The wild and strange west

The Sisters Brothers tells the story of hitmen siblings.

Some Westerns aim to uphold frontier mythology; others want to drag that mythology into the muddy grit of reality. And some don't necessarily want to do either. The Sisters Brothers seems to fit into that latter category; it's a strangely entertaining, slightly off-kilter take on the American West during a time of transition.

The Sisters Brothers (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly) are hitmen who work for a ruthless character known as the Commodore (Rutger Hauer). But these two gunmen are not like other gunfighters you've seen before. They're more brutal than slick and they banter and argue as only siblings can.

Based on a novel by Patrick deWitt, The Sister's Brothers takes French director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, Dheepan and The Prophet) to the northwestern US -- Oregon mostly -- to follow the twisted adventures of brothers who have developed a proud level of expertise in their chosen occupation.

Not surprisingly, the brothers aren't always on the same page. Brother Eli (Reilly) has grown weary of killing people. He longs for the tenderness of home and hearth. He wants to retire. Brother Charlie sees no reason to quit, so long as the Commodore keeps giving them lucrative assignments.

Perhaps to let us know that we're not about to take a customary Western ride, Audiard begins his movie with a gunfight that takes place in the dark. Flashes from fired weapons pop across the screen along with the deep-throated sound of firing revolvers. If you're interested in assigning meaning to this battle, it might have something to do with Charlie and Eli's aimlessness. They're acting out an old script, but they have no real vision about what they might be pursuing. They're dancing in the dark.

The story soon focuses on the task to which Charlie and Eli currently have been assigned. They're supposed to catch up with Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed) and torture him for reasons best discovered in a theater.

For their part, the brothers are task-specific; they've been hired to torture; it's not their job to locate the fleeing Warm. That task falls into the hands of John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) a detective whose impeccable diction couldn't seem more out of place in this environment.

As it turns out, Warm has a large agenda: He wants to found a harmonious, non-violent, egalitarian society in Dallas, Texas, and damn if Morris doesn't catch a bit of utopian fever himself.

The performances are marked by idiosyncratic fervor. Phoenix portrays Charlie as a drunk with a quick temper and a taste for life without regret. Reilly gives Eli a dogged quality with hints of unexpected tenderness. A shawl Eli carries with him serves as a kind of security blanket, a reminder that the comfort of a woman might exist somewhere, although it's probably somewhere where Eli isn't.

One of my favorite moments arrives when Charlie asks Eli why he insists on carrying around a scarf he purportedly was given by a woman. It's not a scarf insists Eli; it's a shawl. To him, the distinction means everything.

Audiard sets all this against the backdrop of the still-evolving west. At one point, Morris -- who keeps a diary -- notes that he's visiting settlements that didn't exist three months ago. In another signal of change, Charlie discovers the toothbrush, a device that he uses awkwardly. Think about it. How would you approach a toothbrush if you'd never seen one before?

Audiard allows what symbolism he employs to crawl out of the natural landscape. On the trail, a sleeping Eli swallows a spider that leaves him sick and poisoned. His face becomes distorted and swollen with bloat. The natural world seems to be turning against Eli.

I won't reveal the movie's ending but I'll tell you that Audiard allows his movie to settle like a pot that has been taken off the fire and has begun to lose its boiling fury. Audiard has given us a half-real, half-fantastical portrait of the West, putting it on the shoulders of two brothers who only seem unconstrained by their torments when their horses are bounding across open terrain. As the movie suggests, the West may not be what we once thought it was, but the image of horse and rider hasn't lost its power to stir.

The story of a young 'witch'

Rungano Nyoni, described in her biography as a Zambian/Welsh director, demonstrates a keen eye for the strange hypocrisies and contradictions in everyday life among ordinary villagers in Zambia. Nyoni's I Am Not a Witch focuses on what we're told is a "witch camp," a place where women who've been targeted as witches perform what looks to be forced labor. Sometimes, they pose with painted faces for tourists hungry for some exoticism. Shula (Maggie Mulubwa) shows up early. She's a serious-looking eight-year-old who may have been orphaned and who seems entirely lost. It doesn't take long for Shula, who has evidently no place else to go, to be encouraged to identify herself as a witch. As a low-level government official with a keen eye for exploitation, Mr. Banda (Henry B.J. Phir) takes a proprietary interest in Shula. She'll be good for tourism. Shula becomes government property. Nyoni finds warmth in the close ties among the women, who are victimized by the idiocy that arises from conflicts between government, tribal authorities and self-serving officials. Not without humor, I Am Not a Witch ultimately rests on Shula's story, which builds toward a mournful and mysterious finale.

