An FBI hunt for white supremacists

  The Silent Brotherhood, a foray into the ranks of right-wing extremism, was written by reporters Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt. I remember the book’s 1990 publication because its authors were then co-workers of mine at The Rocky Mountain News, a now defunct Denver daily.

   Gerhardt passed away in 2015, and Flynn went to become a Denver City Council member after the News’s demise. 

  I don't know when I first heard that The Silent Brotherhood would be adapted for the screen and that it would star Jude Law, but the movie based on Flynn and Gerhardt's book -- now called The Order -- finally is reaching the nation’s theaters.

    The Order tells a story triggered by the murder of outspoken Denver talk show host Alan Berg (Marc Maron in a brief performance). I didn’t know Berg well, but I’d met him and had been on his show a couple of times, talking movies, I guess.

   Berg was gunned down in front of his Denver condo in 1984, a crime that, in The Order, becomes the catalyst for a penetrating look at the criminal activities of violent neo-Nazis operating in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s, often supporting themselves by robbing banks.

  Australian director Justin Kurzel takes a no-frills approach to a true crime story with frightening political implications, providing insight into people attracted to the furthest corners of the American far right. 

  Law plays Terry Husk, an FBI agent who’s drawn into the investigation when he’s assigned to an office in a remote corner of Washington state. He’s had big cases in New York and elsewhere, but seems to be on the downside of his career.

  Law creates a character who's worn, dogged, and sad. But he perseveres.

  Tye Sheridan plays Jamie Bowden, a local cop who knows some of the gang members from when they were kids. Bowden serves as a guide for Husk; in return, he's schooled by Husk in the ways of cops who know the ropes.

   Jurnee Smollett joins the cast as another FBI agent who contributes to the investigation, a fraught task for a Black woman working to bring white supremacists to justice.

  Set during the 1980s, The Order finds its principal outlaw in neo-Nazi Bob Matthews, played with charisma by Nicholas Hoult, soon to be seen in Nosferatu. 

   Matthews, who founded a group called The Order, relies on his likability and persuasiveness to attract others to his foul cause. He creates a sense of belonging among his followers, a brotherhood of the disaffected united by bonds of hatred for the federal government and anyone who isn't white.

   Bombings, an armored truck heist, and other violent incidents light the movie’s action spark; they're part of The Order's disruptive tactics, some motivated by their obsession with The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel and white supremacist influencer.

   Not every supremacist believes in Matthews's approach. At one point, Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), the head of the Aryan Nations, tries to control Bowden, who he views as a dangerous rogue. Butler comes off as a neo-Nazi institutionalist who’s willing to bide his time.

  The Order has been classified as a crime thriller. Heaven knows, we've seen plenty of them. But in a divided, fearful country, The Order acquires renewed  urgency. It has been 40 years since Matthews died in a fiery confrontation with the FBI. I wish his story felt more like a footnote than a precursor. 

Bob's Cinema Diary: 9/17/20 -- 'Blackbird' and 'The Nest'

The Nest

Director Sean Durkin returns to the screen after a long hiatus. His last movie was  2011's Martha Marcy May Marlene. With The Nest, Durkin travels back to the 1980s for a look at a marriage struggling to survive the upheaval of a transatlantic move. Jude Law  (as Rory) and Carrie Coon (as Allison) star as a husband and wife who have fallen off the same page even before they move to London. She loves their suburban life in the US. He’s too ambitious to be content. She runs a riding school: He's a commodities trader. Rory and Allison have two kids: a daughter (Oona Roche) from Allison's previous marriage and a son (Charlie Shotwell) from the couple's current marriage. Not only does Rory drag his family across the ocean, he soon runs out of funds. He vastly overestimates his ability to persuade his London boss (Michael Culkin) to merge his company with an American firm, a development that ensures that Rory won't be able to  afford the Surrey estate he impulsively rented for the family. Late in the movie, a taxi driver asks Rory what he does for a living. "I pretend to be rich,'' says Rory, who by this time has entered a state of dejected realization: The rungs on the social ladder he's climbing have begun to collapse. As the horse-loving Allison, Coon embodies the emotional volatility of an '80s woman who doesn't always listen to her better judgment. Initially charming, Rory refuses to acknowledge his limitations and, in Law's hands, reaches a state of hollowed-out desperation. Durkin, who has no interest in feel-good sentiment, courageously brings his movie to a conclusion marked as much by exhaustion and defeat as by anything that might be called reconciliation. 

