Leftovers from the old year

I'm offering brief reviews of two movies (Anaconda and Goodbye, June) to go on record about movies that I hoped might offer diversion (in the case of Anaconda) and emotional heft (Goodbye June). Neither movie did either of those things, so here's my gloss on both them:

Anaconda

The end of the year usually finds critics weighing in on some of the year's more serious offerings, movies that probably will dominate the upcoming awards season. That wouldn't apply to Anaconda. Director Tom Gormican offers the sixth installment of the series, this one starring a usually reliable comedy crew that includes Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Thandiwe Newton, and Steve Zahn. The story revolves around a quartet of  old friends who reunite to rekindle the spark of enthusiasm they felt about the horror movies of their teens. Black, as a director of wedding videos, joins Rudd, as an actor with a dismal career, for a no-budget indie remake of their beloved Anaconda. Along with Newton, as a former high school pal, and Zahn, as another pal and cameraman, the principals head for the Amazon. Selton Mello appears as Santiago, the local hired as the movie's snake handler. Gormican mixes broad comedy and satire about movie cliches, but the movie's laughs may have gotten lost in the jungle, and its additions of horror seem like transfusions of gore into an already lost cause.

Goodbye June

And while we're on the subject of strong casts and weak results, consider Goodbye June, a Christmas movie that marks Kate Winslet's directorial debut. Winslet also appears on screen along with Toni Collette, Andrea Riseborough, and Johnny Flynn. They're siblings dealing with the imminent death from cancer of their mother (Helen Mirren). Dad (Timothy Spall) seems more interested in football and alcohol than in his family. Did I mention that the movie takes place at Christmas time and reaches a sentimental conclusion when grandchildren perform a Christmas play for their dying grandma? This one is meant to jerk tears,  but if I were going to shed any tears, they would be for a cast that deserved better material. No hard feelings, though. These accomplished actors surely will triumph anew.

Despite its ambition ‘Amsterdam’ falls short

      Director David O. Russell doesn’t always make things easy for himself — or for an audience.

      In Amsterdam, Russell aims big, offering a tilted comic take on a serious subject: the volatile political climate in America just after World War I and before World War II. 

    Creating a drama that swirls with plot and artifice in the early going, the story avoids disclosing its point until its final act when Russell not only clarifies what he’s been doing but tacks on an unconvincing message about the importance of love and kindness.

    That’s a mouthful of meaning and Amsterdam can't quite swallow it whole -- even with help from a strong cast that revolves around Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and David Washington.

   Bale, Robbie, and Washington play characters who meet during World War I. Assigned to lead a company of black soldiers, Bale's Dr. Burt Berendsen develops a lasting friendship with Washington’s Harold Woodman, who returns from the war to become a lawyer in New York City.

   After the war, Burt helps combat-disfigured vets reconstruct their faces using replacement parts that cover gaping wounds but have a stitched-together look that, to push a point, reflects the movie’s fractured soul. Berendsen’s patients are patchworks.

   Berendsen also suffered grave war injuries. He has a glass eye that Russell uses in comic fashion, abetted by Bale whose hair rises from his head like a garden of untended weeds.

   Married to a woman (Andrea Riseborough) whose family can't abide his mixed breed (Catholic/Jewish) origins, Burt struggles along until he and Harold are drawn into the mystery that propels the movie -- albeit in fitful fashion. 

  The movie's central trio is supposed to discover who killed their beloved military commander, a decent fellow played by Ed Begley Jr.

   Washington plays things fairly straight. During the war, Harold falls for Robbie’s Valerie Voze, a free-spirited nurse who creates art from shrapnel she removes from the bodies of wounded soldiers.

   In a playful interlude the three main characters travel to Amsterdam to recover from the war. Burt and Harold decide to return home, even though they might have continued to live with joyful abandon in Europe. 

   For a time, it seems that Amsterdam’s production design has been influenced by Wes Anderson, who specializes in creating environments that insist on existing on their own terms.

   Amsterdam features a host of talent in its supporting roles, too many to name here. I’ll highlight a few. Michael Shannon stands out as a CIA agent who works with a British secret agent (Mike Meyers). Bird lovers both, they make a fine comic duo.

   In the movie's third act, Russell introduces Robert De Niro as if he were a hole card being turned over by a gambler late in the game.

