A mother who cares for someone else’s kid

  Billed as a horror movie, Nanny takes us into a world where social and psychological issues collide. As can happen with revealing movies, director Nikyatu Jusu embodies her themes in a single character, a nanny played by Anna Diop. 

  A Senegalese immigrant, Diop’s Aisha lands a job working as a nanny for a well-heeled Manhattan couple, a wife (Michelle Monaghan) who's struggling with a demanding job and a photo-journalist husband (Morgan Spector) with a wandering eye.

   Jusu doesn't have to underline the movie's central irony: Aisha cares for someone else’s child so that she can earn enough money to bring her young son to the US from Senegal. 

   Jusu also doesn’t overplay the movie’s racial dynamics, but they can't be ignored.  The only person who relates fully to Aisha is the girl (Rose Decker) she cares for. Aisha pays attention to Rose. She sees her as more than a source of logistical problems for her parents.

   The movie’s horror tilt appears when Aisha begins having hallucinations that reflect the already heightened anxiety she feels for the son who has been left in the care of a Senegalese cousin. 

   Visions aside, life progresses as Aisha develops a warm relationship with Malik (Sinqua Walls), the doorman in the building where she works. 

   Well-schooled in West African lore, Malik’s grandmother (Leslie Uggams) sees terrible forebodings in Aisah’s hallucinations.

    Jusu includes one shocking scene in which Aisha is almost overcome by her “visions,” but the movie isn’t particularly scary and, in truth, I could have done without the supernatural suggestions.

    That doesn't mean that Diop and Jusu haven't combined for a movie that brings us close to a part of life that too often is ignored. In New York, it’s possible to see African women sitting on benches in playgrounds, chatting while keeping a watchful eye on their scampering charges. 

   Jusu challenges us not to be passersby but to take a closer look. 

Heroism on a bad day in Boston

Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg reunite for a look at the Boston Marathon bombing.

Patriots Day reunites director Peter Berg with actor Mark Wahlberg for a look at the horrible April day during which the 2013 Boston Marathon was disrupted by terrorist bombings.

Berg, who directed Wahlberg in Lone Survivor and Deepwater Horizon, approaches the story from two mostly compatible directions: On one hand, he's writing an ode to the city of Boston. He's celebrating the strength and good will of the city's ordinary residents. He supplements that ode to Boston with a police procedural about the frantic search to find the two bombers, who fled the scene of their foul handiwork.

Tense and well-edited, Patriots Day focuses mainly on a slightly disaffected Boston sergeant (Wahlberg) who, at the picture's opening, receives a kind of punishment assignment: He must serve in uniform at the finish line of the marathon, a job he regards as the equivalent of penance. He refers to his uniform -- not usually part of his detective's garb -- as a "clown suit."

Naturally, Wahlberg's Tommy Saunders gets more than he bargained for when a couple of bombs, planted in pressure cookers, turn a day of celebration into a day of bloodshed and grief.

In this case, Wahlberg portrays a character whose personal struggles really don't amount to much; Tommy grumbles about drawing uniformed duty, but he's basically a good-natured policeman who loves his city and his wife (Michelle Monaghan). Wahlberg certainly knows this character, and inhabits him with ease.

We also meet a variety of other characters. Kevin Bacon plays the FBI agent heading the hunt for the bombers from a Boston warehouse; John Goodman portrays the city's police commissioner.

We also meet a young couple (Rachel Brosnahan and Christopher O'Shea) who become victims of the bombers, as does an MIT security guard (Jake Picking) and a young Chinese app designer (Jimmy O. Yang), whose car is hijacked by the bombers while they're on the run.

Khandi Alexander has a brief, but entirely compelling, scene as the woman who interrogates the wife of one of the bombers (Melissa Benoist). Why Alexander doesn't find work in more movies remains a mystery to me. She's terrific here.

Meanwhile, J.K. Simmons suffers from no such shortage of exposure; here, he portrays a Watertown police sergeant who winds up with one of the bombers hiding in a boat in a Watertown driveway.

Themo Melikidze and Alex Wolff portray the two brothers who carried out this monstrous act, setting off a tidal wave of heartbreak in what should have been a day of pure excitement.

Berg focuses on the chaos and impromptu heroism that arose along with the professionalism that it took to keep the situation under control.

If you're looking for nuance, it's probably best to look elsewhere. Patriots Day offers straightforward storytelling with an emphasis on down-to-earth patriotism.

But the real point here, I think, is to salute the working people of Boston as the heart and soul of a badly wounded city. Put another way, you might summarize the whole of Patriots Day by noting that Berg seems to be bringing us one simple message: "This is what we mean by Boston Strong."

A gripping, if muddled, 'Source Code'

Director Duncan Jones' second feature is vivid and entertaining.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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