guy Pearce). The two discuss the nature of creation and the ability of a creation to surpass its creator. The android sounds an eerie note that suggests the inherent inferiority of human life. "You will die. I will not,'' says the robot.

Little in Scott's movie matches the ominous elegance of this prolog which takes place in a large white room that looks as if it might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

But ideas eventually fall prey to the expected shocks in which newly designed horrific looking creatures burst from backs or chests or latch onto the faces of their victims.

The story involves a space ship named Covenant, which is being run by an android named David. The crew has been put into deep-space sleep as the ship heads toward a distant planet with some 20,000 colonists on board. The implication: Humans must leave a fully exploited Earth.

The plan goes awry when a space storm awakens the crew, which almost immediately faces a temptation that we know will lead to trouble. A signal -- John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads -- emanates from a planet that's closer than the ship's original destination. Could years be shaved from the Covenant's planned seven-year journey by finding a closer and apparently habitable planet?

Katherine Waterston plays a crew member who loses her husband, the ship's captain, during the sudden reawakening. Another officer (Billy Crudup) assumes command of the small crew, which includes Danny McBride, Demian Bichir and Carmen Ejogo.

It gives you some idea about the effort that goes into characterization to know that McBride's character is called Tennessee. He wears a cowboy hat. Do you need (or want) to know anything more?

Nowhere near as memorable as the original Alien crew, this group of voyagers winds up buffeted by a conflict between Waterston's evidence-based character and a man more inclined to take things on faith (Crudup).

Additional conflict arises between two robots, both ably played by Fassbender: the android of the prologue -- named David -- and a later model named Walter. David proves the more mission-oriented to the two. Having absorbed what he needs from humankind, the sinister Walter sees no reason for keeping people around.

Scott spends significant amounts of time on the planet that the Covenant reaches, thus sacrificing the extreme claustrophobia that turned the first movie into a white-knuckle masterpiece.

Not surprisingly, the movie's peripherals are all expertly handled by the veteran Scott and his crew: from the look of the spacecraft to the idyllic surface of a planet where the crew encounters monsters capable of working their way into human bodies in a variety of ways.

Alien: Covenant arrives wrapped in a convincing package. For some, that will be enough, but for those who regard the original Alien as a breakthrough movie, it's difficult not to see Alien: Covenant as a slightly depleted helping of a once stunning pop-cultural landmark, something like a well-made TV series that continues to entertain even after it has lost much of its juice.

Logic murdered in 'Assassin's Creed'

Big name cast takes a shot at a movie version of a video game.

I suppose these days nothing should surprise us, but I must admit that I was taken aback to learn that Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling and Brendan Gleeson all appear in Assassin's Creed, a movie derived from a video game about which I happily confess total ignorance.

Plotted to the max, Assassin's Creed revolves around a long-standing rivalry between The Assassins and The Knights Templar, opposing groups that vie for possession of the Apple of Eden, a gizmo that contains the genetic DNA code for free will.

Under the guise of promoting world peace, the Knights plan to use the apple to control mankind.

Divided between two time periods -- the present and 15th Century Spain -- the story begins by introducing us to Callum Lynch (Fassbender), a murderer sentenced to die by lethal injection. Lynch receives his punishment, but instead of drifting into oblivion, he mysteriously (perhaps even incomprehensibly) wakes up in a strange Spanish facility run by Abstergo Industries, which is presided over by Irons' Rikkin.

Rikkin's daughter Sofia (Cotillard) takes charge of connecting Lynch to a machine she invented. It causes him to explore his genetic roots by living as his 15th Century Assassin ancestor, Aguilar.

The Assassins, by the way, are an amoral group that pledges to use darkness to preserve the light. They'll protect the Apple of Eden by any means necessary.

And, yes, this is another movie that takes on conspiratorial airs, one more shadowy projection of the idea that somewhere unknown to us ordinary folks, the real drama unfolds.

There's a point to Cal's time travel: By becoming his 15th Century ancestor, Cal will be able to tell his industrial captors (a front for the Templars) where to find the coveted apple.

Forays into the past give director Justin Kurzel, who directed Fassbender and Cotillard in a screen version of Macbeth, an opportunity to pour on the action; the Spanish segments involve blurry battles in which the Assassins engage the Knights who are trying to wrest the apple from its owner at the time, Sultan Muhammad.

At this point, Cal acquires a female sidekick (Ariane Labed), who helps him kick butt. He also leaps off tall buildings, which -- I've read -- is a bow to the video game.

The movie's complicated conventions (often spelled out in mind-numbing expository dialogue) make it difficult to care what happens.

Some of Kurzel's imagery is strange enough to command interest, a gathering of 15th century clerics at which two Assassins are to be burned at the stake, for example. Moreover, Kurzel knows how to create menacing moods.

It occurred to me that the movie might be more fun as a cascading series of shadowy images, providing the actor's never opened their mouths.

The actors, however, do speak, treating the material as seriously as if they were doing Shakespeare, which -- come to think of it -- would have been a far better use of everyone's time.

A romance burdened by melodrama

Light Between the Oceans seems trapped by its austerity.

In The Light Between the Oceans, his most conventional and commercially oriented movie to date, director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines) casts Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander as a husband and wife living on a remote slab of rock off the Australian coast.

The story begins when Fassbender's Tom Sherborne, an emotionally scarred veteran, arrives in a small Australian coastal town toward the end of World War I. Riven with guilt about having survived the carnage so many of his fellow combatants did not, Tom takes an isolating job as a lighthouse keeper.

Even with some heavily applied atmospherics, watching a man tend to a lighthouse doesn't make for much of a drama, so a story kicks in.