Blackbird

There are few more familiar dramatic conceits than this:  A family gathers for a special occasion only to have soul-wrenching secrets revealed. Blackbird follows such a traditional map but adds a disturbing twist. Mom (Susan Sarandon) is dying of ALS. In response, Sarandon's Lily has decided to end her life. She wants to see her family one more time before drinking the lethal concoction that will enable her to avoid a nightmarish end to an otherwise fulfilling life. As the story unfolds, director Roger Michell introduces us to Lily's family: daughters played by Kate Winslet and Mia Wasikowska and a husband portrayed by an underutilized Sam Neill. Winslet's Jennifer arrives at Lily’s seaside home with her husband (Rainn Wilson) and teenage son (Anson Boon). Lindsay Duncan turns up as Lily's best friend.  Christian Torpe's screenplay boasts finely wrought moments that are well-executed by a fine cast, tense encounters between the sisters, for example. But the screenplay adds a few reveals too many and even a cast this strong can't always compensate for a lack of dramatic crackle. At the same time, Michell eventually finds the emotional power and the deep sadness that accompanies Lily's decision; just because it's the right choice for her doesn't make its irrevocability any less harrowing.

A revenge saga that fails to kill

In a more reasonable world, there would be a national contest to determine whether anyone can find a way to care about the plot of The Rhythm Section, a senseless thriller about a woman who sets out to avenge the death of her family.

Blake Lively portrays Stephanie Patrick, a promising young woman who abandons her work at Oxford when she loses her parents and siblings in a plane crash. More than grief-stricken, Stephanie loses her moral bearings, sinking into a life of prostitution and heroin use.

As for Stephanie's family, they're not only killed in a plane crash, they're rendered lifeless in flashbacks that director Reed Morano uses to remind us of the familial bliss that Stephanie has lost.

Not to worry. A reporter (Keith Proctor) arrives at Stephanie's seedy digs to tell her that this was no normal plane crash, but one engineered by an Islamic terrorist.

What's a girl to do? In a sub-par movie such as Rhythm Section, she decides to take revenge, seeking out a former M16 agent (Jude Law) to help her learn the assassin's trade.

Killing is easy, Law's character says. The hard part? Living with it.

Adapted from a novel by Mark Burnell, who also wrote the screenplay, the movie plays as if it consists of little more than story beats cobbled together without much concern for either credibility or involvement.

Murky motivations substitute for intrigue when Stephanie goes to work for Marc Serra (Sterling K. Brown), an ex-CIA agent who wants her to hunt down the people involved in the bombing.

Stranded by a lifeless screenplay, Law had the good sense to hide behind a beard and look as grim as possible. Lively approaches a physical role by inserting streams of grunting realism into her many bruising fights.

Lest any base is left untouched, the movie travels to London, Tangier and Marseilles in search of excitement, including (what else?) a frenzied car chase.

Perhaps to add faux complexity, the screenplay finds Stephanie hemming and hawing about how much she wants to hone her skills. Is there any form of killing she won't try?

Efforts at nuance aside, Rhythm Section fails as either a satisfying helping of revenge or a drama about a female character kicking down the doors of a formerly male preserve. Does a franchise loom? That may have been the hope, but -- for my money -- Rhythm Section offers no reason we should want to see any of these characters again.

A less-than-marvelous ‘Captain Marvel’

Marvel's female superhero tries to work her way out of a frenzied movie.

Brie Larson is up to the task of playing Captain Marvel, a welcome female entry into Marvel Comics’ galaxy of superheroes. But -- and this is a major "but" -- the rest of Captain Marvel is a scattered, frenetic effort that jams action and backstory together without a great deal of finesse.

Even the movie's attempts at humor -- which arrive in the form of retro flashes from the 1990s -- tally only mixed results when it comes to brightening the proceedings.

One never entirely knows the reasons a movie goes wrong, but judging from a preview screening of Captain Marvel, I'd speculate that this effects-laden helping of Marvel mania was co-directed by a couple of filmmakers (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck) whose indie cred from movies such as Half Nelson and Sugar didn't easily transfer to a major studio production.

Summarizing the plot poses a challenge for reviewers because any such attempt must be extracted from the bric-a-brac that sometimes feels tossed at the screen. Larson portrays a former US fighter pilot who will -- over the course of this origins story -- emerge as Captain Marvel, a hybrid of human and Kree (i.e., alien) biochemistry.

