Dinklage gives 'Cyrano' wit, heart, and bite

   Some characters never vanish. Consider Cyrano de Bergerac. The witty, eloquent outsider has been pining for Roxanne  since Edmond Rostand's play debuted in 1897. 

   Feelings of inadequacy keep Cyrano from confessing his love for Roxanne. Instead, he tries to win her for Christian, a handsome soldier who lacks the necessary poetic skills for inspired wooing. Cyrano writes beautiful letters for Christian.

    A variety of versions of Rostand’s play have made it to the screen. Steve Martin appeared in Roxanne (1987) and Gerard Depardieu proved memorable in Cyrano de Bergerac, a 1990 French version. A 1950 entry starring Jose Ferrer and Mala Powers -- the first one I saw -- occasionally turns up on TV.

     Typically,  Cyrano believes that his large nose excludes him from harvesting the fruits of love.  He lives in a world in which appearances matter.

    In director Joe Wright’s addition to the de Bergerac canon, Peter Dinklage makes a smart, cocky Cyrano who believes that his diminutive stature (not his nose) overrules his consummate wit and intelligence -- not to mention his skill with a sword.

      Cyrano, therefore, demurs when it comes to courting the beautiful, brilliant Roxanne (Haley Bennett) -- albeit not without a measure of resentment.    

       The first requirement of  any production of Cyrano: The actor who plays Cyrano must be good. 

     Dinklage proves a worthy Cyrano. An opening scene in which Cyrano banishes a bad actor from the stage brims with gusto and imagination, giving Dinklage the entrance the character deserves.

     Not surprisingly, Wright hasn't neglected the movie's looks. Period trappings are gorgeously rendered and cinematographer  Seamus McGarvey floods the screen with color. 

       All good, but Cyrano is also a musical based on a stage production written by Erica Schmidt, who also wrote the screenplay for the movie.

       Yes, a musical. I didn't mention it earlier because I've hardly thought about the music since I saw the movie.

       The tunes by Bryce and Aaron Dessner (lyrics by Matt Berninger and Carin Besser) can feel almost prosaic, unlike what we might expect to hear in 17th Century France. Perhaps this is because the lyrics are tailored for actors who aren't all singers. Maybe the music had more impact when performed live on stage.

     Whatever the case, the actors sketch their characters with ease and flair. It's the performances not the music that stick.

     Bennett creates a vibrant Roxanne,  a woman of beauty and wit. Ben Mendelsohn earns his villainous stripes as the conniving Duke De Guiche. Kelvin Harrison Jr. winningly portrays a clueless, handsome, and, ultimately, noble Christian.

    Bashir Salahuddin plays Cyrano's friend and confidant, a comrade who appreciates Cyrano's gifts.

     Like its main character, the story endures. It's not for nothing that it has been re-told so many times. Even with its farcical moments and darker turns, Cyrano always retains some charm. 

     So, if you’re looking for a single reason to see Cyrano, try this: Dinklage's portrayal -- angry, rueful, and sad -- is bound to earn him a well-deserved Oscar nomination. 

     The music may not burn its way into memory, but Dinklage gives Cyrano a taste of bitterness that stings.

Bob's Cinema Diary 6/23/20: 'Babyteeth,' 'Wasp Network,' 'Daddy Issues'

Babyteeth 

Talk about a parental nightmare. Your 16-year-old daughter falls for a 23-year-old drug user without a home. He's tattooed, sports a mullet, and doesn't seem to give a damn about anything. His name is Moses. That's the set-up for director Shannon Murphy's Babyteeth. But wait. There's more. Milla (Eliza Scanlen), the teenager in question, is no ordinary kid. She's got terminal cancer. So Milla's parents (Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn) face a problem. How do you say "no" to a kid who can't ruin her future because she doesn't have one?  Another teenage weepy about a kid with a terminal disease? Not exactly. Working from a screenplay by Rita Kalnejais, Murphy adds whimsical stylistic flourishes and enough emotional realism to upset expectations. A pianist who abandoned her musical career, Mom is about to drown in deep emotional waters. A psychiatrist by trade, Dad is so overcome with trepidation about what looms that at one point he gives himself a shot of morphine. Parental performances are strong but the movie belongs to Scanlen and Toby Wallace.  Wallace gives Moses lots of rough appeal. You never doubt that a good kid lurks beneath Moses' bad-kid surface. Babyteeth is the kind of movie you might approach with dread, but one that turns out to be more creative than you initially might have imagined. None of the characters want to be boxed-in by cliche. If Scanlen's name rings a bell, it might be because she played Beth in Little Women, one of last year's best-received movies.