Two fine docs from National Geographic

He dares to do what seems impossible.

As someone who's not crazy about heights, I approached the documentary Free Solo with a mixture of dread and interest. I wanted to see if I'd be able to watch climber Alex Honnold do what never had been done before: scale Yosemite's treacherous El Capitan without a rope or any other safety equipment.

The often-riveting Free Solo makes for challenging viewing for those of us who like to keep both feet planted firmly on the ground. Qualms or no, this is one compelling film.

Honnold makes his living as a climber, but it would be ridiculous to suggest that he does it for money or fame. What motivates him is an unquenchable desire to push himself, in this case by taking on a 3,000-foot granite wall. No ropes. No gear. Just a bit of chalk to help him secure what look to be the most tenuous of spots to place his hands and feet.

Filming Honnold's climb required the filmmakers to take some risks themselves. Directors E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Meru) faced daunting challenges: How to get the most breathtaking images of the climb while staying out Honnold's way. I've read that the filmmakers used drones, rigs and powerful zoom lenses to accomplish their task.

Chin, who sometimes appears camera, is obviously troubled by an inescapable awareness that things could go terribly wrong. Climber Tommy Caldwell arrives to help Honnold train. He's encouraging but realistic, noting that "everyone who has made free soloing a big part of their carer is dead by now."

It must have been nerve-wracking for the filmmakers to know that they were telling a story about a guy who might die during the filming.

Honnold turns out to be a man of preternatural focus: He sees no reason to give up climbing, even if his girlfriend -- Sanni McCandless -- were to ask him to quit for the sake of their relationship. She doesn't.

Despite a couple of setbacks, Honnold's determination is impressive. I'm not sure that free soloing shouldn't be recognized as a form of insanity, but Free Solo holds your attention -- for every gut-wrenching minute of Honnold's history-making effort.

These science whizzes make you excited for their future -- and ours.

I'd be surprised if Science Fair didn't show up on this year's Oscar's documentary shortlist.

Directors Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster hit the inspirational bullseye by focusing on smart young people who are preparing to compete in 2017's International Science and Engineering Fair, an event that pits 1,700 finalists against one another as they compete for prizes in multiple categories.

The directors concentrate on young people from Kentucky, New York, South Dakota, and West Virginia, as well as from a small city in Brazil and an isolated community in rural Germany. You'll meet young men and women who boldly follow their interest in science in highly competitive academic surroundings such as Louisville's duPont Manual High School or at a school in South Dakota where there are no science labs and the sole competitor for international recognition must be sponsored by the football coach.

Kashfia, a Bangladeshi-American student who's investigating adolescent brain activity as it pertains to risk, is also a Muslim who wears a hijab. She may not be brimming with self-assurance, but the school's football coach recognizes a ferocity in her.

Dr. Serena McCalla, who teaches in Long Island, N.Y., proves a formidable adult presence, pushing her students toward excellence and refusing to accept anything less.

The individual stories all are interesting, but Science Fair deserves extra praise because its young subjects fill us with optimism for the future. I don't know if such positivity will prove entirely warranted, but damn if it didn't feel good to feel positive -- if only for the film's intriguing 90 minutes.

Michael Moore is back in action

Fahrenheit 11/9 fires at many targets, but scores a direct hit on the subject of Flint's tainted water supply.

Michael Moore leaves few stones unturned in his latest movie, Fahrenheit 11/9.

Under Moore's sardonic gaze: the Trump presidency, the water crisis in Flint, Mich., the Democratic party's treatment of Bernie Sanders, and the inability of what Moore views as the country's liberal majority to assert its will.

Put another way: Fahrenheit 11/9 stands as a catalog of current "progressive" laments, as well as a call to action.

Bolstered by a too-brief interview with Yale historian Timothy Snyder, Moore says that our democracy is under siege. No constitutional guarantees will save us from tyranny once it arrives and we may be closer to ruin than we think.

Much of 11/9 will be familiar to those who read the newspapers or watch any cable news channel other than FOX, but the movie includes at least one explanatory observation about the ascendance of Donald Trump that I haven't already heard.

