The pain of 'Love After Love'

Andie MacDowell finds a rich role in this story of a grieving family.

Love After Love has been hailed for providing Andie MacDowell with an opportunity to show that she really can act. If so, MacDowell owes a debt of gratitude to director Russell Harbaugh who cast her as Suzanne, a recently widowed woman and the mother of two grown sons (Chris O'Dowd and James Adomian) who look as if they might be MacDowell's contemporaries. (For the record, MacDowell just turned 60; O'Dowd is 38; Adomian, also 38.)

Maybe what appear to be blurry lines of age and relationship are part of Harbaugh's point: Almost no one in Love After Love seems to have matured into a clearly defined adult.

Harbaugh presents the story of a grieving family in dramatic shards, eliding the passage of time in ways that occasionally make it difficult to keep track of the characters. He leaves it to us to piece the movie together. Nothing wrong with that, but I wish the pieces of Harbaugh’s domestic jigsaw fit more elegantly together. Sometimes, it seems as if he’s tripping into scenes the way a person might stumble into a darkened room before turning on the light.

Early on, the movie makes Suzanne a widow. Harbaugh depicts the death of the family patriarch (Gareth Williams) in brief, unsparing strokes: a loss of voice and mobility and finally an exit from his home, courtesy of a couple of undertakers.

Gradually, we get to know the various characters whose lives revolve around Suzanne, luminous in appearance and bristling with feelings she may not always understand.

O’Dowd’s Nicholas works as a book editor whose marriage to one of his publishing-company colleagues (Juliet Rylance) is falling apart. It doesn’t take long for Nicholas to find a new victim for his love. Soon after his divorce, Emilie (Dree Hemingway) marries Nicholas, a union we presume is doomed from the start.

Harbaugh and his co-writer Eric Mendelsohn present a series of family dinners that range from unpleasant to excruciating. At one of them, Nicholas’ brother Chris (Adomian) gets so drunk he winds up urinating in the foyer of the home in which he's a guest -- not the best way to say thanks for dinner.

O’Dowd dominates another dinner scene in which Nicholas expresses crushing cruelty toward a man with whom Suzanne has begun a relationship.

Mired in unexpressed (and perhaps unfelt) grief, Love After Love can be read as a protracted essay on self-absorption so deep even the death of a loved one can’t dislodge it.

Make up your own mind about David Shire’s jangled jazz score; I found it as obtrusive as was illuminating.

An all-in cast doesn't shrink from the painful nature of material steeped in dissonances and disturbance.

At one point, Chris — a failed comedy writer — takes a turn at stand-up comedy. He delivers a riff on the ways in which Jesus simply couldn't measure up to the achievements of his father. However irreverent and amusing Chris may be, he appears to be talking more to himself than to his audience, something Love After Love sometimes seems to be doing, as well.

Poker for big names and fat wallets

Aaron Sorkin makes his directorial debut with Molly's Game, a movie that features some winning hands from a somewhat limited subject.

When I was browsing the internet looking for information on the real Molly Bloom, I came across a review of Bloom's book, which serves as the basis for writer Aaron Sorkin's eagerly awaited directorial debut.

A website devoted to books about poker featured a headline that suggested that the book struggled to find both an audience and a point.

I'm not sure that Sorkin's adaptation of Bloom's book, Molly's Game, will have trouble finding an audience, but it does have a bit of difficulty finding a larger point. Bloom's journey took her from an Olympic caliber skier to a woman who made a ton of money running high-stakes poker games before running afoul of the law.

In real life, Bloom's LA-based game attracted players such as Ben Affleck and Tobey Maguire. She evidently operated legally until she began taking a cut of the biggest pots. Such "raking" is illegal and evidently changes friendly games (even when played for ridiculously large stakes) into crimes.

Don't get me wrong. Molly's Game can be entertaining, and it features an energized performance from Jessica Chastain as Bloom, a woman whose brother Jeremy Bloom became both an Olympian and an NFL player.