Cianfrance, who wrote the screenplay based on a 2012 novel by M.L. Stedman, quickly brings Tom together with Isabel (Vikander), the daughter of the man who oversees activities at the lighthouse.

Attractive and glowing with vivacity, Vikander's Isabel breaks through Tom's emotional armor. She wins Tom's heart, and soon becomes the lighthouse keeper's wife.

Isabel desperately wants to become pregnant, but she suffers through a couple of miscarriages that demoralize her and tarnish the glow of romance.

Then, the improbable happens. A lifeboat boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a still-living infant. Isabel implores Tom to keep the child.

Tom knows Isabel's request will open the door to moral and legal difficulties, but love compels him to bury the dead man and allow Isabel to raise the child.

Young Lucy becomes the object of Tom and Isabel's mutual affection, and for a time, they live as a happy family -- until, of course, they don't.

For those who don't know the story, I'll say no more except that Rachel Weisz shows up about midway through in a role that helps give a sagging story some real humanity.

Heavily reliant on close-ups that allow the camera to study the actors' faces, Cianfrance's approach doesn't quite mesh with increasingly melodramatic material that revolves around Tom's attempts to unburden himself of the guilt he's been carrying.

Fassbender captures the stoic control with which Tom approaches his post-war suffering, and Vikander conveys Isabel's misguided willfulness, but, as I suggested, they're both outdone by Weisz, as a grieving, tormented woman.

The rest of the story concern's Tom's attempt to make things right, before the movie finds an ending (a postscript, really) that's more sentimental than one might expect from Cianfrance.

Despite Cianfrance's attempts at infusing every moment with an aura of importance and depth, The Light Between Oceans can't disguise the fact it's a certifiable weepy -- only one that's a too austere and self-absorbed to give the tear ducts a proper workout.

Backstage with Steve Jobs

Jobs launches three new products and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin tries to explore human themes in a high-tech world. .

Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network and whose new movie Steve Jobs now goes into wide release, capitalizes on our bottomless interest in the founder of Apple. At the same, time -- and perhaps in contradictory fashion -- Sorkin asks us to accept that he's not trying to give us a factual portrayal of Jobs' life.

Of course, artists are entitled to take license with the facts as they search for larger truths, but -- let's be honest -- had Sorkin focused his movie on a tremendously successful but often callous executive named Barney McBride -- his project might never have been greenlit.

I say all this by way of telling you that I can't totally buy into Sorkin's approach (expressed in a Charlie Rose interview) that he's not replicating real people, but creating characters -- within limits, of course. Sorkin's screenplay draws on Walter Isaacson's much-lauded 2011 biography, Steve Jobs.

Whether Steve Jobs reflects the reality of the real person in full or only in part can be assessed business historians, but Sorkin's screenplay -- brought to the movies by director Danny Boyle -- charts a lively, if not entirely satisfying, course during three clearly demarcated acts.

Those three acts are constructed around backstage events preceding the launch of three products: the Macintosh computer in 1984; the NeXT cube in 1988 and the iMac in 1998.

Sorkin script spends a lot of time on the fraught relationship between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and his daughter Lisa.

It's not that Jobs' relationship with Lisa (he initially denied paternity) is irrelevant to understanding the man (or the character in the movie), it's more that Sorkin may be off base in thinking that this father/daughter tug-of-war is the most telling thing about Jobs. It's a telling thing.

We also get a little too much of Jobs' irritation at being asked for money by Lisa's mother (Katherine Waterston).

Sorkin's great strength is dialogue, so Steve Jobs includes lots of conversations that take place with the rapid fire insistence of a mouse click as we meet the characters who most interest Sorkin:

These include John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the Pepsi executive who took over Apple and who fired Jobs in a dispute over the company's direction. (Twelve years after leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs made a triumphant return to the foundering company. He's credited with turning Apple into one of the most profitable businesses in the world.)

There's also Joanna Hoffman, Apple's marketing genius, who's portrayed by Kate Winslet. Hoffman seems to be the one character who's able to speak truth to Jobs' power.

If the corporate aspects of the movie have a moral center, it belongs to Steve Wozniak, played with patience and determination by Seth Rogen, a nice piece of casting. Woz, as he's called, constantly asks Jobs to do the right thing by acknowledging the team that created the Apple II, the computer that kept the company profitable for a long time.

Fassbender approaches Jobs as a control freak who must juggle 50 different balls at one time, all in the high-stakes atmosphere of a product launch. To this end, Fassbender ably conveys Jobs' focus, intensity and intelligence.

The movie's product-launch backdrop may be the most telling thing about it. Sorkin and Boyle (Slum Dog Millionaire) make it clear that Jobs understood theatrics.

He launched new products in large auditoriums. In front of eager audiences, he shared the spotlight with new Apple products. He gave his user-friendly devices a near celebrity aura, creating a sense of specialness that somehow was supposed to transfer to the consumers of Apple products. (And, yes, I'm one of them.)

I suppose that's part of the point: Jobs could humanize high-tech products, but not himself.

By the movie's final act, Jobs has donned the jeans and black turtle necks that became something of a trademark. He has refashioned himself as a kind of god who brings products down from the digital mountaintop and reveals them to the masses.

Steve Jobs is worth seeing because Sorkin is a clever writer, because the performances are sharp enough to match the brisk pace that Boyle sets, and because much of the byplay is entertaining.

I love the fact that Sorkin takes a shot at Jobs' vaunted design sense when, in the final going, Lisa -- now a Harvard student played by Peria Haney-Jardine -- compares the first iMac to a child's Easy-Bake oven.

