A story that yields to sentiment

Take it as a tribute to actress Gemma Arterton that a movie as contrived and maudlin as Summerland could be even the least bit watchable. Theater director Jessica Swale makes her big-screen debut with a story about an academic writer (Arterton) living in a remote coastal town in England.  Set mostly in the 1940s, the story begins in earnest when Arterton's Alice Lamb is taken by surprise: An escort brings a boy (Lucas Bond) to her home. The reclusive, acerbic Lamb has no interest in the boy who has been shipped from London as part of a program to save the city's children from the Blitz.  Eventually, Alice warms to the boy and him to her with Arterton doing her best to keep Alice from becoming a one-note character. As the story proceeds, we see flashbacks to a time when Alice established a relationship with a young woman (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) awakened Alice to life's possibilities before declining the invitation to a long-term relationship. Mbatha-Raw's character couldn't imagine a life without children. More an emblem than a character, Mbatha-Raw has little to do beyond looking luminous. The interactions between Alice and Frank -- her new charge -- are well-handled but the movie concludes with a couple of dubious twists, one that milks emotions and the other that strains credibility. Penelope Wilton portrays the aging Alice in opening and closing scenes and the movie features Tom Courtenay as a gentle, compassionate small-town man. Swale mostly ignores social responses to lesbian love during less tolerant days, makes little reference to race, and seems most interested in providing a cinematic massage to soothe troubled spirits. I kept wondering whether the thorny, evidence-driven character Arterton creates possibly could have made it through the soggy third act.

A private detective with Tourette syndrome

Edward Norton directs and stars in Motherless Brooklyn, a movie that never attains the impact that seems to have been intended.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with long movies. Problems arise, though, when the content and momentum of a particular movie don't match its length. And that’s what happens with Edward Norton’s two-hour and 20-minute adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn.

In adapting Letham’s novel for the screen, Norton (who wrote the screenplay, directed and stars in the movie) uses Lethem’s story about a detective with Tourette syndrome as a launchpad for a conspiratorial tale about the ways in which a powerful figure built the bridges and highways that shaped New York City, destroying neighborhoods in the bargain.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand that the movie, set during the 1950s, can be taken as a riff on the career of New York power broker Robert Moses -- and perhaps on all wheeler/dealers who accumulate power without applying any ethical constraints.

A complicated story weaves through the various scenes that push Norton’s character deeper into the dens of power. He’s trying to negotiate his way through a labyrinth he doesn’t fully understand and which, frankly, may baffle audiences, as well — at least in the early going.

Moviegoers with memories probably won’t be able to resist comparisons to Chinatown (1974). But that movie became a classic of contemporary noir. Motherless Brooklyn, I’m afraid, is a wannabe by comparison. I’m talking about the movie's characters, its mood and the lack of chemistry between Norton and the movie’s female lead, portrayed by Gu Gu Mbatha Raw.

No point dwelling on the plot, but a word or two about the secondary characters. Bruce Willis appears briefly as the mentor and employer of Norton's Lionel Essrog. Willis' Frank Minna, a private eye with his own agency, rescued Lionel from an orphanage and schooled him in the ways of the street.

Bobby Cannavale portrays the slickest member of Frank's detective agency. Alec Baldwin appears as Moses Randolph, the movie's power broker, a man who doesn't care how many lives he wrecks. Baldwin is fine, although, in crucial moments, his dialogue is too on-the-nose. Willem Dafoe delivers an angry, agonized performance as a compromised idealist.

Safe to say that none of these characters is all that memorable. The same goes for a community organizer (Cherry Jones), a woman who’s fighting for New York’s neighborhoods. Raw’s character is part of that team, an activist lawyer intent on fighting the powers-that-be.

Michael Kenneth Williams portrays a jazz trumpet player who plies his trade at a Harlem nightclub that figures in the movie’s plot. Always commanding, Williams appears at a moment when Norton allows the narrative to stall; it almost seems as if he values listening to the music on the soundtrack more than moving the plot.

Norton gives Lionel the tics and outbursts that define his brand of Tourette syndrome. In displays of uncontrollable agitation, Lionel tries to put sometimes unrelated things together, which may be a metaphor for how he's trying to deal with a broken society. But Motherless Brooklyn isn't really about a man living with Tourette syndrome; it's a plunge into a corrupted world and the movie eventually staggers under the weight of what appear to be ultra-serious aspirations.

A fine cast keeps Motherless Brooklyn watchable, but something odd happened when Norton changed the time period of Lethem's novel from the 1990s to the 1950s. It lost much of its urgency. Motherless Brooklyn ca be so retro, it feels as tired as some of the clothes you might find in a thrift store, almost worn out -- and maybe a trifle passe.