Molly Bloom was on a similar Olympic track until a freak accident derailed her career. At loose ends, she headed to LA where she eventually moved from a gofer at high-stakes card games to an impresario of such big-money affairs.

Perhaps taking a cue from Bloom's book, Sorkin has Molly narrate the movie, a dialogue-heavy plunge into her point of view that, at times, makes it feel as if Molly's reading us the movie.

As much as any writer, Sorkin has a way of making it seem as if he's in the know about whatever subject he tackles. He floods the screen with poker jargon and makes sure that every actor speaks with the kind of rapidity that marked the great screwball comedies of yesteryear. The result can be dizzying, skilled actors engaging in tricky verbal workouts.

Idris Elba adds weight as Molly's attorney. Watching Elba and Chastain bat words over the metaphorical net that separates their characters creates a pleasure all its own.

Bloom's story moves from Los Angeles to New York City, unfolding in episodic fashion, almost as if Sorkin drops little short stories into the larger mix. This approach highlights the work of a strong supporting cast.

Jeremy Strong portrays Molly's first LA boss, a character who makes no attempt to be anything less than obnoxious. Michael Cera does good work as an arrogant player with skills; Bill Camp does a terrific job as a skilled player who swan-dives into a terrible losing streak, and Chris O'Dowd impresses as a dim-witted drunk who works off a gambling debt by bringing some troubling folks into one of Molly's New York games, figures from the Russian mob.

Kevin Costner has one of the movie's best small roles. He plays Molly's authoritarian father, a philandering psychology professor who presides over a flock of high-achieving offspring.

Up to a point, Sorkin benefits from the lavish surroundings that Molly created for those who gambled at her table: drinks, fine food, fancy hotel rooms and beautiful women to wait on both winners and losers.

Earlier, I mentioned that the movie might have difficulty making a point. By the end, it seems as if Sorkin wants to hold Molly out as an example of female achievement. She used her wits to create a small empire and honorably refuses to supply the FBI with the names of those who sat at her table. Public exposure might have ruined lives and destroyed families.

Pretty noble for someone who knows she made a small fortune serving the gambling addictions and fantasies of men who were willing to throw money at her in the form of out-sized tips.

I was entertained by much of Molly's Game, which -- at 140 minutes in length -- probably runs 20 minutes longer than necessary: Sorkin turns cards over with enough flair and snap to keep his movie watchable, but, in its entirety, the movie doesn't make the case for why Bloom's story is more than a sketch in a bigger picture that remains unpainted.

Living inside van Gogh's paintings

Loving Vincent can't find a story equal to the artist who inspired the movie.

It's easy to see why festivals gobbled up Loving Vincent, an animated work that tells the story of artist Vincent van Gogh in the style of the master's paintings. Tactile and throbbing with energy, the movie's images seem intended to allow viewers to take a vicarious journey inside van Gogh's world.

The story of how the movie was made is impressive. Directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman hired 125 painters to take us into the surroundings of van Gogh's later years, if someone who died at the age of 37 can be said to have had later years. To obtain the motion that animates the story, some 64,450 oil paintings were created.

The directors first filmed live actors, using that footage as source material for the movie's many painters. I've read that every second of film required 12 hand-painted frames to bring us into the cafes and rooms van Gogh made famous.

Nothing if not ambitious, Loving Vincent uses actors to give voice to characters familiar to those who've seen van Gogh's work -- and who hasn't? Among the van Gogh subjects who have made it into the movie: postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O'Dowd), Doctor Gachet and his daughter Marguerite (Jerome Flynn and Saorise Ronan). Van Gogh, who appears sporadically, is voiced by Robert Gulaczyk.

Clearly a labor-intensive affair, making Loving Vincent required big-time dedication and the movie easily could have resulted in folly. Loving Vincent is no disaster, but it's not quite the triumph that its subject deserves.

Many reasons: To begin with, the movie's painting proves inconsistent, perhaps an inevitable result of using hundreds of artists.

