Bob's Cinema Diary: Oct. 1, 2024 -- 'The Wild Robot' and 'Wolfs'

Here are two quick, catch-up reviews of two movies that I couldn't review on their opening days. Blame scheduling conflicts and movie overload. The Wild Robot, which has won favor with both critics and audiences, has the potential to become an animated classic. Wolfs, on the other hand, a disposable feel of familiarity, a comic thriller in which Brad Pitt and George Clooney break little new ground.

 

The Wild Robot. Can a robot develop emotions? Can that same robot bond with an orphaned gosling and become its surrogate mother? Can the robot, an automaton that lives apart from other robots on a wooded island, be accepted by the island's natural denizens?  Based on 2020 bestseller by Peter Brown, The Wild Robot provides a stylish and often poignant response to these questions. Rozzum Unit 7134, voiced by Lupita  Nyong'o, becomes the movie's centerpiece as the robot develops relationships with Fink, a sly fox voiced by Pedro Pascal. Kit Connor does the voice work for Brightbill, the gosling. Director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stich, How to Train Your Dragon) offers a mixture of cartoonish action, layered meaning, and appealing characters as both Roz and Brightbill struggle with issues of belonging and connection. Eventually, Roz's maker sends a more strident robot (Stephanie Hsu) to retrieve the wayward bot and wipe its memory. Skillfully animated by Brown's team, The Wild Robot stands as family entertainment that avoids the worst pitfalls of such fare, notably unearned sentiment. Although it leans heavily toward children, adults may appreciate the way the movie balances the predatory instincts of animals with their need to achieve common goals.

Wolfs

Brad Pitt and George Clooney team for a comic thriller about two men with unusual jobs. For handsome fees, they dispose of bodies that otherwise might lead to murder indictments. As loners who've never met before, Pitt and Clooney's bickering fixers are pushed into an uneasy alliance; they must get rid of the body of a young man (Austin Abrams) who had been taken to a high-end New York hotel by a politician (Amy Ryan) looking for a fling. Nothing like a body on the floor to ruin a reputation. Pitt and Clooney deliver the expected banter, but the story, which unfolds during the course of a single night, doesn't feel nearly as offbeat as might have been intended. Undeniable star power boosts director Jon Watts's (Spider-Man: Homecoming) effort, but Pitt and Clooney can't make this stale vehicle shine. 

Roberts and Clooney in a mediocre romcom

 George Clooney and Julia Roberts go to Bali in Ticket To Paradise, a star-driven romcom with a sitcom-level plot. Clooney and Roberts play divorced parents who want to prevent their daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) from marrying a seaweed farmer (Maxime Bouttier) she meets on a post-college vacation in Bali. The parents fear their daughter is repeating the mistake they made when their marriage ended after five years. The scenery (the movie was shot in Australia) proves pleasant and seaweed farming never has looked more idyllic. Then again, it's a low bar because few Hollywood movies (if any) have referenced an occupation that may have grown with the rise of health-food marketing. To complicate matters, Roberts' Georgia is dating a younger man (Lucas Bravo), an airline pilot who wants to marry her. He shows up in Bali, too. But we know that the top-billed bickering stars are destined to reunite. Clooney’s David and Georgia concoct various silly schemes (including theft of the wedding rings) as they try to derail the pending nuptials.  Silly stuff, yes, but not especially amusing. In all, Ticket to Paradise stands as an undemanding mediocrity in which Clooney delivers wisecracks and Roberts fires back. Oh well, everyone looks nice, the warm waters appear inviting, a bit of Balinese tradition finds its way onto the screen, and no one ever mentions how much the hotel and airfare may have cost.

A writer's journey begins at a bar

 

    Some thoughts after watching The Tender Bar, the big-screen adaptation of JR Moehringer's 2005 memoir about growing up in Manhasset, NY: I'll get to a review of the movie in a bit, but I left s preview screening with two thoughts I couldn’t shake.

   First, Ben Affleck is getting better and better as an actor. He was terrific as the flamboyant Pierre d'Alencon in The Last Duel and equally good as a beer-soaked alcoholic in The Way Back, the story of a high school basketball coach wobbling toward redemption.

   In The Tender Bar, Affleck scores again as Uncle Charlie, a bartender who schools his nephew JR, the story's ostensible main character, in a variety of arts -- thinking, reading, drinking, and the behavior of men.

   A bachelor and barroom philosopher, Uncle Charle proves vital to young JR's survival -- and also to the movie's.

    Observation two: I wish I could say that George Clooney was getting more interesting as a director.

   Clooney started with the brilliant Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) and followed with the solid Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) but his Midnight Sky (2020) foundered (at least in my view) and The Tender Bar, with a screenplay by William Monahan (The Departed), doesn’t meet expectations, either.

  Moehringer, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, wrote a well-received memoir but the movie feels cut from pieces of variable interest. 

   Played by Daniel Ranieri as a nine-year-old boy and as a young man by Tye Sheridan, JR wants to be a writer but the movie never persuades us that we should care whether he achieves his goal. 