'Beauty and the Beast:' One more time

Disney's reprise of its 1991 animated hit should please old fans and make some new ones.

The idea that love can break the spell of a powerful curse sounds as familiar to us as fairy tales themselves. In the case of Beauty and the Beast -- as imagined by Disney in a new live action version of its 1991 animated edition -- the Beast, a callous prince who has been cursed by a haggard old woman, must find love before the last petal drops off a rose kept in his dank castle. Absent such a love, the Beast and a gaggle of courtiers who've been turned into inanimate objects forever will be doomed to their cursed fates.

Disney's lavish remake its 26-year-old animated classic, Beauty and the Beastt, created little by way of anticipatory excitement for me. I'm no fan of remakes that take advantage of advances in digital technology just to wow us, in this case with talking versions of a clock, a teapot, a candelabra and a feather duster. And, yes, these digitally created do-dads probably show more personality than some of the story's human characters.

Having said that, this version -- starring Emma Watson (Beauty), Dan Stevens (Beast) and directed by Bill Condon (Dreamgirls) -- has enough whimsy and amusement to satisfy those who also will be buoyed by reprises of the Alan Menken/Tim Rice musical numbers -- with a couple of new additions.

Much of the credit for the movie's engaging collection of talking bric-a-brac goes to the actors who supplied the voice work: Emma Thompson voices Mrs. Potts, the teacup; Stanley Tucci gives life to as Maestro Cadenza, a harpsichord; Gugu Mbatha-Raw adds her vocal prowess to Plumette, the feather duster. The voice behind Cogsworth, the clock, belongs to Ian McKellen; and Ewan McGregor can be heard as Lumiere, a dashing candelabra.

Condon spices things up with references to Busby Berkeley, a ton of production design, a major investment in costumes and a generally capable cast that includes Luke Evans as the impossibly conceited and ultimately duplicitous Gaston and Josh Gad as his loyal sidekick LeFou.

You've probably read that Disney has made LeFou a gay character. That may be daring for a Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, but nothing in this upbeat entertainment seems designed to take the glow off the movie's mass-appeal luster.

The film even neuters the Beast, who has been given a leonine countenance -- with horns and bad teeth added for the sake of fright. This Beast makes threats on which he fails to deliver, and isn't quite as self-assured in his menace as you might expect.

Still, he's softened by Beauty, and by the end, it's difficult to say that anyone would mind if the Beast remained a beast rather than returning to his more Disnified form as a devilishly handsome prince.

In a nice touch, Beauty and the Beast begin their rapprochement when Belle (Beauty) discovers that the Beast has a well-stocked library. She's an avid reader, evidently the only one in the tiny village she and her father (Kevin Kline) call home.

There have, of course, been numerous versions of this 18th century tale from Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Velqleneuve, including Jean Cocteau's landmark 1946 version, but classic stories seem capable of enduring as many retellings as anyone possibly could desire.

This one opts for a visual razzle-dazzle that plays against Watson's plucky but somewhat ordinary Belle. I wouldn't say that Condon and company achieve perfection, but they've provided a lively, entertaining version of Disney's animated entry from the 1990s.

If we were going to have another Beauty and the Beast, I'm not sure what more we could have justifiably asked or expected.

Rebelling against the South's Rebels

Despite Matthew McConaughey's fiery performance, Free State of Jones is a bit of a slog.

Some background: During the heat of the Civil War, Newton Knight left the Confederate army, returned to his Mississippi home and formed a ragtag band of fighters to combat what he viewed as injustices inflected by the Confederate Army on poor farmers and blacks who had been enslaved. Knight's rogue army -- a.k.a. the Knight Company -- was composed of deserters and runaway slaves.

Knight was motivated to desert the Rebel army, where he served as a nurse, by the Confederacy's "Twenty-Negro Law." That law exempted Southerners who owned 20 or more slaves from fighting, thus establishing grounds for believing that the Civil War was a battle in which poor southerners fought to protect the bounties of the rich.

A bona fide man of personality, Knight evidently took seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply. He had nine children with Serena, his white wife. Knight also had a common-law wife, a former slave, with whom he had five children.

So was Knight a prototypical hippie or an authentic champion of the poor?

That argument reportedly remains unsettled, but not for director Gary Ross, whose new movie -- The Free State of Jones -- treats Knight (Matthew McConaughey) as a heroic figure who believes in racial equality and in simple economic justice: A man deserves to own what he plants, etc.