   De Niro appears as General Gil Dillenbeck, the most decorated marine in American history. American fascists and Hitler supporters are trying to turn Dillenbeck into a frontman for a coup.

    About three quarters of the way through a journey that sometimes seems mapless,  Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy turn up as the bother and sister-in-law of Robbie’s Valerie.

   Loosely based on real events, the movie eventually whips comedy and thriller elements into a political cautionary tale with obvious relevance to the current political environment in which some view elections as inconveniences.

  Fair to say that Russell needlessly complicated a story that might have benefited from more straightforward telling. Besides this period of American unease has been dealt with elsewhere, notably in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which turned into an even better HBO series.

   For me, the always adventurous Bale and Robbie are the mainstays of a movie that tries to capture the ingrained absurdity of human interactions during moments of high stress. Think the Marx Brothers only not as funny and without the anarchic glee.

  Amsterdam doesn’t match Russell’s best work in movies such as Three Kings and American Hustle. Sure, the performances can be tasty but this oddly realized movie often has the feel of an interesting fellow who answers the doorbell without first pulling himself together.

 

A look at an artist obsessed with cats

 

  In the well-leafed pages of art history, you’d be hard-pressed to find references to an artist whose sole preoccupation was with cats. Louis Wain was such an artist, a man who drew anthropomorphic pictures of cats for newspapers. He became popular for adding humor and color to the day’s drab news.

  In The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, Benedict Cumberbatch immerses in eccentricity as an oddball artist who became increasingly deranged as his life progressed. Wain’s art also became more interesting and adventurous as he aged and retreated into his own world. 

  If you like psychedelic cats, Wain's your man. He might have been first on the block. Look it up.

  Some believed Wain to be schizophrenic. Maybe he was simply demented. Or maybe he fell somewhere on the spectrum of personalities destined to inhabit worlds most of us are content  to visit only in biographical movies.

  Director Will Sharpe makes use of a deeply committed performance from Cumberbatch to bring the artist to life in ways that can be amusing, although the movie never quite makes a case for its existence.  

   Put another way, Electrical Life teeters on the edge of success without ever quite falling over. 

   The story’s key event involves Wain’s marriage to Emily (Claire Foy), a match that scandalized Wain’s five sisters, women who regarded Emily as beneath the family’s station.

   Class distinctions aside, the union enables Wain to separate from his sisters, establishing an independent residence with a woman who tapped into his heretofore neglected capacity for happiness.

   Emily had been working for the family as a tutor to the daughters of the Wain sisters, a group presided over by Caroline (Andrea Riseborough), the oldest and most severe of the sisters.

   Wain's obsession with cats begins when he and Emily save a stray. Life seems good, but as we know, Victorian stories seldom escape misery.

   Emily’s early death from cancer left Wain alone and bereft. Her departure also abandons the movie to Wain's eccentricities and hallucinations, some of which Sharpe brings to life with mixed results.

   The story also highlights Wain’s financial ineptitude; he didn’t seem to care whether publishers took advantage of him. He never bothered to copyright his work. He's the artist of cliche; i.e., one who couldn't be bothered with contracts or terms of compensation.

    Lest we get lost in all of this, a  narration is provided by Olivia Colman, who has been charged with contextualizing the Victorian England in which Wain labored. She also helps clarify the movie’s title: Wain became obsessed with the new science of electricity.

   Several images at the end of the film have hallucinatory beauty that may not exactly fit the rest of the movie but make a pleasurable appearance nonetheless.

   Overall, Electrical Life wavers as it seeks a tone that matches Wain’s eccentricities. The story wears out as it moves through Wain’s massively disheveled life.

    Who knows? I might have liked it better if I weren't a dog person.

Scarred by war, she visits Luxor

 

Sometimes a movie can be so inward-looking it threatens to vanish inside its own navel. That may be the case with Luxor, a movie about a physician who has been emotionally scarred by serving in a Syrian war zone. 

  Luxor is one of those movies in which setting, performance, and atmosphere far outweigh anything that might be considered a plot. 

   Andrea Riseborough plays Hana, a doctor who has chosen to take a bit of R&R in a city whose main tourist attraction consists of ancient tombs and temples, sobering reminders of lost civilizations.

   Director Zeina Durra builds her movie around Riseborough, who conveys deep spiritual fatigue, delivering a solitary aria of self-imposed isolation. 