Jude Law portrays Yon-Rogg, a Kree who tries to teach Larson's character how to harness energy that she fires in undisciplined bursts from her fists.

There's conflict, of course. The Kree, it seems, are battling the Skrull, a rubber-faced collection of aliens who travel to Earth under the guidance of Talos, a heavily disguised Ben Mendelsohn who brings a bit of winking humor and happily jaded line readings to his role. I say "winking," although I'm not sure the heavy make-up allows much by way of facial movement.

As the plot leaps from battle-to-battle, Larson's character also lands in the U.S. where she picks up an ally, Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury, a familiar figure from the Avengers movies. Larson's Carol Danvers also reunites with her former best friend, another fighter pilot played by Lashana Lynch. A single mom, Lynch's Maria Rambeau has a daughter (Akira Akbar) who, at a crucial point in the plot, cheers Carol on.

Carol, who reaches Earth during the mid-90s, has lost any memory of having spent time on beleaguered earthly soil before awakening on the planet where the Kree hang out. Eventually, we'll learn how she got from to the good old USA to the home of the Kree, but the question doesn't exactly compel intrigue.

Minor pleasures arise. It’s of some interest to discover more about Jackson's Nick Fury, who in this edition displays a tight cap of hair. Annette Bening turns up as a character called Supreme Intelligence. I'll pass on any attempt at a joke. Too easy.

One of the movie's problems involves the abrupt way it handles its back story, introducing Carol's past in intermittent flashbacks that can prove as disorienting as they are revealing.

As is the case with many comic book extravaganzas, the movie leans heavily on effects -- albeit, in this instance, with the approximate elegance of a drunk seeking support from a lamp post. Many of the effects seem to involve flashing bolts of energy. At various times, the characters chase a device known as the "energy core,'' which is hidden in a lunchbox boasting a picture of the Fonz from the Happy Days era.

This energy core emits great power; perhaps it's responsible for discombobulating the story and keeping the movie's action sequences from cohering in any way that might be called thrilling.

Captain Marvel tries to zip and zap its way into the pop-cultural canon dropping jokey references to such bygone stalwarts as Blockbuster stores along the way. Some, I suppose, will enjoy the frenzy, but for me, the point turns out to be inadvertent: Incessant movement doesn't necessarily get you anywhere.

Pop, violence and an attempt to say something

Powerful moments in Vox Lux don't quite add up.

Director Brady Corbet's Vox Lux might be a case of a movie taking a bite out of a big subject but failing entirely to digest it. Filled with pretentious title cards (Act I: Genesis 2000-2001, for example), the movie begins with a school shooting and propels itself toward a portrait of a pop star who's having a bad moment, perhaps after a long series of bad moments involving sex, drugs, and alcohol and trauma dating back to her high-school years.

Corbet opens the film with a riveting display of violence that takes place in the music room of a Staten Island high school. After suffering grave wounds, high-schooler Celeste Montgomery (Raffey Cassidy) writes a mournful song with her older sister (Stacy Martin). Because she's seen as a bona fide national victim, Celeste's song becomes a sensation.

Celeste's career rises from her horrific experience -- with help from a manager, played by Jude Law with an attitude of hard-boiled pragmatism.

Cassidy does a fine job of showing how Celeste -- with help from her sister -- begins to taste the high life that accompanies stardom. Maybe the movie never should have left those teen years in which Celeste still hasn't found her footing.

Natalie Portman takes over the movie's second half as the grown Celeste, who we meet on the day she's supposed to play a concert in her hometown. Natalie is having an awful day for a variety of reasons: She's arguing with her sister, trying to come to terms with her teenage daughter Albertine (also played by Cassidy) and meeting with a press corps that's bound to ask questions about the connection between one of Celeste's videos and another violent incident, a mass shooting on a beach in Europe.

Corbet plunges violence, celebrity, and cultural degradation into a jumbo-sized package as the movie searches for hyper-meanings. But the movie feels most convincing when it isn't reaching for thematic gold but making smaller observations, like how a journalist interacts with Celeste after being warned by a record company executive to stay away from certain subjects.

In a scene between Celeste and her daughter in a Manhattan diner, Corbet's camera generates the kind of uncomfortable immediacy that makes us a third party to their conversation.

But Portman's version of Celeste -- complete with leather jacket, baggy jeans, a New York accent and tons of attitude -- seems forced. To me, her performance screamed of striving more than it suggested a believable character.

