Another creepy helping of horror

   The ever-expanding catalog of horror movies sometimes makes me wonder what the hell’s wrong with us —- or more precisely why we desire to be grossed out, fearful, and knocked about by jump scares. If nothing else, horror movies present us with dangers from which we happily walk away. After all, it’s not our entrails that are spilling onto the bathroom tiles.

   Bring Her Back, a dose of horror from the Australian twins, Danny and Michael Philippou, asks us to set aside any reservations we might have about putting children in danger of losing their lives at the hands of a crazed adult.

   Sally Hawkins plays a retired social worker who takes foster care children into her secluded Australian home.

Aided by Cornel Wilczek's throbbing score, the directors treat early scenes as manifestos of intent. We know horrible things will happen when two recently orphaned children (Billy Barrett and Sora Wong) are placed with Hawkins’s Laura.

  No one will be fooled into thinking that Laura’s welcoming facade doesn’t conceal rich veins of depravity. 

Barrett’s Andy, who will soon turn 18, plans to petition for guardianship of his sister ASP. 

  He believes that he and his sister have arrived at a way station en route to a better future. Younger of the two, Wong’s Piper falls under Laura' s sway. Why not? She’s too young to think she can survive with adult help.

   Grief permeates the proceedings. An inconsolable Laura lost her blind daughter when the child drowned in the now-empty swimming pool behind Laura’s home. That’s where we meet Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), a gaunt-looking boy who doesn’t speak and whose creepy presence suggests demonic possession. 

  Oliver, who functions as a kind of unnerving special effect,  serves to push the movie over the top when, at a three-quarter mark, he bites his way through various objects that shouldn't be chewed on (a kitchen counter, for example) or chomps on a knife that he’s put in his mouth. Bloody.

   Video segments of a weird ritual add an arty touch and build toward a reveal that attempts to explain their jarring presence.

   Attempts at providing psychological depth involve  tensions between Andy and his late father and a mother's twisted denial of mortality. Laura is driven by a crazy idea about how she can bring her late daughter back to life.

   For its skillful atmospherics and amped up weirdness, Bring her Back seems to unfold without generating either fear or intense emotional involvement. Despite an all-in performance from Hawkins, Bring Her Back struck me as a moody muddle.

Surprise! 'Wonka' exceeds expectations

   

  I can’t say I approached Wonka with enthusiasm.I had no pressing desire to hear Timothee Chalamet sing in a musical, and revisiting Roald Dahl-inspired material had no special appeal for me, either.

  Imagine my surprise when it turned out that Wonka   exceeded my expectations, serving up an entertainment I didn't mind sampling.

  Director Paul King bolsters his movie with a strong supporting cast. (More about that later.) King also  refuses to wink at the audience as a way of demonstrating superiority to the material at hand.

  Look, if you’re going to make a movie such as Wonka, you better go all in -- particularly in a version that strips away some of Dahl's wickedness.

  Chalamet approaches the role of Willy with a cheerleader’s gusto, never embarrassing himself by singing in a role played by Gene Wilder 1971. Jim Carrey offered his version of Wonka in 1995, followed by Johnny Depp, who starred in director Tim Burton’s 2005 version.

  Chalamet keeps the movie on track with help from an old-pro cast that includes Hugh Grant as the eight-inch tall Oompa-Loompa, Sally Hawkins as Willy's mother, and Olivia Colman as the devious Mrs. Scrubbit. 

   It’s a relief to see Colman in a role that doesn’t  demand that she turn herself inside out. She has fun, even if she’s playing a warmed-over version of a character Dickens might have written, an ogre of a woman who uses faux kindness to lure and exploit the vulnerable. 

  The story begins when Willy arrives by ship to start a chocolate business in a city in which chocolate seems to serve as one of its currencies.  Willy quickly goes broke and falls under the sway of Mrs. Scrubbit and her gap-toothed henchman (Tom Davis). 

  Promising food and lodging, Mrs. Scrubitt connives to force Willy to spend 15 years working in her laundry, her way of making him pay off a ludicrously inflated debt. 