    The film's main interaction brings Hana into a chance reunion with Sultan (Karim Saleh), a Yale-based archaeologist who's doing a stint in Luxor. 

    Durra hints that Hana may have wanted to see Sultan and we feel as though their relationship once involved a deeper connection than what we're now seeing. 

    But what are we seeing? 

    Hana does touristy things. She has a meaningless but regrettable sexual encounter. She comes to the aid of a woman who passes out while touring a temple. She wanders outside of the luxury hotel where she has taken up temporary residence. She has conversations, mostly initiated by others. 

   Durra makes intermittent use of music, but for the most part, Luxor feels encased in tomb-like quiet with Hana attempting to touch a long-vanished past. 

    Clearly, Hana needs some kind of rebirth before traveling to her next assignment in Yemen.  

    A man of generous spirit, Sultan provides a strong contrast with Hana. Significantly, his memory hasn't been marred as has Hana's. It's as if she's depriving herself of the sensory input that triggers memory, perhaps because for Hana the act of remembering means recalling scenes of unspeakable horror. 

    Honesty compels me to say that I didn't quite know what to make of Luxor. Durra and her cast make the movie seem entirely believable as a portrait of westerners in an Arab country but, for me, its purpose never comes clearly into focus.

    It's possible that Luxor springs from an unresolvable contradiction: It asks us to involve ourselves with a person who’s — at least — temporarily lost her taste for involvement.

An assassin with a strange MO

     Visually arresting and steeped in bloody chills, Possessor does something that many horror movies fail to accomplish. From the start, writer/director Brandon Cronenberg presents us with a strange, forbidding world. There's hardly a moment of Possessor that doesn't sustain its weird, unsettling  mood. Don't look for guideposts.

       (In case you haven’t already guessed, Brandon's father is David Cronenberg, no slouch when it comes to brainy horror.)

       Although Possessor deals with recognizable themes -- identity, privacy, and the link between sex and violence -- it  seldom feels anything less than an expression of high artifice. 

      Take that as a tribute to Cronenberg's skill: Steeped in disorientation, his movie surrounds us like a creepy embrace -- albeit one that's often followed by a piercing knife to the jugular.

     Of course, there's a story. Andrea Riseborough plays Tasya Vos, a woman with a difficult job. Tasya works for Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), proprietor of an odd business. Girder projects Tasya into other people's bodies so that she can carry out assassinations.

     To return from an assignment, Tasya must shoot herself. Once her host body dies, she'll wake up gasping in the room where Girder launches all this body invading.

      I know it sounds crazy, but Cronenberg plays things straight, employing arty effects to show us how these transformations look.

      The main part of the story begins when Tasya is ordered to enter the body of  Colin (Christopher Abbott), a man with an unsavory occupation. Colin spies on others, using a virtual-reality device that relies on cameras planted in places where cameras shouldn't be. 

     The company for which Colin works is run by an arrogant businessman (Sean Bean): Colin is engaged to the man's daughter (Tuppence Middleton). 

     Tasya has three days to use Colin's body to kill both father and daughter, off himself, and return home.

     Thankfully, Cronenberg doesn't overdo the gender confusion that becomes available to him when Tasya occupies a man's body. He wisely leaves it to us to wonder what she's feeling.

      Not surprisingly, things go wrong. Tasya already has shown signs of cracking under the strain of her work. She's separated from her husband (Rossif Sutherland) who has taken over custody of their young son (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot).

     No fair telling more about a plot that takes time revealing itself, sometimes opts for atmosphere over clarity. Know, too, that Cronenberg spills plenty of plasma in the movie's highly stylized displays of violence. 

     Among other things, Cronenberg seems interested in the mind-warping powers inherent in Tasya's job. Tasya must learn to act out the various roles she plays and we're always aware that when we're looking at Colin, Tasya is pulling the strings.

     That's where I'll leave it, except to say that the movie raises  an intriguing question about the perils of performance. If a self becomes too lost, can it ever be recovered?

