Buddies on the road -- and on the water

A country boy and a young man with Down syndrome team for a fairy tale of an adventure in The Peanut Butter Falcon.

We've all seen enough bromances to last several lifetimes. But that doesn't mean anyone plans to retire a genre that continues to connect with audiences.

The Peanut Butter Falcon arrives in theaters as a buddy movie -- but one with a difference. It teams Shia LaBeouf, as a red-neck renegade, with a young man with Down syndrome, played by Zack Gottsagen, an actor who really does have Down syndrome and for whom the movie was written.

LaBeouf's Tyler and Gottsagen's Zak make a typically unlikely duo. Tyler's on the run from a couple of guys (John Hawkes and Yelawolf) who want to kill him for messing up their crab-fishing business. He's also troubled by the death of his older brother (Jon Bernthal).

To hit the road, Zak must escape from the nursing home where he's being housed, no other placement being available. Zak's roommate (Bruce Dern) helps the young man engineer the breakout that leads to his hook-up with Tyler.

A nursing home volunteer (Dakota Johnson) follows. She's supposed to return Zak to the home. She also adds feminine energy to the generally masculine proceedings, which are heightened by Zak's burning ambition. He wants to be a professional wrestler and dreams of visiting a training school run by his idol, a wrestler who goes by the name of Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church).

Eventually, Johnson's Eleanor joins Tyler and Zak's brotherhood of two. Reluctantly, she agrees to help Zak pursue his dream.

Shot in the Florida Panhandle, the movie -- a passion project from first-time directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz -- relies heavily on the chemistry generated by a fully committed LaBeouf and by Gottsagen, a natural charmer with a robust sense of humor.

They're playing two characters who are thrown together for an adventure that includes a raft trip and an encounter with a backwoods preacher (Wayne DeHart) -- all spaced over sufficient time to allow LaBeouf and Gottsagen to develop a conspiratorial bond, two against the world.

Peanut Butter Falcon, which avoids gooey sentiment, takes its fanciful title from the name Zak chooses for his wrestling alter ego. The title proves suggestive; this is a movie that isn't afraid of its sometimes goofy appeal.

To fully enjoy Peanut Butter Falcon, it's probably best to set aside demands for total plausibility and accept the movie as a fairy tale about what it means to be young and feel free.

And -- at least to my knowledge -- The Peanut Butter Falcon is the only film in the long history of cinema that includes a scene in which the characters cook a fish, smear it with peanut butter and eat it. That moment, I should point out, marks the only time I felt sorry for anyone in the movie.

McDormand bristles in 'Three Billboards'

In the town of Ebbing, Missouri, things aren't going well.

Mildred Hayes doesn't brood. After her daughter was raped and murdered on a stretch of lonely Missouri highway, Mildred ran out of patience with the local police for failing to locate a suspect and make an arrest. Mildred took matters into her own hands, renting three rundown billboards outside of her hometown of Ebbing, painting them red and advertising the fact that the police chief dropped the ball.

"Raped While Dying." "And Still No Arrests" "How Come Chief Willoughby?"

Mildred's bold move upsets the police and the townsfolk of Ebbing, Mo. But here's the thing: Mildred doesn't give a damn who she offends. She's angry, grief-stricken and intent on obtaining justice for her departed daughter.

Director Martin McDonagh's often funny third feature, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, brings the British/Irish director to the American heartland for a movie that proudly displays its wild variations in tone. Three Billboards makes its mark as a genre farrago: it's a dark comedy, a profane assault on authority figures, a diatribe about small-town hypocrisies and a comedy built around characters whose speech boils with profanities.

Frances McDormand receives showcase space from McDonagh as Mildred, a woman who spreads her venom the way bees pollinate flowers -- liberally. No one is spared: not the terminally ill Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), not Mildred's son (Lucas Hedges), not her former husband (John Hawkes), an unreliable fellow who left her for a 19-year-old (Samara Weaving), and certainly not police officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a dim-bulb of a cop with a vicious streak and a reputation for racism.

The British born McDonagh (In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths) occasionally seems to be straining to hit notes of political incorrectness as he reveals the blatant homophobia and racism of some of his characters. But touching moments and genuine expressions of feeling also turn up as characters are brought face-to-face with their humanity -- often under terrible circumstances.

Whatever its ambitions, Three Billboards derives its charge to McDormand; Mildred is so furiously committed to her own truth that she doesn't hesitate to provoke, even tossing the local priest out of her home. Of course, Mildred's language proves significantly less polite than a simple invitation for the priest to leave.

The movie's intemperate characters sometimes soften: A bit of homespun wisdom emerges from an unlikely source or a touch of decency is expressed by a character such as Rockwell's Dixon, a comic-book-reading cop who may be too stupid to know how thoroughly reprehensible he can be.