Wasp Network

If you're looking for a good movie by director Olivier Assayas, you might want to try 2005's Summer Hours. I wish the same could be said for Assay's latest, Wasp Network, now showing on Netflix. Having already teamed with Assayas in 2010's Carlos, Edgar Ramirez plays a Cuban who in the 1990s leaves his wife (Penelope Cruz) and daughter to defect to the US. As we later learn, Ramirez's Rene Gonzalez is part of a Castro-conceived program to infiltrate Miami Cuban circles that carry out oppositional activities against the regime. A muddled narrative brings the so-called Wasp Network program to light, introducing two additional characters. Gael Garcia Bernal portrays team leader Gerardo Hernandez and Wagner Moura portrays a slick operative who takes a Cuban-American wife (Ana de Armas). Assayas seems to be aiming for epic scope, but can't put the pieces of the movie together in a way that staves off confusion. Although she doesn't get as much screen time as the men, Cruz makes a strong impression as a woman wounded by her husband's defection and betrayed by the revolution she avidly supports. The same goes for de Armas, another woman whose life becomes collateral damage as the plot unfolds. The performances are all strong, some of its scenes connect and the movie looks great, but Wasp Network registers as a misfire from a fine director and an extremely good cast.

Daddy Issues
Henrietta (Kimberley Datnow) moves from London to Los Angeles when she's summoned to join the board of her late father's firm. It seems that Henrietta -- who aspires to be a stand-up comic -- once lived with her dad and attended school in LA. That’s convenient because Henrietta has friends from back in the day, which means the movie has a supporting cast. Alice (Alice Carroll Johnson), one of Henrietta’s old pals, tries to convince a small group of reunited friends that she's a successful talent agent. In reality, she's a gay woman trying to make ends meet by providing non-sexual companionship for a benevolent Sugar Daddy who misses his late wife and only seems to want someone with whom he can watch TV. When Henrietta moves into her father's LA house, she learns that Nolan (Tanner Rittenhouse) also lives there. He works for dad's company and developed a relationship in which Dad became a kind of mentor. Henrietta's attempt to reunite with an old boyfriend goes nowhere. Director Laura Holliday never convinced me to care about any of this or to believe that Henrietta had real comedy chops. That would have been fine had Daddy Issues been a movie about the difference between wanting to do stand-up and actually pulling it off. Somewhere, there’s a movie here, but no one seems to have found it.

A less-than-marvelous ‘Captain Marvel’

Marvel's female superhero tries to work her way out of a frenzied movie.

Brie Larson is up to the task of playing Captain Marvel, a welcome female entry into Marvel Comics’ galaxy of superheroes. But -- and this is a major "but" -- the rest of Captain Marvel is a scattered, frenetic effort that jams action and backstory together without a great deal of finesse.

Even the movie's attempts at humor -- which arrive in the form of retro flashes from the 1990s -- tally only mixed results when it comes to brightening the proceedings.

One never entirely knows the reasons a movie goes wrong, but judging from a preview screening of Captain Marvel, I'd speculate that this effects-laden helping of Marvel mania was co-directed by a couple of filmmakers (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck) whose indie cred from movies such as Half Nelson and Sugar didn't easily transfer to a major studio production.

Summarizing the plot poses a challenge for reviewers because any such attempt must be extracted from the bric-a-brac that sometimes feels tossed at the screen. Larson portrays a former US fighter pilot who will -- over the course of this origins story -- emerge as Captain Marvel, a hybrid of human and Kree (i.e., alien) biochemistry.

Jude Law portrays Yon-Rogg, a Kree who tries to teach Larson's character how to harness energy that she fires in undisciplined bursts from her fists.

There's conflict, of course. The Kree, it seems, are battling the Skrull, a rubber-faced collection of aliens who travel to Earth under the guidance of Talos, a heavily disguised Ben Mendelsohn who brings a bit of winking humor and happily jaded line readings to his role. I say "winking," although I'm not sure the heavy make-up allows much by way of facial movement.

As the plot leaps from battle-to-battle, Larson's character also lands in the U.S. where she picks up an ally, Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury, a familiar figure from the Avengers movies. Larson's Carol Danvers also reunites with her former best friend, another fighter pilot played by Lashana Lynch. A single mom, Lynch's Maria Rambeau has a daughter (Akira Akbar) who, at a crucial point in the plot, cheers Carol on.

Carol, who reaches Earth during the mid-90s, has lost any memory of having spent time on beleaguered earthly soil before awakening on the planet where the Kree hang out. Eventually, we'll learn how she got from to the good old USA to the home of the Kree, but the question doesn't exactly compel intrigue.

Minor pleasures arise. It’s of some interest to discover more about Jackson's Nick Fury, who in this edition displays a tight cap of hair. Annette Bening turns up as a character called Supreme Intelligence. I'll pass on any attempt at a joke. Too easy.

One of the movie's problems involves the abrupt way it handles its back story, introducing Carol's past in intermittent flashbacks that can prove as disorienting as they are revealing.

As is the case with many comic book extravaganzas, the movie leans heavily on effects -- albeit, in this instance, with the approximate elegance of a drunk seeking support from a lamp post. Many of the effects seem to involve flashing bolts of energy. At various times, the characters chase a device known as the "energy core,'' which is hidden in a lunchbox boasting a picture of the Fonz from the Happy Days era.