A KKK zealot finds a measure of redemption

In Burden, a member of the Ku Klux Klan finds redemption when he encounters a black preacher for whom the Klansman poses an extreme test of love and forgiveness. That sounds interesting and, at times, Burden fulfills its promise. Overall, though, the movie — set in a small South Carolina town in 1996 and based on a true story — takes obvious aim at white supremacy and makes us wonder whether the redemption of a Klansman is worth more attention than the stories of those victimized by the organization's hate. Garrett Hedlund gives the year’s twitchiest performance as Mike Burden, a Klansman who earns his living repossessing TVs. Mike is part of a Klan faction that has decided that what his town needs is a KKK museum. A local black clergyman (Forest Whitaker) leads protests against the museum. The museum's founder, a Klan honcho played by Tom Wilkinson, raised the orphaned Mike on a diet of supremacist ideology and white rancor. Director Andrew Heckler doesn’t explain Mike’s distracting shuffle and bobblehead movements until late in the movie, too late to keep them from driving us crazy. Mike’s reformation begins when he meets Judy (Andrea Riseborough), a young mother who has no use for the Klan. Her son plays with black children, just as Mike did when he was a kid. Heckler’s unsteady direction works against involvement in a story that spends too much time in KlanWorld. Tensions between Whitaker’s Reverend David Kelly and his son deserved more attention and I left unconvinced by the movie's suggestion that love conquers hate. How about fair laws, rigorous enforcement, and public condemnation? Just sayin'. Though intermittently effective, Burden stands as an anecdote straining to carry a larger message.

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.

When hope has all but vanished

Andrea Riseborough plays the title character in Nancy, a movie set on a landscape in which love has all but died.

In Nancy, a debut feature from director Christina Choe, all the characters have been made miserable by loss or neglect. Nancy -- the movie's title character -- lives with her demanding mother (Ann Dowd) in a rundown house in a nameless town. Mom's dying of Parkinson's and relies on Nancy to tend to her every need -- small and big acts that Mom accepts without ever showing a trace of gratitude.

Given the roles that Dowd typically plays, her appearance instantly triggers an expectation of bad things to come. Dowd's portrayal of Aunt Lydia in Handmaid's Tale stands as a brutal study of tyrannical conformity. In the recent Hereditary, she played a seemingly compassionate, grief-stricken woman, but -- with Dowd -- we've learned not to trust the surface.

Dowd isn't the main character in Nancy, but she helps to set the movie's bleak mood.

Andrea Riseborough portrays Nancy, a character who makes no effort to be likable or even comprehensible. Nancy invents stories about herself. At one point, she feigns a pregnancy as a means of consoling a grieving man (John Leguizamo) whose infant daughter died a while back.

Leguizamo's character asked to meet Nancy after reading a blog post she wrote. He has no ulterior motives; he only wants to talk to someone who might give him hope, someone with enough faith in life to bring a newborn into it. Even if well-intended at first, Nancy's deception becomes an act of cruelty.

When her mother dies of a stroke, Nancy sees an opening. She attempts to insinuate herself into the lives of a couple (J. Smith-Cameron and Steven Buscemi) who long ago lost a daughter to kidnappers. Having seen the couple discussing their lives in a recent TV interview, Nancy decides to contact them, claiming to be that long lost child.

What unfolds is an intimate exercise in acceptance and delusion, an exploration of grief and diminished hope conducted by a trio of highly skilled actors.

As a professor of literature, Smith-Cameron wants to believe in Nancy. Buscemi's Leo, a psychologist by trade, proves more skeptical, but never aggressively so. It's a pleasure to see Buscemi give a subdued performance as a man who has known pain but has struggled to keep his balance.

Leo orders a DNA test to determine whether Nancy's story is true. But the meat on this movie's bone has little to do with the results of that test. Choe's doesn't aim for pin-point specificity; she doesn't even bother to develop an entirely credible plot. We don't so much watch Nancy as we sink into the bleak lives of its severely damaged characters.

Choe doesn't spell things out; she gives us plenty of room to discover. As a result, Nancy turns out to be a small but troubling movie about the way hope can flicker in lives that have all but abandoned it. Is that flicker a saving grace or the cruelest of delusions? Could it possibly be both?

Vipers in the Soviet hierarchy

Laughs, terror, and dramatic punch mingle in The Death of Stalin.

I can’t think of another movie exactly like The Death of Stalin, which is part of the reason this movie feels so unsettlingly original. Best known for creating HBO’s Veep, director Armando Iannucci gives us a movie in which farcical, dramatic, and satirical elements bump into one another with collision force. If The Death of Stalin ultimately qualifies as a comedy, it's one that refuses to allow us to drop our guards.