Moore says that Trump decided to run for president in a fit of pique after hearing that NBC was paying Gwen Stafani (The Voice) more than he earned as host of The Apprentice. Make America Great Again was preceded by Make My Deal Better -- at least that's how Moore sees it.

Fahrenheit 11/9 qualifies as several films in one, all loosely related and all pointing to the terrible state in which a deeply polarized country now finds itself.

The strongest section of Fahrenheit 11/9 focuses on the water crisis in Moore's hometown, Flint, Mich. It’s not difficult to feel empathy for and outrage in behalf of Flint’s beleaguered residents who were victimized by their state government and by a Federal bureaucracy that didn’t respond adequately to their problems.

After some ill-advised tinkering created the issue, Rick Snyder, Michigan's Republican governor, refused to alleviate Flint's suffering. He could have switched the source of Flint's water from the polluted Flint River to its previous point of origin, Lake Huron. The result: Too many of Flint's children were subjected to unhealthy amounts of lead. Moore sees this as an assault on the town's mostly black population, a form of ethnic cleansing.

I won’t recount the details of everything that happened and still is happening in Flint, but this portion of the film is enough to justify its existence, and I'm grateful to Moore for putting Flint's story in one accessible place. Moore allows the residents of Flint to tell their stories, keeping his editorializing to a minimum ... well ... almost.

Moore repeats one of his familiar ploys; he visits the state capital in an attempt to make a citizen's arrest of Snyder. He also sprays the grounds of Michigan's governor's mansion with Flint water, hauled to the governor's home in a tanker truck.

In a lengthy film (a little longer than two hours), such prankish gestures seem even more superfluous than usual. Same goes for a montage about Trump's supposed prurient fascination with his daughter Ivanka.

Republicans may not like Moore’s film (certainly Trump fans won’t), but Democrats may be upset as well. Moore makes a point of noting that former President Obama, a politician he admires, visited Flint but didn’t bring the salvation that residents expected — and deserved.

Moore also takes aim at the "Repubicanization" (my word) of the Democratic party under a wily Clinton and an overly cautious Obama. He assigns a share of blame for our current situation to comprising Democrats who have failed to fight for the traditions of the party even though a majority of the country believes in a women's right to choose and affordable health care.

The strong section on Flint is surrounded by satellite stories that touch lots of hot-button issues -- not all convincingly. Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who endured a terrible school shooting last February, launched a national campaign against guns: Moore clearly loves their activism and perhaps overestimates their impact.

A segment on the already well-covered West Virginia teachers strike deserved a film of its own.

Moore pushes the idea of an approaching American fascism when he compares Trump to Hitler, using Trump's voice over images of Hitler speaking at one of his rallies. The danger of authoritarianism in the US may be real and comparisons between the US today and Weimar Germany of the 1930s can be instructive, but using Trump's voice over a gesticulating Hitler struck me as a stunt.

Early on, I mentioned that Moore's interview with Timothy Snyder, the author of The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America and On Tyranny; Twenty lessons from the Twentieth Century, was too brief.

I say this because those familiar with Snyder's work know that he worries about the future of American democracy as much as Moore but is far more thorough and thought-provoking than a lot of what you'll see in Fahrenheit 11/9.
Moore might defend his approach by asserting that today's dangers are so obvious, so much on the surface, that there's no need to over-analyze. He'd have a point. Besides, he's calling his audience to action, asking viewers to channel their "mad-as-hell" attitudes into political activism; he wants more involvement and more voting.

I'd say that's basic civics dished out in a form that many will find entertaining and provocative; whether Moore's audience will do anything beyond seeing 11/9 and nodding their agreement remains to be seen.

He sang, drank and died young

Ethan Hawke directs a movie about country singer Blaze Foley, a man who may not have gotten his due..

Some musicians play the blues. Some live the blues. Some do both.

I guess you could say that Blaze Foley falls into the latter category. Foley, who acquired an admiring reputation among country music aficionados, probably would have drunk himself into an early grave had he not been shot by the son of one of his friends. He died in 1989 at the age of 40.

An actor of estimable intelligence and wide-ranging interests, Ethan Hawke has directed a film about Foley's life and music, both of which find ample expression in Blaze.