This energy core emits great power; perhaps it's responsible for discombobulating the story and keeping the movie's action sequences from cohering in any way that might be called thrilling.

Captain Marvel tries to zip and zap its way into the pop-cultural canon dropping jokey references to such bygone stalwarts as Blockbuster stores along the way. Some, I suppose, will enjoy the frenzy, but for me, the point turns out to be inadvertent: Incessant movement doesn't necessarily get you anywhere.

Trying to conquer a virtual world

Steven Spielberg brings plenty of visual spark to Ready Player One. The story? Less than spectacular.

In Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ready Player One -- Ernest Cline’s popular 2011 novel -- almost everyone obsesses about virtual reality.

Why are so many in need of so much escapism? Because the movie takes place in the dystopian year of 1945 and reality sucks: Suffering from all manner of deprivation, folks are forced to live in the Stacks, trailers piled atop one another in tenement fashion.

Not surprisingly, the downtrodden residents of Columbus, Ohio -- the movie's main real-world setting -- don headgear and special gloves as they try to experience excitement through personal avatars that travel around a virtual universe known as the Oasis.

The book has major fans and I'm guessing that they'll mostly enjoy Spielberg's movie.

Speaking for myself, I’d put it this way. In Ready Player One, the side trips are significantly more rewarding than the main story, which puts a youthful resident of Columbus (Tye Sheridan) in the middle of a high-stakes video game inside the Oasis.

Sheridan's Wade Watts -- make that his avatar Parzival -- sifts through clues as he searches for three keys. Should Parzival acquire all three, Wade will inherit ownership of the Oasis, thus saving everyone's favorite synthetic playground from the clutches of IOI, an evil corporation that wants to monetize the Oasis experience. A greedy corporate shark (Ben Mendelsohn) runs IOI.

I should point out that these side trips really are the point of a movie that tells a story that never seems all that momentous. Minute-by-minute, the stakes in Ready Player One feel significantly higher than what happens at the end of the movie's 140 minutes.

It’s also possible to look at Ready Player One as Spielberg's chance to command a broad swath of the pre-summer market. Visually sophisticated and full of invention, the movie harkens back to one of Spielberg’s career sweet spots: the 1980s.

Conveniently, James Halliday (Mark Rylance) -- the man who designed the Oasis -- was deeply immersed in ‘80s popular culture, so much so that he loaded his virtual creation with references to it. You'll find nods to Back to the Future, The Shining (one of the movie’s best and most amusing set pieces), Duran Duran and … oh, well … you get the idea. There's lots of '80s stuff.

When the story kicks off, Rylance's Halliday, who set up the game in the first place, has been dead for five years. A skilled Oasis gamer, Wade wants to own the Oasis, not just for himself but for all who would resist IOI's insidious corporate intrusion into everyone's personal headspace.

Inside the Oasis, Wade meets Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), a sexy, spunky avatar who immediately captures his heart. He also has other virtual allies, notably the gruff but inventive Aech, a giant-sized man who looks like he wandered into the movie from a Marvel Comic.

Some of the movie's action is fun, notably an early-picture car race that Spielberg mounts with tipsy fury. Imagine speeding along a road when the road suddenly comes to an abrupt end or when King Kong leaps off a building and tries to crush your vehicle.

For me, Ready Player One's third — and needlessly protracted final act — took a bit of the gleam off the movie’s virtual shine. Spielberg brings real life and virtual reality together. Real-life gamers must meet people they've known only as avatars. All of this builds toward massive battles as Wade seeks his triumph. Really? Noisy battles are the best the movie can do?

As difficult as it must have been to create Ready Player One's teeming visual environment, it’s also true that the movie lacks the sophisticated spin of the best sci-fi, something that couldn’t be said of Spielberg’s work in A.I. or Minority Report.

In the end, Ready Player One predictably endorses reality over virtual fantasy, although almost nothing about the movie suggests that anyone involved with this massive project really believes that.

Obviously, Spielberg is no slouch when it comes to handling gigantic projects. He keeps the action coherent, jams images with information without getting lost in them and propels his characters through the movie's effects.

So enjoy the side trips for as long as you can. This is one movie in which the ride definitely beats arrival at the final destination.

Gary Oldman's finest hour

An actor's portrayal of Winston Churchill carries Darkest Hour to victory.

The most striking thing about Darkest Hour, the story of how Britain teetered on the edge of defeat in World War II but regained its moral resolve, involves Gary Oldman's make-up and performance as Winston Churchill. Although he seems the least likely of actors to tackle Churchill, Oldman and makeup artist Kazuhiro Tsuji pull off a near miracle. They give us a Churchill who's domineering, insecure and witty, but also a man sagging as the weight of decision falls on his shoulders.

There aren't many sure bets these days, but it seems certain that Oldman will be nominated for a best-actor Oscar for what he has done in a movie directed by Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina).