If you want an indication of just how daring Iannucci has been, consider this: He has cast Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev. Now, if you were to make a list of actors who might play the table-pounding former head of the Soviet Union, I doubt whether Buscemi’s name would have crossed your mind.

As it turns out, Buscemi does an impressive job portraying an aide to Stalin who eventually rose to a top position in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Buscemi's wily Khrushchev has a sardonic streak that makes it clear that he's not about to be out-maneuvered.

The movie begins when Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) dies at the age of 74, after an evening of gathering his top staff to watch an American western, a ritual they've endured many times before. After his evening with cronies and alone in his room, Stalin drops to the floor. He has just read a note wishing him dead that was sent by a favored Soviet concert pianist (Olga Kurylenko).

Before Stalin expires, we learn that he keeps a list of those he plans to kill — usually for capricious reasons or perhaps for no reason at all. The head of Stalin’s secret police Lavrenti Beria (a frightening Simon Russell Beale) executed (pun intended) Stalin’s orders with a particularly perverse relish. Beria was feared — not only by ordinary folks but by those in Stalin’s inner circle.

Iannucci obtains fine work from the actors who play members of Stalin’s coterie, a group that has been cowed into ceaseless expressions of admiration.

Michael Palin appears as Vyacheslav Molotov, a major Bolshevik figure who unwittingly managed to find his way onto Stalin’s feared hit list. Jason Isaacs has a wonderfully robust turn as Georgy Zhukov, a swaggering Red Army officer with a major World War II record. Jeffrey Tambor appears as Georgy Malenkov, an indecisive “yes” man who succeeds Stalin and who, like a frightened dog, keeps sniffing the air to see if something dangerous might be approaching.

Based on graphic novels by Fabien Nury and Theirry Robin, the movie brims with scorching dialog as the vipers try to navigate the choppy waters of intrigue that begin to roil after Stalin’s death.

It’s never certain which of these men will emerge from the conspiratorial muck. Gradually, it becomes clear that Khrushchev might out-maneuver the rest of the group. He reacts against the worst of Stalin’s excesses, favoring a modicum of reform by freeing political prisoners and putting an end to the hated hit list.

The clash between Khrushchev and Beria takes the form of an epic piece of internecine warfare; Khrushchev's no saint, but Beria's barbarous cruelty and child molestation stand as the corrupted core of Stalin’s insidious regime.

At one point, Stalin’s flustered daughter (Andrea Riseborough) arrives to add an element of hysteria. She’s followed by the entry of Stalin’s massively deluded son (Rupert Friend).

I’ve seen quotes describing The Death of Stalin as hilarious. I didn’t find it hilarious, although much of it is funny.

More importantly, The Death of Stalin is marked by an acute trenchancy, a look at men attempting to fill a sudden power vacuum in ways that illustrate the darker side of their ambitions. It makes us laugh, yes, but this is one comedy that's deadly serious.

A fight for equality or more hype?

Emma Stone and Steve Carell star in Battle of the Sexes, a movie about the much-heralded match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

Battle of the Sexes -- the story of the much-hyped 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs -- isn't exactly a good movie, but it contains interesting work around the fringes.

Bill Pullman, to take one example, steeps his performance in a fully vested sense of privilege as Jack Kramer, a former tennis champ and executive director of the Association of Tennis Professionals. A staunch opponent of the idea that women and men tennis players should earn equal money, Pullman's Kramer stood at the head of the tennis establishment.

Pullman effortlessly imbues every ounce of his performance with an ingrained belief: Women never could equal men on the tennis court. I don't know what the real Kramer was like, but Pullman has been asked to embody the sexist beliefs of a sport that was male-dominated in the 1970s, and he uses the opportunity to deliver a character who has no idea that he's confusing prejudice with fact.

Another fine -- but also minor performance -- in Battle of the Sexes belongs to Elizabeth Shue, who plays Riggs's wife, Priscilla. The scene in which Priscilla dissolves their marriage becomes an exquisite rendering of decisiveness from a woman who understands that Riggs, a compulsive gambler, never will provide the stability she needs. Priscilla tells Riggs the marriage is over with a sense of dignity, authority, and love that's stunning in its compassion.

In line with Shue's performance, the movie treats endangered marriages with a kindness that's quite unusual. Prior to the big match, King's marriage is being tested. She begins a lesbian relationship with her hairdresser. King's husband (Austin Stowell) tries to weather the storm, holding his emotions in check.