  It's not JR's dream that made his book enjoyable; it was his practice of the writer's art, which he brought into play when dealing with the bar -- named the Dickens. Uncle Charlie presided over the Dickens and its  cast of oddball characters who gathered for fun, solace, and moments of commemoration.

   On screen, the story becomes a collection of episodes joined by several themes: The absentee father, the devoted Mom, and JR's initiation into the world of love. None of these land with much force.

   JR's biological father (Max Martini) is barely a presence in his life. He's a New York disc jockey who JR's family calls "The Voice." Abusive and prone to drink, he's hated by JR's mom (a warm Lily Rabe). 

    Rabe's Dorothy has one dream for young JR. He'll attend either Harvard or Yale. He's going to get a first-rate education.

    JR, by the way, attends Yale, where -- in the movie version -- he tells friends that he wants to be a writer. He also meets a young woman (Briana Middleton), a biracial student whose snooty architect parents make it clear they have little use for someone of JR's low breeding.

   The movie works overtime trying to establish JR's working-class bona fides; he may be a Yalie, but he's more a graduate of the bar and of his unruly family than of the prestigious university. 

   Christopher Lloyd portrays JR's grandfather, a grump who comes through for JR when it counts.

   The picture loses focus as JR steps into the "real" world, landing a job as a copy boy at the New York Times and trying to figure out next steps.

    Sheridan may be stuck with a thankless job. If JR entertained as a writer; Sheridan can't entertain by telling us he wants to be a writer.

   The story weakens whenever Uncle Charlie isn't around and feels far more comfortable with scenes in the bar than anywhere else.

   Enough. The Tender Bar generates neither antagonism nor deep affection. Put another way: If you haven’t read the book, you’d do well to start there.

Midnight Sky falls short of noble goals

   I wish Midnight Sky had been able to live up to its lofty ambitions. As star and director, George Clooney aims big, constructing a variety of impressive set pieces, including a terrific spacewalk sequence and scenes that unfold in the middle of a blinding arctic storm.

  Despite reaching such visual heights, the movie falls short of achieving the semi-mournful, vaguely hopeful impact for which it's apparently striving. Midnight Sky is serious, steadfast but seldom grand.

   Clooney plays Augustine Lofthouse, a scientist working at a deserted facility in the Arctic Circle. The year: 2049.

    Augustine, who's suffering from terminal cancer, decided to remain in the Arctic after the rest of his co-workers departed. An   unspecified global disaster has doomed the Earth's entire human population.

   At the same time, a manned-mission to one of Jupiter's moons is working its way back toward Earth, having scouted the place as a possible alternative residence for humanity. Augustine has taken on the task of delivering a devastating message: The crew is returning to a doomed planet. He thinks they should head back to Jupiter.

   The movie divides between action on the ship (the exterior has been beautifully designed) and Augustine's efforts to reach it — with a few flashbacks inserted to give a hint of Augustine's character and to allow him to be played by an actor (Ethan Peck) who looks nothing like a younger Clooney.

    Augustine, we learn, has devoted his life to science at the expense of maintaining important family connections.

    While roaming in his Arctic observatory, Augustine discovers a girl (Caoilinn Springall)  about age seven. The evacuating team somehow left her behind. 

   Resigned to his lonely solitude, Augustine doesn't know how to care for the girl, a task made more difficult because she doesn't talk.

    Slowly, he develops a relationship with her, which means he has to take her with him when he begins a cross-ice trek to reach a radio transmitter at a weather station located away from his home base.

    The onboard crew of the spaceship Aether includes David Oyelowo as the captain and Felicity Jones as a crew member we soon learn is pregnant. Jones's Sully and Oyelowo’s character developed a relationship during the flight, which includes other  less intriguing astronauts played by Tiffany Boone, Demian Bichir, and Kyle Chandler

    Transitions between Earth and space don’t always feel fluid and I wondered whether the obvious physical difficulties of the shoot had blinded the filmmakers to the movie’s narrative insufficiencies and thinly developed characters.

   Based on a novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton, Midnight Sky hobbles itself with weighty themes. The possible extinction of the human race might be as weighty as themes get — at least for those of us who belong to it. But Midnight Sky yields to mild attenuation, offering hope with an ending (which if you think about it) raises a ton of questions.

   I won't say more. Midnight Sky generated no animosity on my part, just a sense that the movie resembled a space voyage that didn’t carry enough fuel to penetrate the existential questions it tries to probe.

Life at Carlyle Hotel. It's pampered

Somewhere in my journalism past, I did interviews in the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel, one of New York's most exclusive, upscale -- and unapologetically elitist -- hotels. Note: I never got any further than the lobby, certainly not on a journalist's paycheck. In the new documentary, Always at The Carlyle, it's amusing to listen to George Clooney talk about his love for the hotel or to hear how attentive the elevator operators are or to learn that a member of the hotel's staff is responsible for embroidering the names of guests on pillowcases. Director Matthew Miele has made what amounts to an enthusiastic ode to a hotel most of us never will check into. Anjelica Huston turns up for an interview. We also learn that Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge once stayed at the Carlyle. Jack Nicholson was nice to the help. The recently departed Anthony Bourdain talks about the hotel's Bemelmans Bar, which features murals by Ludwig Bemelmans, the illustrator who did the Madeline books. The movie also takes time to celebrate the indispensably sophisticated talents of pianist Bobby Short, a fixture at the hotel cafe until his death in 2005. The movie's point -- the Carlyle does a great job catering to the rich and famous -- is made early and repeated. Me? I got only limited pleasure from again and again hearing how those who can afford the Carlyle are pampered and protected.