Corbet's style, which comes on like fragments from a vivid dream, can't compensate for what I saw as the movie's lack of clarifying viewpoint about the amorphous web that's woven from elements of fame, violence and pop culture.

With Celeste vying for the title of the year's most unpleasant character, Vox Lux sweats its way toward something I think we're meant to take as seriously as the intermittent narration offered by an off-screen Willem Dafoe.

All I can say is that I tried, but I also wondered if effort (a palpable sense of reaching for something) didn’t outweigh the movie’s overall achievement.

Lock, stock and a smokin' hot sword

King Arthur gets the Guy Ritchie treatment -- and suffers for it.

In King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, director Guy Ritchie goes medieval on us, and the result is bleary-eyed, loud and full of summer-movie bluster.

Ritchie, who broke onto the international film scene with his kinetic gangster epic, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and who brought us a couple of big-ticket Sherlock Holmes movies starring Robert Downey Jr., goes further back in history, but, unfortunately, brings his adrenalized sensibilities along with him.

These emerging Knights of the Round Table talk with cockney-inflected accents as Ritchie tells an origins story about how King Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) came to lead his kingdom. In this version, a young Arthur escapes slaughter by an evil king wannabe named Vortigern (Jude Law). Vortigern robs Arthur of his throne by killing the boy's father (Eric Bana), an actor who amazingly manages to look composed in the midst of all the visual chaos.

Raised in a brothel as a child of the streets, Arthur's story begins in earnest when he pulls Excalibur, his father's sword, from the rock where it has been embedded for most of the young man's life. Arthur's feat is accompanied by an oops. Once Vortigern knows where the real heir to throne is, he sees only one option: Arthur must be killed.

Meanwhile, a multi-cultural band of comrades -- notably Djimon Hounsou's Bedivere and Tom Wu's George -- goad a reluctant Arthur toward his destiny.

Ritchie heaves shards of Arthur's story at us in ways that add confusion to a narrative that seems to have been invented to support a variety of booming set pieces. In one of them, Arthur visits the Dark Lands to fight bats and rats as part of his inner journey; i.e., before he can triumph, Arthur must remember the murder of his mother and father at the hands of Law's evil Vortigern.

In many respects, Ritchie's approach to the Arthurian legend owes more to Marvel Comics than it does to English mythology. One difference: It's not Arthur who has super powers, but his sword. Arthur must learn to wield this glowing weapon throughout the course of a cluttered, 126-minute running time.

The movie's editing style seems to have been inspired by the desire to inflict a thousand cuts on any given moment. Accompanied by Daniel Pemberton's pounding score, the movie barrels its way through action sequences that produce more frenzy than coherence.

When Arthur swings his sword, the movie slows down as if it's showing us the way an athlete enters what some call "the zone." Arthur perceives everything in slow motion, vanquishing foe after foe with an ease he barely remembers when the carnage stops, and the movie renews its double-time pacing.

Arthur's attempts to impress with scale are obvious from the outset: The movie's opening -- a prolog, really -- offers displays of carnage featuring mammoth creatures that resemble the kind of elephants that might appear as floats if a Thanksgiving parade were run by Satanists.

Hunnam takes a step back after his work in The Lost of City Z, which made room for subtlety. Think Crimson Peak and Pacific Rim, in which Hunnam also appeared. But in fairness to Hunnam, a set of leather pants, a buffed torso, and a street-wise attitude do not a character make.

Looking as if he's reprising the most malicious moments of the character he played in HBO's The Young Pope, Law supplies the expected hiss/boo helping of murderous villainy.

Astrid Berges-Frisbey adds a feminine touch as The Mage, some sort of magical character who helps Arthur realize his role this teeming fantasy world.

I suppose Ritchie deserves some credit for trying not to genuflect at the feet of a well-worn legend, but he drags the story of Arthur into the dirt and never allows it to shake off the mud.

Ritchie batters an estimable story, and, I'm afraid, it winds up beating him to a pulp.

A self-absorbed writer and his editor

Genius focuses on the relationship between Thomas Wolfe and Max Perkins.

Genius -- a movie starring Colin Firth, Jude Law and Nicole Kidman -- presents a handsomely mounted but somewhat tepid portrait of the relationship between volatile novelist Thomas Wolfe and his editor Max Perkins.

The gist of the story: Perkins, who also edited the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, tolerated Wolfe's alcoholic digressions and emotional outbursts because he believed in the author's talent.