Wright directs with a sure if somewhat heavy hand, underscoring the momentous nature of nearly everything that happens in Darkest Hour. The major question before Churchill and his war cabinet: Should Britain negotiate some sort of peace agreement with Herr Hitler, as Churchill refers to the Austrian paperhanger?

The alternative: battle until victorious or until the last British warrior falls.

We all know how the story turns out, but at its best, Darkest Hour -- which depicts some of the events leading up to the civilian evacuation of British soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk -- reminds us that history only looks inevitable when viewed through a rearview mirror.

In 1940, it was by no means certain that Britain could withstand the German onslaught. The US had yet to enter the war, and Hitler's armies were toppling one European country after another.

Audiences that have seen Dunkirk already are prepped for Wright's movie, which recreates behind-the-scenes haggling among the anti-Churchill forces. Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup), who Churchill replaced as Prime Minister, wanted to stave off destruction by negotiating with Hitler. Stephen Dillane appears as Viscount Halifax, a Chamberlain ally who was even more anxious to capitulate than his friend.

King George VI (in a fine, subtle performance from Ben Mendelsohn) had doubts about Churchill, whom he both feared and mistrusted -- at least during the early days of Churchill's Prime Ministership.

Wright doesn't pay a great deal of attention to the women in Churchill's life. His wife Clementine (Kristin Scott Thomas) bolsters Churchill's ego when it begins to flag. Lily James plays Elizabeth Layton, Churchill's secretary, a young woman he initially intimidates but whom Churchill eventually sees in human terms.

Some scenes are as hokey as Churchill is bombastic. Besieged by doubts late in the movie, Churchill takes a ride on the underground (supposedly his first ever) to mingle with the people, listen to their views and draw on their strength.

Of course, Churchill was a large man -- both physically and in importance. The movie is at its best when Oldman delivers important Churchill speeches ("We shall fight on the beaches, etc.") and when peppering his performance with Churchill's many peculiarities: He couldn't abide single-spaced typing, drank whiskey with his breakfast and throughout the day and seldom could be seen without a cigar.

So the verdict is mildly mixed. Darkest Hour isn't as great as the historical moment it depicts but Oldman's performance certainly rises to the occasion.

War? What's it good for? A 'Star Wars' movie that pits rebels against the Death Star

Rogue One may stand alone, but it doesn't stand above the best Star Wars movies.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story takes place at a time when The Empire, imperial source of all evil, is in the process of constructing a Death Star, a weapon so powerful it can destroy entire planets.

As familiar as that may sound, Rogue One turns out to be a slightly different kind of Star Wars adventure. Production notes for the movie describe it as a stand-alone effort -- albeit one that's meant to fit into the Star Wars universe.

Led by director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Monsters), the Disney team takes us on a less-than-epic tour of a darkly hued Star Wars world. We meet a ragtag group of rebels that fights the massive Empire, but the movie mostly takes the twinkle out of Star Wars' eyes, opting instead for a battle-heavy extravaganza with stunt-and-grunt impact.

Felicity Jones plays Jyn Erso, a young woman whose father was a scientist who tried to hide from the Empire but later was captured and forced to work on the Death Star. When the movie opens, Jyn and her father (Mads Mikkelsen) are living in isolation on a remote planet.

Troops from the Empire swoop in, kill Jyn's mom and take Dad prisoner. Jyn escapes, and grows into a young woman who's recruited by rebels.

Cinematographer Grieg Fraser (Zero Dark Thirty, Foxcatcher) seems to prefer dark imagery that often obscures the actors, which isn't altogether bad considering that Jones's performance feels a bit muted. She's the latest version of a female protagonist who can handle herself -- and others.

Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) leads the rebel mission which is supposed to locate Jyn's father. Neither Cassian nor Jyn initially wants anything to do with the other; it's not providing anything by way of spoilers to say that their relationship evolves -- although it doesn't ignite much by way of sparks.

The other characters include Chirrut (Donnie Yen), a blind monk who knows how to use The Force. Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen) serves as Chirrut's less well-kempt pal.

Other characters include the morally ambivalent Bodhi (Riz Ahmed), and K-2SO, a long-armed droid voiced by Alan Tudyk with 3-CPO intonations. K-2SO comes closest to giving the movie a big of comic spin. It tells you something about this massive enterprise that the character with the most humor is a droid.

The opening of the movie does a bit of confusing planet hopping, before explaining the role that's being played by an oxygen-snorting character portrayed by Forest Whitaker.

You'll also see brief appearances from Darth Vader, but the evil Empire mostly falls under the leadership of Krennic, who appears in a white cape and is played by the always menacing Ben Mendelsohn.

Alien creatures also appear, but this time, few are played for laughs.

I always get a bit lost in Star Wars jargon, so forgive me if I'm wrong in saying the planet Jedha is where much of the movie's explosive urban warfare takes place. A climactic battle is set on Scarif, a planet with beaches and palm trees that give the movie a war-in-the-Pacific flavor.

