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.

Snakes as a pathway to the divine

If you have an aversion to snakes, particularly poisonous snakes, you may not want to see Them That Follow, a backwoods drama about an isolated group of snake-handling Pentecostals. Directors Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage employ a powerhouse cast as they examine the terrible impact of those whose beliefs not only are literal -- but weirdly dangerous. Pastor Lemuel (Walton Goggins) uses rattlesnakes to purify sin: Handle a rattler without getting bitten and you're clean. If you get bitten ... well ... the devil hasn't been banished from your tarnished soul. The drama centers on Mara (Alice Englert), the pastor's daughter. Englert's Mara finds herself caught in a love triangle between the devoted Garrett (Lewis Pullman) and the non-believing Augie (Thomas Mann), a young man whose only desire is to escape this stifling community. Matters are further complicated because Mara has become pregnant after a brief but guilt-inducing fling with Augie. Olivia Colman -- fine as ever -- and Jim Gaffigan, equally good, portray Augie's believing parents. The directors fill the movie with Appalachian flavor as the story works its way toward a conclusion that may shake you, even if you see it coming. The mood is somber and the movie flirts with back-country cliches, inducing a degree of skepticism: Doesn’t anyone who might be called “normal” live in these woods? Kaitlyn Dever appears as Mara's best friend, a young woman who's understandably confused by the tension between religious dictate and human impulses. Nice work all around, with Goggins giving a stand-out performance as a pastor who can seem level-headed around the dinner table but who exerts sinister control over his followers. There's nothing particularly profound to be realized -- or at least nothing you don't' already know about the dangers of fanatical belief -- but Them That Follow catches you up with its mood and performances. And, yes, scenes involving the snakes will give you the shivers.

A teen comedy with smart twists

In Booksmart, two high school seniors challenge themselves to leave the library -- and party. It's not as dumb as you might think.

It’s easy to see why the teen comedy Booksmart took the recent SXSW film festival by storm, garnering big laughs from audiences and early raves from critics. The movie, which marks actress Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, fires a high energy rocket of comedy that proves infectious, even when the individual bits aren't working.

For those of us for whom high school no longer captivates, Booksmart may carry sociological weight. After a preview screening, a young woman -- much closer to high school than I -- said that Wilde had caught something true about today's high school experience. I'll take her word for it.

Though not the first of its kind, the movie gives teen comedy a feminist spin and a muted testosterone quotient. That doesn’t mean Booksmart isn’t raunchy; it just means that Wilde, working from a screenplay credited to a quartet of writers, gets the most out of her two stars (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever) and the well-selected problems with which she confronts them.

A shade short on sensitivity, Booksmart makes smart use of an unusual twist. The two main female characters — both brainy and one gay —- have spent their school years conforming to every cliched standard they could find. Their goal: to march triumphantly through the world of high-scoring SAT elites who are destined someday to run the country — or so they think.

When the movie begins, Feldstein's Molly already has been accepted to Yale; Dever's Amy will head to Columbia after a year-long stint of resume-building, do-gooder work in Botswana.

But achievement hasn't made Molly feel secure enough to do without the self-affirmation tapes that begin her day. And Amy, upfront about her gayness, is clueless when it comes to any real sexual encounters. Molly, by the way, isn't much better at reading hetero cues.

These young women have more than met expectations. But here's the rub: While Molly and Amy were hanging out in libraries, their classmates were having fun. And guess what? Most of the classmates who these nose-in-the-air teens have been deriding are on success tracks, as well. They’re either headed to great colleges or have found other ways to make an impact.

Feeling cheated, Molly and Amy vow to make up for the lost time in one night. They’ll find the best party and hit it hard.

Of course, lots goes wrong as the young women try to earn their party credentials. To begin with, they don’t know the location of the school’s purported best party. Moreover, their search for the ultimate party leads to many mistakes, including one that involves them with the school's rich kid (Skyler Gisondo). Nobody likes Gisondo's Jared, partly because he pushes so hard to be everyone's friend. Gisondo's Jared hangs out with a free-spirited girl (Billie Lourd) who Amy and Molly can't figure out.

Molly and Amy also are steered toward a party hosted by the school’s ultra-pretentious drama club before winding up at the party they wanted to attend in the first place. Noah Galvin and Austin Crute play the school's drama nerds.

There aren't many adults in view. Jason Sudeikis appears as a teacher who finds himself in an unexpected encounter with the two girls and Jessica Williams portrays a teacher who encourages the girls in their party pursuits.

I don't want to oversell Booksmart, but it’s a cut above the usual teen junk and Feldstein and Dever give winning performances before the movie concludes with a ringing endorsement of friendship and delivers its message: All work and no play makes for two insufferably successful girls and, perhaps more importantly, not everyone is the person you think they might be -- even in high school.