In part, the movie suffers because time hasn't entirely justified Perkins' faith. Novels such as Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel don't command the widespread attention they once did.

Director Michael Grandage focuses the story on the Perkins/Wolfe relationship during the Depression years, a time when Perkins plied his trade at Scribner's. Wolfe would dump his colossus-sized manuscripts -- all written in pencil -- on Perkins' desk. Perkins then would work with the writer to whittle Wolfe's efforts to more manageable size.

When not ensconced in Perkins' Manhattan office, the movie visits his Connecticut home, where Laura Linney plays the mostly negligible role of Perkins' wife.

The point of these scenes may be to tell us that Perkins preferred the comforts of home and hearth -- he had five daughters -- to the roller coaster ride taken by those who more directly stoke their creativity fires.

Wearing an ever-present fedora, Firth inhabits the character of Perkins with ease and quiet grace, although his performance can feel a trifle sparkless. As the ebullient, life-embracing Wolfe, Law compensates for Perkins' preternatural calm with emphatic expressions of energy.

Wolfe's relationship with a married woman, Kidman's Mrs. Bernstein, mostly demonstrates the devastating consequences of Wolfe's boundless self-absorption.

Grandage's wan drama might have been better had Wolfe's work retained the regard still given to Fitzgerald and Hemingway, played in cameos by Guy Pearce and Dominic West respectively.

Otherwise, Genius -- based on a 1978 biography of Perkins by A. Scott Berg -- needed something that Perkins probably would have insisted on had edited movies instead of books: the infusion of enough urgency to prevent both period and characters from feeling trapped in the past -- as if they're being suffocated by a sepia-hued fog.

Tension on a rundown submarine

Jude Law leads a group of rogues on an undersea adventure.

Black Sea, the latest in a long line of submarine thrillers, has the ragged feel of a B movie, not necessarily a bad thing. Once you give up the idea that you're watching another over-hyped thriller, you can relax and enjoy the tension that inevitably builds when men -- especially greedy men -- are jammed into cramped spaces.

Populated by unwashed Russian and British men on a treasure hunt, Black Sea unapologetically dives into action, ratcheting up pressure as the crew faces danger: from the sea and from one another.

Led by a disaffected, unemployed submariner (Jude Law), these crew members bicker, allow greed to conquer their better impulses and deal with a steady stream of life-threatening situations.

The goal: To retrieve a fortune in Nazi gold from a German U-Boat that has been languishing at the bottom of the sea since the end of World War II.

Law's Robinson learns about the treasure from a former shipmate. He then meets with an American (Scoot McNair) who works for a wealthy tycoon who agrees to finance the mission for 40 percent of the haul.

Law's Robinson accepts the terms, but champions equality among the men: He insists that the crew divide its share of the loot equally.

In a movie that takes a dim, genre-appropriate view of human nature, it's hardly surprising that some of the crew members think they deserve bigger shares than others.

It's possible to regard the movie's submarine as another character. A rusty, wreck of a Russian vessel, the sub had been left to rot off the Crimean coast. It has the look of a low-tech, submersible boiler room.

The Russian sailors are jumpy from the outset. They object to the fact that Law's Robinson has brought an inexperienced young man (Bobby Schofield) on board. The Russians think the 18-year-old is bad luck because they believe (incorrectly) that he's a virgin. He is, of course, a novice at sea.

Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland and Touching the Void) efficiently builds tension, particularly in a sequence in which several crew members leave the sub to retrieve a drive-shaft from an abandoned U-boat. This dangerous maneuver is the sub's only hope of getting off the bottom, where it has unceremoniously crashed.

Why isn't Black Sea a perfect deep-sea saga?

Several reasons: Anyone familiar with Ben Mendelsohn, who plays one of the crew members, knows that this edgy Australian actor has cornered the market on loose-cannon characters. To make the matters even more obvious, we often see Mendelsohn's Fraser toying with a knife.

Put another way, the movie can't help but telegraph the moment when Fraser will turn violent.

That bit of predictability aside, the screenplay by Dennis Kelly is burdened by occasional sprays of lame dialogue, and it's not easy to accept Robinson's transition from a down-and-out working man to a kind of crazed Captain Ahab.

About that working-man angle: Black Sea isn't as convincing as a lower-class anthem as it is as a cinematic pressure cooker, but it does take a swing at working-class resentment.