By the end, Edwards pretty much turns Rogue One into an action blur (on the ground and in space), an interminable battle in which, among other things, space ships and space stations ram into one another with brute force, but without much by way of the rousing thrills.

References to predecessor movies let us know that we are, indeed, in the Star Wars universe, and Rogue One definitely benefits from the association. I'm not sure how it would fare as separate hunk of sci-fi. Probably not so well.

Edwards evidently wanted a bit of war-movie verisimilitude to characterize this journey into the Star Wars universe. That doesn't mean there's no zap and pow to the battles, but it makes you wonder whether the filmmakers have had a memory lapse. Isn't Star Wars supposed to be a fantasy -- telling but still a fantasy?

Oh well, the Star Wars canon is vast, and more movies are planned. But for all its huffing and puffing, this one only intermittently feels like a full-blown helping of deep-space fun.

One thing you can bet on: Devotees don't much care what critics think and will spend lots of time hashing this one out among themselves. If you've grown past that point in your life, I wouldn't say Rogue One, though hardly a bad movie, offers sufficient reason not to get on with other business.

Tension on a rundown submarine

Jude Law leads a group of rogues on an undersea adventure.

Black Sea, the latest in a long line of submarine thrillers, has the ragged feel of a B movie, not necessarily a bad thing. Once you give up the idea that you're watching another over-hyped thriller, you can relax and enjoy the tension that inevitably builds when men -- especially greedy men -- are jammed into cramped spaces.

Populated by unwashed Russian and British men on a treasure hunt, Black Sea unapologetically dives into action, ratcheting up pressure as the crew faces danger: from the sea and from one another.

Led by a disaffected, unemployed submariner (Jude Law), these crew members bicker, allow greed to conquer their better impulses and deal with a steady stream of life-threatening situations.

The goal: To retrieve a fortune in Nazi gold from a German U-Boat that has been languishing at the bottom of the sea since the end of World War II.

Law's Robinson learns about the treasure from a former shipmate. He then meets with an American (Scoot McNair) who works for a wealthy tycoon who agrees to finance the mission for 40 percent of the haul.

Law's Robinson accepts the terms, but champions equality among the men: He insists that the crew divide its share of the loot equally.

In a movie that takes a dim, genre-appropriate view of human nature, it's hardly surprising that some of the crew members think they deserve bigger shares than others.

It's possible to regard the movie's submarine as another character. A rusty, wreck of a Russian vessel, the sub had been left to rot off the Crimean coast. It has the look of a low-tech, submersible boiler room.

The Russian sailors are jumpy from the outset. They object to the fact that Law's Robinson has brought an inexperienced young man (Bobby Schofield) on board. The Russians think the 18-year-old is bad luck because they believe (incorrectly) that he's a virgin. He is, of course, a novice at sea.

Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland and Touching the Void) efficiently builds tension, particularly in a sequence in which several crew members leave the sub to retrieve a drive-shaft from an abandoned U-boat. This dangerous maneuver is the sub's only hope of getting off the bottom, where it has unceremoniously crashed.

Why isn't Black Sea a perfect deep-sea saga?

Several reasons: Anyone familiar with Ben Mendelsohn, who plays one of the crew members, knows that this edgy Australian actor has cornered the market on loose-cannon characters. To make the matters even more obvious, we often see Mendelsohn's Fraser toying with a knife.

Put another way, the movie can't help but telegraph the moment when Fraser will turn violent.

That bit of predictability aside, the screenplay by Dennis Kelly is burdened by occasional sprays of lame dialogue, and it's not easy to accept Robinson's transition from a down-and-out working man to a kind of crazed Captain Ahab.

About that working-man angle: Black Sea isn't as convincing as a lower-class anthem as it is as a cinematic pressure cooker, but it does take a swing at working-class resentment.

At the outset, Robinson loses his job on a salvage submarine. His 20-year devotion to a single company cost him his wife (Jodie Whittaker) and young son. Penniless and put upon, he sees himself as a victim of bankers and corporate types made rich by working stiffs who ultimately are played for suckers.

OK, so Black Sea isn't perfect, but it's good enough. Darkly hued and making the most of the sub's claustrophobic chambers, Black Sea offers the kind of thrills that arrive coated with grease, sweat and, of course, desperation.

Escaping bondage -- with help

Ridley Scott directs, Christian Bale plays Moses and the Hebrews flee.

If I were able to talk to Ridley Scott, who directed Exodus: Gods and Kings -- a 3-D rendering of one of the best-known Bible stories -- I'd ask him what on Earth (or under the heavens) attracted him to the material.

It's a question the movie itself never entirely answers.

Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments combined gaudy spectacle with an Americanized freedom agenda as the benighted children of Israel -- with a snarling Edward G. Robinson in tow -- fled 400 years of bondage in Egypt.

Scott downplays the story's religious/spiritual aspects, but doesn't find enough by way of replacement. I'm no literalist when it comes to Bible stories so I have no problem with an artist using the Bible's rich and venerable stories as a springboard for an interpretive statement.

