A movie that doesn't keep its promise

Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac star in The Promise , a would-be epic that touches on the Armenian genocide of 1915.

When the Ottoman Empire was falling apart in the early part of the 20th Century and the first shots of World War I were being fired, 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by the Turkish army. Unlike the industrialized genocide of Nazi Germany, the murder of Turkey's Armenian population took place in less systematic fashion. In part, the Ottoman mass murders were prompted by deep-rooted Ottoman suspicions that the Armenians represented a rebellious social element. An already teetering empire would be further imperiled. And, of course, the Armenians were Christians in a predominantly Muslim culture.

There were other reasons for Ottoman antipathy toward its Armenian citizens, but few of them -- beyond the bigotry of Turks -- are effectively dramatized in the historically sketchy new movie, The Promise.

Although the Armenian genocide makes its way into much of the movie, the filmmakers try (understandably, I suppose) to find a hook on which to hang a drama with mainstream aspirations.

In pursuit of said hook, they concoct a romantic triangle between an Armenian who aspires to become a doctor (Oscar Isaac), a sophisticated Armenian woman who has lived in Paris (Charlotte Le Bon) and an American journalist (Christian Bale) trying to chronicle the murderous assault on the empire's Armenians.

Working in a conventional style that favors handsome imagery, director Terry George (Hotel Rwanda) introduces audiences to a horrific chapter of history about which many know little. But George fails to fuse the movie's many elements into an emotionally shattering whole.

Tellingly, the movie's most moving element arrives during the end credits when we see photos of young Armenians who perished at the hands of Turks. A title card that enumerates the period's genocidal toll leaves us to contemplate the unthinkable in ways the movie too often fails to provide.

The story begins in a small village in southern Turkey, where Turks and Armenians live in harmony, according to Mikael Boghosian (Isaac), the village apothecary. Mikael aspires to be a doctor. To achieve his goal, he agrees to marry and use his fiancee's dowry to pay tuition in Constantinople, where he'll pursue his medical studies. Mikael vows to return to his bride-to-be (Angela Sarafyan) as soon as he completes his studies.

In cosmopolitan Constantinople, Mikael meets Le Bon's Anna. Immediately, he's smitten, thus putting his marriage promise in jeopardy. Anna, an Armenian who has lived abroad, already is involved with Chris Myers (Bale), a hard-hitting reporter who tends to lose his temper when confronted with Turkish prejudice and self-satisfaction. He becomes pretty involved in the stories he covers.

The romance forces George to bring the lovers together before driving them apart, a necessity that also prompts George to divide his attentions between Mikael's story -- forced labor to support the war effort and subsequent escape -- and Chris's attempts to document genocidal atrocities.

Mikael's perilous journey eventually returns him to his home village, where his mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo) insists that he fulfill his promise, marry his fiancee, hide in a cabin in the woods and "make babies." Chris's journalistic probing lands him in a Turkish prison.

Unfortunately, many developments in the movie are telegraphed or put to the service of the emotional agenda dictated by the love story and by what may have been a desire to tame a period of indigestible political chaos for the screen.

There's value in The Promise for those who know nothing about the fate of the Armenians, but a movie such as this should have left one devastated and inconsolable. Perhaps it could have had George been able to shed the kind of italicized filmmaking that, at one point, introduces actor James Cromwell (as Henry Morgenthau, US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire) to deliver an on-the-nose bit of dialogue in opposition to injustice.

Isaac's brooding, thoughtful demeanor is supposed to play against a bearded Bale's singular commitment to getting the story, but George and his co-screenwriter Robin Swicord haven't been able to satisfy two masters: the need to depict the horrors of genocide and the desire to tell a heartbreaking love story.

So we wind up with a movie that often misses its mark, and suffers all the more for it by having had the courage to tackle such an important subject.

The story of a stormy relationship

Cezanne et Moi tells the story of the friendship between Paul Cezanne and Emile Zola.

Sometimes expectation becomes the enemy of enjoyment. That partly explains why I found Cezanne et Moi, the story of the stormy friendship between artist Paul Cezanne and novelist Emile Zola disappointing.

But my initial enthusiasm about the prospect of seeing a movie about an artist whose studio and home I visited in Aix-en-Provence isn't the only reason that Cezanne et Moi proved a letdown.

The rub: The movie doesn't have enough to say about either Cezanne's art or Zola's writing.