That, however, wouldn't have mattered had the story lived up to the stature of the artist. Kobiela and Welchman try to wrap the story in mystery. After van Gogh's death, Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth) is dispatched from Arles by his postman father to deliver a letter Vincent wrote to his brother Theo in Paris, but never mailed.

As the story unfolds, the initially skeptical Armand becomes increasingly sympathetic to van Gogh; in particular, he wants to know more about van Gogh's death.

Questions about whether van Gogh killed himself or was murdered don't do enough to add intrigue to a movie that covers mostly familiar ground about one of the world's most recognizable artists.

As various characters recall their dealings with the artist, the movie switches to black-and-white renderings of episodes from the painter's life, some of which look more photographic than painted.

In sum, Loving Vincent might be deemed a noble failure that some will wish to see me merely because of love for van Gogh or because the endeavor certainly qualifies as daring. But it's equally true that little in Loving Vincent proves as illuminating as van Gogh's work itself.

Besides, isn't adding motion to van Gogh's painting a prime example of gilding the lily. Van Gogh's work already reflects a reeling, explosive sense of energy that hardly needed a booster shot from the movies.

'Miss Peregrine' runs a cluttered home

Tim Burton tries his hand a weird YA novel.

The YA novel, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, seems a perfect vehicle for director Tim Burton, whose ability to blend effects, story and mood tilts toward the dark and perverse without sacrificing something we might call general appeal.

With movies such as Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow and Corpse Bride, Burton has developed a following based on his distinctive style and a willingness to dip into the dark side of his palette.

Considering all that, Miss Peregrine should have been a slam-dunk.

But for reasons having to do with a glut of plot and the somewhat confusing creation of an alternate reality, Burton's adaptation of Ransom Riggs' 2013 novel proves only fitfully engaging.

Burton mounts a variety of captivating images -- from scary monsters to moments frozen in time to a floating girl who wears weighted shoes to keep herself earthbound.

At times, Burton seems to have been inspired by the Quay brothers, whose work with stop-motion animation surpasses almost all other cinematic peculiarities.

The story finds young Jake (Asa Butterfield) mourning his grandfather (Terrence Stamp). Just before his death, Grandpa instructed his grandson to travel to Wales to locate Miss Pergerine's School for Peculiar Children: Put anther way, Grandpa sends Jake on a destiny-defining journey.

After consultation with a child psychologist (Allison Janey), Jake's parents (Kim Dickens and Chris O'Dowd) decide that Dad should take the boy to Wales.

Once in Wales, Jake finds Miss Peregrine's school in ruins, destroyed by a direct hit from a German bomb during World War II.

But as he rummages through the bombed-out rubble, Jake begins to see the peculiar children of the movie's title. Eventually, he time travels back to the day the school was bombed.

He soon learns that Miss Peregrine (Eva Green), the school's head mistress, has the ability to stop time by creating time loops. Moments prior to the German bombing, Miss Peregrine stops the clock, and the day again repeats. Her charges are saved, although they're suspended in time. They never age another day.

For emotional heft, the movie focuses on the developing relationship between Jake and Emma (Ella Purnell), the girl who floats. He also meets Enoch (Finlay MacMillan), a kid who knows how to give life to expired creatures.

There's also an invisible kid and a girl who has a mouth with sharp predatory teeth on the back of her head; at times, the movie feels like an off-kilter take on X-Men, a story about young people who are heroic precisely because they don't fit into any mold.

Burton embeds all of this in a jargon-heavy screenplay that requires those unfamiliar with the novel to master a new vocabulary. An example: Ymbrynes, of which Miss Peregrine is one, can create time loops. You'll also find monsters called Hollowgasts -- or some such.

By the end, a new villain surfaces, Samuel L. Jackson's Barron, a creature known as a wight; i.e., a Hollowgast that can assume human form after devouring lots of eyeballs plucked from peculiar children.

And, yes, I gave Google a workout to catch up.

No stranger to over-the-top menacing, Jackson does what's expected of him. Butterfield doesn't bring much by way of expression to his role; and it falls to Purnell's Emma to make the biggest impression.