Satire sinks in Clooney's 'Suburbicon'

Finding the right tone for dark comedy might be one of the most difficult things for a director to achieve. Case in point, Suburbicon, a mangled George Clooney-directed comedy about the nightmares that bubble beneath the surface of America's suburban dream.

Set during the 1950s in the fictional community of Suburbicon, Clooney's movie struggles (but ultimately fails) to link a story about family hypocrisy and horror to the racism that pervades a carefully designed community that has been marketed as a mid-century utopia.

The story focuses on a family in which Matt Damon plays Gardner Lodge, a father who contrives with his sister-in-law (Julianne Moore) to murder his wife (also Moore), a woman confined to a wheelchair after an automobile accident.

To carry out his foul plan, Lodge hires a couple of thugs (Glenn Flesher and Alex Hassell) to invade his home. Gardner's six-year-old son Nicky (Noah Jupe) functions as the movie's innocent witness to the horrible deeds that unfold around him, and, at times, your heart aches for this tormented young actor. What's he doing in movie that treats his character so cruelly?

Joel and Ethan Coen are listed among the film's writers, and traces of the Coens' work reveal themselves as the story unfolds. Clooney and Grant Heslov also take writing credits, but the overall result is a hodgepodge that Clooney can't unify. Worse yet, Clooney plays some of the movie straight. The result: scenes that feel as if they were lifted from a low-grade thriller.

The harassment of Suburbicon's African-American family (Karimah Westbrook, Leith M. Burke, and Tony Espinosa) supposedly was inspired by a real-life, 1957 case in which William and Daisy Myers were subjected to terrible race-based abuse in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Suburbicon's easy-target approach to racism consists mostly of showing sneering expressions of hatred by the supposedly upright residents of Suburbicon.

Moreover, a baseball-related friendship between Nicky and the African-American kid next door (Espinosa) sees like a transparent effort to add symbolic and emotional resonance.

The only actor who finds precisely the right tone for Suburbicon is Oscar Isaac, who shows up midway through as an insurance claims investigator with his own sleazy agenda.

The cast does its best to keep the story tracking, but scenes that are intended to be funny don't produce the expected laughs and the satirical point (Lodge is the real menace, not the town's only African-American family) doesn't resonate the way it should.

Maybe Clooney wanted to expand a small story about the underbelly of suburban life by offering a sidebar about the racism that underlies America's shining facade. Whatever he was thinking, he mostly missed the mark.

Aiming at big targets -- and missing

George Clooney and Julia Roberts bring star power to Money Monster, a second rate critique of the media and the financial system.

The Money Monster is a situation in search of a movie -- and, I'm afraid, it's a search conducted in vain.

The movie's premise is known to anyone who's seen the trailer. A blustering cable TV financial maven is taken hostage while doing his show. The gunman, who takes over a studio at the fictional FNN network, straps a bomb-containing vest to TV loud mouth Lee Gates before voicing what the movie seems to view as a legitimate grievance.

The aggrieved gunman lost his life savings because he acted on a supposedly solid stock tip Gates gave his gullible audience.

When the stock tanks, the gunman decides that the system -- i.e., just about everything -- is rigged. He wants answers.

Well, here's one. A movie that's trying, among other things, to expose a lack of credibility in our brazen 24/7 media ought to be far more credible itself.

The Money Monster flirts with thriller and satirical elements without providing enough of either, and despite the presence of appealing stars George Clooney (as Gates) and Julia Roberts (as Patty Fenn, his producer), the movie shorts sells character development. There isn't much.

Gates is a self-congratulatory on-air clown whose show traffics in noisy gimmicks. Patty is all business, the savvy woman who presides over the TV circus in which Gates performs.

Clooney gives Gates the brash presence of an unashamed showman; Gates likes to don a gold top hat and open his business report with a song-and-dance number. Roberts' character speaks to Gates through an earpiece while he's being held hostage. She tries to keep him from making a fatal mistake.

The gunman (Jack O'Connell) becomes the movie's slightly demented everyman, a $14-and-hour delivery guy who has a girlfriend and a kid on the way. He sees no future for himself. He doesn't want his $60,000 investment back; he wants answers.

It's not always wise to judge a movie by its predecessors, but The Money Monster evokes memories of far better entertainments -- Network, Dog Day Afternoon and The Big Short among them.

Director Jodie Foster can't fuse the material into anything substantial. The Money Monster seldom rises far enough over-the-top to qualify as wildly inventive satire, and its thriller elements (a hostage is held, the police arrive, etc.) are routine.