Skipping back and forth in time, director Daniele Thompson depicts a relationship in which Zola gains fame and fortune and Cezanne suffers from a lack of recognition. Although their fates were different, neither man achieved much by way of contentment.

Cezanne comes across as a typical outsider, a painter who's contemptuous of the success of other artists. He can behave in ways that turn him into the sort of fellow people might cross the street to avoid.

Zola, on the other hand, acquires money, a home in Paris and social status. But in this telling, he also knows that his comfortable life is at odds with the social outlook expressed in his writing. He frets about being a hypocrite.

Cezanne and Zola were childhood friends in Aix-en-Provence, but as the two matured, their social positions reversed. Usually broke, Cezanne struggled to survive on a small allowance from his disapproving family. Zola, who didn't hail from a family with money, found material success.

Zola's novel, L'oeuvre became the occasion for a major split between the two men because it depicted details of Cezanne's life. Cezanne felt betrayed.

Guillaume Canet plays Zola as an emotionally steady fellow who loans Cezanne money and mostly endures the painter's insults. Guillaume Gallienne has the showier role as an artist of explosive temperament.

Women are less important to the story, but not inconsequential. Alice Pol portrays Zola's wife, Alexandrine, a woman with whom Cezanne once had an affair. Alexandrine was a seamstress and maybe a prostitute whose marriage to Zola moved her up the social ladder. Deborah Francois portrays Cezanne's mistress.

All of this would have been fine had Thompson done more to explore the work of either man. She particularly shortchanges Cezanne, offering too little by way of illumination about how he viewed his work.

Safe to say that Cezanne has eclipsed Zola in terms of reputation, so a modest suggestion: A trip to a museum where you can view Cezanne's art might prove more rewarding than this scattered, intermittently compelling drama.

Bloat hits the 'Furious' franchise

A ridiculous story, lots of action and decreasing amounts of fun.

What started in 2001 as an amped-up and gritty look at the street racing subculture has spawned a total of sevens sequels. Overall, the Fast and Furious movies have done a good job of satisfying action-hungry audiences while also taking on the job of turning an ethnically diverse cast into a popular rogue family.

That was then.

In its latest incarnation -- dubbed The Fate of the Furious -- the franchise finally falls prey to a 21st Century disease: overstated bloat. Not only that, the movie has lost much of its original flavor, resorting instead to a ludicrous story in which the Furious gang becomes a kind of Mission Impossible team that must thwart the ambitions of a super villain named Cipher (Charlize Theron). Cipher wants to go nuclear and take half the planet with her.

Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto faces what passes in such movies as a moral crisis, and the movie drags out familiar characters Jason Statham's Deckard, Dwayne Johnson's Hobbs and Kurt Russell's Mr. Nobody. A hodgepodge of a script mixes and matches characters as the ruthless Cipher coerces Dom into working against his old team.

The movie begins with Dom and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) honeymooning in Havana. With Latin beauties allowing their rumps to protrude from skimpy short shorts, a street race develops, really the last time the movie takes a serious bow toward its revved-up roots.

Director F. Gary Gray increasingly yields to the temptation of producing a clangorous noise-machine with lots of computer-generated effects, the most notable occurring when hundreds of cars tumble headlong out of a parking garage as the result of a major hacking that takes control of their computer systems.

By the end, the movie introduces a gargantuan submarine that threatens the car-crazed team. And, of course, many "hot" cars race by, although they all speed so quickly, it's difficult to admire them.

Some of the regulars get short shrift, particularly Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris, who banter with one another in limited but typical fashion. Nathalie Emmanuel portrays the group's tech genius.

A screenplay by Chris Morgan and Gary Scott Thompson includes the kind of macho lines that are supposed to be repeated outside of the theater but most of them prove ham-handed. At one point, Diesel's Dom says that the mad genius Cipher should be wary about taking her foot off the tiger's neck; i.e., him. I suppose that's the movie's idea of sage advice.

Of course, gunplay and explosions are followed by more gunplay and more explosions.

Best thing about the movie: Helen Mirren's cameo appearance.

Second best thing: Statham bringing a bit of winking humor to his role as an assassin.

Third best thing: There is no third best thing.

OK, I'm speaking only for myself here. It should be noted that this installment surely will rock the box office, that two more movies are slated and that, by now, audiences have learned to accept the preposterous and even to love it.