   In the laundry, Willy meets Abacus Crunch (Jim Carter), another of Scrubbit's indentured servants and, most importantly, Noodle (Calah Lane), a girl who'll help Wonka achieve his chocolate dream.

   King's origin story also pits Wonka against the town's chocolate cartel led by Slugworth (Joseph Paterson). A happily corrupt police chief (Keegan-Michael Key) helps to upend Wonka's goal: to make the world's best chocolate.

   Early on, we learn that Wonka’s chocolate has exceptional kick; in some versions, it even makes people levitate, floating into the air like helium-filled balloons in a holiday parade. 

   I don't know if you'll be humming any of the songs on the way out of the theater, but this unashamedly corny Wonka surpassed my hopes. I ask for no more.

   King (who directed the Paddington movies) has made an old-fashioned entertainment that, at least for me, warded off bad vibes and didn't give me tooth decay. Consistent with a fanciful approach, the subject never arises, despite Wonka's copious flow of candy.

   An addendum: Sporting a green wig and orange skin, Grant scores as the tiny Oompa Loompa. Grant turns himself into a kind of special effect. Say what you will,  it’s better than another romcom.

Sally Hawkins dominates 'Lost King'

      Director Stephen Frears has made groundbreaking movies (My Beautiful Launderette) and movies that haven’t matched his best work (Victoria & Abdul). Now comes The Lost King, a movie based on a screenplay be Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope. 

      Lost King may not be a landmark work for Frears, who's now 81, but a memorable performance by Sally Hawkins keeps the movie on track.

     The Lost King tells the story of Philippa Langley, the woman who instigated the real-life effort to discover the remains of King Richard III. If you recall the news stories from 2012, Richard’s bones were discovered in the parking lot of a social services office in Leicester. The less-than-majestic setting turned the discovery into irresistible headlines fodder.

      But the movie is more about Philippa than the king Shakespeare vilified. At the outset, a downtrodden Philippa is passed over for a promotion at work. A bit harried by her two young sons, she's   separated from her husband (Coogan). A new love interest hasn't kept him from remaining part of Philippa's life.

     Hawkins mixes insecurity and assertion as Philippa embraces a quest that few others take seriously, including representatives of the academic establishment she eventually encounters.

     The screenplay tells us Philippa’s interest was sparked by a production of Richard III. She was taken with the performance of the actor (Harry Lloyd) who played Shakespeare’s fabled hunchback.

    As the movie develops, Philippa begins seeing Lloyd as Richard everywhere she goes. I’m not sure we needed visual assistance to understand Philippa’s obsession. Hawkins makes Philippa’s undaunted commitment clear enough -- sans hallucinations.

    Before launching her project, Philippa joins a branch of the Richard III Society,  a group that harbors a contingent of Richard nerds, some of whom claim that Richard was neither a hunchback nor the ambitious murderer of Shakespeare’s play. He was, they insist, a rightful king, England's last Plantagenet monarch.

   Philippa's work picks up speed after she convinces an archaeologist (Mark Addy) to join her search, but her instincts prevail over his more measured approach. 

   Eventually, hypocritical institutions try to cash on Philippa's work but Frears sticks to the point: Sometimes, it takes an obsessive outlier to push a cause to its satisfying conclusion. Philippa did that for Richard; Hawkins does it for the movie.

He played some of the world's worst golf

 