Apple users may get more excitement out of a real Apple product launch than they do from a movie that follows on the heels of a documentary about Jobs (The Man in the Machine) and a 2013 bio-pic that cast Ashton Kutcher as Jobs.

Ultimately (and perhaps unfortunately) Sorkin underscores the movie's message: In a climactic scene, he has Woz tell Jobs that it's possible to be both a genius and a compassionate person at the same time. "It's not binary,''says Woz.

Those words needn't have been spoken. They're like an exclamation point on a conclusion that Sorkin should have let us draw for ourselves, and they made me wonder whether the movie shouldn't have been given a subtitle: Steve Jobs, The Nagging of a Genius.

Music from the fringe

Michael Fassbender spends nearly all of Frank -- an oddball movie about an avant-garde rock musician -- wearing a giant head made of papier-mâché.

The head seems like the kind of amusing stunt David Byrne might have attempted back in the halcyon Talking Heads days, except for one thing: Frank never removes the beach-ball sized orb, even during what seem like normal conversations with his bandmates.

The look of the head is interesting for its near parodic ordinariness. The artificial head boasts a modest haircut, large blue eyes that look as if they might have been appropriated from one of those annoyingly wide-eyed Margaret Keane paintings and a perpetually open mouth.

Director Lenny Abrahamson and Fassbender use the disguise without undue flourish, a wise choice because it's weird enough without being italicized.

The band, by the way, is called Soronprfbs, an unpronounceable name that suggests that this group of musicians couldn't care less about how their music is received.

The story focuses on Jon, a keyboardist played by Domhnall Gleeson. Jon joins the band by accident after the group's keyboardist attempts suicide.

Jon soon finds himself spending almost a year with the group in a secluded hideout where Frank inches his way toward Soronprfbs' first album.

The rest of the group is far from hospitable. Maggie Gyllenhaal appears as Clara, a woman who plays theremin and who makes no attempt to conceal her contempt for Jon, whose often cheery voice-over narration creates an ironic counterpoint to reality.

The group also includes the band's manager (Scoot McNairy), a drummer (Carla Azar) and a French-speaking bass player (Francois Civil) who also loathes Jon and regards him as a smiling no-talent.

The movie breaks its isolation when Jon arranges for the band to perform at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, a spawning ground for cutting edge bands.

Not surprisingly, Frank is ill-equipped for a coming-out party, and Gyllenhaal's Clara seems to view the entire idea of "entertaining" as a sell-out.

I've read that the movie is a riff on the real-life experiences of co-writer Jon Ronson, who wrote the screenplay with Peter Straughan. Ronson evidently worked with Chris Sievey, a British musician and comic who died in 2010. Sievey created a character named Frank Sidebottom, who wore a head very much like the one donned by Fassbender in the movie.

You don't have to know anything about that backstory to appreciate Abrahamson's movie, which deals with the fragility of genius in a way that can be quietly funny.

Jon attempts -- rather foolishly it seems -- to bring Frank's talents to a wider audience, something that takes its toll on Frank and leads to a finale that's mildly redemptive and touching in a bittersweet way.

'X-Men' + time travel = a winner

It's difficult -- perhaps impossible -- to say anything critical about the glut of comic-book movies without sounding like a cultural elitist and, even worse, a scold.

Still, I can't proceed with what's going to be a positive and even enthusiastic review of X-Men: Days of Future Past without expessing a little dismay about the way Hollywood continues to cannibalize the backwaters of popular culture.

This move toward the mainstream turns the once-forbidden fruit of comics into tentpole entertainments that can't help but diminish the pleasure of those who shared in what once amounted to a semi-secret society based on avidity and accumulated knowledge, much of it useless.

There, that's off my chest.

Now about X-Men. The latest installment is a superior helping of a big-screen Marvel comic that boasts creative special effects, a mostly involving story and some very good acting.

The story, which brings together various generations of X-men, begins in a horrible dystopian, war-riddled future. Things are so bad that Patrick Stewart's Professor X and Ian McKellen's Magneto have united in a last-ditch attempt to stave off the destruction of humanity.

To accomplish their goal, Professor X and Magneto employ the consciousness-shifting powers of Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back to 1973. Wolverine's time-travel mission: to prevent the assassination of industrialist Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) and, thus, alter the course of a history that otherwise would lead to wholesale slaughter.

Director Bryan Singer, who hasn't directed an X-Men movie since 2003, judiciously uses the '70s -- reminding us of everything from lava lamps, to the Vietnam War to Richard Nixon. Wisely, though, Singer doesn't overwhelm the story with the events and curiosities of the '70s: He uses them as punctuation to create an effective mixture of humor and gravity.

Upon returning to the '70s, Wolverine must locate younger versions of Professor X and Magneto, played respectively by James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender.
It's a bit of a stretch to think that McAvoy's Charles Xavier could mature into someone who looks like Patrick Stewart. But there's no faulting McAvoy's performance as a dissolute and cynical young man who has yet to find his inner nobility.

Fassbender, who like McAvoy has played this role before, is entirely convincing as the young Magneto, summoning the out-sized polarities of a personality that seems at ease with both its humane and malevolent impulses.

The key to the plot's resolution can be found in the character of Raven, a.k.a. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), the shape-shifting mutant who can avert total doom and who also looks sleek in her form-fitting blue outfit.

The themes of this installment mimic those of previous movies. Society's mutants -- those who represent upward steps on the evolutionary ladder -- are scorned by those who either are threatened by their presence or want to harness mutant powers as a means of advancing personal agendas.