The movie's less-than-suspenseful plot hinges on complicated business shenanigans involving Ibis Clear Capital, a financial company that claims that its rocketing stock -- the one Gates boldly recommended -- tanked because of a computer glitch, thereby losing a total of $800 million for its stockholders.

Credit the movie with introducing -- or at least popularizing -- a bit of jargon. Algorithms are referred to as "algos,'' and the guy who invented the algorithm that governs Ibis' dealings is called a "quant,'' as in "quantitative analyst."

I left the theater happy to know that I'll now be able to address all my problems by asking anyone who'll listen to help me "find the quant."

As bona fide movie stars, Clooney and Roberts keep The Money Monster watchable, but in this case, seeing definitely isn't believing.

You may not be able to take your eyes off Clooney and Roberts, but their magnetism mostly is wasted on a screenplay that dares to take place in real time, but seldom bothers to make what happens during that time seem believably real.

The Coens take on '50s Hollywood

Great cast, but Hail, Caesar! is enjoyable only in bits and pieces. Fortunately, some of those bits are inspired.

Despite the exclamation point in its title, the new Coen brothers film, Hail, Caesar!, isn't the sharpest or most emphatic of their many amazing efforts. A collection of sketches that both satirize and celebrate Hollywood of the 1950s, Hail, Caesar! lands the Coens in what for them is strange terrain: They've come up with a middle-ground addition to their idiosyncratic oeuvre with -- and this deserves underlining -- touches of entertaining brilliance.

There's a whisper of a story here: Fictional Capitol Studios finds itself in the midst of a major production. The movie is called Hail, Caesar!, and it carries the same heavily freighted subtitle as Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ. The plot, which offers echoes of The Robe focuses on a hardened Roman officer who eventually sees the light, rapturously submitting to a new faith when he encounters Christ on the cross.

Capitol's mega-buck epic stars Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), a slightly dissolute movie star who is also slightly dim.

During the filming of a scene, Whitlock is drugged and spirited away by extras who demand a $100,000 ransom. As it turns out, they are rebels with a cause, leftist screenwriters enamored of the Soviet Union who meet regularly to be lectured by Professor Marcuse (John Bluthal), an unveiled reference to Herbert Marcuse, a hero of the New Left during the 1960s.

It falls to Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the studio's tough but perpetually burdened mogul, to return Whitlock to the set so that his mega-production can wrap. Eddie's part businessman and part fixer, a guy who's accustomed to covering the tracks of the studio's frequently wayward stars.

Eddie Mannix is modeled on a real-life MGM studio fixer of the same name. Here, Mannix is treated as decent but beleaguered man who's trying to keep the studio from running aground -- not an easy task when its stars have a penchant for landing themselves in embarrassing positions.

As Eddie puts out one Hollywood fire after another, he also entertains an offer from Lockheed, which wants to give him a high paying job that would allow for a more regular and presumably respectable life.

Now, very little about the plot matters. What makes the movie palatable are several winningly ludicrous snippets from Capitol's movies. Think of them as footnotes that are more interesting than the main body of the work.

One of the best involves a bone-headed decision to turn the studio's acrobatic cowboy star into a romantic lead, jamming him into comedy in which characters dress to the nines and speak in the kind of faux British -- or British-ish -- accents that were popular in some movies during the '30s and '40s.

Director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) is stuck with this egregious piece of miscasting. The scene in which Laurentz tries to prepare cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) for sophisticated patter might be enough to justify the price of admission.

The same goes for brief appearances by Tilda Swinton, who plays two roles -- gossip pedaling, twin columnists Thora and Thessaly Thacker. Listen to the way Swinton says Eddie's name, giving it a twist that evokes the pleasures of a whole era of studio filmmaking.

And if you don't smile during a production number featuring Channing Tatum as a tap-dancing sailor who, along with his shipmates, contemplates life at sea without "dames," you're in an even worse mood than I usually find myself in.

And then there's a broadly comic bit involving Frances McDormand as C.C. Calhoun, a chain-smoking film editor.

For me, those were highpoint to be savored, along with numerous small touches.

Alas (to be as stilted as some of the dialogue in Capitol Studio's productions), not all of the sketches work so well. Though beautifully produced, an Esther Williams' style swimming number featuring Scarlett Johannson might have been included just to show that the Coens could do it.

Johansson plays DeeAnna Moran, a pregnant movie star who forces the studio to find ways to cover the fact that she's not married. Her story eventually leads to Jonah Hill, whose role amounts to little more than a forgettable cameo. Hill plays Joseph Silverman, a man who specializes in "personhood," a joke that's not really worth the trouble of explaining.

In A Serious Man, the Coens took on religion; their attempts to do the same here aren't nearly as rich. The movie opens with Mannix in a confessional booth where he establishes himself as a serious Catholic who's addicted to confession. Mannix feels guilty because he lies to his wife about having quit smoking, but his real guilt comes from working so hard to support a morally dubious and often lunatic enterprise.

Stretches of Hail, Caesar! proves only mildly amusing and some of the humor built around the Hail, Caesar epic struck me as more obvious than we expect from the Coens who've taken swipes at Hollywood before, notably in the feverishly brilliant Barton Fink.

