Denzel Washington as a savant attorney

Roman J. Israel, Esq. makes room for moments that are so thought-provokingly enjoyable that the movie, which can't be called a success, may be more interesting than movies that would have garnered more praise. Denzel Washington creates one of his more memorable characters, a legal savant whose values and tastes are firmly stuck in the 60s. Washington's Israel sports an afro, baggy-ill fitting pants, and glasses a couple of sizes too big. Directed by Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler), Roman J. Israel, Esq. is at its best when it's focused on this misfit of a man whose heroes include Bayard Rustin and Angela Davis. A key story element arrives early: Israel has spent 36 years working for a famous lawyer. Israel has been the backroom brains for William Henry Jackson, an attorney who knew how to handle himself in a courtroom. Jackson suffers a heart attack and slips into a coma, igniting a plot that brings Israel into touch with a hot-shot attorney portrayed by Colin Farrell. Farrell's George Pierce has been asked to dissolve Jackson's firm, which -- unbeknownst to Israel -- has never turned a profit. Israel also meets a civil rights activist (Carmen Ejogo). She sees past Israel's strange behavior and finds a righteous man. The plot puts Israel into a position in which he must decide how righteous he really is, a development the movie doesn't seem to know how to explore. For roughly half of its two-hour and 9-minute running time, Roman J. Israel, Esq. complies scenes that don't quite cohere. It's almost as if Gilroy, who also wrote the screenplay, can't figure out precisely what he wants to say. He compensates by giving Washington some scorching dialog and with a bit of cinematic daring, even employing some throwback style to evoke a feeling of '60s cinema. Roman J. Israel, Esq. emerges on one of the year's true oddities, a film that stumbles but, before it falls, hits notes you're not likely to hear anywhere else.*
As was the case with Wonder, I had a conflict with the preview screening of Roman J. Israel, Esq. and caught up with the film after its opening.

A family fights for survival

It Comes at Night serves up a slice of narrowly focused, end-of-the-world horror -- minus a ton of gore.

Sometimes a movie benefits from a willingness not to be specific about something that, on its face, seems of paramount importance.

Director Trey Edward Shults (Krisha) bravely refuses to define the threat that endangers his characters in It Comes at Night. That bit of restraint determines almost everything else about his movie -- both in terms of its strengths and weaknesses.

All we know is that something unseen and mysterious has caused people to contract a highly contagious disease that inflicts terrible suffering and always proves fatal.

Faced with this mass contagion, Dad (Joel Edgerton), Mom (Carmen Ejogo) and their 17-year-old son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) have withdrawn to an isolated cabin in a woods. They've sealed their home which features a corridor leading to a red door, the only way in or out.

Set in the midst of what appears to be an end-of-the-world scenario, It Comes at Night makes wise use of its limitations, focusing on how people respond to a situation that's fraught with fear and peril.

The family does its best to protect itself from danger. When family members leave their cabin, gas masks give them an ominous, alien look. Inside, they try to keep their environment as impenetrable as possible.

Early on, the family confronts an intruder (Christopher Abbott). As it turns out, Abbott's character also has a family. He offers to share food in return for shelter and water. After plenty of initial doubts, Edgerton's Paul agrees to join forces with a new family, which also includes a wife (Riley Keough) and a child (Griffin Robert Faulkner). None of them has yet to contract the sickness.

Harrison gives the film's best performance, ably reflecting the disoriented quality that accompanies what seems to have been the family's sudden retreat from everyday life, as well as the gloomy acknowledgment that the future must be bleak.

It doesn't help that Travis also is haunted by what he sees in the movie's opening scene, the mercy killing of the family's grandfather (David Pendelton), an early victim of the unidentified "sickness," a malady that causes those who suffer to breathe unevenly and break out in festering sores.

For all its virtues, It Comes at Night also makes us realize that this kind of concentrated, hot-house approach to filmmaking can hamper the way characters are deepened or a film's themes are enriched.