As one who has the latter ambition, Dinklage's Trask comes as close as we get to an identifiable villain. Trask has invented destructive creatures called Sentinels, which seem to threaten both humanity and mutants.

What else needs saying?

Not much really. Singer -- in his first X-men movie since 2003's X-Men 2 -- cooks up some fine special effects, among the most impressive, the elevation of an entire stadium that hovers perilously above the White House.

In all, X-Men: Days of Future Past proves entertaining and well-constructed, a helping of comic-book adventure that knows how to wink at itself without undermining its loftier purposes. These mostly boil down to a question as simple as, "Can't we all get along?"
Not all of the X-men are given equal time in this edition, but if Days of Future Past -- a title that sounds a bit too much like a grammar lesson -- stands as an exemplary addition to the never ending cycle of comic-book movies. If we have to have them, they should at least be this much fun.

The abject cruelty of U.S. slavery

12 Years a Slave is a powerful and necessary look at enslavement

When I was a kid, we learned that the Civil War was fought over slavery -- sort of. Though acknowledged as a cause of the war, the subject of slavery always seemed muted by more generalized issues: The industrial North vs. the agrarian South and states' rights vs. centralized federal concerns.

Fair to say that slavery didn't come alive as a shocking horror. We read little or nothing about the torments of the Middle Passage, about the cruelties of a system in which people were bought and sold without regard for family connections or about how much of the southern economy was built on the backs of people who were forced to endure humiliation and toil without either rest or recompense.

Movies haven't done much to clarify the picture. From Gone With the Wind to the recent Django Unchained, we've not had a story dedicated fully to describing what the world was like during the time of slavery -- and doing it from the point of view of someone who had been enslaved.

Now comes director Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, written by John Ridley from a book by Solomon Northrup, a free black man who in 1841 was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. and sold into slavery.

Although McQueen has altered some of Northrup's narrative, Northrup's source material gives 12 Years a Slave an authenticity few other historical movies can claim.

This first-person account of America's "peculiar institution" maintains the formality of Northrup's language, but McQueen's images spring to life with troubling urgency.

Built around a solid and moving performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor (as Northrup), 12 Years a Slave hinges on a hideous deception. An accomplished fiddler, Northrup was tricked by a couple of charlatans into traveling with them as a violinist for a circus with which they supposedly were connected.

Once Northrup left his wife and children in Saratoga, N.Y., his fate was sealed. He was drugged and held in a "slave pen" in Washington a few blocks from the Capitol. In order to survive, Northrup gradually learned to hide his literacy (he was an educated man) and to answer to the name a slave trader arbitrarily gave him. He was called "Platt."

Obviously, we're a long way from the devoted slaves of southern fantasy. Mothers and children are viciously separated; brutal whippings are common, as is the sexual abuse of black women. At one point, Northrup is lynched.

His tormentors are driven off, but he's left to hang from a tree, his toes barely touching the ground, a man dancing over his own grave until his then owner (Benedict Cumberbatch) arrives to end his ordeal.

Northrup's life was threatened when he found himself subjected to an overseer's wrath. The overseer (Paul Dano) couldn't abide Northrup's intelligence. Northrup had figured out a way to get his owner's lumber more easily to market. Dano's character -- a man called Tibeats -- deeply resented any initiative on the part of a black man.

After this horrific episode, financial difficulties forced Cumberbatch's character to sell Northrup to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), a malicious slave owner who delights in abuse and who is involved in a sexual triangle with his wife (Sarah Paulson) and a slave (Lupita Nyong'o), who also happens to be the best cotton picker on the plantation.

For all of Epps' obvious evils, we probably learn more about southern society from the parts of the movie involving Cumberbatch's "kindly" Mr. Ford. Ford treats his slaves reasonably well, but he obviously accepts the institution of slavery and has profited from it. He's troubled by cruelty, but not enough to reject the system that allows it to flourish.

At times, McQueen presents us with tableaus that might have been inspired by old photographs, perhaps as a way of establishing tension between what we regard as "history" and the urgency of a drama that appears to be taking place before our eyes. A scene in which Northrup encounters a group of Indians might be the film's most mysterious, groups of outcasts who don't know quite what to make of each other.

In 1853, Northrup finally was rescued and restored to his former life. He was able to write a book about his experiences, and evidently helped slaves escape the South via the underground railroad.

As moving as Northrup's reunion with his family is, it can't (and shouldn't) entirely be enjoyed. The story of slavery isn't really about one man's journey back to his home and family; it's about all those who died as slaves, unconsoled by a loved one's touch, distant from the mothers who bore them and regarded as property in an economy built on acceptance of people as chattel.

McQueen, who previously directed Hunger and Shame, allows room for such thoughts. It's also telling (and more than a little sad) that 150 years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a movie such as 12 Years a Slave still qualifies as a rarity.

A 'Counselor' badly in need of advice

A great pedigree can't save this scattered, mildly pretentious thriller.

Tell me you weren't looking forward to The Counselor, a thriller with a screenplay by novelist Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men), direction by the talented if variable Ridley Scott (Gladiator and Prometheus) and acting from a cast that includes Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz.

That's the kind of pedigree that should excite moviegoers, especially those who are attracted to the spare toughness of McCarthy's worldview. In The Counselor -- McCarthy's first piece written solely for the screen -- the esteemed author creates a world in which toxic mixtures of greed and desperation reap heavy consequences and in which any display of naivety sets one up for an unimaginably dire fate.

The characters in The Counselor are surrounded by forces they can't control: Their only mistake lies in believing that a degree of control might be possible. When things go terribly wrong (as they must in a movie such as this) no amount of improvisation or bravado can spare the hapless. They're exposed for what they are: someone else's prey.