If you look at the picture on the right, you might suspect that you're about to read about a movie set in the world of golf. You'd be half right. There's golf in The Phantom of the Open, a British movie comedy starring Mark Rylance, but most of the golf is bad enough to be laughable. Early on, we learn that Rylance's Maurice Flitcroft qualifies as a caring guy: He married his wife Jean (Sally Hawkins) even though she was pregnant with another man's child. That child (Jake Davies) grows up to become become Maurice's boss at a shipyard in the port town of Barrow-in-Furness.  Maurice and Jean have children together, twins played by Christian and Jonah Lees. The twins dream of becoming famous disco dances. Why not?  It's the '70s. Maurice, who's 46, has his own dream. He wants to compete in the British Open, even though he knows nothing about golf and has never played the game. Based on a true story, Phantom of the Open follows the exploits of Maurice who in 1976 actually made his way into the British Open, where he chalked up a miserably high score of 121, the worst in the tournament's history. Rhys Ifans signs on as the official who wants to boot Flitcroft from the sport.  The golf establishment is dutifully alarmed but the bumbling and unflappable Maurice assembles a fan base. Don't look for a life-changing experience, but Rylance and the rest of the cast keep director Craig Roberts' Phantom of the Open close to par.

Diana and deadening life among royals

 

   They eat the best foods but take no joy in dining. Surrounded by grandeur, they have become exemplars of stifling  insularity. A funereal solemnity embraces them, suggesting a form of social rigor mortis.

   These are the royals of director Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, a look at three days in the life of Princess Diana. Early on, the princess (Kristen Stewart) gets lost driving a small green sports car to Sandringham House, a mansion where the royal family plans to celebrate the Christmas holiday. With these royals, celebration plays more like commemoration.

   Larraín directed Jackie, a meditative 2016 movie about Jacqueline Kennedy. Larrain's fascination with the interior lives of iconic women pushes realism aside. Larrain introduces Spencer as “a fable from a true tragedy.”  

   No surprise, then, that Spencer becomes an increasingly  subjective chronicle of how Diana experiences the holiday with Stewart fully committing to the task of playing a woman desperate to reclaim her life.

   As Diana, Stewart talks in breathy gasps that, for me, evoked memories of Marlyn Monroe, another women locked in the gilded cage of expectation. Aside from her wardrobe and blonde  hair, little attempt has been made to make Stewart look like Diana, a move that wisely diverts attention from the external to the internal.  

   During three days at Sandringham, Diana is drawn to her old home, a now-deteriorating mansion not far from the royal estate. 

   The point, like many in Steven Knight's screenplay, becomes obvious: Diana longs to retrieve the self that she's supposed to  sacrifice on the altar of aristocratic duty.

   For Diana, everything is double-edged. Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) gives her a pearl necklace. The gift puts Diana in a suffocating chokehold that evokes comparisons to Anne Boleyn, the wife of Henry VIII who lost her head. Diana reads a book about Boleyn and even hallucinates conversations with Henry’s unfortunate second wife.

   The screenplay makes only one fleeting reference to Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s true love, but the point is clear. 

   We wonder whether Diana might have endured the burden of scripted confinement had Charles been an emotional partner rather than someone who, at least in this movie, pushes  his wife to accept a divided self. 

   Diana's supposed to project the royal image while realizing that her public posture never will fully accommodate her  buoyant personality. She must train her body to do things she hates.

   The rest of the characters reinforce the instructions Charles delivers to Diana as the couple stands on opposite sides of a large billiard table, another expression of Diana's terrible isolation.

   Timothy Spall portrays Major Alistar Gregory, whose sole duty involves protecting royals from prying eyes. His face molded into an impressive scowl, Spall talks softly but makes no attempt to conceal Gregory's authority.

  Jonny Greenwood, cinema's most original composer, creates an unsettling jazz soundtrack that drapes over the movie like a shroud and, at times, makes Spencer feel like an exercise in horror. 

   The score also underlines the impression that Spencer is driven, at least in part, by Larrain’s affinity for disharmonious notes. It also mirrors what's going on inside Diana's head.

  The approach is not without costs, the primary one being a sense of airlessness. From the opening, the message already seems clear: Life's being drained from this young woman. In a sense, nothing remains but for Larraín to tighten the vice grip of propriety around Diana's delicate neck.

  Because Spencer has a gloomy undertow,  an aura of unreality pervades the movie. In works such as Netflix’s enormously popular The Crown, royals don’t always seem like figures borrowed from a wax museum. Not here.