But in skipping some of the key ingredients of the story -- serial confrontations between Moses and Pharaoh, for example -- Scott not only makes an interpretive choice: He abandons some of the story's most fertile dramatic ground.

Gods and Kings makes masterful use of CGI to create great battles (Egyptians vs. Hittites), the fabled plagues -- frogs, boils, rivers turned to blood, etc. -- and, of course, the parting of the Red Sea. It would be shocking if a 21st Century filmmaker couldn't outdo DeMille in the effects department. Scott clearly does.

But then there's the rest of the movie ....

I suppose the movie's most controversial element involves Scott's depiction of God, the prime mover in the Exodus narrative. Turns out that Moses sees God as a shepherd boy (Isaac Andrews) with a close-cropped hair, a British accent and a confrontational attitude.

This vision -- it should be noted -- may be a hallucination, an image resulting from a rock slide that beans Moses and leaves him buried under a ton of mud.

Hallucination or not, the relationship between God and Moses sometimes gets testy. They argue about such details as whether God has gone too far over the top with the plagues, particularly the final one which takes the lives of the first born of all the Egyptians, including Pharaoh's son.

Are we supposed to find irony in the fact that mighty Pharaoh is undone by a child whose voice has yet to change?

Then there's Moses himself. Poor Christian Bale. Any actor who tackles this kind of iconic role must pit himself against the cumulative weight of centuries of western art and kitsch -- from Michelangelo to Charlton Heston.

Bale opts for a contemporary interpretation, aided by language in a script by a quartet of credited writers (Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian) that does its best to avoid any trace of poetry. The movie treats Moses as a warrior/general and early action hero.

Moses's greatest internal struggle seems to revolve around his initial inability to accept his ethnic origins as a Hebrew, but even that conflict lacks much by way of urgency.

Joel Edgerton plays the movie's other key figure: Ramses. With a bulbous shaved head, Edgerton more resembles Kojack than a king.

Perhaps in an effort to give Ramses a bit of shading, he's presented as a cruel man, but one who loves his son and who sometimes seems confounded, particularly when his own priests and priestesses are unable to stem the tide of so many vicious plagues.

What's a Pharaoh to do? Grumble and, on at least one occasion, play with his pet snakes.

The rest of the cast largely is reduced to non-entity status. That would include Aaron Paul as Joshua, and Andrew Tarbet as Aaron, key figures in the story who are reduced to ... well ... almost nothing.

John Turturro makes an interesting Seti, Rhamses's father, a god/king who prefers Moses to his own son. Blink and you'll miss Sigourney Weaver as Seti's duplicitous wife.

Ben Kingsley makes a bit of an impression as Nun, a wise old Hebrew slave who knows Moses's true identity.

The always interesting Ben Mendelsohn brings a seamy twist to the role of Hegep, a conniving Egyptian who exposes Moses as a Hebrew, the development that pushes Moses into exile where he meets his wife (Maria Valverde), a woman made to look like a Bedouin princess.

Beset by structural flaws, including a tendency not to build toward the story's key events, Scott's Exodus shortchanges both the spiritual and political relevancies of a story that still resonates on many levels. The movie doesn't exactly break new ground as an action/adventure, either.

Most memorable shot: An upward look at the corpses of Egyptian soldiers floating in the Red Sea after the Hebrews have reached safety.

So what are we left with? At times, Moses seems like an actor who can't quite find a center for his portrayal -- or maybe that's Bale. Ramses can come off as a bit of a schlub, and God seems like a cosmic spoilsport.

When Moses reunites with his wife after his Egyptian exploits, she quite reasonably asks about the throngs who are traveling with him.

Who are they?

My people, says Moses, demonstrating that he finally has accepted his true identity.

What else to say but, "Mazel tov, Moses." Or maybe, where's Mel Brooks when we need him?

The fury of men behind bars

The accents may be difficult, but the message is clear.

By the time 19-year-old Eric Love arrives in an adult prison, he's already been schooled in brutality. Eric, the main figure in the hard-as-nails British movie Starred Up, has an explosive temper that leads him to acts of extreme violence. He's a young man who has had to spend most of his short life defending himself -- often in the most violent possible ways.

The term "starred up," by the way, refers to being sent to a maximum security prison at a tender age. That's a bit of British slang in a movie with accents so thick, you may find yourself wishing for subtitles. No matter. You'll get the gist.

At first impassive, Eric -- brilliantly played by Jack O'Connell in a shockingly physical performance -- quickly lets us know that he's defiant and uncontrollable. Eric also understands the dangerous environment into which he has been thrust. As soon as he reaches his cell, he makes a weapon out of his prison-issued toothbrush and razor.

We're not sure what landed Eric in jail, but whatever it was couldn't have been worth it. The prison is full of tough men and corrupted officials. Only a lone therapist (Rupert Friend) makes any attempt at rehabilitating lost souls. Friend's character believes that some prisoners can change and that Eric is young enough to be one of them.