Contrary to its title, The Counselor isn't really about an individual; it's about systemic rot, most of it taking place in lavishly appointed environments where high-class consumption is the rule, much of it funded by money derived from the drug trade.

In The Counselor, drugs support the criminal upper class, an observation that seems a little tiresome for someone of McCarthy's stature. "Drugs again?" we ask ourselves, as we fight to stave off disappointment.

Fassbender plays a nameless attorney whose motivations are so sketchily presented, they're almost irrelevant. The Counselor feels as if his back is to the wall. He's helped a lot of criminals. Now, he wants to cash in by involving himself in a drug deal. He also wants to find a happily-ever-after situation with his wife, played by Cruz as the only character in the movie with any claim to innocence.

Fassbender's character deals with two associates. The wealthy Reiner (Bardem) is a genially sly man with an outrageous, blown-back hairstyle that make him look as if he just put his finger in a live electric socket. Reiner can be comical, but he warns the Counselor that deals such as the one he's contemplating tend to take on a life of their own. If everything sours, the Counselor won't have the slightest idea of how to cope. He'll be dangerously out of his depth.

The Counselor also meets with Pitt's Westray, a relaxed man with a fondness for a white cowboy hat. Westray also issues warnings to the Counselor. The easy-going Westray seems to understand that he may have pushed his luck too far. Perhaps he already should have abandoned crime, but he's playing things out, maybe even egging disaster on.

Diaz is cast in the movie's most mysterious role: She plays Malkina, a woman we first meet when she watches Reiner's pet leopards chasing down prey on an open plane. It doesn't take much by way of intuition to know that Malkina's all business and that when she does business, it will be bad business -- if not for herself, then for those she encounters.

In a bit of self-conscious boundary stretching we see Malkina having sex with Reiner's yellow, convertible sportscar. No, I'm not kidding. I won't describe exactly how this bizarre feat is accomplished. Know only that it involves Malkina doing a cheerleader-like split atop the car's windshield. Scott may be making a point in weirdly literal fashion: This woman gets off on material things.

The world of The Counselor is ripe with intrigue and abundant corruption, and yet, the movie can't be called a success.

To begin with Fassbender's character is never well-enough defined to hold the center of a movie. Bardem, so impressive as the lethal Anton Chigurh in the big-screen adaptation of McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, gives a performance that flirts with shtick, alternating comic exaggeration with a feeling that he briefly has returned to his senses, something like a jazz musician picking up the melody after a wild improvisational riff.

Diaz seems sufficiently jaded as a woman who strives to create a straight line between her intentions and her actions, even if those actions show up on the wrong side of the moral ledger.

And then there's the narrative itself. It takes an awfully long time for the story to lock in, and when it does, we watch less because we care about the outcome, but because we simply want to see the various chunks of story find a semblance of coherence. This is more a formal accomplishment than a deeply felt human one.

It's equally true that McCarthy's dialogue, though sometimes mordantly witty, carries the weight of pretension, so much so that by the movie's end, some of the characters (notably a crime lord played by Ruben Blades) begin to spell out the movie's harsh themes in an approach that's probably too clear, an example of literary obviousness that recursively articulates what we already know.

All of this makes for intermittently intriguing but only partially satisfying viewing experience, a movie in which adornment and opulence are conspicuously displayed as part of Scott's attempt to seduce us, and -- at times -- to show the gap between the upper classes of criminal life and the minions who serve them. We catch glimpses of the lumpen work force that keeps the drug wheels spinning, whether it comes to creatively executed assassinations or the drudgery of moving more product.

Scott and McCarthy put a lot on the table here, trying hard (too hard, probably) to add spice to a fairly routine story that, in its overall arc, looks as if it's trying to punish characters who have lived too large.

Scott and McCarthy have chosen a strange way to fail; their overly complex a story-telling approach makes things too difficult at the outset, and the proffered explanations for what we've been watching make the movie too easy in the end.

It sounds like an odd and perhaps even disrespectful thing to say about a McCarthy-written movie, but The Counselor could have used a rewrite.

'B' movies just keep getting bigger

A stunning opening, some intelligence and plenty of action make Prometheus decent, but Ridley Scott's latest doesn't deliver the knockout punch.

At the age of 74, director Ridley Scott has gone back to the turf he so ably mined with 1979's Alien. Alien, of course, spawned a franchise that included entrees by such important directors as James Cameron (Aliens) and David Fincher (Aliens 3).

Scott's initial movie, which has stood the test of time, caught moviegoers by surprise with its high-voltage suspense, terrifying creatures and cynicism about what might happen if humans encountered alien life forms. Alien arrived in theaters as a welcome antidote to the awed optimism epitomized by movies such as Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

In the world Scott created, space no longer represented a final frontier where mankind might find salvation, but a lonely expanse filled with unrelenting terror.

Although Prometheus marks Scott's return to outer space, it can't steal the fire of cultural relevance that marked the director's initial attempt to shed Earth's gravitational pull. Prometheus makes use of lots of spiffy new technology -- notably the improved 3-D that seems to have become a mandatory part of every summer movie -- but the movie feels as much like an embellishment of recognizable themes as a bold journey of discovery.

Scott has applied a taste for the monumental to a lurid B-movie, sci-fi scenario about a voyage to a distant planet, and for a time, it works. But when the crew faces its predictable eve of destruction, vague aromas of familiarity begin to waft over the proceedings.