It also should be noted that Sarah Silverman has a nice turn as Gladys Heldman, the savvy woman who helped organize and find funding for the women's tour that King and others started.

I know. I haven't said a word about the big match that the movie presents as a pivotal moment in the evolution of the women's movement. I also haven't mentioned that Emma Stone does a credible job as King, although I found myself constantly evaluating her against whatever memories I have of the real person.

With a set of crooked false teeth, Carrel gives an interesting spin to Riggs's life, making him a man whose chauvinism becomes shtick. At the time of the match, Riggs was 55; King was 29. Solely on the basis of his gender, Riggs tried to sell the idea that an aging male tennis star could beat a vibrant young woman with an exceptionally strong game. Riggs, of course, couldn't conquer the difference caused by age, even with a gargantuan supply of vitamin supplements.

You don't get the sense that Riggs totally believed in his chauvinistic rants. He was trying to sell tickets and provide himself with a big payday. For him, the match was an opportunity to put himself into the center ring of a circus -- until, of course, the moment when he realized that he couldn't beat King.

For King the stakes are higher: She wants to prove that women should be treated equally by the tennis authorities. Earlier in the movie, she leads a revolt in which women players withdraw from high-profile tournaments and create their own tour. The issue: equal pay.

Much of the movie (too much, I'd say) is taken up by the budding relationship between King and her hairdresser (Andrea Riseborough). At the time, any hint of gayness would have destroyed King's career, so she was forced to walk a thin line between her emotional needs and her public image.

In part, the movie is hampered by its structure. Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (Little Miss Sunshine) alternate between Riggs and King, a stylistic choice that's equivalent to putting a net between two parts of the narrative and, then, shifting from one side to the other. As a result, Battle of the Sexes can feel as though it's moving sideways instead of gaining forward momentum.

Faris and Dayton do a decent job with the big event, which took place in Houston's Astrodome. The surrounding hoopla almost overwhelmed the actual match, which King won easily.

During the match, the directors show us shots of women rooting for King and middle-aged men looking disconsolate as they realize that their avatar was headed for defeat.

Granted the '70s were a tumultuous time for male/female relations. I know. I was there. But the guys I knew at the time thought the King/Riggs spectacle had less to do with gender barriers than with hype: I didn't take the match seriously enough even to watch the ABC telecast of it.

Working from a script by Simon Beaufoy, the directors must have realized that they had loaded their plates, picking a subject that touches on gay emergence, marital woes, shifting cultural norms, the inflated atmosphere that can surround sports and the desire of some to cash in on all of the above. Faris and Dayton never quite find a tone to encompass the chaos that not only rocked the culture but impacted individual lives.

Put another way, this is one tennis movie that could have used more topspin.

'Oblivion' has an intriguing look

But Tom Cruise's latest doesn't have a plot to match ...
I saw Oblivion at a preview screening at an IMAX theater. I'd have to say that seeing the movie that way made for a heightened viewing experience. Even at that, I can't say that I'd ever had any desire to see a three-story projection of Tom Cruise's face, particularly in a role in which an awful lot of Cruise's acting consists of open-mouthed staring at special effects.

Maybe Cruise shouldn't be blamed. The effects in Oblivion -- directed by Joseph Kosinski of Tron Legacy fame -- offer a lot to tempt wandering eyes. Here's one post-apocalyptic thriller that doesn't look like every other sci-fi movie you've ever seen.

Set on Earth in 2077, Oblivion revolves around a future in which civilization mostly has been destroyed. The planet's population used nuclear weapons to annihilate an invading army of interplanetary thugs, achieving what may be the ultimate in pyrrhic victories. When the movie opens we meet a two-person mop-up crew that has been left to patrol the war-ravaged Earth before they join the rest of the survivors on Titan, a distant moon of Saturn. The team consists of Jack Harper (Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough). The duo periodically checks in with a mission controller (Melissa Leo) who speaks with a folksy southern accent.

Jack and Victoria occupy a home above the clouds that has a spare, ultra-modern look, sort of what you might imagine the creators of the Jetsons would have come up with had they taken themselves seriously.

You'll just about have settled into your seat when Kosinski has Cruise flying around Earth in Top Gun-style, only this time his airborne vehicle looks like a cross between a helicopter, a jet and a drone. Not content with one toy for Cruise, the movie quickly provides Jack with another, a motorcycle that detaches from the body of Harper's aircraft.