At the outset, Robinson loses his job on a salvage submarine. His 20-year devotion to a single company cost him his wife (Jodie Whittaker) and young son. Penniless and put upon, he sees himself as a victim of bankers and corporate types made rich by working stiffs who ultimately are played for suckers.

OK, so Black Sea isn't perfect, but it's good enough. Darkly hued and making the most of the sub's claustrophobic chambers, Black Sea offers the kind of thrills that arrive coated with grease, sweat and, of course, desperation.

Jude Law goes gangster

He's brutal and vulgar, but he fills the film.

In playing a low-level thug desperately trying to find his footing after a 12-year-stint in prison, Jude Law pulls out every stop he can find.

Law's Dom Hemingway -- the title character of director Richard Shepard's foray into the world of cockney criminals -- gives us a main character who's mesmerizingly vulgar.

Dom's a brutal man without impulse control, a stocky, angry mess of a fellow who refused to rat out his partners in crime while in prison.

For that, Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir) -- the crime czar who profited from Dom's silence -- has a debt to pay. So Dom and his buddy Dickie (Richard E. Grant) travel to the south of France to visit Mr. Fontaine's estate and collect Dom's reward.

One assumes that Shepard, who splashes title cards over bright red screens and adds other pop-oriented flourishes, gave Law all the room he needed to find his inner beast.

Law obliged by putting as much physicality into the role as possible. When Dom gets out of prison, he looks as if he's going to burst the seams of his dated double-breasted blue suit.

Dom's post-prison life isn't easy. He runs into a problem with Mr. Fontaine's larcenous lover (Madalina Diana Ghenea).

When he returns to London, a thug threatens to slice off his ... well ... you know. I suppose it's appropriate since the priapic Dom opens the movie with a soaring, ferocious monologue proclaiming the glories of his penis.

For all his bravado, Dom's a magnate for bad luck. He probably doesn't expect to be greeted warmly when he tries to reunite with the daughter (Emilia Clarke) who grew up without him. Clarke's Evelyn resents Dom deeply -- and probably justifiably.

By the time, Dom locates Evelyn, she's living with a Senegalese musician with whom she's had a son.

In trying for too much (the movie's episodic story elements create a cascading slice of contemporary British life), Shepard may have achieved too little. Dom Hemingway becomes the movie's story, a pretty big burden for any character -- even one as out-sized as Dom.

A scattershot collection of low-life bits and pieces, Dom Hemingway mellows with the unfortunate emergence of some late-picture sentimentality.

Still, Law's performance has too much raw energy to ignore: He's playing a man who doesn't know whether there's anything about himself that's worth salvaging. Dom rails at others, at an uncaring universe and perhaps at himself.

If Dom has any charm, it derives from his naive determination not to let the universe win.

'Side Effects,' an intriguing thriller

Seven Soderbergh's latest movie (and possibly his last) proves involving right up until its less-than-credible last act.

Director Steven Soderbergh has said that the thriller Side Effects will be his last big-screen venture. The 50-year-old, Academy Award-winning director recently told New York Magazine that he plans to spend much of his time painting. Soderbergh didn't rule out theater or a television series, but said that he wouldn't continue as a filmmaker while he felt as if he were "running in place."

In place or not, Soderbergh certainly has been running; he has made 26 features since rocking and transforming the independent film world with 1989's Sex, Lies, and Videotape. As it progressed, Soderbergh's career seemed to divide between star-driven mainstream movies and more idiosyncratic fare. He has had franchise success (the Oceans Eleven movies), won a best-director Oscar for Traffic (2000), and challenged commercial wisdom with Che (2008), a four-hour, two part look at the revolutionary life of Che Gueverra. Most recently, he scored a box-office victory with Magic Mike, an upbeat look at the world of male strippers.

Intriguing and deftly made, Side Effects doesn't always tell the most believable of stories, but it's easy to overlook plausibility issues, right up until the movie's unfortunate and less-than-credible last act.

It may be stretching the point, but Side Effects struck me as a middle-ground helping of Soderbergh, a movie lodged somewhere between the director's mainstream and more specialized efforts. This time, Soderbergh roots his thriller in a culture that frequently over-uses or abuses prescription drugs. All of us are bombarded with drug advertising, and we've read about doctors who receive consultancy money from pharmaceutical companies looking to steer patients toward one drug or another.

At the outset, Side Effects looks as if it's going to be an expose -- perhaps even a heavy-handed one -- about the social and personal perils of America's drug obsession. But Soderbergh quietly shifts gears on us, moving his movie into more classical thriller terrain.

