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.

Cesar Chavez unionizes farm workers

Cesar Chavez, a truncated bio-pic about one of the country's most famous labor organizers, offers a step-by-step look at the hard work of winning decent working conditions and reasonable wages for migrant laborers in California.

Director Diego Luna, who starred in Y Tu Mama Tambien and who previously directed a small movie called Abel, does a solid job of refreshing memories about Chavez's landmark efforts during the 1960s.

Working from a script credited to Keir Pearson and Timothy J. Sexton, Luna concentrates on the five years in which Chavez (Michael Pena) helped organize the workers who picked grapes for California wine growers.

After deciding he needed to be closer to the workers he was trying to help, Chavez moved his family to the agricultural town of Delano, Ca., and began the arduous work that resulted in the formation of the Farmer Workers Union.

Chavez and coworker Delores Huerta (Rosario Dawson) ultimately found themselves leading a lengthy strike, which the workers ultimately won.

The rest of the supporting cast doesn't make much of an impression. A grower named Bogdanovitch (John Malkovich ) becomes the movie's main bad guy. Wes Bentley makes a brief appearance as a lawyer who helps Chavez. We also see Robert Kennedy (Jack Holmes), who turned up to support Chavez during a 25-day hunger strike that he staged.

Please, a moratorium on actors playing Kennedys. It almost always a distraction.

Chavez's wife Helen (America Ferrera) proves a woman of independent spirit, and, at times, Chavez's devotion to the farm workers causes him to spend less time with his oldest son than he'd like.

Pena portrays Chavez as a regular guy who believed in non-violence and who had no doubt that the farm workers were being exploited. His convictions seem almost inbred, an inseparable part of his being.

At times, Cesar Chavez can feel too routine, and the use of news footage doesn't do much to expand the movie's reach. We don't learn much about Chavez's eight children, and if Chavez had deep personal failings, the movie isn't interested in finding them.

Still, Cesar Chavez is represented as a tireless leader who wrought major changes and whose story deserves to be told. Viewed as an expansion of the voices represented in American movies, I'd call it a start. Let's hope it's not the finish.

Will Ferrell, the Spanish-language edition

If you know nothing about Mexican cinema, you might be fooled by Casa de me Padre into thinking that films produced in Mexico are poorly made, overly melodramatic, embarrassingly cheap and inadvertently silly. Those who know Mexican film understand that nothing could be further from the truth. Mexican cinema, though often neglected in the U.S., has had many periods of high achievement. What Will Ferrell & company have done in Casa de me Padre is to make a parodic version of the kind of movie they believe characterized Mexican cinema in the 1970s. Some critics have suggested that this subtitled movie, in which Ferrell and all the other actors speak Spanish, is more indicative of the work found in popular Spanish-language telenovelas. If you can get past all that, you may find some chuckles in what amounts to a courageous gamble for Ferrell, starring in a Spanish-language movie that may not appeal to his generally avid fan base. Ferrell plays Armando, the nerdy son of a rancher (Pedro Armendariz Jr.) Armendariz's Miguel Ernesto regards Armando as a lovable dolt, favoring his more wayward son Raul (Diego Luna).* When Raul arrives home with a beautiful woman (Genesis Rodriguez), papa is overjoyed. The smart son has returned. But all is not well. An illicit and often-brutal drug trade (led by a gangster known as La Onza (Gael Garcia Bernal) flourishes on the ranch. The movie plays a bit like an extended sketch, but Ferrell and his spirited comic cohorts plunge happily into material that draws much of its humor from the self-consciously shoddy way in which the film has been made. At one point, Ferrell and Rodriguez ride fake horses, a phony looking white cat adds mystical flourish, and no attempt is made to paper over holes in the movie's low-rent artifice. It's quite possible that Casa de me Padre -- a hit-and-miss affair that includes some amusing moments -- will become a footnote in Ferrell's career. Despite occasional burst of violence, the movie plays like a good-natured spoof that pokes fun at the kind of movies that, though presented with great seriousness, can't help but be perceived as preposterous.

*For those who like to keep track of passing time, it has been 11 years since Bernal and Luna appeared in the popular comedy, Y Tu Mamá También.