Once a bona fide movie, the real fate of the series is to have become a highly calculated mix of muscle, mayhem, faux menace and canned sentiment. For me, there's more noise than fun in this edition.

Youth in Warsaw: bored and a bit boring

The Polish movie, All These Sleepless Nights, makes its point about the hollow lives of Warsaw 20somethings early and then makes it again and again -- and yet again. This dreamy drift of a movie involves real people playing themselves, but doesn't qualify as a documentary. The movie mostly shows scenes from the lives of two friends (Krzysztof Baginski) and Michal (Michal Huszcza). The movie covers a year of nocturnal wandering through the city, as Krzysztof and Michal party and smoke cigarettes. One night seems to fade into another: The movie's only plot development occurs when Krzysztof begins a relationship with Eva (Eva Lebuef), a woman who used to be Michal's girlfriend. Tension develops between the two men, who begin as roommates but drift apart. Krzysztof's off-screen narration makes attempts at philosophical musing, but the movie's greatest achievement may be an inadvertent one. This generation is too young to remember either World War II or even the great liberation from Soviet oppression in 1989. The young people we meet spend no time talking about politics nor do they seem interested in establishing meaningful careers. Krzysztof senses that his life is empty and perhaps even realizes that finding a healthy relationship isn't necessarily going to fill the void. Director Michal Marczak never hurries through any of this. Clearly, those living lives of booze, drugs and hanging out won't be able to sustain it forever. But what comes next? The movie -- and we -- can't be sure. It's this kind of context that gives the movie whatever meaning it manages to convey. Otherwise, All These Sleepless Nights proves a rather unrelenting test of audience endurance.

Weird horror, but what's the point?

Let me confess it at the outset: I'm getting awfully tired of low-budget horror, and The Void did little to change my mind. Writer/directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski serve up a gore-soaked story about one horrible night in a rural Canadian hospital. The movie's directing duo tells the story of a feckless cop (Aaron Poole) who finds a battered young man (Evan Stern) in the woods. Poole's Daniel takes the wounded fellow to the ill-equipped local hospital, where the staff doctor (Kenneth Walsh) tends to him. Daniel also interacts with a nurse (Kathleen Munroe) who happens to be his estranged wife. Their marriage teetered after the death of a child. There's also a dopey trainee (Ellen Wong) and a couple of threatening outsiders (Daniel Fathers and Mik Byskov) who, at least initially, terrorize everyone. Meanwhile, a group of mysterious men in white robes begin circling the hospital. The movie is poised to punch a tension-filled ticket, but veers off into a heap of dimly explained gobbledegook about mad attempts to outwit death. Horror aficionados may enjoy the movie's style. In the end, though, a nuthouse approach to its story undermines The Void's eerie efforts.

She's gifted. Is that good?

Chris Evans stars in a story that asks: What's the best way to raise a math genius?

Is it better for a child to be supremely gifted or ultra-normal? Let's define some terms. In the case of the new movie Gifted, a genius child is one who can hang with mathematicians twice or even three times her age, figure out brain-busting equations and become a splendid freak of nature, a prodigy who deserves to be separated from her rude and scoffing peers. Normal? Well, those kids play with other children, don't consider themselves part of brainiac aristocracy and generally fit into their surroundings.

If those sound like extremes, you're right. And that's part of the trouble with Gifted, which concocts many scenes designed to advance one side or the other. Nuance? Not really.

Frank (Captain America's Chris Evans) takes care of his seven-year-old niece Mary (Mckenna Grace). Mary's a math genius, but Frank -- who lives in Florida and who scratches out a meager living repairing boat motors -- doesn't want his niece to become an isolated outsider, a girl segregated from other kids by her astronomical IQ.

Mary lives with Frank because her mother (also a math genius) committed suicide. Before her death, Frank's sister suggested that Frank raise Mary. Mary's late mom grew up under the harsh tutelage of a mother (Lindsay Duncan) who focused on math prizes to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

Against the advice of his neighbor (a wasted Octavia Spencer), Frank sends Mary to public school. Her teacher (Jenny Slate) quickly recognizes Mary's capabilities and suggests -- along with the school's principal -- that Mary enroll in a school for gifted kids. A full scholarship will be arranged, but Frank resists.

To add to the movie's inflated poignancy, Mary has a one-eyed cat for a pet, another of the film's outcasts.