   Only Maggie (Sally Hawkins), Diana’s dresser, sees the princess as a human being and Charles sends her away, depriving Diana of even momentary possibilities for intimacy.

   Diana suffered from bulimia and Larraín uses her malady metaphorically, a dubious choice, I think. She can’t stomach the royal food that nourishes so much rigid conformity. When her liberating break-out arrives at the film’s end, she  takes her sons (Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry) for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Apparently, she’s willing to give up a seat at the royal table to consume the food of the people. 

   Larrain uses his considerable skills to create a change-resistant world in which, as someone puts it, there can be no past or future, only a ceremonial sameness. I guess that makes Spencer a sophisticated movie with a simple point: No one should be expected to endure the horrors of so much suffocating  isolation.

Godzilla stomps through a chaotic movie

A surfeit of creatures can't make King of the Monsters into something to care about..

Loud, chaotic and repetitive, Godzilla: King of the Monsters suffers from a script that puts three creatures into a monster traffic jam that jars any hope of coherent storytelling off its moorings.

The monsters, in no special order, are Mothra, Godan, and Godzilla. As it turns out, these titans (as they're referred to in the movie) offer the last hope for saving the Earth, which has been ravaged by humans. But before the monsters can launch their world-saving, environmentalist mission, another monster must be vanquished, a three-headed dragon called Ghidorah.

The humans in the movies take sides -- sort of. One side -- led by Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler), a father who sank into dereliction after the death of his son in the previous installment, wants to kill the monsters. The other side is led by Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), Mark's ex-wife. She wants to employ the monsters to save a world in which humans teeter on the edge of extinction.

To achieve her goal, Emma has thrown in with Jonah Alan (Charles Dance), a military man who has become an eco-terrorist; he's willing to pay a large price to save the world.

Madison Russell (Mille Bobby Brown), daughter of Mark and Emma, vacillates between the two approaches, as the movie bounces off one destructive set piece after another, none of them benefiting from anything resembling a well-staged buildup.

Other actors include Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Thomas Middleditch and David Straitharn, all of whom are swallowed -- not by monsters -- but by a screenplay that seems to have been eaten by the monsters, spit out as indigestible and then reassembled in ways that allow for dialogue that might have been fun had anyone bothered to deliver it with anything resembling a campy spirit.

As a result, Godzilla: King of the Monsters amounts to a collection of entirely forgettable performances.

The movie's big brain lodges in Farmiga's character: Dr. Russell is working on ORCA, a tacky looking electronic gizmo that can be used to communicate with the monsters by employing sonar or some such. If she's able to find the correct frequency she can calm the monsters, soothing their fire-breathing spirits.

The movie's high points all involve the mammoth creatures. The birth of Mothra, for example, reveals her glowing, elegant wings. Say what you will about Rodan, he knows how to make an entrance: He blasts out of a volcano.

Impressive in size, Godzilla doesn't have a particularly expressive countenance, and Ghidorah's three heads might productively have spent time talking to one another. Maybe they could have brought some much-needed coherence to a project that loads up on action involving battling monsters. These fights, splayed across ravished urban landscapes, aren't especially distinguished, but they're really all this Michael Dougherty-directed movie has to offer.

For some, that may be enough. Warner Brothers has more of these monster mashes on the way. Maybe next time, they'll add some things that this one seems to lack, human characters about whom we might actually care and action that raises the pulse instead of drubbing us into indifference. Look, they're fighting again. Sigh.

A fairy tale from Guillermo del Toro

The Shape of Water, a romantic fantasy about a cleaner and a "monster.''

Guillermo del Toro chases dreams, attempting (and often succeeding) in mixing horror and romanticism as he allows his ample imagination to invade reality. In his great 2006 movie, Pan's Labyrinth, del Toro produced a dark fantasy about Franco's Spain. Now in The Shape of Water, del Toro turns to American shores, for a fairy tale about the love between a mute woman (Sally Hawkins) and a creature who has been brought from the depths of the Amazon to the US by government officials who see him as a threat.