Still, most of the performances click. Behind a thick beard, Edgerton does pared-down work in his second interracial relationship movie since Loving, and Abbott conveys an understanding of the harrowing difficulties involved in negotiating an impossible situation. The script shortchanges Ejogo, as well as any potential racial issues.

If there's real horror here, it has less to do with jolts and gore than with the realization that under extreme conditions, mistrust can become an essential, if double-edged, survival tool. That's a truly scary idea -- and one that seems to fit the precarious moment in which we currently find ourselves.

Ethan Hawke excels as Chet Baker

A jazzy rendition of a musician's life.

Jazz musician and singer Chet Baker was 58 when he passed away in 1988. He was high, and apparently fell out of the window of his Paris hotel. Baker's tumultuous life helped invent what has become a nearly cliched profile: A hard-living, heroin-addicted musician can't seem to separate self-expression from self-destruction.

Director Robert Budreau's Born to Be Blue tries to freshen the story by mixing scenes of a movie Baker is making about himself (the film never happened) with scenes that reflect Baker's artistically rich but dissolute life.

I don't know enough about Baker's life to tell you how close Budreau has gotten in terms of detail, but he certainly gives us a strong feeling for the kind of person Baker was, a task that receives a mighty boost Ethan Hawke's appropriately elusive performance as Baker.

Hawke plays Baker as a trumpet player of wavering confidence and staggering vulnerabilities, a man who was difficult for others to grasp. Maybe he wanted it that way.

Baker, of course, did plenty of hard living, and his approach to women wasn't exactly monastic. Budreau focuses on one woman.

Baker begins a relationship with Jane (Carmen Ejogo), an actress he meets while shooting the movie about his life. Ejogo, who played Loretta Scott King in Selma, is a wonder as the woman who tolerates Baker's addiction and immaturity -- until she no longer can.

The movie also suggests the tension between black and white musicians that sometimes surfaced in the jazz world. Early on, Miles Davis (Kedar Brown) refuses to acknowledge Baker as anything more than a musician who plays "sweet." Davis didn't mean it as a compliment.

But if Baker's music was sweet, whatever was happening inside his head wasn't quite so placid: Baker founders throughout much of Born to Be Blue.

At one point, he has his front teeth knocked out by a drug dealer to whom he owes money: He then must learn to learn to play his trumpet with false teeth, no easy task.

Hawke hits all the right notes, and he and Ejogo play a tipsy, sometimes fractious duet in a semi-successful movie whose best moments stand out like memorable solos in a long and somewhat scattered set.

A stirring moment for civil rights

David Oyelowo's performance as Martin Luther King anchors director Ava DuVernay's look at a landmark demonstration.

A few observations from the fine new movie Selma: Martin Luther King sometimes ate ravenously. He had difficult conversations with his wife, a woman forced to deal with matters as ominous as death threats while wondering about his relationships with other women. Like many busy men, he spent too much time away from his family, and he became the symbol for a movement that would have gone nowhere without the hard work of many others. On occasion, he smoked cigarettes.

All that's tactfully shown by director Ava DuVernay.

DuVernay's movie also makes it clear that King's rhetoric soared and inspired a nation, that he often put his body on the line to advance the cause of justice and that he understood how to move public opinion. He was the prophet who stood outside the gates of power, urging the powerful to help the long arc of the moral universe bend toward justice, as he might have put it.

For all that, Selma isn't a King biopic: It's an entirely absorbing look at the landmark 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. Stirring and sobering, Selma enables us to feel the urgency and complications of a moment when the wheel of history definitely was turning.

DuVernay surely knew that Dr. King already has been enshrined in the sacred pantheon of American greats. She's interested in the man who fought for civil rights, not the icon created by a self-congratulatory culture that belatedly lauds him.