Hail Caesar! may not rank at the top of Coen's impressive list, but it should do nothing to sour anyone on their work. My advice: Treat the movie as a smorgasbord. Pick what you like; forget the rest.

Disney sci-fi with George Clooney

Tomorrowland tries to save humanity from itself.

Among the many things I had hoped never to see in life was George Clooney flying through the air with a jet pack strapped to his movie-star back. In Gravity, Clooney floated over the earth as an astronaut. But in Tomorrowland, his late-picture airborne antics seem almost cartoonish.

And as much as I support efforts to save the planet, I had no desire to hear an Imax-scaled lecture about it, which is pretty much what happens at the end of Tomorrowland, an ambitious but not entirely satisfying addition to summer's box-office sweepstakes.

There's a good deal of anticipation about Tomorrowland, not only because of Clooney, but because Tomorrowland was directed by Brad Bird, a Pixar veteran who has acquired avid followers for his animated work in The Incredibles and The Iron Giant. In addition, the screenplay for Tomorrowland was co-written by Bird and Damon Lindelof, best known as the show runner of the popular TV series Lost.

Bird certainly hasn't made life easy for himself with Tomorrowland a large-scale production that demands lots of heavy imaginative lifting, particularly when it comes to the movie's vividly realized production design.

Bird and his team try hard to keep the visual environment stimulating, but it's the movie's foreground -- a somewhat confounding story -- that troubles.

Clooney plays Frank Walker, a disillusioned guy who opens the movie talking directly to the camera while being interrupted by an unseen character who's trying to give him directions about how he should tell his story.

We later learn that Walker's off-screen tormenter is none other than Athena (Raffey Cassidy), who appears to be a girl of about 12. I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you that Athena is a highly developed child robot, another striking example of how far artificial intelligence has progressed -- at least in the movies.

As it turns out, Walker's telling a story about how, as a boy, he visited the 1964 Worlds Fair in New York and was transported to another dimension. That would be Tomorrowland, the alternate universe where young Frank cemented his relationship with Athena.

At that point, Clooney goes on sabbatical for a while, and another plot development takes over. A perpetually avid young woman (Britt Robertson) also travels to Tomorrowland.

As it turns out, these young people don't get to Tomorrowland by accident. They're chosen when they receive a pin that as a "T" embossed on it. For a time, they don't know exactly where they are or why they're shifting back and forth between two realities.

If you've passed the age of 10 and still are paying attention, I'll tell you that the movie's two plot strands eventually merge. Robertson's Casey Newton joins a reluctant Walker on a visit to Tomorrowland, where they trip out on manufactured wonder, run from evil androids and try to convince us that the world is worth saving.

Bird has no trouble being visually creative as he spins a scenario in which he pays increasing homage to "special" people, the chosen few who presumably will save the rest of us from extinction. At one point, a rocket blasts off from inside the Eiffel Tower. A visit to a toy shop provides amusement.

But the story isn't exactly gripping, and it's odd to see Clooney running around with kids in what sometimes looks like a massive hunk of children's theater.

Of course, there's a villain: Hugh Laurie plays Nix, one of the more benign bad guys in recent movie history.

At times, I wondered if Bird -- who first forayed into live action with 2011's Mission Impossible -- Ghost Protocol -- might have had an easier time had he made Tomorrowland as animated feature rather than as a live-action movie that sometimes feels like an animated feature.

And I never entirely found an answer to a question that bothered me throughout: What the hell is Clooney doing in a sci-fi movie with a Tinker Bell heart.

Perhaps as an act of self-protection against those critics who aren't impressed, Tomorrowland takes a stance against cynicism and negativity. It goes something like this: If you think the future will be a dystopian disaster, it probably will be. And aren't big movies already propagandizing us for a horrible "destiny"?

Sorry, I didn't buy it. I'm not unduly cynical, but Tomorrowland didn't do much for my today, although I have to confess that some days I wouldn't mind getting a pin that could transport me to another dimension.

But wait. I already have such a device. It's called my imagination.

'Monuments Men' misses the mark

Intriguing subject short-changed in Clooney-directed movie.

In his sixth directorial effort, George Clooney has made a middle-of-the-road movie about an intriguing subject, the attempt to rescue priceless art seized by the Nazis during World War II.

The Monuments Men of the title are a group of aging academics and art specialists charged with saving paintings, sculpture and monuments from Hitler's rapacious legions. Upper-echelon Nazis wanted to appropriate most of western art for a gargantuan museum to be named after the Fuhrer. Pieces that didn't make it into Hitler's art mausoleum would find their way into the private collections of Nazi bigwigs.

Clooney also stars in the movie: He plays Frank Stokes, an art historian from Harvard's Fogg Museum: Stokes leads the culture-saving effort after assembling his team in what amounts to a subdued Dirty Dozen style.