Once director David Mackenzie and screenwriter Jonathan Asser establish the prison environment, they begin telling a story in which another prisoner tries to control Eric. He happens to be Eric's real father (Ben Mendelsohn), a man who's apparently serving a life sentence. Mendelsohn's Neville Love had little to do with raising his son, who grew up in institutional settings where he was abused.

Mendelsohn, who first came to international attention in the Australian film Animal Kingdom, displays the simmering frustration of a father who wants to protect his son, but who hardly knows the kid whose violent outbursts make you shudder.

In one of his super-tantrums, Eric bites into the crotch of a prison guard, and refuses to let go.

Two men seem to rule the prison. An indifferent warden (Sam Spruell) and a top con (Peter Ferinando). Together, they conspire to keep the lid on, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not.

We're thrown into this raging stew along with Eric, who gradually becomes the center of what might be described as the world's toughest coming-of-age story.

There's no sentiment in this hard-boiled world. But the more we see of this grim prison, the more we realize Mackenzie wants to pose fundamental questions about whether a man's humanity totally can be destroyed.

Starred Up tends to make us feel as caged as its prisoners: Put another way: I've seldom been so glad to see a gripping, admirable movie come to an end.

Fathers and sons in Upstate N.Y.

The Place Beyond the Pines has powerful moments, but doesn't always add up.
Just about anyone who sees director Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines should agree that Cianfance is a talented and ambitious filmmaker. Cianfrance's third feature -- a look at three generations of men in downtrodden Schenectady, N.Y. -- has moments that pulsate with the energy of a filmmaker driven to infuse his story with vividly realized life.

If you had a chance to meet Cianfrance (as I have on several occasions dating back to 1998), you'd know that he's a principled filmmaker who tries (and often succeeds) to wring hard-won truth from every moment in this films.

Co-written with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder, Cianfrance's latest movie has plenty to recommend it, even though it can't quite match the ambition that went into creating what the director calls a "triptych," a look at the impact of fathers on sons in three loosely related acts.

The movie's shortcomings can be attributed to a bit of imaginative depletion in its second act, to a casting misstep in its third, and, perhaps to a generalized over-emphasis on authenticity of milieu, sometimes at the expense of enduring insight.

That's not to say that Cianfrance's achievement is negligible. There's enough good work in The Place Beyond the Pines (the Mohawk name for Schenectady) to make it a worthy follow-up to Cianfrance's widely praised Blue Valentine. For the most part, Cianfrance finds ways to encourage his cast to plunge headlong into risky emotional terrain.

Like Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines benefits from the presence of Ryan Gosling, who this time plays Luke, a heavily tattooed motorcycle stunt rider who -- during an annual visit to Schenectady with a carnival -- learns that he has a son with a woman (Eva Mendes) with whom he had a fling.

With the movie's bravura opening shot, Cianfrance makes it clear that Luke's life is going nowhere. We follow Luke into a metal cage where he rides his motorcycle in circles, a death defying carnival stunt that serves as a metaphor for a life of trapped fury.

When Luke learns that he has a son, he quits the carnival and commits himself to taking care of the boy, a task for which he's ill-suited.

At a loss about how to function in "normal" life, Luke's future changes when he meets Robin (a scary Ben Mendelsohn), a mechanic who introduces Luke to the fine art of bank robbery. Luke enters banks, robs them and speeds away on his motorcycle. He eludes police by driving his bike into Robin's waiting truck, and disappearing from the roads.

Cianfrance, who likes to work in comfort-shattering close-ups, keeps this section of the movie percolating, right up until its violent conclusion.

This portion of movie benefits in no small part from Gosling's trademark edginess, as well from strong work by Mendelsohn (familiar from the brilliant Australian neo-noir Animal Kingdom). Equally good are Mendes and Mahershala Ali, who plays the man who lives with Mendes's Romina. Unlike Luke, Kofi has more than fantasy ideas about how to care for a son.

The movie's second section features a strong performance by Bradley Cooper, most recently seen in Sliver Linings Playbook. Cooper, who made Beyond the Pines prior to Silver Linings Playbook, plays a Schenectady cop who becomes a DA and who later runs for the office of New York attorney general. A confrontation with Luke brings him into the story.

Bradley's good, but the movie loses imaginative steam as it immerses itself in what seems an overly familiar story about police corruption that features an appearance by a menacing Ray Liotta, who portrays Deluca, a cop who introduces Cooper's Avery to the world of corruption.

In this second segment, the screenplay raises issues of betrayal, ambition and guilt that don't break much new ground, but allow Cianfrance to sustain a mood of encroaching dread.

Some of the late-picture problems result from a crucial piece of miscasting. In the third act, Emory Cohen portrays Avery's son AJ, a high school kid who has adopted the linguistic style of a wannabe gangsta. It's not easy to believe that he's the son of an aspiring politician and of his mother, a minimally seen Rose Byrne. Cohen's performance proves distracting enough to undermine some of the movie's credibility.