Early on, the story centers on Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), a young woman whose husband (Channing Tatum) has just finished a four-year prison sentence for insider trading. Once a Wall Street golden boy, Tatum's Martin Taylor tries to rehabilitate his professional life, but soon realizes that he has other problems.

Emily seems severely depressed. She has trouble relating to others, and at one point, she drives her car into the wall of a parking garage. This apparent suicide attempt brings her into contact with a British psychiatrist (Jude Law), who lives in New York City with his wife (Vinessa Shaw) and young stepson.

Law's Dr. Jonathan Banks eventually puts Emily on a new antidepressant called Ablixa. The drug seems to work -- until it doesn't. The potentially dangerous side effects of Ablixa help put the thriller elements of screenwriter Scott Z. Burns's story into motion. Burns, by the way, wrote the screenplay for Contagion, also directed by Soderbergh.

It's impossible to tell more without tipping the movie's hand, so I'll simply say that Soderbergh increasingly concentrates on Law's character as the psychiatrist finds himself foundering in troubling ethical and legal waters.

It takes time to understand why Mara, last seen in the American version of Girl With a Dragon Tattoo, seems a bit drab. Stick with her. Law excels as an empathic psychiatrist who also needs money. He's taken a $50,000 consulting fee from the company that manufactures Ablixa.

At one point in the story, Dr. Banks meets with the psychiatrist who previously treated Emily, a crisply efficient Catherine Zeta-Jones. Zeta-Jones's character ultimately has more to do with propelling the plot than with creating insight into any of the ethical or psychological issues the movie raises.

If Side Effects really is Soderbergh's swan song, it stops short of qualifying as a totally triumphant conclusion. I don't think I'd rank it as one of the best movies in a career that frequently has balanced entertainment with social significance (Erin Brockovich and The Informant) and that has seen the director employ a dazzling variety of approaches in movies such as Kafka (1991), King of the Hill (1993), Schizopolis (1996) and Bubble (2005).

Obviously, it's not easy to fit Soderbergh into any pigeon hole, which is part the reason I hope he doesn't remain a retired filmmaker.

Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra, the story of Liberace, will play on HBO later this year. But if Side Effects really does turn out to be Soderbergh's final theatrical release, I can understand why.

Directing can become an exhilarating but exhausting exercise in cunning and craft. And every movie presents all sorts of steep challenges -- funding and logistics, to name but two. On top of that, Soderbergh often serves as his own cameraman.

No wonder he's tempted to seek the nourishing solitude of an artist's studio, where he can tend to his creativity in ways that keep it from -- in his words -- "running in place."

An 'Anna Karenina' rich with artifice

A radian Keira Knightley shines as Anna, but it takes time for the story to break through all its artifice.

Director Joe Wright and playwright Tom Stoppard have tried (boy, have they tried) to avoid the musty odor of costume drama in adapting Tolstoy's masterpiece, Anna Karenina, a novel that has been brought to the screen at least a dozen times.

Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement and Hanna) immerses the movie in theatrical artifice and dazzling stagecraft. He uses model trains as real trains. He sets scenes in front of a proscenium arch. He has characters walking on catwalks suspended over the sets. His opening scenes quickly destroy the naturalistic grounding we're accustomed to finding in period pieces.

Rather than adding a sense of contemporary urgency, Wright's artfully exercised gimmickry gives Tolstoy the feeling of an opera -- albeit one in which the characters never sing. Exposing us to the artifice of the settings can be both distracting and instructive, and one presumes that Wright wants to put the empty facade of a highly defined society on display. He plays urban falseness against the more authentic realities of country life, breaking away from the confines of sets and filming rural scenes on actual landscapes.

Amid all this, the story clarifies itself in concise bursts. I sometimes felt as if I were watching greatest hits from Anna Karenina, snatched from the pages of Tolstoy and presented in a giddy whirl.

Wright and Stoppard concentrate on Tolstoy's story of passion and ruin, one of the great themes of the novel. Anna (Keira Knightley) is married to Karenin (Jude Law), a government minister. She has a young son and most likely believes herself to be happy and well-placed in society. Then, she meets the alarmingly attractive Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Anna's world is rocked by the intrusion of undeniable passion, a desire that will lead her away from the constraints required to keep up appearances in a world of scintillating Tsarist-Russian surfaces.