It's telling that Prometheus's collection of characters includes only one real standout and that this most memorable of characters is a robot played by Michael Fassbender, an actor whose lightly expressed sardonic wit can be as subtle as one of his character's raised eyebrows. Fassbender's David is a humanoid variation of 2001's HAL, a machine that develops its human style by watching Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. Nice touch.

Those who see Prometheus will not enter an idea-free zone. I have mixed feelings about whether that's a good thing. The screenplay tries to pit creationism against Darwinism and then stand both of them on their heads, but the movie's "serious" talk doesn't always synch with the expected and often well-delivered shocks.

The greatest of these jolts occurs during an automated operation undergone by Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, played by Noomi Rapace, still best known for her work in the Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy. I'll say no more about this bit of surgery, but it's probably destined to become the movie's most talked about scene.

Dr. Shaw, who wears a neckless from which a cross dangles, subscribes to the notion of a created universe. Her faith-based position contrasts with her lover Dr. Charlie Halloway (Logan Marshalll-Green), a staunch Darwinian.

Both Shaw and Halloway are participants in a mission prompted by their early-picture discovery of cave drawings that suggest that an alien life form may have had something to do with the origin of life on Earth. When the movie heads into space, we learn that the mission has been taken over by a corporation whose on-board rep (Charlize Theron) is an ice princess and the movie's resident bitch. The vessel's captain (Idris Elba) is a hard-boiled guy who who tends not to focus on big questions.

As the story progresses, Rapace's performance becomes increasingly focused, a display of ferocious determination. And, of course, a variety of lesser characters become fodder for many hideous-looking monsters that seem to have been designed to ensure that the movie fulfills its obligations as a summer slimefest.

With a couple of amazing exceptions, Scott's use of 3-D proves less than spectacular and some of the movie's visual creations -- an alien spaceship that looks like a giant bagel from which someone has taken a healthy bite -- are more impressive for their size than for their imaginative design.

During the movie's stunning prologue, I scribbled a note to myself; I wondered whether Scott had begun so amazingly that nothing in the rest of his movie could live up to what transpires during the opening credits. I was sort of right about that, although Scott can't be faulted for not adding enough bells and whistles. If you sit through the closing credits, you'll discover that Prometheus's technical crew takes up nearly as much space as half the London phone book.

Should you see Prometheus? I certainly wouldn't try to talk you out of it. Prometheus is a decent helping of sci-fi that's probably a shade more intelligent than most of what we'll see this summer, but ... and this is a major "but" -- it is not the knock-out for which I had been hoping, and as a colleague eloquently expressed after the movie, Prometheus , which eventually does become a kind of prequel to Alien, diminishes in the mind the more the furor around it subsides.

She kicks butt -- and means it

Director Steven Soderbergh stops making sense, and opts for action.

The other night I was looking at Angelina Jolie's body, not an uncommon activity for male moviegoers, but my motivations had nothing to do with prurient fantasy. Watching Jolie at the 69th Golden Globes, I couldn't help thinking to myself, "God, that woman is thin."

I mention this because Jolie has appeared in a variety of movies -- notably the Lara Croft series -- that emphasize her physical prowess. Seeing the elegantly dressed Jolie at the The Golden Globes, I had a difficult time believing in her action-hero chops.

But Gina Carano, the star of director Steven Soderbergh's new thriller Haywire? She's a whole other story.

According to a fan site, Carno's a 145-pound kickboxer. Carano not only looks as if she can deliver a punch, she actually does deliver many of them, often in rapid, punishing succession.

I probably never would have heard of Carano had Soderbergh not cast her in a thriller that's notable for ... well ... Carano, as well as for some protracted, bruising action, much of it cleverly conceived.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that Carano happens to be attractive or that she's able to hold the center of an action-oriented thriller. So, if you want to see a woman who fights -- and means it, Haywire definitely fills the bill.

But beware, the plot of the movie can go as haywire as the title, and, as a colleague suggested after a preview screening, you run the risk of wearing yourself out if you try to follow it too closely.

Carano plays Mallory Kane, a woman who works for a private espionage agency. In Soderbergh's globe-hopping story, Mallory is pursued by a variety of foes, some of whom pounce on her with sudden fury.

For those who want to know a little more, I'll take a shot: Someone wants Mallory dead. Displeasure with Mallory has something to do with a Barcelona-based job in which she was hired to rescue a Chinese journalist (Anthony Brandon Wong).

Upon returning from Barcelona, Mallory is given another assignment by her boss (Ewan McGregor). He tells her that he has a really easy job for her. Reluctantly, she travels to Dublin to hook up with a British agent (Michael Fassbender). There, Mallory discovers that she's the target of an elaborate assassination plot.

Fassbender, who played a sex addict in Shame, again finds himself between a woman's legs - only this time he's subjected to strangulating punishment during a fight in a hotel room that does more damage than six drunken rock bands.

To carry out his cinematic mission, Soderbergh has hired a large and impressive cast that includes Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum and Bill Paxton. Don't get to worked up, though, most of these actors appear in what amount to extended cameos.

Soderbergh also gets tricky with the movie's structure. He has Carano tell the early part of the story to a befuddled young man (Michael Angarano) whose car she commandeers. Her tale is told in a series of flashbacks that feature chases on foot, excruciating brawls, and rooftop scrambles. All of this concludes with a car chase in the woods that's both novel and harrowing.

When Mallory has finished her story, the narrative shifts to the present, building toward a finale that's both pointed and a little confounding. I know that sounds impossible, but that's how it is.

Part of me wants to say that Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs have steeped the movie in needless complication and purposeless confusion. Sure, Haywire shows off Soderbergh's ability to handle action, but when set pieces become a movie's main attraction, you have to wonder why a little more care wasn't spent on storytelling.