To keep everything slightly off balance, McDonagh sometimes mixes brutal and tender sentiments in the same scene. His approach creates ragged edges, but, like his main character, McDonagh may not care. Three Billboards takes its cues from McDormand, who infuses Mildred with uncompromising strength, the kind that allows a formidable woman to go toe-to-toe with any man and strike fear into his trembling heart. She marches to her own drummer and is more than ready to knock down anyone who stands in her way.

'Too Late,' another LA neo-noir

John Hawkes breaks the mold as a Los Angeles private detective.

Dividing its story into five segments that unfold without regard to chronological order, the LA-based neo-noir Too Late boasts a technical feat that's worth mentioning: Each segment consists of one shot that runs for 20 minutes thanks to something called a Techniscope-format 35 mm reel. (Normal 35 mm reels accommodate 12 minutes of filming.)

Not only does the movie take on a cinematic challenge, but it also asks a lot from a cast led by John Hawkes, who plays Mel Sampson, a private investigator.

Hauck, who wrote the screenplay, challenges his actors with a ton of self-consciously written dialogue: I'm supposing that Hauck, who also wrote the screenplay, wanted to plunge us into a noir world where no one talks like they would in real life, but in 2016, the writing can seem awfully self-conscious.

Besides, we've been down these neo-noir back alleys too many times before, which is why I heard a kind of ironic (and unintended) echo in the movie's title. Given the movie's dense plotting, this could be a case of too much, too late.

The always intriguing Hawkes by no means delivers a formulaic performance as a detective who winds up encountering a variety of women after a shocking murder in the early going. At every turn, Hawkes breaks the mold.

Among the movie's women, Vail Bloom qualifies as the most exposed -- literally. She does much of her acting naked from the waist down. Dichen Lachman works the hard-boiled side of the street as Sampson's long-time love interest.

Hauck certainly has an eye for strange locations (a dreary drive-in theater that also boasts a boxing ring), and his convoluted, Tarantino-like structure slowly and sometimes improbably resolves itself.

But Too Late has difficulty getting beyond what appears to be a meta-narrative about characters trapped in the shadow of previous movies with nothing much at stake besides whether Hauck can make the pieces of his noir jigsaw finally fit neatly together.

An adventure that scales major heights

It's people vs. the mountain in a dizzying Everest.

Take a bunch of actors with bushy beards that conceal their identifying features, dress them in bulky snow gear, cover their noses and mouths with oxygen masks and make them wear goggles to reduce glare from the sun. Do that and you'll be making a movie in which it's not always easy to tell one character from another.

That's what happens in Everest, the true story of a guided expedition that tried to scale Everest in 1996. You may have to hang around for the end credits to make sure you've gotten the actors straight.

Normally, that would be grounds for failure, but director Baltasar Kormakur's 3D IMAX adventure into mountainous terrain effectively builds tension around harrowing set pieces and spectacular scenery.

The movie also has a point: Everest can make a mockery of human ambition. You look at the steep precipices, the tangle of ropes and litter left by previous climbers, and rock faces that seem alien to human life, and you wonder whether the mountain isn't the movie's loudest voice: Everything about Everest says that people don't belong there.

Working from a script by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy, Kormakur wastes little time trying to flesh out a story that can be summed up in a few words: Folks climb, the weather turns bad, not everyone survives.

Confusion not withstanding, it's possible to provide a Who's Who in this Himalayan adventure.

Jason Clarke plays Rob Hall, the leader of the expedition and the closest the movie gets to having a main character.

At the outset, Clarke -- who projects good humor and climbing competence -- leaves his pregnant wife (Keira Knightley), and heads to Nepal to join colleagues who also work for a company that helps climbers reach the summit.

Included in the cast are Sam Worthington (as another member of the team); Emily Watson (as the person who holds down operations at the base camp), and Elizabeth Debicki (as the team doctor).

Jake Gyllenhaal portrays Scott Fischer, a tour guide who joins forces with Hall to make the climb a bit easier. Ingvar Sigurdsson portrays a Russian climber who seems to think oxygen is for wimps.

John Hawke appears as one of the climbers, a mailman who wants to prove that an ordinary guy can dream big.

Providing one of the movie's more recognizable faces, Josh Brolin portrays a climber who learns that Texas-style bravado isn't much help under dire, blizzard conditions.

The real-life story of what happened on this expedition was written by Jon Krakauer , who recounted the tale in his book, Into Thin Air. Michael Kelly portrays Krakauer, who joined the expedition to report for Outside Magazine. (The screenplay, by the way, isn't adapted from Krakauer's book.)

To the movie's credit, arrival at the summit occurs about half way through. Everest lets us know that the real accomplishment involves more than reaching the top: The triumph rests in getting back down.

The second half of the movie involves the climbers' descent, a trek that turns into disorganized frenzy with the arrival of a ferocious storm.