Before the movie ends, Duncan's Evelyn sues her son for custody of Mary. The drama takes us through foster homes, courtroom scenes, separations that are supposed to be heartbreaking, and the near-death of the one-eyed cat.

The movie ignores many potentially rich dramatic pathways, the most notable being its refusal to explore why Frank quit his job as a Boston philosophy professor to become a blue-collar dropout in Florida. If Frank really wanted to become Mary's guardian, he might have kept his job and his health insurance. He would have avoided looking irresponsible and bereft.

But Gifted isn't complex or subtle enough to explore such contradictions: They simply become part of a backstory that's more suggested than probed.

Shorn of his Captain America persona, Evans seems only a little less bland; Duncan does her best to convey the arch elitism if an IQ snob and young Grace proves cute and engaging.

The movie's basic conflicts are interesting enough, but director Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider Man and (500) Days of Summer) doesn't plumb enough depths: Instead, he throws lots of tasty ingredients into his stew and overcooks them until they soften and (alas) turn to mush.

A comedy that doesn't age well

Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin are all wonderful actors, but they're not miracle workers. They can't save Going in Style.

Three aging friends who are trying to scrape by on Social Security organize a bank robbery. That was the premise of a 1979 movie called Going in Style, which starred George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg. Writing about that movie in the Chicago Reader, critic Dave Kehr said the movie, which was directed by Martin Brest, "imposes a quiet, attentive style on the story, saving it from cuteness and emotional facility. There are laughs, but the prevalent tone is one of discreet compassion, without condescension or sanctimony."

Leap ahead to 2017, and you'll find another movie entitled Going in Style, which has the same basic premise, but which stars Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin. Sadly, Kehr's quote isn't applicable to this new comedy, which has little to say about aging and hardly draws blood with its stab at social relevance. Our aging and embittered protagonists consider robbing a bank because the company for which they worked for many years has dissolved their pensions.

It shouldn't need saying, but I'll say it anyway. Freeman, Caine, and Arkin are all worthy of much admiration, and they do their best to keep this leaky ship afloat. They're all watchable, but the material with which they're working proves neither funny nor poignant.

Caine portrays Joe, a retired factory worker who lives with his daughter and granddaughter in Brooklyn. After falling behind on house payments, Joe's on the verge of losing his home. Freeman's Willie and Arkin's Albert are roommates who share an apartment across the street from Joe's house. They, too, worked at the factory and will fall into dire straits when their pension checks stop.

To further complicate matters, Willie needs a kidney transplant because dialysis no longer is doing the job for him.

Director Zach Braff, working from a script by Theodore Melfi, who re-worked the Edward Cannon story on which the 1979 movie was based, takes us through a variety of stock situations, including a ludicrous (but not funny) warm-up robbery in which the three men enter a local convenience store to try their hands at shoplifting.

Recognizing their incompetence at larceny, Caine's Joe consults with his former son-in-law as he searches for a consultant to help plan a bank robbery. The trio commits to stealing only enough to cover their pensions. Any additional monies will be given to charity.

Enter Jesus (John Ortiz), a pet-store owner who instructs the would-be felons in the intricacies of bank robbery, which he regards as an art.

Additional support comes from Anne-Margret, as an older woman who's interested in Arkin's character, from Matt Dillon as an FBI agent, and from Christopher Lloyd in the thankless role of a demented senior who belongs to the same neighborhood club as the movie's three main characters. If nothing else, Lloyd demonstrates what you might expect, senility is no laughing matter.

Braff, still best known for his work on TV's Scrubs, has directed before (Wish I Was Here and Garden State), but his touch here is far from deft.

Because the movie's stars all qualify as treasures of the cinema, the best approach to Going in Style might be simply to sigh with disappointment and move on.

Capturing the rhythms of real life

Director Hirokazu Koreeda tells a story about a man who has lost his way -- and many not want a map.

Hollywood-style, delusional escapism remains foreign to Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda. Koreeda (Our Little Sister and Like Father, Like Son) doesn't make movies that bang home plot points with sledgehammer force.

Instead of reaching out and dragging us into his films, Koreeda allows us enough space to approach situations that resist melodramatic overstatement. Slowly and deftly, he entangles us in the lives of his characters.