Not surprisingly, all of the actors are a bit outdone by the movie's copious effects.

Finding the story less than compelling, I drifted from scene-to-scene, wondering how Burton achieved some of the movie's more impressive images and trying to decipher the screenplay's murky references to the Holocaust.

What I didn't do was emerge with a coherent feeling about a movie that doesn't seem to have an entirely coherent feeling about itself. Miss Peregrine felt like movie I'd just as soon thumb-through as watch.

A priest and his fallen flock

If one were to judge only by the movie Calvary, it would be possible to proclaim Ireland the unhappiest place on Earth.

Starring Brendan Gleeson and directed by John Michael McDonagh, Calvary upsets every known cliche about the irresistible charms of small Irish villages.

Calvary has been referred to as a mixture of dark comedy dialogue, whodunit tropes and serious ruminations about the decline of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

I suppose all those things are true, but Calvary is also a probing look at how a society grapples with its sins. Whether you buy into the movie's ideas about sacrifice and forgiveness or not, you'll be forced to admit that Calvary is stern stuff, immersing us in a microcosmic world of cynicism, violence and cruelty.

The story centers on Gleeson's Father James, a man who became a priest after his wife died. Father James has a grown daughter (Kelly Reilly), who visits him from Dublin after a suicide attempt. Her wrists still are bandaged.

Gleeson gives a masterful performance as a priest who seems as rooted in the world as any of his parishioners. Bearded and bulky, Gleeson suggests struggles that are deep and abiding.

Flawed as he is, Father James might be the perfect man to tend to a flock that's deeply troubled and seems to have little or no respect for the church.

Chris O'Dowd plays a butcher whose wife (Orla O'Rourke) is having an affair with an African mechanic (Isaach De Bankole). O'Dowd's character doesn't seem to care.

The town's top cop (Gary Lydon) dabbles in homosexual sex with an obnoxious male prostitute (Owen Sharpe). The town's richest resident (Dylan Moran) made his fortune with unscrupulous dealings, and now regards everything in life as meaningless.

A smirking local doctor (Aidan Gillen) seems driven by his own death wish: He's constantly smoking.

A sick and aging American writer (M.Emmet Walsh) is living his final days in Ireland. He wants Father James to help him procure a gun so that he can end his life before his suffering peaks.

Running through all of this is the threat that opens the movie: During a session in the confessional, an unseen man tells Father James that he plans to kill him.

A victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a priest ("I was seven years old when I first tasted semen"), the man says that he wants to balance the scales of justice by killing a good priest.

The priest who abused the man is long dead, but by some twisted logic, the would-be perpetrator has come to believe that he can set the world right by murdering an innocent man.

The story unfolds during the course of a week as Father James moves about his community, and we try to guess who wants to kill him.

It quickly becomes apparent that McDonagh, who previously worked with Gleeson on The Guard (2011) and In Bruges (2008), has more than mystery in mind. In some ways, it doesn't matter who has it in for Father James. What matters is McDonagh's depiction of a disillusioned, fallen world in which only one character seems genuinely touched by faith.

Marie Josee-Croze plays the wife of a man killed in an auto accident while passing through town. She qualifies as the most spiritual person in a story full men and women stuck in the mud of their own rancid lives.

The main questions that McDonagh raises may go something like this: What's left when the major upholders of morality -- in this case the church -- prove corrupt? How do people function in a world bereft of kindness and beset by indifference when they've lost all belief in their own effectuality?

One presumes that the town in which the movie takes place is meant to be seen as a hothouse where big issues can grow. When you step back from the movie, you may decide that its concerns are as conceptional as they are literal, an exploration of characters and events that McDonagh wants us to view metaphorically.

The movie's most haunting scene takes place in jail. Father James visits a young man who raped, killed and cannibalized several girls. The young man -- played by Gleeson's son Domhnall Gleeson -- fantasizes about meeting his victims in heaven where he expects to find a beautiful moment of reconciliation.