The movie leaves you to ponder why anyone would risk life and limb to make this sort of climb, but Kormakur (2 Guns) mostly avoids philosophical musings.

Instead, he makes us feel the sting of blowing snow or the apprehension of climbers traversing a narrow ledge or inching their way across ladders that span impossibly deep crevasses.

But Everest offers more than pure action; it also creates understanding of the teamwork required to accomplish this kind of feat and the pain and loss that accompany failure.

And although Everest hardly qualifies as a character study, it conveys the love that professional climbers have for one another. That feeling helps generate emotion, particularly at the end.

Not surprisingly, Everest is about courage and stamina, but it also tells us that sometimes these qualities aren't enough. That's not exactly the message one expects from a big-ticket movie that most people will see because it's the closest they'll ever want to get to this kind of experience.

Music, heroin and fatherhood on the fringe

A look at the relationship between a musician and his daughter.

Jazz pianist Joe Albani, who went by the name of Joe Albany, died in 1988 at the age of 64. Albany spent most of his adult life as a musician and heroin addict, not always in that order.

No slouch wannabe, Albany established his reputation playing with such greats as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. That alone might have made for a good movie.

But Low Down, which only touches on Albany's jazz life, turns out to be another kind endeavor, one that focuses on Joe's faltering attempts at fatherhood.

Based on a memoir by his daughter, who also had a hand in writing the screenplay, Low Down introduces us to Albany during the 1970s.

At the time, he was living a marginal life in the kind of seedy Los Angeles dives that writer Charles Bukowski memorialized, single-room occupancy hotels where the clientele was sometimes too drunk or stoned to notice much of anything.

Director Jeff Preiss, who worked as the cinematographer on the Chet Baker documentary Let's Get Lost, tells the story through the eyes of Albany's 13-year-old daughter Amy (Elle Fanning).

Albany -- played by John Hawkes -- bobs in and out of the story, sometimes sober, sometimes not. At times, he allows heroin to disconnect him from music, yet we never doubt his seriousness as an artist.

Hawkes (The Sessions, Martha Marcy May Marlene and Winter's Bone) is too good an actor to serve up a series of junkie cliches. He gives us a father who's gentle and bright with his daughter and who's imbued with a kind of tolerance for himself and others.

Joe obviously has little idea about how to be a father, but he leaves no doubt that he loves his daughter, and Fanning does justice to a teen-ager who's trying not to be overwhelmed by her father's indulgences or by an alcoholic mother (Lena Headley), made viperous by booze and bitterness.

Obviously, Amy isn't living a normal teen life; she's exposed to prostitutes and to a strange but gentle fellow (Peter Dinklage) who lives in the basement of the dump where her dad crashes.

If there's a surprising performance here, it's given by Glenn Close, who plays Joe's mother and Amy's grandmother, a tough woman who chain smokes, takes no guff, and takes care of her granddaughter when her father can't. She appreciates her son's talent, but fears for him.

Fanning observes her father, his friends and the life he's fallen into with baffled curiosity, and Hawkes can feel almost airborne as Joe floats through some awfully dreary days.

The movie floats a bit as well; it's steeped in a kind of '70s filmmaking style in which the truth of every scene often takes precedence over any narrative arc.

I don't know what else to say to give you an idea about this movie, but it might help if I conjectured a bit. I think John Cassavetes would have liked and admired Low Down -- at least, I hope he would have.

Sex & a very singular man

The Sessions tells the story of a man in an iron lung whose libido has not been paralyzed.

Until his 1999 death at the age of 49, poet and journalist Mark O'Brien had spent most of his life in an iron lung. A boyhood bout with polio left O'Brien without the use of muscles from his neck down. He couldn't breath on his own for long.

In 1997, filmmaker Jessica Hu made a made a documentary about O'Brien, Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien. I haven't seen that documentary, but I have seen The Sessions, an often funny (really) and always revealing account of O'Brien's efforts to have a sex life -- or maybe just to have sex. Not surprisingly for someone in his condition, O'Brien remained a virgin at age 38.

As depicted in The Sessions, O'Brien's interest in sex seems like the most natural thing in the world for a man whose zest life far exceeded the boundaries imposed on him by his iron lung. Always upfront about his circumstances and about himself, O'Brien wrote a magazine article about his sexual adventures. If he felt sorry for himself, he did a good job of hiding it.

John Hawkes (familiar from Winter's Bone and Martha Marcy May Marlene) plays O'Brien, and it may take audiences time to connect this gaunt, atrophied version of Hawkes to any previous images the actor has projected.

If Hawkes is not nominated for an Oscar in the best-actor category, it will go down as one of the great injustices in Academy Award history. But don't think that Hawkes deserves a sympathy Oscar for playing someone with a crippling disability; he deserves an Oscar nomination for creating a memorable character, a man of varied interests (from poetry to baseball) whose desire to experience sex seems like an extension of his curiosity about the world.

