An agreeable comic drama

  Movies about psychologically damaged people can easily lead to dramatic overkill. Fantasy Life, which stars Amanda Peet as a 50ish actress whose career has evaporated, takes a different approach. Written and directed by Matthew Shear, who also plays a lead role, the movie takes place against a backdrop of ongoing crises that have become the soundtrack for the characters’ lives.

  Shear plays Sam, a schlub who, after losing his job as a paralegal, consults with his therapist (Judd Hirsch). Hirsch’s Fred prescribes drugs for OCD and also suggests that the unemployed Sam might babysit for his son’s three preteen daughters. 

   Shy and subject to panic attacks, Sam seems entirely unsuited for the job, which — of course — he takes.

  David (Alessandro Nivola), the girls’ father, works as a musician who’ll soon depart on an Australian tour as a fill-in bassist with a popular rock band. 

  The real story begins when Mom (Peet) arrives in Manhattan after having taken a mental health break on Martha’s Vineyard. Mired in depression about her vanishing career, Dianne decides that Sam should accompany her to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer. He’ll look after the kids, and she’ll continue with her inertia.

   Sam agrees. It doesn’t take long to see that he’s attracted to Dianne. Why not? Dianne’s attractive, both she and Sam are emotionally wounded, and Dianne’s marriage has hit a rough patch. It’s also clear that Dianne likes Sam, who makes no demands and praises her skills as an actress.  Less a matter of sexual attraction, the two create a comfort zone that both of them desperately need.

   Shear gently develops a relationship that raises eyebrows with Dianne’s parents (Bob Balaban and Jessica Harper). Hirsch is joined by Andrea Martin, who plays his wife and secretary.

  Aside from Sam, the characters seem affluent enough not to have to worry about money, and Shear’s eye-averting characterization turns him into a kind of walking human apology. 

  The story builds toward a climactic dinner scene. Dianne’s resentments erupt in comic fashion — or at least that seems to be the intent.

  Shear operates on a human scale, but Fantasy Life can seem a bit edgeless, and Sam’s mental issues --he's Jewish but antisemitic phrases pop intrusively into his head -- feel under-explored. Sam's inability to cope is made clear enough without what seems an  extraneous embellishment.

  Mostly, though, Fantasy Life passes easily without being uproariously funny or straining for satire. Call it agreeably light.

An architect's fight for integrity

   Few filmmakers -- Paul Thomas Anderson may be one -- make movies that seem to live and breathe in worlds of their own. The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet's three-hour and 15-minute foray into the life of a fictional Jewish Hungarian architect qualifies as such a movie. Like the architectural style for which it's named, The Brutalist can be raw and abrasive, a story blanched of sentiment.

   A movie as ambitious as The Brutalist puts a tremendous burden on the actor (Adrien Brody) who'll play architect László Toth, a refugee who arrives in the US in 1947 after being separated from his wife (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece (Raffey Cassidy).

    Stuck in an immigration limbo, Toth's wife and niece still languish in Europe, but Toth perseveres in the face of a displacement the movie makes clear with his arrival in New York City. A cockeyed shot of the Statue of Liberty signals that neither Toth nor we have reached a mythic land of liberty and justice. 

     But Toth’s not arriving in the America of historical realism, either. He lands in the world Corbet and his co-writer,  Mona Fastvoid, create, a world full of striving and duplicity, as well as opportunities for reinvention. 

     The movie, which shows with a 15-minute intermission, divides into two acts and an epilogue that allow Corbet steadily to open thematic doors. Among them:  capitalism’s inevitable perversion of art, the fierce individuality needed to protect artistic integrity, and the abiding agony of surviving events that never can be left behind. 

       Early on, Toth moves in with a cousin (Alessandro Nivola) who lives in Pennsylvania with his American wife (Emma Laird). Nivola's Attila seems to have shed his Old Country past, even converting to Catholicism. Toth designs furniture for the shop Attila owns, a dim connection to his previous life but still a creative endeavor.

     The story shifts gears when the cheerfully opportunistic Attila puts Laszlo in touch with Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), the son of a wealthy tycoon (Guy Pearce). Harry wants to surprise his father by renovating the library where Dad houses his rare book collection.

   Laszlo makes the library into a design-oriented space that takes the rarity of the books into account. He designs shelves that turn to shield the books from the sun. 

    When he arrives home, Pearce's character -- an infuriated Harrison Lee Van Buren — tosses Laszlo and Attila out of his home. He hates the library, which, for him, has one only purpose: to  display his taste and purported erudition. 