When he describes his imagined redemption, the young man's face seems nearly beatific. The moment represents a mixture of sickness and aspiration that you won't soon forget. Like the movie itself, it leaves you shaken to the core.

'The Sapphires' has some real sparkle

Why complain about a movie that makes you tap your toes and puts a smile on your face?
When it comes to movies as engaging as The Sapphires, resistance seems pointless. This feel-good, crowd-pleaser from Australia features exuberant performances, infectious helpings of R&B and enough social awareness to keep it from turning into total fluff.

Director Wayne Blair tells the story of three Aboriginal sisters and a cousin who hone their girl-group skills in Vietnam. The women are selected to perform for war-weary GIs, under the guidance of their shambling white manager, a funny and charming Chris O'Dowd, familiar from Bridesmaids.

Perhaps realizing that his movie is going to survive on energy, as well as on the winning personalities of his cast, Blair keeps the story simple, quickly defining the women's personalities.

Deborah Mailman plays the woman who takes charge of any situation; Miranda Tapsell portrays the boy-crazed sister; Jessica Mauboy plays the group's determined lead singer, and Shari Stebbens appears as Kay, a cousin who was taken from her village in the outback to become a member of Australia's Stolen Generation.

As a result of an outrageous (and now discarded) government policy, light-skinned Aboriginal children were seized by the government and given to white families, a cruel policy that was supposed to foster integration into the larger society.

O'Dowd's Dave Lovelace proves an appealing -- if initially skeptical -- manager. Dave helps shift the group -- which began life as the Cummeraganja Songbirds -- from country western music to R&B. He encourages them to produce polished covers of such songs as Marvin Gaye's Heard It Through the Grapevine and the Staple Singers I'll Take You There.

By the time, the Sapphires start performing, they no longer sound like amateurs. Blair and his cohorts must have realized that it would be a grave mistake not to make the music slick and effective. Even in its Vietnam scenes, which strive for a bit of battle-scarred realism, the music never loses its toe-tapping drive.

The screenplay gives each of these young women a bit of background, but it's Mailman's Gail who dominates. Gail's no-nonsense demeanor is supported by her frankness and determination. She's formidable, but not without vulnerabilities.

The Sapphires is the kind of movie about which there's not a whole lot to say, other than, "See it and enjoy." And to borrow a line from the Staple Singers, if you like this kind of music -- 70s R&B -- The Sapphires definitely will take you back.

This is 40 -- and it's pretty funny

Judd Apatow puts a toe into mature waters, but doesn't forget to bring along the laughs.

It takes a long time to get to her, but when the new Judd Apatow comedy, This is 40, arrives at a scene that's stolen by Melissa McCarthy, the humor suddenly becomes incendiary, foul-mouthed and very funny. Building on the crudeness she established in Bridesmaids, McCarthy scores big -- so big, in fact, that writer/director Apatow had the good sense to include one of her character's rants in an outtake.

But I digress, even before I begin.

In this mostly enjoyable outing, Apatow casts Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann (Apatow's real-life wife) as a husband and wife who also happen to be the self-absorbed parents of two daughters (Apatow's real daughters, Maude and Iris). Rudd's Pete runs a Los Angeles-based record company devoted to indulging his passion for '70s rock. Mann's Debbie owns an upscale boutique. And, yes, This is 40 represents a reunion for Rudd and Mann, both of whom appeared in Apatow's 2007 comedy, Knocked Up.

Of course, Pete and Debbie are way past knocked up. They're deeply ensconced in the grind of family life. Over the years, their relationship has lost a good deal of its romantic luster. Not surprisingly, Pete and Debbie have issues -- not the least of which revolves around the financial help Pete gives to his father (Albert Brooks), a likable freeloader who has started a new family.

A sharply funny Brooks -- who immediately raises the movie's comic ante -- plays an older man married to a younger woman and now grappling with three young children. Long on gall, Dad views any resistance by Pete as evidence of his son's selfishness. Never mind that Pete has financial troubles of his own.