And speaking of drones ...

It's just here that Oblivion finds a small measure of topical relevance. Jack's job involves servicing flying weapons the movie calls ... well ... drones. Harper's job: Refuel the drones, which are used to wipe out lingering marauders known as Scavengers or, more familiarly, "Scavs."

The movie's early scenes are devoted to action set pieces, including one that takes place in an abandoned library. Another scene takes us to the top of the Empire State Building, which now sits at ground level. Jack's haunted by memories of pre-war New York City, but doesn't know what to make of them. He knows every detail of the last Super Bowl, which he tells us was played in 2017. He wears a Yankee baseball cap, and evidently has given up shaving on a regular basis.

The plot -- which can be confusing -- takes a strange turn when Harper discovers a crashed ship during one of his Earth patrols. The crew has been scattered about in coffin-like containers where they've been "sleeping" for an extended period, presumably because they were supposed to make a lengthy space flight. Harper is able to rescue one member of the crew.

I guess if you had to pick one crew member to save, you could do worse than the beautiful Olga Kurylenko, last seen in Terrence Malick's To the Wonder. Kurylenko's Julia seems to have some sort of connection with Jack.

Jack, of course, must be portrayed as having a few special traits. Perhaps that's why he savors a book that he finds on one of his missions, a copy of Thomas Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. Jack's particularly drawn to line about how to die a noble death.

If you've seen the trailer for Oblivion, you know that a cigar-chomping Morgan Freeman appears in the movie. Best not to explain Freeman's role in the story, but his character eventually helps drive the plot toward its muddled and disappointing destination.

Because the movie's primary pleasures are visual, it's worth mentioning that cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who also did Life of Pi, contributes to the movie's allure -- although Oblivion's considerable visual pleasures become somewhat repetitive as the action unfolds.

So what goes wrong? The troubles seem to have started at the typewriter; i.e., with the screenplay by Karl Gajdusek and Michael DeBruyn, who based their work on a graphic novel and original story by Kosinski. The various plot machinations often defy logic, and the movie includes an epilogue that struck me as a cheat.

I also wish that Cruise would find something else to do aside from big-budget extravaganzas that can undermine their intelligence with dumb dialogue (Oblivion has its share) and obligatory action. But that, I'm afraid, takes us out of the realm of science fiction and into the realm of hopeless fantasy.

An affair remembered -- but not well

If you enjoy hating Madonna, a pursuit many seem to regard as a kind of moral obligation, you'll definitely be put off by W.E., Madonna's look at the relationship between divorcee Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII. Wallis and Edward's world-shaking affair led Edward to abdicate the throne in 1936. He claimed that he could not rule without the woman he loved at his side.

If you're not a Madonna hater -- and I'm not -- you still may be disappointed by Madonna's directorial effort, a lavishly empty attempt to say something (I'm not sure what) about obsessive love.

Perhaps fearing that the Simpson/Edward relationship -- shown briefly in The King's Speech -- has lost its sensational luster, Madonna and screenwriter Alek Keshishian juxtapose it with a story that takes place in 1998: A young married woman -- in the throes of a bad marriage -- becomes obsessed with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

It's just here that the movie falls apart: The movie's two stories do not seem to inform or enhance each other, and taken on their own, the Manhattan segments aren't all that intriguing.

Nothing wrong with Madonna's casting: Andrea Riseborough, who plays Simpson, may be more attractive than her real-life counterpart, but she conveys Simpson's troubling mixture of ambition and confusion. Edward (James D'Arcy) comes across as something of a lightweight.

Abbie Cornish also acquits herself well as a Manhattan woman who's fascinated by items once owned by Simpson and Edward, possessions that are being auctioned off as the story unfolds. Cornish's Wally Winthrop strikes up a relationship with an auction house security guard (Oscar Isaac). He arranges for her to have private viewings, and becomes romantically interested in her.

Madonna seems to have spared little expense in capturing the formal but slightly decadent ambiance around Edward, but W.E. seems more self-consciously arty than it needs to be.

I've read British reviews of W.E. that take Madonna to task for not doing more to show that the fashion-conscious Simpson wanted to catch a king. In this version, it's Edward who pushes for marriage.

I don't know if that criticism is justified, but I do know that W.E. stands as a stylish mediocrity that definitely could have benefited from some of the flashy/trashy wit Madonna brings to her stage shows.