    A reporter for Look magazine discovers the library and proclaims it as the masterwork of a genius whose career was disrupted by war and the Holocaust. Van Buren recants. He pays Laszlo for his work, and invites him to design a community-oriented art and spiritual center for the suburban town of Doylestown, Pa.

    The plot's density increases. Laszlo moves into quarters on Van Buren's estate. His wife and niece return to him. He continues a heroin addiction that began as a way to cope with an injury, and his relationship with Van Buren wobbles, leading to a jarring and metaphorically strained act of sexual violence during a trip the men make to Carrara to select marble for the chapel's altar. 

    I’m not sure that The Brutalist makes groundbreaking statements about art, America, or the incorporation of new populations into the American tapestry. Toth’s Judaism remains, but isn't deeply explored. Corbet introduces a Black character (Isaach De Bankole) who becomes part of Toth's orbit, but whose story proves minimal.

      Limitations aside, Corbet's characters are among the year's most vividly realized and distinctive, offering Brody, Pearce, and Jones opportunities for  major performances. Together, director and cast create moments that prove provocative, fresh, and artfully imagined. 

       You may remember the movie as if it were dream, not entirely graspable but notable for its lingering power.

   

A loopy, discombobulated 'Kraven'

 

   I'd never heard of Sergei Kravinoff until I looked at the credits for Kraven the Hunter, the latest Sony Marvel movie to reach the screen.

  Still confused, I sought more information. Better known as Kraven the Hunter, Kravinoff, I read, is an arch-enemy of Spider-Man. That didn't help, either. Spider-Man didn't appear in the credits or, as I later found out, in the movie.

  Seeing this standalone helping of lethal action resulted in only mild clarification. Marked by R-rated violence, director J.C. Chandors's scattered origin story plays like a darkly-hued Russian thriller that occasionally stops to remember its comic-book origins.

    The story kicks off in earnest when Sergei (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) flees his corrupt father (Russell Crowe) and sensitive brother (Fred Hechinger). He’s off to the woods, where he builds a yurt-like home and communes with wildlife

   Sergei, who'll become Kraven, holds a grudge against Crowe's Nikolai Kravinoff, a big-time drug dealer who drove Sergei's mom to suicide. Dad divides the world's inhabitants into two categories: Weak and strong. Mom was weak. 

  Two villains appear. Alessandro Nivola plays Rhino, a psycho nut job whose skin can turn into rhino hide when he needs protection. The transformation is painful, requiring the insertion of a tube into a portal that links to Rhino's gut, pumping him full of whatever turns sadists into rhinos.

   Christopher Abbott plays Foreigner, a villain who can vanish in one place and reappear in another, although it's unclear how he manages this trick.

  Perhaps to keep Kraven from drowning in testosterone, the screenplay introduces Calypso (Ariana DeBose), a lawyer who allies herself with Kraven; she helps him locate the miscreants he pursues. He has a list.

   Kraven has an advantage over his foes. He possesses the keenly developed senses of a hunter who forms bonds with animals. You may not get him, but four-legged creatures view him as a friend.

   Employing a Russian accent, Crowe delivers his sparse lines with fortune cookie terseness. "Man who kill legend becomes legend,'' he tells his then teenage sons during a hunting trip to Ghana in the movie's early going.

   At one point, Demitri, Kraven's sensitive brother, opens a piano bar and lounge. Listening to his son sing, Dad delivers the movie's most unabashedly irrelevant line. He announces that he trusts no man who doesn't like Tony Bennett. 

   Enough. Chandor (Margin Call, All is Lost) tries to corral a heap of disparate characters and ingredients: a Russian drug lord who groves on Tony Bennett, a potion that brings Sergei back from the dead, action scenes in which Kraven climbs walls and scampers on all fours, and a thundering herds of CGI yaks among them.

  Oh well, as Crowe's character might describe the resulting discombobulation, "No sense in screenplay makes nonsense on screen."

A dreary true-crime story

 

You can't say they didn't try. Whoever assembled Boston Strangler -- a movie about reporters covering a famous case of the 1960s -- hired a first-rate cast. Kiera Knightley and Carrie Coon team as reporters for the Boston Record American. Knightley's Loretta McLaughlin rises from lifestyle obscurity to become an ace crime reporter. She was the first journalist to report that a string of 13 horrific murders were connected. Coons portrays Jean Cole, a veteran journalist who already had broken into the male-dominated ranks of “hard” news. The two give fine performances, although the movie tilts more toward McLaughlin, showing snippets of her home life. Chris Cooper, as the paper’s editor, and Alessandro Nivola, as a detective working the case, add heft. Writer/director Matt Ruskin conveys some of the ambiguity about the case’s resolution. Tagged as The Strangler, Albert DeSalvo (David Dastmalchian) became known as killer but was positively linked to only one of the 13 murders. Attempts to tell the story of a woman battling for a bigger journalistic role are conjoined with a dreary narrative that also dips into police bungling. For the most part, Ruskin proceeds in a prosaic fashion that tends to drag. What feels like a dutiful approach to storytelling often robs the movie of opportunities to sizzle.