"But wait," the Soderbergh fan in me says. Maybe there's another way to look at it. Maybe Soderbergh is offering a wry commentary on the way most Hollywood action movies are packaged and sold. Couldn't almost every action movie be called Haywire? Aren't they all wild collections of set pieces thrown around plots that make little sense? And was my colleague right? Maybe it's wrongheaded of me to want to know what motivates any of these characters.

Oh well, Whatever Soderbergh had in mind, he's found the right woman for the job. Put another way, you come away from the movie believing that Carano easily could kick Jolie's butt -- and maybe even take on her share of punks with names like Bruce, Arnold and Sylvester.

Besides, there's one thing I know for sure: McGregor has the worst hair cut I've seen in a movie in a long time, especially for someone who's not playing a death-row prisoner who's about to be fried.

A surprisingly safe "Dangerous" movie

It features lots of interesting period-piece trappings, but David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method is an unsatisfying piece of work.

In David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method – an adaptation of a Christopher Hampton play called The Talking Cure – Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung, Viggo Mortensen portrays Sigmund Freud and Keira Knightley takes on the role of Sabina Spielrein.

Jung and Freud presumably need no introduction; Spielrein on the other hand, may not be familiar to most audiences. She was a patient of Jung’s who went on to become an analyst of some repute and who also was one of Jung’s mistresses – at least according to Cronenberg’s talky period piece.

Try as I might, I seldom got past the sense that all three actors were playing characters rather than deeply inhabiting them, an impression that’s reinforced by the fact that Jung, Freud and Spielrein eventually become advocates for different – if overlapping – views of human behavior.

The screenplay, which was written by Hampton and based on a book by John Kerr, revolves around an interesting conflict, although the movie tends to make its clash of ideas seem less than urgent. I’ll risk a bit of reductionism to put it this way: Freud insisted that sex was at the core of human behavior. Jung believed there was more to humanity than sex; he affirmed what he saw as humanity’s inherently religious impulses.

A Dangerous Method might be the least Cronenberg-like of recent Cronenberg movies, a stylistically straightforward piece that sprinkles conversations (some vaguely interesting) over a variety of Swiss and Austrian locations, many shot by cinematographer Peter Suschitzky with tasteful rigor.

The movie’s sense of caution comes as a bit of a surprise because sex (and its importance) lies at the heart of the drama, as well as at the core of a growing conflict between Jung and Freud, who – for a time – thought Jung would inherit his mantle as head of the psychoanalytic movement.

Cronenberg fans needn't totally dismay; the movie is not without a bit of kinky behavior. As it turns out, Knightley’s Spielrein achieves her greatest sexual kicks by being spanked, a pleasure Jung obligingly provides, although he seems determined to show that he’s not having a good time doing it.

Jung seems to be torn between a conformist commitment to his marriage (perhaps made easier by the fact that his wife was wealthy) and the unleashing of his more libidinous drives.

Although I had difficulty totally buying either Fassbender or Mortensen, neither has the annoying impact of Knightley, who enters the picture screaming as she’s being carried into Jung’s hospital in Zurich. In portraying Spielrein’s hysteria, Knightley juts out her jaw and contorts her facial muscles as if her body is being jolted by high-voltage shocks.

I don’t know if this is a “realistic’’ portrayal of severe hysteria, but I do know that in movie acting suggestion sometimes can be more powerful than demonstrative assertion. Put another way, Knightley’s performance may drive you a little crazy.

The story is not without political overlay: An increasingly concerned Freud fears that Jung’s interest in such matters as mysticism will undermine the scientific aura that's essential to the acceptance and growth of psychoanalysis.

These arguments too often make it seem as if the movie exists to articulate various points of view rather than to deeply probe the nature of its characters. At one point, though, Vincent Cassel shows up as Otto Gross, a brilliant psychoanalyst who believes all repression represents an unhealthy limitation of freedom. Cassel's welcome presence pushes the movie away from the neatly intellectualized debate between Freud and Jung.

Of the movie’s trio of principals, Mortensen probably provides the most interesting interpretation. His Freud has a deep and cagey sense of self-assurance – at least as it applies to the psychoanalytic domain over which he presides. A Dangerous Method, however, really has more to do with Jung than with Freud, who is absent from long stretches of the movie.

Maybe that’s why Mortensen’s performance wasn‘t enough to make me buy into A Dangerous Method, a movie that seems to unfold on a distant planet where talk about sex and dreams tends to become absurdly dispassionate. In the introduction to his book, Kerr talks about the ways in which Freud and Jung became the first thinkers to live with “that peculiarly intense burden of self-reflection that distinguishes the psychology of modern man.”

Maybe, but intense self-reflection isn’t necessarily the best place to begin a drama, and neither Cronenberg nor Hampton has been able entirely to liberate the material from the confines of the stage – other than by ensuring that the film’s conversations take place against a variety of elegant European backdrops.

In a time when the talking cure seems to have been supplanted by the dispensation of pills, the issues in A Dangerous Method don’t readily spring to life. They seem to swirl inside the embryonic and insular world of psychoanalysis, which – at least in this outing – provides no satisfying dramatic conclusion.

Into the heart of a soul-destroying obsession

Shame, which has been rated NC-17, explores the depths of one man's sex addiction.

After two exceptionally grueling movies – Hunger and now Shame – it seems fair to wonder whether British director Steve McQueen isn’t trying to test the soul of actor Michael Fassbender.