In pursuit of his goal, O'Brien contracts for the services of Cheryl Cohen Greene (Helen Hunt), a professional sex surrogate with a husband (Adam Arkin) who knows about her job. That job turns out to be the source of the movie's quietly expressed emotional life. And although Mark and Cheryl eventually must deal with emotions, which always are difficult to sever from physical interaction, The Sessions doesn't hide behind a veil of faux romance.

Appearing naked in many scenes, Hunt portrays a woman who sees her role as that of an educator, teaching her clients the ways of the body with remarkable levels of sensitivity and acceptance. The sex scenes between Mark and Cheryl are frank (he has difficulty not ejaculating prematurely) but never seem distasteful.

For those who somehow wonder about the morality of all this, The Sessions focuses on Mark's relationship with Father Brendan, a priest played with practical intelligence and appropriate discomfort by William H. Macy.

Father Brendan wonders about his role as an adviser in Mark's sexual pursuits, ultimately (and rightly) concluding that although he doesn't believe God condones out-of-wedlock sex, Mark surely qualifies for a pass.

Director Ben Lewin presents Mark's story in straightforward fashion, infusing every scene with believable reactions -- from the clerk at the motel where Mark and Cheryl meet, as well as from Mark's various care takers.

Without shame and with a good deal of courage, The Sessions answers questions that you might think about but would be too embarrassed to ask if you actually met someone such as Mark, who (as you can see from the above picture) was able to spend brief amounts of time out of his iron lung.

The Sessions stands as one of the more intriguing and quietly remarkable movies of the year, as well as a reminder that sexual experience can and should be one of life's joys.

She escapes a cult -- or does she?

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a study in tension, dread and carefully built anxiety.

Ever since I heard it, I've had trouble remembering the title of Martha Marcy May Marlene. The movie? That's another story. Director Sean Durkin's debut feature brims with enough quiet tension to make it one of the year's most memorable movies.

Durkin, who also wrote the screenplay, tells the story of a young woman (Elizabeth Olsen) who escapes from a rural cult in upstate New York, but can't entirely shake off the experience.

On a deeper level, Martha Marcy May Marlene is a creepy mediation on the darker corners of identity. Just as Martha seems to juggle many identities -- some of her own choosing, some not -- the film, too, comes across as a kind of mixed tape, finding its roots in both horror and psychological drama, genres that often are at their best when merged.

Olsen plays Martha, a young woman who, having fled a cult, shows up at the home of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson). It's immediately clear that Martha's presence will elevate tensions between Lucy and her architect husband (Hugh Dancy). Lucy feels responsible for her younger sister, even though she hasn't seen her in a couple of years.

This kind of movie -- ambiguous and haunting -- puts tremendous pressure on its lead actress, and Olsen handles it well. On one hand, we believe that she's had her fill of cult life; on the other, it's clear that Martha's life on the farm has toppled her ideas about personal boundaries and social convention. At one point, Martha pops into bed with her sister and her husband while they're making love. We eventually learn that in the cult, women are initiated by being drugged and raped by the cult's charismatic leader (John Hawkes).

Martha's constantly flashing back to her experiences in the cult. We know enough about other cults -- the Manson family, for example -- to fear that terrible violence lurks among cult members who are committed to defending their isolated way of life, which offers an indigestible mix of puritanical rigor (the man and women eat separately) and perversion (the women are offered to the cult leader as if they were sacrifices to an earthly god).

Durkin leaves plenty of blanks for us to fill in. We speculate that Martha joined this cult because she felt displaced, and that, for a time, the cult provided her with a safe heaven, as well as with a sense of power.

We also wonder whether Martha is strong enough to escape the influences of Hawkes' Patrick, who knows how to cast a wicked spell. He keeps telling Martha that she's "a teacher and a leader," someone special.

Durkin builds additional tension by forcing us to wonder when the cult members will follow Martha -- who they call Marcy May -- into her sister's suburban home, which represents a lifestyle Martha seems to find as off-putting as that of the cult.

Durkin purposefully keeps us off balance: At times, we're not sure whether we're in the present or re-living a piece of Martha's past. This approach makes sense because Martha may not be sure, either, and the movie benefits from its unhinged sense of creepiness.

Martha never tells Lucy where she's been, and it strains credibility to think that Lucy waits until the picture nearly has concluded to suggest that Martha seek professional help.

But Durkin's ability to sustain a sense of dread more than compensates for a few plot holes, and Martha Marcy May Marlene stands as one of the year's more intriguing pictures, a portrait of a self-contained world that's suffocating the spirit of a young woman who doesn't know (and maybe never will) how she fits into the general scheme of things.