Life before the Tony Soprano era began

 

   During the course of six seasons, The Sopranos established itself as one of the greatest series ever seen on American television. There are many reasons for this, including our endless fascination with gangster culture, if the word "culture" isn't too much of a stretch here.

    Steeped in violence, betrayal and duplicity, The Sopranos was a gangster story with a difference. It centered on Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), a mob boss with an impressive suburban home, a wife and two kids. We got to know every member of the Soprano immediate and extended family -- and know them well. 

    The series also introduced a twist that, at first, seemed preposterous. Tony regularly consulted a shrink (Lorraine Bracco) but seldom faced up to his massive appetites. I never counted, but scenes of Tony eating were as abundant as his many infidelities. It seemed impossible for Tony to pass a refrigerator without opening it.

    Over time, The Sopranos acquired depth worthy of a Russian novel. We couldn't stop watching.  

   Now, David Chase -- the show's creator -- has made The Many Saints of Newark, a movie that functions as a kind of prequel to The Sopranos.  At 120 minutes in length, the movie can't offer the complicated flavors and personal intrigue of a series. 

    We get profanity, violence, infidelities and a look at the young Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini's son, Michael Gandolfini). But Many Saints is more period piece — the New Jersey mob circa 1967-1970something — than a probing character study.

    Young Tony doesn't occupy the movie's center. That job falls to Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), the father of Christopher Moltisanti, who provides the movie's narration from behind the grave. If you're a series fan, you know that Christopher didn't make it to the end.

     Hot-headed and profane, Dickie is Tony’s uncle -- or at least that's how Tony thinks of him. Tony idolizes Dickie and the sequel (screenplay Chase and Lawrence Konner, direction by Alan Taylor) makes Dickie a pivotal figure in determining whether Tony, a bright kid with a penchant for trouble, will follow a mob path or make a different choice.

   I have no idea whether non-Soprano fans can relate to the movie because much of the time we're looking for hints of what's to come in the characters we meet. 

   Does Corey Stoll, for example, make a credible Corrado "Junior" Soprano? (Pretty much).

   Does Vera Farmiga, as Tony's mom Livia, seem as if she could develop into the character Nancy Marchand so brilliantly created in the series? (Definitely).

   References to the series abound, but The Many Saints of Newark is its own movie — albeit one that’s hampered by a running time that makes it seem as if an entire season of the Soprano's has been reduced to short hand. 

   Casualties accompany such condensation. Tony's father (Jon Bernthal) doesn't become a big enough figure. We learned almost as much about him in the series when Tony discussed his father with his therapist.

   Ray Liotta portrays Aldo "Hollywood Dick" Moltisanti, Dickie's father.  Dickie is involved in a vivid and revolting bit of violence that would have made us gasp had it occurred in a series where we already had spent considerable time forming opinions about Dickie.

   Perhaps to add a social wrinkle to the movie, Chase begins the story in 1967; a.k.a., the Summer of Love and continues it in the 1970s. 

   In 67, racial tension are boiling in Newark, where much of the mob activity takes place. Dickie forms a relationship with a young black man (Leslie Odom Jr.), who eventually develops criminal aspirations of his own.  

   The Newark riots play a role in creating the movie's atmospherics, but the attempt to give the racial conflict thematic weight feel anemic -- doing little more than underscoring the idea that the world once ruled by these mobsters is changing.

   Liotta also plays Dickie's uncle, a man serving life imprisonment for a mob hit. What seem like attempts to turn him into the movie's conscience don't really go anywhere.

   Then there's Michael Gandolfini. Although Tony isn't the main character, everything in the movie insists on being weighed against the character we know Tony will become and the world he’ll create. Gandolfini incorporates Tony's mannerisms into his performance, but Michael’s performance can't help but live in the shadow of his late father’s work.

   At its best, Many Saints laces vivid brutality with humor and New Jersey color, but it's most stirring moment comes at the end when we finally hear Alabama 3's Woke Up This Morning, the song that played over the opening credits in every Sopranos' episode. Maybe that's where the movie should have begun. 

   And then there's this: When an artistic endeavor achieves greatness, it might be best to leave it alone.