Played by singer Ben Dickey, Foley comes off as a bearish man of contradictions: shy, belligerent, gifted and funny. He can wring laughs out of a folksy story or sell the sadness in a song. Foley was known for tunes such as If I Could Fly and Clay Pigeons; his tunes were recorded by artists such as Merle Haggard, Lyle Lovett and John Prine.

As a kind of framing device, Hawke shows singer Townes Van Zandt (played by Charlie Sexton) during a radio interview. The interviewer (a barely seen Hawke) receives an unexpected lesson in the history of Blaze Foley, a singer he's never heard of. Then again, lots of people haven't heard of Foley, who never really occupied country music's center stage.

In some ways, then, Blaze becomes the story of a gifted singer/songwriter who could be as charming as he was off-putting. Just about everything Foley did was accompanied by his three most reliable companions: liquor, cigarettes, and pot.

Hawke also spends time on Foley's relationship with Sybil Rosen (Alia Shawkat), an actress who wrote a memoir about her life with Blaze. It would take quite a woman to keep up with Blaze and Sybil was that woman -- at least until the relationship fell apart. Early on, the two share their romance while living in a Georgia tree house. They met at a Georgia artists colony.

In one of the movie's funniest scenes, Sybil and Blaze visit her Jewish parents, a couple that's not accustomed to people such as Blaze. Worried about having non-Jewish grandchildren, Dad questions Blaze about his commitment to Christianity. Let's just say Blaze's answer wouldn't have evoked cheers from evangelicals.

The real Rosen plays her mother in this scene as an accommodating Blaze and an assertive Sybil deal with a moment that's awkward under the best of circumstances. If you want to stretch your mind a bit try to imagine Thanksgiving dinner at the Rosen household.

Foley's hardscrabble childhood comes into view when he and Sybil visit Blaze's father, a once-feared man who has slipped into senescence in a nursing home. Kris Kristofferson makes an impact in a small role as Foley's father. Age seems to have taken all the mean out of the man.

The best parts of the movie involve music or plain old hanging out. When they're not playing, the musicians talk, telling stories in colorful fashion. It's a pleasure to listen to these guys.

I wish I could say that I didn't get a little tired of all the movie's meandering but Hawke shows no interest in grabbing us by the collar and pulling us through a movie composed mostly of side trips. In one of them, Richard Linklater, Steve Zahn, and Sam Rockwell play Texans who want to push Foley toward stardom. You don't need to be a fortune teller to know that their plan won't work. Foley will find a way to mess things up.

At one point, Foley says that he's not interested in being a star; he wants to be a legend. I don't know if he became either, but for the length of Hawke's film, he's the center of a sauntering look at the life of a man who other musicians respected, who left the world a few songs and a ton of stories -- many of them quite entertaining.

'Bel Canto' sings a dull tune

For a hostage drama, this Paul Weitz-directed offering proves awfully slack.

Bel Canto is a seriously intended movie that I found impossible to take seriously. Adapted from a 2001 novel by Ann Patchett, Bel Canto tells the story of a celebrated opera singer (Julianne Moore) who visits an unnamed Latin American country to give a private concert. Instead of dispensing with a quick-hit engagement, the singer winds up being held hostage -- along with her affluent audience -- by a band of guerrillas. The country's vice president arranged the concert in hopes of impressing a visiting Japanese industrialist (Ken Watanabe). Watanabe's Hosokawa, an avid opera lover, accepted the invitation even though he had no intention of building the factory for which the vice president had been angling. For its part, the invading band of guerrillas wants the country's president to release all political prisoners. Moore lip-synchs (Renee Fleming did the actual singing), and the hostages and their captors slowly begin to bond as it's revealed that the insurgents are ... well ... not all that bad. Because Hosokawa is obsessed with Moore's character's voice, the leap from the love of music to the love of the singer proves a short one. In a more unlikely romance, one of the rebels (Maria Mercedes Coroy) falls for Hosokawa's multi-lingual translator (Ryo Kase). Sebastian Koch portrays a Red Cross negotiator who's reluctantly thrown into the mix. Once everyone is trapped in the veep's luxurious home, the movie begins to suffer from a claustrophobia that director Paul Weitz can't defeat. What surely should have been tense becomes slack, a limp attempt to sing the praises of art as a means of unifying disparate (and desperate) souls. When the hostages and their captors wind up in an impromptu soccer game before the movie's violent finale, all I could think was that it takes more daring than was available here to save this movie from looking like a cross-cultural summer camp.