The second half of del Toro's conception -- the part involving an attempt by a government agent (Michael Shannon) to destroy the creature -- might be the weakest part of the movie, flirting with cliches about the way officialdom inevitably becomes the enemy of beauty and mystery.

But this creature is different. Called Amphibian Man in the credits (Doug Jones under a ton of make-up), the creature has the physique of a man but also has scales and the ability to be fierce when threatened. In the Amazon, natives thought Amphibian Man was a god. Rather than trying to trample his strangeness, they elevated it.

Perhaps never quite as poetic as its wonderful title, The Shape of Water nonetheless allows del Toro to give full vent to an imagination into which movies flow, cinematic tributaries that fuel his sense of invention. It's not coincidental that Hawkins' Elisa lives above a theater called the Orpheum where The Story of Ruth is playing or that her neighbor (a gay artist played by Richard Jenkins) obsessively watches old movies, preferring them to the news of the day.

Set in Baltimore during the 1960s, the movie alternates between two major locations: Elisa's apartment and her place of employment, a government installation where Amphibian man is being held prisoner.

Elisa and her co-worker (a down-to-earth Octavia Spencer) learn that the creature is being tormented by Shannon's character. An authoritarian jerk, Shannon's Strickland becomes the real monster, a self-justifying sadist disguised as a "normal" man. Shannon's Strickland lives in suburbia, indulges himself by buying a Cadillac and pounds away (literally) during sex with his mildly libidinous wife.

Michael Stuhlbarg makes an appearance as a scientist who wants to preserve the creature. He believes that it would be a crime to destroy Amphibian Man. Stuhlbarg's Bob has a double identity. It's not much of a spoiler to tell you that Bob is also a Russian spy and that the Russians have their eye on this creature. They, too, would like to harness its powers.

Hawkins excels in her performance as a silent woman who gradually reveals her strengths. From the beginning, del Toro establishes Elisa's affinity for water. For Elisa, water and sexuality are intimately connected. And, yes, Elisa not only has a romantic interest in the creature; she has sex with him. She explains to Spencer's curious Zelda how this union is possible in one of the movie's giggly joking moments.

Del Toro delivers on the promise of the title. There's a lot of water in The Shape of Water, arriving in the form of flooded rooms, downpours and the tank in which Amphibian Man languishes. Water is life and, as such, can't always be contained.

The movie's romanticism extends to its elements that in the 1960s might have been considered "subversive," a woman who can't speak, a gay man, and a black woman. It falls to these outsiders to appreciate Amphibian Man in all his scaly glory. It is only in union with Amphibian Man that Elisa finds her true identity. She's finally complete.

Those familiar with del Toro's work won't be surprised at the movie's visual mastery, greatly aided by the cinematography of Dan Lausten and the production design of Paul D. Austerberry; they help the movie live in a world all its own.

The Shape of Water doesn't quite reach the magical heights at which del Toro must have been aiming, but it stands as a work in which sweet and sour tones bump against one another with del Toro insisting that only in the full embrace of those we deem alien do we find our deepest humanity -- or maybe he's just telling a small story about a woman who deserves more than life has given her.

Either way, The Shape of Water brims with strange charm.

The troubled life of a math whiz

A Brilliant Young Mind tells an affecting story.

The superior intelligence of math prodigy Nathan Elis (Asa Butterfield) separates him from the rest of the society. As a kid who also suffers from a variety of autism, Nathan may be even more isolated than an ordinary genius -- if there is such a thing.

As handled by director Morgan Matthews -- who previously made a documentary about kids such as Nathan -- the fictionalized A Brilliant Young Mind eventually involves Nathan in the International Mathematical Olympiad, a world competition for brainy high school students.

As the story develops, young Nathan travels to Taiwan to train and to determine whether his brilliance at discerning patterns will win him one of six slots on the British team.

Prior to his trip to Taiwan, Nathan is coached by a troubled teacher (Rafe Spall). An epic underachiever and former Olympiad competitor, Spall's Martin Humphreys suffers from multiple sclerosis, a disease that has diminished his hopes for excelling either in professional or personal realms.