Matt Damon plays James Granger, an art expert from the Museum of Metropolitan Art in New York; Bill Murray portrays architect Richard Campbell; John Goodman appears as a sculptor; Jean Dujardin portrays a French art dealer; and Bob Balaban plays Preston Savitz, a character whose professional skills weren't entirely clear to me. British actor Hugh Bonneville takes on the role of a British art expert who's trying to rehabilitate his reputation as a drunk.

Cate Blanchett has a smaller role as Claire, a French woman who works at a Paris museum, and who has been forced to assist the Nazis in their pilfering. It takes a while for Damon's character to convince Claire, who also has ties to the Resistance, to help find hidden art treasures: She's fearful that the U.S. will appropriate masterpieces in much the same way as the Germans have done.

A couple of major tensions break through the movie's somewhat frozen surface. First, there's an on-going argument about whether any piece of art is worth a human life. That raises additional questions about the importance of culture, even during war-time duress.

Early on, Clooney's Stokes asks President Roosevelt -- a leader for whom art was not a top priority -- what the war will have meant if, at the end of it, Michelangelo's David has been reduced to rubble.

The Monuments Men also race to keep important art objects out of the hands of the advancing Russians, who are portrayed as eager to get their hands on landmarks of Western civilization.

As it turns out, much of the stolen art was hidden in German mines, but the movie's discoveries have a plodding feel. The men's various missions proceed without much vigor.

That seems a major miscalculation: The Monuments Men is like a caper movie -- only without the caper.

The screenplay by Clooney and Grant Heslove (based on a book by Robert M. Edsel) makes some attempts at humor, most of it italicized by one of the most disappointing musical scores in recent memory, a shock since it was written by the gifted Alexandre Desplat, whose work I've almost always admired.

The movie attempts to differentiate among the characters in broad ways, but, as depicted here, these are not the most interesting group of people. Moreover, Clooney doesn't find enough ways to demonstrate either the men's passion for art or their expertise.

Ironically, the movie could have benefited from more talk about art. Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges turns up, as does a famous Ghent altar piece, but for a movie about the enduring importance of art, Monuments Men pays too little attention to it.

Oh well, call it a miss by some very talented people: This little-known and clearly fascinating story deserved more than the shrug The Monuments Men induces.

'Gravity' and the loneliness of space

Director Alfonso Cuaron makes us feel as if we're tumbling through space.

Seen from our minuscule perspective, space is a lonely place, a void that leaves us awestruck at its vastness and perhaps terrified about the possibility of its unending lifelessness. At various points in the new movie Gravity, we're made to feel the solitary magnitude of a depopulated universe.

The key word in the previous sentence is "feel." Director Alfonso Cuaron and his technical team have made a movie in which zero gravity becomes the norm. We not only observe what's happening, we experience it in sensorially powerful ways.

All movies do this to an extent, but because Gravity takes place in space -- even with Earth in full view of the movie's orbiting astronauts -- nothing feels typical. We tumble through the movie like an untethered astronaut somersaulting through space. And when things go wrong, the agony is felt more deeply because the astronauts still can see the Earth.

Unlike what happens in many sic-fi movies, the characters are not embarked on a journey to some forbidding planet. They've put a toe in the inky waters of space. No more.

Thematically and for sheer grandeur, Gravity is not the equal of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it rivals that movie in its insistence on creating -- with help from effectively used 3-D photography -- the experience people in space might actually have.

As astronauts, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are first seen working on the Hubble Telescope. Even though they're encumbered by bulky space suits, they're like space babies floating in the amniotic fluids of the universe.

The dialogue in a script by Cuaron and his son Jonas, doesn't try to create poetry; it's unnecessary. We see the poetry, as Gravity offers us looming views of the planet we all call home.

Despite its apparent lack of mystical fervor, Gravity should not be seen as a cinematic amusement park ride, space like you've never seen it before. Cuaron has a simple story to tell, one involving grief and possible renewal.

Clooney's Matt Kowalski is the mission's captain. Clooney tempers the captain's all-business approach with jaunty humor and confidence; he has the poise of a man who has faced danger many times and who knows how to remain unrattled, or at least how to pretend that he's calm.

The two astronauts are threatened when they're bombarded by debris from a Soviet satellite, putting them in the middle of a terrifying shower of flying metal.

At that point, Gravity becomes a story of survival, simple under any other circumstances, but not in this case because everything we see is taking place in space. To further augment the tension, the astronauts lose radio contact with Earth. They're on their own, Robinson Crusoes without the benefit of an island on which to seek refuge.

Bullock spends a lot of time on the screen alone. She's climbing in and out of space suits, at times floating inside a space capsule in her underwear. Humans are a talkative lot, and in moments of isolation and near-panic, Bullock's Ryan talks to herself -- trying to hold steady, reviewing things from her past and working as her own counselor.

Gravity is the kind of masterful movie that stands as a triumph of contemporary moviemaking craft, using sound and the lack of it to great advantage. Cuaron may have made the most astonishingly representative movie of his time, a film in which the technical achievements are unparalleled and entirely intrinsic to the story's meaning.

As an experience that puts you into space, Gravity has few real rivals. We feel unmoored, dislocated and, most of all, vulnerable in the dark beauty of space, Earth glowing in the distance, a beacon of luminosity in an otherwise empty universe.