Why did Lizzie Borden wield her ax?

Directed by Craig William Macneill, Lizzie showcases the work of Chloe Sevigny as Lizzie Borden, the 19th century Massachusettes woman who purportedly killed her stepmother and father with an ax. Sevigny gives an unnerving performance in which her face can show either rigid determination or the unraveled fury of a woman who has unleashed a terrifying rage. Sevigny's Lizzie finds herself in the middle of a tale of repression so severe, only the most violent assertion can break its hold. Sevigny is aided by Kristen Stewart, who plays Bridget, a diffident Irish maid who works for the Borden family and who becomes Lizzie's lover. Jamey Sheridan exemplifies all the worst qualities of patriarchy; he portrays Andrew Borden, a man of punishing cruelties that may be intended to mask his own sexual desires. Fiona Shaw plays Lizzie's stepmother -- not quite wicked but acquiescent in her husband's sadism. Denis O'Hare portrays uncle John, an unscrupulous facilitator of Mr. Borden's business life. Slowly paced, Lizzie ultimately delivers the bloody goods with a naked Lizzie chopping her way into American criminal lore. Carefully appointed and photographed, Lizzie ultimately suffers from its one-note insistence on turning Lizzie into a warrior against patriarchy. The movie juxtaposes period-piece pacing with a contemporary reading of the Borden story. The mixture doesn't always work, but there's no denying Sivigny's commitment to the role; she cuts through the movie's lumbering pace with a bluntly expressed but towering rage.

A homebody's best friend disappears

Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively play a snappy duet in A Simple Favor, a thriller with as much comedy as mystery.

In A Simple Favor, Anna Kendrick plays a woman who's determined to be an ideal mother. Kendrick’s Stephanie Smothers is a widow who immerses herself in her son's pre-school activities and in a cooking vlog that she begins with a trademark greeting that defines her vision of an audience. "Hi, Moms,' she chirps.

Stephanie is the kind of mother who brings out the resentments of parents who aren’t quite so gung-ho about pre-school. She drives less conscientious crazy.

Stephanie gives Kendrick an opportunity to go for laughs while keeping us guessing about whether there might be something less controlled under Stephanie's ultra-organized surface.

At first, I thought Kendrick might be overdoing Stephanie's diffidence, offering a near parodic version of a kid-and-kitchen obsessed suburban mom, but her performance grew on me.

Kendrick finds an able comic accomplice in Blake Lively, who plays Emily a woman whose confidence contrasts mightily with Stephanie's timidity. Director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) makes it clear from the outset that Emily qualifies as a career-obsessed woman who brings a take-no-prisoners attitude to everything she does. When it comes to being a mom, Emily is ... well ... indifferent to the point of neglect.

The movie opens with Stephanie telling her video blog followers that best-friend Emily has disappeared. Emily left her young son with Stephanie, who picked the kid up from pre-school along with her own son. Emily's husband is tending to his sick mother in London.

Once Emily goes missing, A Simple Favor turns into a jaunty, comic mystery built around events that unfold after Emily vanishes.

Enter Sean (Henry Golding), Emily's husband, a novelist who hasn't published anything for a decade but who lives with Emily in a sleekly modern home that evidently is supported by Emily's work as a high-power PR woman for a fashion firm and by ample amounts of debt. Fresh from Crazy Rich Asians, Golding once again is called upon to be handsome, emotionally vulnerable, charming and, in this case, perhaps a bit devious.

I wish the movie had made more time for Rupert Friend, who plays Dennis Nylon (great name), the taste-arbiter who runs the fashion firm at which Emily ruthlessly plies her PR trade.

In this case, though, it's the women -- Kendrick and Lively -- who give the movie its spark as Stephanie turns into an amateur sleuth. She searches for Emily, gradually learning that her friend might not be all that she seemed. Then again, Stephanie isn't all that she seems, either.

As a mystery, A Simple Favor doesn't always work. Feig offers a big reveal too early and an over-stuffed wrap-up threatens to tie the movie in knots.

But Feig keeps A Simple Favor marching to a snappy cadence. He also includes enough satirical garnish to heighten interest without cutting deep enough to draw blood. That's not a criticism. Feig points the movie in the right direction. Simple Favor never extinguishes its sparkle. It's a good-natured helping of venom.