Cianfrance does better with Luke's son, played by the gifted Dane DeHaan, who you may have seen in a segment of HBO's In Treatment. DeHaan captures the turmoil of a high school kid who's beginning to confront difficult truths about his family history.

It would not be fair to say that The Place Beyond the Pines unravels in the late going. But it can't afford the loss of credibility that accompanies its melodramatic and somewhat self-conscious conclusion.

Cianfrance can't entirely sustain the movie's intensity over its two hour- and 20-minute length, and the screenplay probably could have benefited from a healthy dose of nuance. I hope, by now, you've gotten the point: The Place Beyond the Pines is far from perfect, but when Cianfrance connects, he tends to connect in a big way.

Another foray into gangster rot

It's pungent, but Killing Them Softly feels weary and familiar.

Given the mall-culture perkiness that dominates so much of American culture, it's hardly surprising that filmmakers are attracted to downbeat stories about criminals and crime. Working in the criminal milieu can relieve filmmakers of the pressure to make moral judgments about characters -- or even to fret about how vicious they might become.

In Killing Them Softly, director Andrew Dominik looks for nourishment in the low-life world created by the late George V. Higgins, a novelist who specialized in Boston-based tales from the low end. Director Peter Yates adapted Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle for the big-screen in 1973, giving the great Robert Mitchum one his best roles -- and that's saying something.

Now, Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) has updated Cogan's Trade, a 1974 novel by Higgins. Setting the story at the tail-end of the 2008 presidential campaign and in the middle of the fiscal meltdown that's still shaking the economy, Dominik moves Higgins's characters to the shabbiest parts of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Dominik's adaptation also tries to mount a critique of American capitalism, complete with a riff about the hypocrisy of a slave-owning Thomas Jefferson and the audacity of politicians (in this case, President Obama and John McCain) who try to portray the U.S. as a community of folks pulling together in common cause.

Bullshit, says Dominik's movie -- and it says it loudly.

In fact, Dominik delivers the message so directly that watching the movie might put you in mind of reading a book that's already been underlined by the time you get hold of it.

Hey, I'm as open to capitalism bashing as the next guy, but Domink's attempts to link the fiscal crisis to mob mores -- or the lack of them -- struck me as simplistic and hollow. The idea, I suppose, is to find some sort of equivalence between the big-time mainstream economy and the brutal shadow economy in which small-time criminals operate.

Drably shot and evoking the storytelling structure of Quentin Tarantino (particularly Pulp Fiction), Killing Them Softly punctuates its gangster talkfest with bursts of violence as the various characters betray one another in plot twists based as much on how people perceive reality as on what's actually real, another theme the movie explicitly states.

Stories such as this don't really need much by way of stylistic embellishment, but Dominik puts his stamp on the material anyway. A slow-motion assassination is set to the strains of Love Letter Straight From the Heart, not the last time that music is used to create an ironic counterpoint to the action. Same goes for a steady stream of TV and radio newscasts that become as monotonous and annoying as yellowing wallpaper in a cheap hotel room.

The story begins when a former felon (Vincent Curatola who played Johnny Sac in HBO's The Sopranos) devises a scheme in which a couple of dim-witted thugs (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) are asked to rob a card game run by Markie Trottman (Ray Liotta). Markie once arranged to have one of his own games robbed, but made the mistake of boasting about it. Curatola's Johnny Amato believes that Markie automatically will be blamed for the heist, thus providing a risk-free opportunity for enrichment.

The robbery -- one of the slowest and most protracted I've seen on screen -- sets off a string of gangster machinations that center around a white-collar mob rep (Richard Jenkins) who asks a cunning hit man (Brad Pitt) to clean up a variety of messes caused by the robbery.

Pitt's Jackie Cogan decides he can't do all the dirty work by himself, so he calls for help in the person of Mickey (James Gandolfini), a hit man who's not at the top of his game. Instead of taking care of business, Mickey spends his time drinking and whoring or telling stories about problems with the wife who keeps serving him with divorce papers.

There are funny, pungent touches here, including a bit about dognapping. Too bad, that oddball crime turned up earlier this year in Seven Psychopaths, but still...
Look, Pitt has de-glamorized himself before. Gandolfini has a nifty monologue, but putting him in any mob movie can't help but evoke memories of Tony Soprano. In general, the actors seem committed in a dreary sort of way that fits the movie's bleak settings.

Although Higgins arrived early on the low-life scene, his successors have made this kind downbeat approach a little too familiar, and it might have been nice had Dominik generated a little suspense about what was going to happen next.

From the moment Johnny Amato proposes robbing Markie's card game, it's apparent that nothing good is likely to result. And by the time, Pitt's character delivers the final bit of dialogue -- the bitter pill the movie has been waiting for us to swallow -- it feels more like a punchline than a dramatic conclusion.