In Hunger, McQueen cast Fassbender as Bobby Sands, the IRA rebel who in 1981 led a prison hunger strike that resulted in his death. The role, which seemed to blur the line between performance and ordeal, was nothing if not demanding.

In Shame, McQueen puts Fassbender through another wringer. Fassbender plays Brandon, a New York sex addict, whose behavior involves him in a soul-crushing ordeal.

OK, so McQueen isn’t really trying to destroy Fassbender, but he sure knows how to set an arduous physical and emotional pace -- and his actor responds in kind. Shame is a journey to the very bottom of Brandon’s parched soul, and Fassbender holds nothing in reserve.

Shame, which features nudity and explicit sex scenes, has been rated NC-17. But it’s not the nudity or the graphic sex (none of it erotic) that turns the movie into a brutalizing viewing experience; it’s the emotional violence to which Brandon subjects himself and others, as well as the maddening persistence of his compulsions.

This is a guy for whom the office men’s room is a place to masturbate, a man so seized by his sexual urges that he follows women off subway cars, hires hookers and can’t stop watching porn on the Internet.

Brandon is handsome, but also has a kind of ghastly pallor, as if he’s only half alive. When he’s not in the throes of his addiction, he works at keeping his distance from others. When Brandon’s sister (Carey Mulligan) tries to move in with him, his protected world faces a major disruption. Mulligan’s Sissy is a singer whose personal life is in disarray.

At one point, Brandon and his boss visit a nightclub to hear Mulligan’s Sissy sing. She does an agonizingly drawn out version of New York, New York that moves Brandon to tears. It’s not a place he likes to be.

Later, Brandon finds himself attracted to a woman in his office (Nicole Beharie). He takes her to dinner. He loosens up a bit. But when it comes to making love to this woman, he can’t perform. For Brandon, relationships are the enemy of desire. He prefers anonymous sex.

McQueen’s directing style involves holding shots for an exceptionally long time, sometimes photographing conversations from a distance, and using wide-screen spacing to create tension between characters.

Now, you can’t watch a movie such as Shame without taking a walk on the seamy side. If you’re interested in seeing an actor plumb the depths of a powerful addiction, Shame will take you on one of the year’s most disturbing rides.

Whether you emerge from the experience having learned something from Brandon’s torments is another matter. Shame is powerful, but not necessarily profound. It tends to be obvious when it comes to Brandon’s addictive personality and not especially interested in how he might have gotten that way.

Oh well. Shame shows the prolonged agony of being chained to a compulsion. Its unremitting intensity and startling frankness make it stand apart, even if those same qualities do not carry it to greatness.

Cheers for a new edition of 'X-Men'

This prequel offers a good deal of fun.

It trivializes history, beckons to our inner mutant, and, oh yeah, offers a fair measure of summer fun. We're talking X-Men: First Class, a prequel that shows how the series' mutants split into opposing groups -- those with a "can't-we-all-get-along" credo and those who mistrust humankind, and, therefore, seek to destroy it.

First Class mostly hits the spot with an origins story that explains how Magneto and Professor Charles Xavier came to occupy their respective positions in a Marvel Comics universe occupied by mutants who are leaving humans in the dust as they move up on the evolutionary scale.

Magneto, you'll recall from previous X-Men movies, is the evil mutant; Professor Xavier helps train mutants to aid humankind.

In the hands of British director Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass), X-Men: First Class advances the franchise by moving backward in time, specifically to the Cuban missile crisis which pitted the U.S. against a mighty Soviet foe, a looming nuclear showdown that feels almost quaint by today's standards.

This foray into history yields a surprisingly entertaining prequel that survives a few brushes with effects that border on the cheesy.

Credit a strong cast led by Michael Fassbender, who plays Erik, the young Holocaust survivor who will grow up to be Magneto. Erik has difficulty balancing his desire for revenge -- a Nazi killed his mother -- and his willingness to help others.

Played with conviction and charisma by Fassbender, Erik eclipses a youthful Charles Xavier (James McAvoy). Charles, also a mutant, tries to persuade Erik to join him in a quest that not only will help settle Erik's Auschwitz score, but also will benefit the rest of humanity.

The preternaturally good-natured Charles has grown up in the company of Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), a red-haired, blue-skinned mutant who can change appearances, often morphing into a lovely young blonde who wants to fit into human society.

In pivotal early action, we meet a Nazi doctor (Kevin Bacon) who's trying to force young Erik to use his psychic powers to advance evil causes. As it turns out, this Nazi doctor is Sebastian Shaw, a mutant who wants to rule the world and who re-emerges in the 1960s with a beautiful but chilly assistant, January Jones' Emma Frost.

Once the movie arrives in the 1960s, The X-Men crew gathers and begins its training, first under the guidance of a CIA official (Oliver Platt) and then on its own. Rose Byrne, last seen in "Bridesmaids," portrays a more sympathetic CIA operative.

This time around, the mutant crew includes Hank (Nicholas Hoult), Alex (Lucas Till), Sean, (Caleb Landry), Armando (Edi Gathegi) and Angel (Zoe Kravitz). Before the movie's finished, all the mutants will acquire comic-book names related to their powers: Beast, Havoc, Banshee and Darwin, for example.

The climax involves a ferocious battle of wills between mutants who are forced to take sides. Forgive me for thinking that Erik's arguments for the dark side can be more persuasive than the opposition's plea for understanding, a conclusion that may have more to do with the power of Fassbender's performance than with the strength of Magneto's powers of reason.

You get the idea: This is an enjoyable comic-book view of history as a bubbling cauldron of oppositional forces locked in a tug of war that never can be fully resolved -- at least not without jeopardizing a franchise.