Drugs and despair in the streets of Detroit

Director Yann Demange grounds White Boy Rick in grim realism.

Illegal gun sales, drugs, gangs, corruption, and injustice.

You can tell from this list, and I've abbreviated it, that the new movie White Boy Rick spends little time traversing feel-good turf. Based on a true story, White Boy Rick plunges into Detroit's economic decay during the free-wheeling 1980s.

White Boy Rick focuses on three tumultuous years in the life of Rick Wershe Jr. (Richie Merritt) as he moves from a being a wayward 14-year-old with a father (Matthew McConaughey) who traffics in illegal guns to a cocaine peddler to an FBI informant and, finally, to his inevitable identity: prisoner.

In telling Rick's story, director Yann Demange pushes McConaughey into more of a supporting role than you might expect. This time, McConaughey plays a dirtbag hustler with a difference. Richard Wershe Sr. lacks the charm of some of the rogues McConaughey previously has played.

Aware of his mammoth failures as a father, Richard knows he has nothing to give his son, but the tricks of an illegal trade. McConaughey's performance hints at a sad self-awareness that borders on the tragic.

As Demange tells Rick's story, the movie evokes the ragged, jittery style of the '70s, chopping its way through lives that would be utterly empty if not for trouble.

Early on, Ricky falls in with a group of black drug dealers led by Johnny Curry (a quietly scary Jonathan Majors). Johnny's younger brother Boo (RJ Cyler), Ricky's only real friend, brings Ricky into a gang in which he's the only white guy.

For a time, it's all fun and games as Ricky finds friends and family-like ties among a group of black men who have connections to City Hall. Finally, Rick belongs to something -- or thinks he does.

Meanwhile -- and White Boy Rick is a movie of many "meanwhiles" -- Rick's sister Dawn (Bel Powley) wallows in a drug-addicted life that brings her to the edge of physical ruin. Ravaged by crack, her face seems to be rotting right along with Detroit's declining industrial landscape.

Ricky also draws the attention of two FBI agents (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rory Cochrane) who want Ricky to help them bring Johnny down. Ricky's given an impossible choice: Either he informs for the FBI or the FBI will shut down his father's illegal gun business. Family ties win out.

Some of the movie's scenes are given a humorous twist -- few greater than the movie's prologue which finds father and son arriving home from a successful buy at a gun show trying to convince the drug-addicted Dawn to accompany them for frozen custard, a ludicrous and inevitably futile stab at familial normalcy.

But harsh realities overshadow humor, even when it comes from Ricky's grandparents (Bruce Dern and Piper Laurie). Grandma keeps a pistol in her oven.

Merritt, who has no previous acting experience, gives a raw, natural performance as a kid who never entirely sells out his innocence. When Rick begs his father to join him in the drug business, he's not so much acting the thug as pleading for the life of his family and the ability to sustain it the only way he knows.

White Boy Rick isn't a perfect movie, perhaps because it never entirely convinces us that there's anything major to be gained from watching these characters fall prey to their devastated environment. Still, there's something to be said for movies that insist on shining realistic light on society's margins.

White Boy Rick makes a last-minute attempt to criticize the justice system that ultimately betrays Ricky, but the feeling one draws from the movie has less to do with rage at judicial inequity than with the bone-deep despair that stems from watching so many lives swirl desperately before going down the drain.

Nicolas Cage and a warrior's revenge

Horror, comedy and blood mix in Mandy, a movie designed to unhinge.

Mandy is the kind of movie that has enlivened the cinematic fringe for years, a repulsive, funny, deadpan helping of horror and revenge that pushes Nicolas Cage -- already a master of violent action -- into terrain so soaked in blood it could support a thousand transfusions.

Director Panos Cosmatos's penchant for extremism matches Cage's and the result is a movie that's likely to amuse, unhinge and terrify those willing to take its nightmarish journey.

A sporadic use of animation and dream sequences thwart any sense of realism as the movie feeds off Cage's ability to turn minimal bits of dialogue into grim jokes. I'm guessing that Cosmatos wants us to see his movie as a grisly fable, as well as an in-joke for those with enough movie savvy to know the ground rules of this sort of febrile expression.

Set in the 1980s, the movie begins by introducing a couple living in isolation in the northwestern woods. Cage's wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) seems to have adjusted to life off the grid. But the couple's crazy quilt of a home suggests an inherent lack of stability.