Most of the time, Gravity, which unfolds over an economical but absorbing 90 minutes, thrives on the intensity of situations that force its characters to react quickly. Every moment seems to involve a life-or-death decision.

In the rare moments when we catch our breath, Gravity gives us productive pause; its setting makes us wonder whether -- like Bullock's Ryan -- we all aren't really talking only to ourselves, even as we reach for the stars.

Clooney loses his cool in Hawaii

Early in The Descendants - the latest movie from director Alexander Payne - we're warned against being seduced by Hawaii's abundant charms. The movie's narrator - an increasingly troubled father played by George Clooney - cautions us not to be deceived by the scenery: People in Hawaii suffer as much as everyone else.

Clooney's character speaks from experience:

During the course of this deceptively relaxed and engaging movie, Clooney's Matt King grapples with death, betrayal, parental angst and personal responsibility. In other words, "The Descendants" is a full-blooded movie, not a travelogue.

But before you reach for your handkerchief or begin wringing your hands in grief, know that the tone of The Descendants is far from lugubrious. Payne manages the kind of neat trick that defines some of Hollywood's best work: The Descendants can be generously entertaining without scraping all the emotional meat of its bones.

Let's get the movie's bona fides out of the way: Yes, The Descendants likely will show up on Oscar's short list for best picture. Yes, Clooney probably will find himself among the nominees for best actor. Payne probably will win a best director nomination, as well as a nomination (along with his co-writers) for best-adapted screenplay. (Kaui Hart Hemmings wrote the novel on which the movie is based.)

There could be more Oscar nominations on tap for The Descendants, but you get the idea: The Descendants has been positioned to make a major splash as one of the year's best big-screen endeavors, and - before we proceed - let me assure you that I'm not going to pull a 180 and tell you to forget all the hype and pre-opening accolades. Some of them are well deserved.

Clooney plays Matt King, a successful real-estate lawyer who hasn't paid a great deal of attention to his wife or to his 17- and 10-year-old daughters. Of course, life is about to teach Matt a major lesson.

The trigger: Matt's wife is involved in a boating accident that puts her into a coma from which she has no chance of recovering. Not surprisingly, Matt's world turns upside down - both as a parent and as a husband. Matt also begins to discover that he may have had an entirely mistaken notion about the kind of life he'd been living.

The movie's trailer reveals way too much, but I won't say more about a screenplay in which Matt accumulates disasters large and small, even as we ignore his early-picture warning and are lulled into something like a state of Hawaiian ease.

Matt's woes extend beyond worry about his wife's medical condition. He's also the trustee for a magnificent parcel of his family's land in Kauai, unspoiled acreage that most of the relatives want to sell to a developer. They think they're doing the right thing because they favor a local developer over an outsider.

Thankfully, the heart of the story belongs to Clooney and to the actresses who play his daughters (Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller). Woodley, from TV's The Secret Life of the American Teenager, portrays a spiky, 17-year-old student. She's difficult, and, perhaps as part of that difficulty, insists that her boyfriend (Nick Krause) accompany her everywhere. Krause's Sid seems like a major dope - until he doesn't.

Despite the problems she presents, Matt increasingly relies on his older daughter. Woodely gives a complex, layered performance. She's playing a character who's not fully mature, but she's not a child, either. She's in that most awkward of categories: an almost adult.

Matthew Lillard and Judy Greer find themselves in major supporting roles, with Greer perhaps having the better showcase, particularly in a scene near the movie's end. Robert Forster makes a strong impression as Matt's embittered father-in-law.

A word or two about Clooney: Clooney is a first-rank star, and he can't check his stardom at the door when the cameras roll. But Clooney deserves major credit for putting aside some of his trademark cool. He's playing an emotionally rumpled guy who can be clueless, a man defined by what he doesn't know.

The Descendants might be a shade too easy, considering some of the issues it raises, and like many good movies, it may be receiving more praise than it deserves. If so, it's because Payne's movie soars above most mainstream entertainment, offering us something welcome and rare: movie characters behaving in ways that are touching, funny and sometimes even smart.

Never boring, but not brilliant either

George Clooney's Ides of March wallows in fashionable cynicism.

Here's some shocking news: Politics can be a dirty business -- full of betrayals, double dealing and unholy bargains. If that comes as a surprise to you, you've probably never read an American newspaper, but this widely held and fashionably jaundiced view permeates George Clooney's The Ides of March, a story about a governor who's trying to win an Ohio presidential primary.

Clooney directed, co-wrote the screenplay and plays Governor Mike Morris, an idealistic liberal who's not afraid to admit that he's not a religious man. Clooney donned many hats to make the movie, but he's not its star. Instead, he cedes the spotlight to Ryan Gosling, who portrays Stephen Myers, an ambitious but idealistic campaign worker and political hotshot who works for Morris' more-seasoned campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Based on Beau Willmon's play, Farragut North, The Ides of March resembles Clooney's previous directorial efforts -- particularly Good Night and Good Luck and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind -- in its snappy intelligence.