Vronsky represents another facet of appearances; he's striking in his white uniform, a figure who -- as the late Pauline Kael once said of someone -- looks as if he belongs on top of a wedding cake.

Anna's story is set against the backdrop of another tale. Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) is a young man who initially is rejected by a princess (Alicia Vikander). He then retreats to his rural estate where he tries to relieve his painful self-consciousness by joining with the peasants in physical labor.

Consider this a gloss on Tolstoy's story. There are many additional characters and currents that ripple through a movie that sometimes seems as if it's caught in a limbo between the stage and the screen with hints (as already noted) of opera and even of ballet tossed in for good measure.

A stylized ball where Anna and Vronsky dance calls much attention to itself, as does a lot of what Wright attempts. Wright's betting that no amount of artifice can squelch the story's emotional life.

To the extent that this holds true, credit must be given to the performances, most of which survive the movie's devotion to so much uber-artistry. Knightley can be radiant, determined, vulnerable and shattered as Anna. Law, who has been made to look clerical and plain, makes a sturdy Karenin, a man trying to control a situation that's spiraling toward chaos. Attuned to the importance of social arrangements, Karenin seems incapable of connecting marriage with passion. Taylor-Johnson makes a dashing if increasingly distressed Vronsky.

The main actors are bolstered by a large and well-selected supporting cast that includes Kelly MacDonald as Dolly, Anna's sympathetic sister-in-law, a woman trying to get over the adultery of her husband (Matthew Macfadyen.)

Once the affair between Anna and Vronsky is exposed, Wright no longer can maintain the movie's spinning frenzy. The pace slows. Prices must be paid.

Credit Wright with pushing the medium and trying a fresh approach to Tolstoy. I can't say it entirely works, but in the end -- many of the emotions associated with Anna's tragedy remain, and I doubt whether any actress could bring more to the role than Knightley, who embodies nearly all of Anna's epic passion and gathering torment.

'Sherlock Holmes,' the Franchise Continues

As a version of Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows doesn't cut it. As a big movie action contraption, it's passable.

Forget the Sherlock Holmes once known as a detective with a keen and unforgiving intelligence. That Holmes -- a creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- has vanished inside a much more contemporary creation: a kick-ass movie franchise.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows -- the second movie starring Robert Downey Jr. (as Holmes) and Jude Law (as Dr. Watson) - seems less interested in celebrating Holmes' legendary powers of deduction than in flexing as much action-movie muscle as possible.

So it should come as no surprise that the plot doesn't much matter, except to say that it pits Holmes against arch rival James Moriarty, played here by a bearded, confidently evil Jared Harris.

In the early going, Holmes frets over Watson's impending marriage. Few other renderings of Sherlock have flirted so openly with Holmes and Watson's infatuation with each another, and this one goes so far as give them an improbable comic scene in which they waltz together. If I remember correctly, Holmes leads.

If you saw the first installment, you pretty much know director Guy Ritchie's game. Ritchie sees Holmes as a disheveled detective who's as quick with his fists as he is with his wits. For his part, Downey lives up to this image of Holmes, seldom looking as if he's not in need of a bath.

The banter between Holmes and Watson doesn't exactly reach Noel Coward levels, and there's no enjoying Game of Shadows if you don't revel in amped-up action, including the firing of some very heavy artillery.

Even taken on its own terms, the movie is not without miscalculation: Noomi Rapace, the brilliant Swedish actress who created the role of Lizbeth Salander in the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is entirely wasted as gypsy woman who's shoehorned into the movie for plot reasons.

Surely, Rapace could have made larger contribution; her role is the dramatic equivalent of a guy who holds another guy's coat during a fistfight.

Stephen Fry fares better in a genuinely amusing role as Holmes' diplomat brother, Mycroft Holmes. Fry's comic talents are used to best effect in a scene in which he appears nude. (No, we don't see enough of Fry to challenge the movie's PG-13 rating.)

When not busy changing costumes, Holmes' tries to get to the bottom of a mystery that has something to do with arms sales and with setting various European countries at one another's throats. But let's be honest: There's nothing much at stake here aside from getting to the next action set piece and maintaining the scaffolding of characters and effects that keeps the series from toppling.

Game of Shadows does that - and so it probably should be regarded as a passable addition to a successful franchise. I didn't love Game of Shadows, but I didn't mind Ritchie's latest action contraption, either. Perhaps because nothing about this helping of Sherlock Holmes needs to be taken seriously - and Ritchie seems to know it.