Sure enough, Mandy soon is abducted by the followers of Jeremiah, a wacko cult leader (Linus Roach) who thinks he's touch with a divine voice; the voice tells him that the world is his, which means he has license to kidnap women and turn them into sexual partners. Jeremiah's thinks his lust is holy.

Drugged but unsubmissive, Riseborough's Mandy quickly falls victim to terror. She's stuffed into a burlap sack that's hung from a tree and set on fire. Cage's Red -- strung up, as well -- is forced to watch. Red, however, is left alive.

At this point, the movie uncorks a potent bottle of revenge that features a fearsome looking ax that Red forges like a blacksmith called to battle characters who have embraced their madness.

Energized by currents of unbearable pain, Red turns into a warrior who emerges from a roll in the muck with humanity's darkest impulses. Red moves along a near-mythic trajectory, facing one demonic character after another until he reaches the movie's dark center.

Imagery saturated in red (everything in this world seems blood-soaked) abets the stroboscopic forward motion Costmatos creates as does Cage's performance; as a man fired and numbed by grief, Red comes across as both comic and tragic, a goof that just might not be a joke. When Red stares at the camera, his eyes glow like dark coals. Is he looking evil straight in the eye or catching a glimpse of his own damaged soul?

I hope I've already made the point clear, but just in case: Mandy is not for the squeamish or for those who have no taste for exaggerated, graphically depicted horror. I also wondered whether Cosmatos had decided to name his movie Mandy to shred any memories of the Barry Manilow song with the same title, a bit of pop culture that derives from a whole other universe.

'Peppermint': a kickless revenge saga

Jennifer Garner plays a character out for revenge, but a female star can't mask Peppermint's shamefully derivative approach.

Jennifer Garner's performance proves impressively convincing as a woman with a sparkling sense of humor and an obvious concern for the welfare of her audience, a pleasant variation of the girl-next-door image that seems to have taken over the actress's career.

Unfortunately, I'm not talking about the new movie Peppermint, a revenge saga in which the actress has been cast in the kind of role that's usually slotted for men. I'm referring instead to Garner's work in a series of Capital One Venture commercials in which Garner wonders what card might be in our wallets.

In Peppermint, Garner might still be playing the girl next door, but she's the kind of girl next door who happens to have acquired the stealthy prowess of a ninja, the lethality of a serial killer and the determination of Liam Neeson when he's in full Taken mode. No surprise there because in this lurid outing, Garner is being directed by Pierre Morel, who also directed Taken.

Gratuitously violent and ultimately serving as an irresponsible endorsement of vigilantism, Peppermint can't duck criticism by claiming that its formulaic approach should be accepted as a necessary helping of female empowerment. Man or woman at pulling the trigger, it's the same old movie.

Early on, Peppermint puts its bloody cards on the table: Garner's Riley North, her husband, and her daughter are gunned down -- on her daughter's tenth birthday and at a Christmas festival no less. Talk about piling on.

Riley's husband had become the target of a drug cartel, members of which mistakenly thought he was involved in a plot to steal some of their money.

After the legal system fails Riley, the only surviving member of her family, she disappears for five years, a time on which I'm not sure the movie devotes five minutes. Riley re-emerges as a warrior who somehow has acquired the skills necessary to avenge her family's horrible demise.

Garner gives her all to a movie in which her character tortures and blows up a judge (corrupt, of course), wields a mean knife and subscribes to a theory that that raises the ante on the old saw about an eye-for-an-eye. In Riley's case, one eye seems to be worth a hundred eyes. She piles up a war-like body count.

Most of Riley's victims seem to be fierce-looking Hispanic men with enough tattoos to cover a wall. I won't say which wall, but did so many Latino people need to be blown away?

There are two ways in which a movie such as Peppermint could have succeeded. First, it could have made us complicit in Riley's hunger for revenge; i.e., it could have induced us to share the satisfaction that accrues from seeing obvious miscreants brought to justice. Peppermint doesn't offer even this pleasure, guilt-ridden as it might be.

A surer road to success has to do with style. When the wave of Hong Kong movies from masters such as John Woo (Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled) were making their international bones in the 1980s and early '90s, they brought wild creativity to the choreography of violence. American descendants include such recent movies as John Wick.

Morel brings little by way of twisted panache to the movie's ample violence, which is presented without much by way of directorial innovation.