Never boring and full of intriguing moments, Ides of March gets its best work from a terrific supporting cast: - Paul Giamatti (as the campaign manager for the opposition); Hoffman (as Morris' veteran campaign manager); and Evan Rachel Wood (as a flirtatious young intern working on the Morris campaign). Gosling is at his best before the script turns the tables on his character, forcing him to decide whether he's going to wallow in the dirt along with the rest of the pols or keep his self-respect.

Clooney's Mike Morris isn't much of a character; he's a kind of walking position paper, and the script --- predictably, I think -- contrives to find ways to challenge Morris' status as a liberal icon. The central plot twist is best discovered in a theater not in a review, but I found Morris' inevitable act of hypocrisy to be less than shocking, an obvious attempt to evoke an incident with which we're all depressingly familiar.

And by the end, it seemed to me that Ryan had adopted a kind of single-minded approach to his character that might have benefited from some shading.

But what surprised me most about The Ides of March is its hermetic quality. The movie lacks the infectious bustle and noise of a campaign; it's fine when the exchanges between characters tend toward intimacy, but it misses the rambunctious excitement of politics. The movie resembles a tune that's all melody and no harmony.

That's not to say that Ides of March is a bore; it's not. The best thing about Ides of March is watching its various characters jockey to prove who's most in the know. Still, it felt to me as Clooney & company never allowed the story's cynicism to bubble urgently from its core. I enjoyed Ides of March, but couldn't entirely shake the feeling that Clooney was playing a game that had been rigged from the start.

Quiet killer, quiet movie, quiet Clooney

I can’t remember the last time a George Clooney movie arrived in the marketplace with less buzz than The American, a purported thriller about a hit man in the midst of an existential crisis. Filmed mostly in Italy – with a European supporting cast – the movie’s title misleads: The American, couldn’t be further from the Hollywood noise machine. It plays like a deliberately paced foreign film.

Nothing wrong with that except that the script by Rowan Joffe (28 Weeks Later) seldom digs beneath the surface. Credit director Anton Corbijn with taking a non-exploitative approach to potentially volatile material, but subtract points for Corbijn’s inability to sustain tension, a vital part of even the most cerebral of thrillers.

Despite its pretensions, The American doesn’t measure up to the kind of work we’ve come to expect from Clooney, a movie star with the sort of adventurous taste that has attracted him to movies such as Up in the Air, The Men Who Stare At Goats and Michael Clayton.

The American provides us with little background about Clooney’s Jack, an assassin who knows how to modify weapons for use in nearly any situation. Clooney deadpans his way through most of the movie. That fits the socially isolated character he’s playing, but also holds an audience at arm’s length.

To complicate matters, Jack’s background is hardly fleshed out. Tattoos suggest military experience. That’s about it. If this is a character study, it’s one without a character.

Jack (sometimes called Edward) might be working for a government agency. He might be an independent contractor. He spends most of the movie in an Italian mountain village. Presumably, we’re not supposed to care too much about the past. We’re expected to occupy ourselves with the question that persistently intrudes on Jack's life; i.e., can a man who takes lives ever hope to build one?

Not surprisingly, Clooney’s graying character has grown tired of the hard life. To succeed at his job, Jack can’t have friends or lasting relationships with women. He lives a monkish existence. He sustains an interest in butterflies, creatures that symbolize the transformation Jack wants to make: from killer to a man who’s able to live normally.

To make the obvious even more blatant, Clooney’s character engages in transparently “deep” conversations with a kindly village priest (Paolo Bonacelli). To give himself a semblance of human connection, Jack visits Clara, a local prostitute (Violante Placido).

For all their attempted realism, the filmmakers don’t exactly go hardcore on Placido’s character, a woman who looks none the worse for the wear of a profession that usually tends toward rougher edges. Can Jack and Clara find happiness together or must he pay the bill for past sins? How heavy are the sins? Consider this: Jack kills three people before the opening credits have even rolled.

When the movie reaches its climax, plot developments don’t seem entirely credible. That’s more forgivable than an inherent confusion at the movie’s core: Listlessness is not the same as quiet intrigue. For a long time, though, I found myself appreciating the movie’s approach: a parsimonious use of music, Clooney’s emotional minimalism, the monastic quality of the hotel rooms Jack occupies. But after a time, it becomes clear that this kind of heightened attention also suggests an absence of urgency.

Corbijn also, I think, overestimates our interest in the mechanics of assassination, turning Jack into a kind artisan of murder. He’s very precise in his labors, machine tooling various parts of the rifle he’s assembling for that one last job. He’s building the weapon for a woman (Thekla Reuten) who has been hired to assassinate an undisclosed target.

True to its butterfly symbolism, The American seems to want to transform from a genre piece into something more significant. As you probably have gathered, the movie takes itself quite seriously – which in this case proves less of a virtue than you might suspect. Clooney fans, thriller fans and art-house fans all may experience a mild letdown from a movie that seems to want to say something profound, but can’t quite get to it.

The American takes admirably careful aim, but ultimately misses its target.