Nathan's story hinges on a terrible loss. Early on, his father (Martin McCann) dies in an automobile accident; Nathan's condition worsens, and his relationship with his mother (Sally Hawkins) is made more difficult by the fact that Nathan can't bear to be touched.

Hawkins' Julie appreciates Nathan's gift, but doesn't totally understand him. She encourages Nathan, but his inability to respond to her leaves her as isolated as her son.

Mom's also a bit tyrannized by Nathan's eccentricities. Among other things, Nathan insists that the shrimp balls in a carry-out dinner must add up to a prime number. The stability of his world depends on such things.

While training in Taiwan, Nathan meets a Chinese Olympian (Jo Yang) who takes a liking to him, and coaxes him out of his shell -- at least a little. Unlike Nathan, Jo's character believes there's more to life than numbers.

Butterfield (Hugo and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) doesn't short change Nathan's difficulties or inwardness, but suggests enough vulnerability to make us fearful that Nathan will be chewed up by a world that has little tolerance for his idiosyncratic compulsions.

Once on the Olympiad track, Nathan finds himself in an intensely competitive environment. The coach of the UK team (Eddie Marsan) demonstrates more interest in winning than in dealing with the personal issues of his charges. Marsan's character is no ogre, but he insists that his young charges be focused.

Flashback scenes between Nathan and his late father have a lovely, playful tenderness; they serve to make scenes between Nathan and his mother even more painful. She lacks the ease and humor with which Nathan's father approached his son.

Sensitive and willing to set formula aside at key moments, A Brilliant Young Mind tells a moving story about a shy genius who knows how smart he is -- and who also senses that his great "gift" may not be enough to make him happy.

Blanchett brilliant in 'Blue Jasmine'

First the simple good news: Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine finds the director in fine form.

Now, a work inspired by figures as disparate as Tennessee Williams and Bernie Madoff seems like an impossible, perhaps even ludicrous, concoction. But in borrowing elements from both reality and drama, Allen has given Blue Jasmine a voice all its own.

The movie also serves as a dazzling showcase for an actress who hardly needs one. Cate Blanchett is brilliant, funny and fiercely scattered as the wife of a fallen Wall Street wheeler-dealer named Hal (Alec Baldwin). Jasmine has hit bottom since her philandering husband was jailed for a massive fraud that prompted the government to seize everything the couple owned.

Mercurial, rueful and sophisticated -- at least when it comes to matters of style -- Blanchett's Jasmine draws on Blanche DuBois from Williams's famed A Streetcar Named Desire, a role she played in New York in 2009 to much acclaim.

Bereft of resources, Jasmine arrives in San Francisco to live with her sister (Sally Hawkins), a divorced woman whose former husband (Andrew Dice Clay) was one of Hal's victims. And, yes, Clay -- someone I had no desire ever to see again -- acquits himself well here. It's an interesting bit of casting.

Like Stella in Williams's play, Hawkins's Ginger is involved with a boisterous and sometimes crude mechanic (a fiery Bobby Cannavale). I'm not entirely sure Cannavale's Chili makes a great deal of sense, but the character doesn't detract, either. The same can be said for Michael Stuhlbarg who shows up as a dentist who hires Jasmine as a receptionist, and then tries to force her into a sexual relationship.

Happily, Allen hasn't attempted an updated replication of Williams's play; he uses Streetcar as a launching pad from which he can examine what happens when the nouveau riche suddenly become the nouveau poor.

Those who prefer Allen with laughs should know that he hasn't stripped the proceedings of humor, but -- at least for me -- there was considerably more pain than hilarity in Jasmine's precipitous decline.

In some ways, Blanchett is the movie. She fills Jasmine with a mixture of disdain and anxiety: This -- Allen seems to be saying -- is how we arrive at Blanche DuBois in 2013. Tossed off the Wall Street planation, Jasmine has been left for near-dead.