I don't know whether Ross's interpretation of history is correct, but I do know that his movie possesses a pulse that beats only intermittently. Free State of Jones also suffers because Ross seems to prefer the lengthy accumulation of events to incisive character development.

Looking fierce, a bearded McConaughey blazes with passion as the committed Knight, but the rest of the cast -- including Knight's two wives (Keri Russell and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) -- aren't given enough chance to evolve.

Like nearly everyone else in the movie, they're swamped by Ross's need to cover ground -- from the waning days of the war through reconstruction to a jarringly presented 1948 trial in which Knight's great-grandson is accused of miscegenation, interracial marriage being illegal in Mississippi.

At times, the movie seems like an American take on Robin Hood with Knight's merry band of rebels living an idyllic life in the Mississippi swamps. At other times, the movie seems like a Western; Knight becomes the loner who protects the weak. At still other times, Ross uses photographs of the period to add authenticity. It's as if Ken Burns cropped up in the middle of the story to add his two cents.

There are compelling scenes, Knight discovering the body of a comrade in arms (Mahershala Ali) who has been hanged and castrated by Klansmen who can't accept the Reconstructionist idea that black men could vote. Unfortunately, such harrowing moments emerge amid what amounts to a general slog through an obscure slice of history.

Not widely known, Knight's story proves interesting enough to keep this lead-footed effort from totally foundering. But Ross (The Hunger Games) squanders an opportunity: Too many of the movie's scenes fail to spark in ways that would have taken The Free State of Jones to more memorable levels.

The doctor who fought the NFL

The story of one-man's battle to warn against the damage of concussions.

Concussion, a movie about the dangers of playing pro-football, may not be a classic, but it's worth seeing, particularly for Will Smith's highly concentrated performance as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian born pathologist who identified brain trauma in a number of deceased NFL veterans.

Also -- and more important -- there's the subject of the movie; i.e., the dangers of prolonged football careers that can ruin lives, leading to dementia, violent outbursts, depression and even suicide.

The movie begins when Omalu, working in the Pittsburgh coroner's office, decides to do an autopsy on former Steelers star Mike Webster, rendered in small, early scenes by an appropriately alarming David Morse.

Omalu takes a detective's approach to his work; he respectfully talks to corpses, encouraging them to yield their secrets before he cuts them open. Eventually, he discovers that Webster suffered from CTE, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the result of repeated blows to the head.

If you've been reading the papers, you know that the NFL originally paid little attention to the brain traumas caused by repeated hits. That makes for the movie's tension: Omalu's findings weren't welcomed by an organization that's heavily invested in a game that thrives on violence. (And, no, I'm not being holier than thou. I watch and enjoy professional football, too.)

Concussion, which was directed by Peter Landesman (Parkland), tells the straightforward story of a physician who worked hard to bring the truth of CTE to light and who also confronted racial prejudice, an aspect of the story that probably should have received more attention.

Smith masters Omalu's accent and gives a memorable performance as a doctor who's sure of himself, sometimes to the point of annoyance: Not everyone admires Omalu's persistence and some believe that he refuses to understand the importance of football in the city's communal life. They're right.

Albert Brooks gives a notable performance as Omalu's boss, one of the few doctors who takes his side. Alec Baldwin may be a bit miscast as a former Steelers physician who comes to see the light about the terrible consequences of head injuries and the athletic culture that produces them.

There's also a romance when Omalu meets Prema (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a Kenyan nurse who becomes his wife, as well as an important part of his support system.

It's not easy to buy Luke Wilson as NFL commissioner Pete Godell, but Smith and Landesman put their story over with enough conviction to make us a tad uncomfortable the next time we sit down for an afternoon of hard-hitting football. We're fans, yes, but let's be real: We're also enablers.

A show business cautionary tale

Gugu Mbatha-Raw finds a star vehicle in Beyond the Lights.

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Director Gina Prince-Bythewood's Beyond the Lights mistakenly, I think, tries to pack a lot of issues into an essentially small frame: It's a fairy tale romance, a show-business cautionary tale and a look at how black women are marketed and sold by a sexually-obsessed music business.

Beyond the Lights isn't void of entertainment value -- and that may be part of its problem: It misses too many opportunites to dig deeply.

The movie focuses on the career of fictional pop star Noni -- played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, last seen in the historical drama Belle.

A British-born singer, Noni achieved her American breakthrough after teaming with a white American rapper named Kid Culprit (Colson "Machine Gun Kelly" Baker).

Not surprisingly, success hasn't brought Noni happiness. She's alienated from her authentic self, and pushed toward commercialism by her aggressively driven stage mother (Minnie Driver).