As played by the gifted British actor David Oyelowo, Dr. King never wavers about his goal -- in this case gaining voting rights for black people in the Jim Crow South. He strategizes, looks for the best ways to dramatize each protest and bring repression to the forefront of American consciousness.

On occasion, he's beset by doubt, not about the cause, but about what he's asking others to sacrifice.

The first attempt to cross the bridge, of course, resulted in brutal attacks on 600 peaceful marchers by state and local law enforcement officials. DuVernay doesn't flinch from that violent reality, either.

These bridge scenes are mini-masterpieces of tension in which DuVernay makes terrific use of silence to create a sense of fearful anticipation. She allows us to feel what it must have been like for the marchers to see armed men -- some on horseback -- awaiting them on the other side of the bridge.

In Washington, a frustrated Johnson expresses annoyance with King for insisting on a voting rights bill so soon after Johnson had pushed a Civil Rights Bill through Congress. Eventually, the movie suggests, Johnson unleashed J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI (Dylan Baker) in an attempt to embarrass King with a purported recording of a sexual encounter. The recording was delivered to Mrs. King.

You may have read that this Johnson/Hoover alliance, along with other matters concerning LBJ, has been disputed by some. Don't let these criticisms sway you from the movie. Selma recognizes the scope of a movement that climbed the ladder of power. It shows disagreements that sometimes tore at the civil rights movement from within, but also how its force rippled all the way to the White House. I'd argue that DuVernay appreciates the difference between a president and someone who's pushing that president to act.

History, of course, is seldom as tidy as we'd like in to be. Young black activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee had been working in Selma before King and his Southern Christian Leadership contingent arrived. Initially, they viewed King as a celebrity interloper, a man who wanted to cash in on the grunt work they'd been doing.

King knew they had a point, but also understood that the movement needed a figure head and a voice. He thought he and his colleagues were best suited to calling attention to a movement based on a three-part approach that already had produced results: negotiation, demonstration and resistance.

The days leading up to Selma were full of stark contrasts. Perhaps that's why DuVernay begins in 1964 with Dr. King receiving the Nobel Prize in Oslo. He shares a fancy hotel room with his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo).

Oyelowo's subtly tuned performance picks up the irony of the situation -- he's enjoying comfort in Norway while many were suffering at home. Oyelowo lets us know that King realizes that his work isn't finished. His eyes are on a bigger prize than any that could be awarded in Europe.

DuVernay takes us from Stockholm to the Birmingham bombing that resulted in the death of four black girls. She then shows us obstacles put in the way of Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey), a black woman who's trying to register to vote in Selma. Cooper is given a ridiculous qualifying test in which she's asked to name every county judge in Alabama.

Working from a screenplay by Paul Webb, DuVernay evokes a potent feeling for the time -- its ugliness, its idealism, its internecine battles, its heroism and breadth.

King may have endured his dark nights of the soul, but he also was a great man, and his speeches (adapted here from originals) still produce goose bumps. It doesn't take a perfect man to speak to the conscience of a nation. It takes a man who's brilliant, brave and right about the justness of his cause.

Many of the supporting performances are spot on. Tim Roth, for example, makes a convincingly appalling George Wallace, the Alabama governor who thought he just might be shrewd enough outfox Lyndon Johnson.

Selma also introduces the supporting cast that surrounded Dr. King, figures such as Andrew Young (Andre Holland), Diane Nash (Tessa Thompson), Rev. Hosea Williams (Wendell Pierce) and John Lewis (Stephan James).

As you look at DuVernay's images of the march, you'll be reminded of an important truth. Prominent figures are seen leading marchers across the Pettus Bridge. But when demonstrators finally headed for Montgomery, it wasn't the people in the front of the line who turned a protest into a movement. It was everyone who marched along -- taking the rest of the country with them.

Selma serves as a look at a fascinating collection of real-life characters, as an ultra-dramatic rendering of a tumultuous moment and perhaps as a goad: The march may not look the same today, but there's still much to overcome.