We see glimpses of the person Jasmine once was when she meets Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), a San Francisco businessman with political ambitions. Dwight understands that Jasmine is the kind of woman he proudly can drape over his arm. She knows how to behave herself around money, an asset for any politician's spouse. And, when she's on her game, she looks great.

Of course, Dwight eventually must discover how wrong he is about Jasmine. It's a bit of a stretch to think that the wife of a notorious Wall Street criminal wouldn't instantly be recognizable to someone like Dwight, but this lapse of plausibility also proves forgivable in light of Blanchett's bravura turn.

Baldwin's Hal, whose criminality fuels the story, is seen in flashbacks that put both his arrogance and indifference to conventional morality finds on display.

In what seems a digression as much as an enrichment, Louis C.K. shows up as an alternative suitor for Ginger, someone who gives the so-called "lesser" sister a chance to attain a new, more confident sense of her self. Don't expect a happily-ever-after.

By the time, Blue Jasmine concludes, Jasmine's personality has shattered. She's left talking to herself, one of those sad, anonymous people you see wandering the streets of some cities. It's a sobering moment, and it makes you wonder: Has Jasmine been talking to herself for her entire life? Has she ever been able to step outside the kind of delusions that make her so appalling, so human and so deeply tragic?

An alienated teen narrates his own story

Sometimes I wish I'd never heard of Holden Caufield, the teen hero of J.D. Salinger's seminal novel, The Catcher in the Rye. *** Had I never read Salinger or seen movies such as Rushmore, I might have thought more highly of director Richard Ayoade's Submarine, the story of 15-year-old Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), the Welsh narrator of a story about (what else?) himself. *** Ayoade tries for (and sometimes succeeds at) giving his movie visual flair, but his strenuous commitment to quirkiness wore me out. *** Oliver, who seems to be growing up in the 1970s, is baffled by his parents, a depressed biologist father (Noah Taylor) and a frustrated mother (Sally Hawkins) who flirts with an old beau, a proto-New Ager played by Paddy Considine). *** Oliver also becomes involved with Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige), a classmate with a taste for arson. *** The story leads Oliver to a defining test: Can he drop his cynical pose and be available when Jordana needs more than another deadpan playmate? *** Ayoade's visual acrobatics didn't totally freshen this teen-age story for me. I kept thinking that Oliver should get back to us in maybe 10 or 15 years. Maybe then I'd be interested. Or maybe not.

The advantages of being organized

A dual blast of conscience -- feminism and unionism -- in a feel-good movie from Britain.

Made in Dagenham is an easy movie to knock. Predictably designed to create feel-good vibes in its intended audience, the movie stands as a prime example of the kind of British cinema that wears its social conscience on its sleeve. * I hadn't thought of myself as belonging to the group that cherishes such movies, but I must admit that Made in Dagenham's pro-labor stance gave me a lift in these days of high unemployment and rampant corporate profit. * Director Nigel Cole (Calendar Girls) may not be the most nuanced of filmmakers, but he employs a strong cast and benefits from the easy union of dual causes: unionism and feminism. * Focusing on a 1966 strike at a Ford plant in Dagenham, England, the movie tells the story of women who demanded the same pay scale as the plant's male work force. * Sally Hawkins, familiar from Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, plays Rita O'Grady, the leader of the strike who must battle the male hierarchy of her union, as well as a recalcitrant Ford management.* Bob Hoskins portrays a union official who encourages the women, and Daniel Mays appears as Rita's mostly supportive husband. * Perhaps to show that feminist causes cross class lines, the script introduces us to Lisa (Rosamund Pike), the wife of a plant manager who sides with the workers. * Hawkins ably holds the movie together. Look, too, for a nice turn from Miranda Richardson as Barbara Castle, a government official who meets her match in Rita. * Yes, Rita has the entirely expected assortment of colorful co-workers, and, yes, the story isn't exactly loaded with surprises, but Made in Dagenham harkens back to a moment when we could derive good feelings from expressions of solidarity, as opposed to overwrought individual triumphs.