The supporting cast includes John Ortiz as an LA cop, John Gallagher Jr. as another detective and Juan Pablo Raba as head of the drug cartel. Each of these characters has his own reason for wanting to corral Riley, an avenging angel who has been lionized by Los Angeles' homeless and on social media.

This isn't a case in which there's reason to fault any performance. Blame the movie's shamelessly derivative plot, its joyless overkill and a blatant end-of-picture suggestion that sequels may loom.

Perhaps naively, we expect an uplift from summer movie fatigue come September. Labor Day may have passed, but with Peppermint, the dog days continue. Peppermint, an ice cream flavor for which Riley's daughter fleetingly expresses fondness, may add flavor to desserts and chewing gum; it doesn't do much for this movie.

A portrait of man who took portraits

Socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of President Teddy Roosevelt, is credited with having uttered the now famous line, "If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit next to me." Longworth probably would have loved sitting next to photographer Cecil Beaton, the subject of Love, Cecil, a documentary by director Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Beaton, who died in 1980 at the age of 76, led a life that brought him into contact with the successful, the famous and the beautiful; he loved and loathed the people in his life with equal passion. Openly gay and in possession of a stunning gift for portraiture, Beaton eventually went to work for Conde Nast. He was a star at Vogue until an anti-Semitic reference appeared in one of his drawings (yes, he drew, as well). He eventually righted the foundering ship of his career, which included activities as various as becoming a war photographer during World War II and later serving as art director for movies such Gigi and My Fair Lady. Rupert Everett delivers a narration in the form of some of Beaton's writings, taking us inside the mind of a man whose name may not be well-known to many, thus allowing the movie to make an inadvertent comment on the fleeting nature of fame: Beaton, by the way, won four Tonys and three Oscars. Those who enjoy caustic wit will relish Beaton's trashing of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as well as his withering remarks about Katharine Hepburn. But he loved Greta Garbo and may have had a sexual relationship with her. Juicy gossip aside (and there's plenty in Love, Cecil), Vreeland's documentary introduces us to the work of a man who wrote, took pictures, designed and drew -- and did all of these with skill and a well-honed aesthetic.

She's the afterthought in his life

Jonathan Pryce and Glenn Close play husband and wife in The Wife.

The complicated relationship between a husband and wife moves to the forefront of The Wife, Swedish director Bjorn Runge's adaptation of a 2003 novel by Meg Wolitzer. The movie centers on the Castlemans, a couple brought to convincing life by Jonathan Pryce and Glenn Close.

When the movie begins, Pryce's Joe Castleman is awaiting word on whether he has won the Nobel Prize for literature. He does and the movie then shifts to Oslo, Norway where Joe, his wife and his grown son (Max Irons) have gone to celebrate Joe's success.

Of course, that's not the end of the story, but only the beginning of a slow revelation of the secret behind Joe's literary triumph. For those unfamiliar with the story, I'll say no more except to note that Close's Joan Castleman seems to have taken responsibility for every mundane aspect of Joe's exalted life, tasks she carries out despite Joe's penchant for philandering.

As events in Oslo unfold, Runge shows us flashbacks to various stages of the couple's relationship, which began when Joe, married to someone else at the time, taught writing at the college level. Joan (played as a young woman by Close's real-life daughter Anne Starke) was one of his prize students. At the time -- the 1950s -- prospects for emerging female writers seemed dim and Joan sacrificed her talent on the altar of Joe's ego.

Importantly, the movie shows us that Joan, though definitely exploited, was complicit in her fate. For reasons of her own, she loyally subordinated herself to Joe's ambitions. No one can do such a thing without paying a price, and Joan's resentments ripple through Close's finely tuned performance.

For his part, Pryce conveys the egotism and occasional cruelty of a famous Jewish-American writer. His relationship with his son, an aspiring author, reeks of authoritarianism and neglect. Joe isn't kind when talking about his son's writing, disguising his lack of compassion as an insistence on high standards.

Strong hints of threatening disclosures run throughout the movie. Christian Slater plays a wily journalist who has been trying for years to write Joe's biography. He wants Joan to help him topple Joe from his throne, a lofty perch built on the pile of critically acclaimed books the author has published.

Despite building toward an inevitable showdown between Joe and Joan, The Wife never quite feels revelatory. But Pryce and Close add undeniable polish to this peek into literary lives -- both fulfilled and wasted.