Perhaps to balance things, Debbie's father (John Lithgow) enters the picture, as well. He's also married to a younger woman, and has been estranged from his daughter for years.

As the movie progresses, Lithgow's character sheds the bonds of caricature and becomes a real, flesh-and-blood father. Credit Apatow with mixing some expectedly crude humor (not all of it funny) with a few well-played scenes in which the writer/director makes a welcome journey into adult territory. Hey, at least he's putting a toe in deeper waters.

Unlike a comedy such as The Guilt Trip, This is 40 is no anemic two-hander. Apatow not only makes room for Brooks and Lithgow, but for Jason Siegel (as an overly confident physical trainer), Graham Parker (as a musician who can't sell any of his new recordings), Chris O'Dowd (as one of Pete's employees) and Megan Fox (as a woman who works in Debbie's boutique).

That's a decent amount of support for a comedy that aspires to be attuned to the debilitations of middle-age, many of them shockingly trivial. Pete is a little too fond of cupcakes. Debbie likes to sneak cigarettes. In this sun-splashed and mostly prosperous LA world, what could be more sinful than overeating or doing something that poses a direct threat to robust good health?

At 134 minutes, This is 40 probably overstays its welcome, and no one's likely to confuse it with Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, which Apatow reportedly watched before making his movie. OK, so Apatow isn't making great art, but, then again, Bergman didn't get many laughs, either.

With friends like these ....

A trendy sitcom of a movie substitutes banter for real depth.

Call me old-fashioned, but I still cling to the expectation that movies should to be richer, bigger and more emotionally savvy than anything that's available on TV. While watching Friends With Kids, a rom-com from director Jennifer Westfeldt, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had tuned into a sitcom made by a writer/director who was well-versed in the distressingly insular language of contemporary relationships.

Westfeldt's movie feels smart in the way that sit-coms sometimes feel smart; it's almost as if issues are being referenced rather than explored.

Like most rom-coms, Friends With Kids springs from a contrivance. Two friends (Westfeldt and Adam Scott) are wary of the pitfalls that can sabotage sustained relationships, but want to become parents anyway. So, they decide to avoid the problems faced by their friends with children and have a kid without the burden of also having a romantic relationship. Because they're not sexually attracted to each other, they think it should be easy to have a kid, share parenting chores and otherwise get with their lives. It helps that they live in the same Manhattan apartment building.

For the most part, the movie's more traditional couples are accessories that support the main endeavor. Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd play a husband and wife who fight all the time because they're both constantly frazzled about the demands of child-rearing. Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig play another couple. Their marriage buckles because of the strains placed on it by his womanizing.

Not surprisingly, the married couples think that Westfeldt’s Julie and Scott’s Jason have lost their minds. They think it's a mistake to have kids without a formal relationship, but at least in the beginning, Julie and Jason seem to have made a wise choice. They're super-tolerant of each other’s dating lives, and they split the demanding chores of caring for an infant.

Westfeldt (co-writer and star of Kissing Jessica Stein) keeps the tone reasonably light, as she examines the dating lives of Julie and Jason. A beefy looking Ed Burns shows up as a a possible beau for Julie; he’s a generally nice guy who’s divorced and has kids of his own. Jason falls for a sexy dancer (Megan Fox) who’s very clear about having no interest in a traditional relationship or in having kids.

About three-quarters of the way through, Westfeldt shifts the movie's tone. At a dinner on a Vermont ski trip the friends take together, Ham’s character has too much to drink and launches into a sneering tirade about Julie and Jason, predicting that their arrangement ultimately will crumble.

True to form, it does, and the movie stops being a trendy look at contemporary lives and love, and becomes a traditional rom-com that poses a distressingly predictable question: Will Julie and Jason become a couple?

I watched Friends With Kids without being bored or totally put off, but things never really deepen in ways that feel emotionally right.

One footnote: I won't give anything away, but the last line of the movie is needlessly coarse, a turn-off just at the moment when Friends With Kids could have used a little glow.