In his new film, After the Storm, Koreeda focuses on Ryota Shinoda (Hiroshi Abe), a man who's approaching middle age with only one achievement under his belt: He wrote a prize-winning first novel. Since then Ryota has accomplished virtually nothing. He works for a low-grade detective agency, gambles away whatever money he earns, and generally fails to meet any of the responsibilities that a husband and father should meet, which is why his marriage fell apart.

Ryota may be another the many movie men who refuse to grow up, but as the long-faced Abe plays him, he's hardly despicable. Although he treats child support payments with indifference and isn't above asking his appropriately judgmental sister (Satomi Kobayashi) for money, he clearly loves his son Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa).

Ryota also frets about his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, a guy who buys Shingo the baseball glove that Ryota had promised to deliver. Ryota knows he's a man who can't be relied on to keep a promise, but still resents the role another man might play in his son's life.

If the plot has a prime mover, the role falls to Ryota's mother (Kirin Kiki). She understands that her son is very much like his late father, a man who made frequent visits to the local pawn shop to support his gambling habits. Mom lives in a suburban apartment complex. She wonders when her son will buy her a better apartment. Her face and manner tell us that she knows that's wishful thinking.

Like many older people, Kiki's character seems resigned to her fate, but not without showing traces of humor and spunk.

The storm of the title arrives in the form of a typhoon that strands Ryota, his former wife and his young son at his mother's apartment. As she contemplates her own demise, Ryota's aging mother hopes that she can help reconstitute the family her son shattered, but Mom is no dope. She knows she's working against very long odds.

It's possible to conjecture that the storm of the title is not the typhoon that slams into this coastal suburb, but the series of events that broke Ryota's family apart in the first place.

Koreeda -- who works with an unfussy camera -- takes us through a transitional period in Ryota's life, although it's not clear that he'll ever defeat the psychological demons that keep him from fulfilling his promise.

If you're after cinematic flamboyance, Koreeda probably isn't your kind of director. But if you have a taste for a movie that tries to show us the consternation of characters whose lives haven't worked out as anticipated, you may well find yourself warming to a movie that looks at lives that are not very far from our own -- unless, of course, you're one of those rare souls who's living precisely the life you imagined for yourself when once you were young.

Kidman of Arabia (really)

Werner Herzog directs Nicole Kidman in Queen of the Desert, a sparkless historical epic.

Werner Herzog isn't David Lean, and Nicole Kidman is no Peter O'Toole. I don't mean that as a slam on either Herzog or Kidman, the talented director and fine actress who have teamed for Queen of the Desert, an historical epic about Gertrude Lowthian Bell. Bell, a woman who probably will be unknown to most audiences, was a writer and adventurer who helped Winston Churchill draw the lines that carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

Herzog fans immediately will be struck by the movie's surprisingly conventional style, which (alas) relies heavily on images of Kidman riding camels, on two somewhat listless romances and on the less-than-exciting intricacies of tribal politics among the Arab populations of the empire once controlled by the Turks.

A miscast James Franco portrays Henry Cadogan, Bell's first love. As he whispers his way through a British accent, it's difficult to take Franco seriously. Robert Pattinson, who shows up as T.E. Lawrence at least uses his crooked half-smile to suggest Lawrence's mischievousness.

Damian Lewis plays the third man in Belle's life, Maj. Charles Doughty-Wylie; Bell writes to Doughty-Wylie as she wanders across the desert. Periodically, we hear Kidman reading these letters in hushed tones.

Kidman captures Bell's courage, her confusion when it comes to romance and her determination not to be limited by gender. But Herzog relies on far too many glamor shots of Kidman, who manages to look beautiful even in extreme circumstances of desert heat and dust, not to mention the threat of hostile Arabs, most of whom ultimately are charmed by Bell's tenacity.

Herzog can't be accused of skimping on scenery; many of the desert images are steeped in grandeur, but the movie's swelling musical score feels like something lifted from another era.

Bell supposedly drew up the boundaries of modern Iraq, a skill that may have inspired Herzog to use on-screen maps to follow Bell's progress around the region, an old-fashioned technique that he presents without any trace of irony. Same goes for some of the cornball dialogue in which Bell talks about giving her heart to the desert.

Aside from telling us that Bell -- one of the first women to attend Oxford -- was an early example of feminine assertion, it's not exactly clear what Herzog hoped to say. Such is the price of reigning in idiosyncrasy: Herzog seldom has made a movie this sparkless and generic in its feel.