The movie sets the parameters of Noni's problem in an economical prologue. A young Noni (India Jean Jacques) participates in a talent contest in which she sings an a cappella version of Nina Simone's Blackbird.

Simone, the jazz singer who died in 2003, can be taken as the antithesis of a show-business sell-out.

An obvious victim of discrimination, Noni nabs second place. Not good enough, says Noni's oblivious white Mom, who -- in a pre-contest scene -- begs a black beautician for help with Noni's hair.

The movie then leaps into the present. Now a celebrity, a despairing Noni -- suffocating under a ton of exploitative packaging -- decides to leap from the balcony of her Los Angeles hotel room.

She's pulled back by a hunky LA cop (Nate Parker), who assures her that he sees past the razzle-dazzle. He knows who she is.

Although both Mbatha-Raw and Parker are compelling actors, I found it difficult to believe in their story-book romance.

Moreover, attempts to parallel Parker's story with Noni's throw the movie off course: He's a cop pushed toward politics by his father (Danny Glover). He, too, needs to reconnect with his real self.

There's also something inherently problematic about Prince-Bythewood's approach. It's not easy to show a hyper-sexualized Noni without feeding off some of the same energy that's being criticized.

Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball) obtains a star-making performance from Mbatha-Raw, but it's tethered to an uninspired romance and to a movie that tries to offer the satisfaction of a familiar story arc along with fresh insights into celebrity, particularly as it concerns black women.

Perhaps because of its fractured ambitions, this movie about the need for Noni to find her real voice doesn't always feel as if it has found one of its own.

Young, indepednent and biracial

Belle gives Austen-like treatment to a historically important story.

If you've ever wondered how Jane Austen's novels might have looked like had the author paid more attention to race, you no longer need to use your imagination.

Loosely based on a true story, Belle spins an Austen-like yarn about Dido Elizabeth Belle, a woman who was raised by British aristocrats and who also happened to be the daughter of a British Naval officer and a black woman.

After her father leaves for sea -- where he eventually perishes -- Dido is taken in by her father's uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson). She's raised on the Mansfield estate during the 1800s, prior to the abolition of slavery.

Belle follows Austen's lead when it comes to finding a man for Dido. Dido's ultimate soul mate must be a fellow whose values are more important than his position in society, presuming that he doesn't fall too low on the British totem. Virtue trumps status.

Full of inspiring speeches about justice and well-acted by an exceptionally talented cast, Belle stands as a respectable period piece that approaches its subject in straightforward fashion.

Though portrayed as mostly happy, Dido's upbringing wasn't without problems. She and her white cousin Elizabeth became fond playmates, but when guests were present, Dido had to dine apart from the family lest visitors be offended by her presence.

This is but one of the movie's many attempts to portray the mixture of gentility (which it does well) and savagery (which it does less well) that defined British society at a moment when the formal social order had begun to change -- at least a little.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw leads the way as Dido, giving us a woman whose independent spirit and intelligence is clear from the outset. As the movie progresses, Dido gains in both assurance and conviction.

Dido's realizations take two forms: Having lived among the upper classes, she knows she's their equal. Increasingly, though, she also understands that her color connects her to those who are being viciously exploited because of their race. Dido's political consciousness grows.

Wilkinson (joined by a fine Emily Watson as Lady Mansfield) delivers a wonderful performance as a conflicted man. As Britain's Lord Chief Justice, Mansfield is about to rule on an important case involving the slave trade.

Lord Mansfield believes in maintaining the social order through law, but understands that he has a moral obligation to do the right thing. He loves Dido, but fears for her future.

As directed by Amma Asante -- from a screenplay by Misan Sagay -- Belle eventually conflates legal matters and romance. With Justice Mansfield's decision looming, Dido's personal life becomes increasingly complex.

Dido is courted by the socially well-positioned Oliver Ashford (James Norton), a man who's willing to "overlook" her mixed-race background, perhaps because he's eager to gain access to the income Dido inherited from her seafaring father.

You don't need to be a master prognosticator to know that Dido ultimately will give her heart to an abolitionist firebrand (Sam Reid) who happens to be the son of a lowly vicar.

Miranda Richardson appears as the manipulative Lady Ashford -- mother of Oliver Ashford. Lady Ashford's older son James (Tom Felton) portrays the movie's staunchest racist.

Sarah Gadon nicely handles the role of Elizabeth, Dido's less-than-astute cousin who comes to envy Dido for the marriage proposal she receives.

Belle uses Dido's story as the basis for a portrait of British society in the days prior to abolition. It's not a subtle film, but the movie -- to no small effect -- is bolstered by a cast that knows precisely how to bring Asante's plan to life.