When the police become torturers

Detroit immerses us in a brutal racist incident that took place during the city's 1967 riot.

I found it impossible to watch Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit and not be flooded by a complex torrent of reactions to the movie's undeniable visceral power. Bigelow takes an unflinching look at a little known racist incident that took place during the Detroit riots of 1967. Police brutality and racism are awful, of course, but how much of it do we need to see before that point effectively has been made?

That's a question that every moviegoer will have to answer for his or herself, but -- I wondered, if in trying for unblinking honesty, Bigelow hadn't sometimes mistake intensity for insight.

Bigelow divides her movie into three unequal parts. She begins with an appropriately frenzied approach to the Detroit riots, settles into a disturbing and violent example of racist brutality, and then -- as if to temper the horror of what we've been watching -- spins out a courtroom finale in which the offending police officers are brought to trial.

Bigelow bases her movie on a true story, chronicled in a 1968 book by John Hersey, The Algiers Motel Incident. Events at the Algiers were a kind of adjunct to the Detroit riots that began when the police raided an after-hours bar frequented by black patrons.

No matter what side of the political divide on which you fall, it's nearly impossible to watch Detroit without making references to the climate between black communities and police forces that have been infected by institutional racism -- not only in 1967, but in 2017.

At the Algiers Motel, several young black men, two white women, several police officers and a black security guard are thrown together during the heat of the riot. The police officers -- led by a racist cop (Will Poulter) -- terrorize their captives in ways that result in psychological trauma and, ultimately, killing. By the end of the night, three young black men are dead.

From the outset, we've tagged Poulter's Krauss as an undisguised racist. Even before the incident at the Algiers, he goes unpunished for shooting an unarmed black man in the back.

The movie's segments in the Algiers Motel are on a par with the kind of sustained cruelty we sometimes see in horror films. Of course, torture is precisely what the police are doing to their innocent victims, perpetrating an invisible slice of horror during the intensely pressurized atmosphere of a violent outburst that made Detroit resemble a war zone.

During this portion of the film, the police line their victims against the wall, singling them out for humiliation, along with two white women (Hannah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever) who were partying at the Algiers. The cops accuse the women of being prostitutes, an opinion they seem to justify only because the women have been hanging around black men.

Three figures stand out among the black men, the lead singer of a group called The Dramatics (Algee Smith), a military veteran recently returned from Vietnam (Anthony Mackie) and a friend of Smith's character (Nathan Davis Jr.).

No one is more conflicted about what's happening at the Algiers than John Boyega's Dismukes, a security guard sent by his employer to protect a store from looting. Dismukes becomes caught up in the Algiers' drama. He's a law-and-order guy, but he's not blind to the racism that's being displayed by out-of-control cops.

All of this begins because the cops believe that someone in the motel fired a gun at them. As it turns out, the gun was a starter pistol fired by a young man (Jason Mitchell) who had been trying to frighten a small gathering at the Algiers by mimicking the way white policemen treat blacks. To make his act more convincing, Mitchell's character draws the fake gun, eventually firing it out a window.

I don't want to leave the impression that Detroit proceeds entirely without nuance. In the movie's later going, we meet cops who are appalled by what happened at the Algiers. We sometimes see the movie's brutal but self-serving cops trying to find a way out of the situation they've created. Not every black character is willing to stand up for truth when it comes to exposing the viciousness to which they've been subjected.

Bigelow may want us to understand that the cops have deluded themselves into believing that abuse is not only justifiable but a privilege of their positions of authority. Once the firebombs start flying, these policemen seem to think they've been granted license to do anything.

All of this unfolds after a prologue featuring paintings by Jacob Lawrence that try to provide some context for the riots: northward migration by blacks devolved into segregated housing projects and high unemployment. That's the gist.

Later, we'll see news clips of George W. Romney and President Lyndon Johnson, political leaders who remind us that what we're witnessing springs from a reality; the government apparatus geared up to meet what it saw as the challenge of unleashed fury and wanton destruction.

Written by Mark Boal, who also wrote Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Detroit might have been even more daring had it taken some time to show us the pre-riot atmosphere in the Detroit police department, the conditions that presumably made Poulter's character possible.

As the movie unfolded, I found myself wondering how a director as meticulous as Sidney Lumet (Prince of the City) would have handled such a volatile story.

It's also worth remembering that Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing already made a statement about the ways in which racial violence can be kindled.

So a confession: At various points during events at the Algiers Motel, I wondered what Bigelow was trying to accomplish by allowing them to drag on so long.

Other points are more economically made. Mackie portrays a Marine who recently returned from Vietnam. Having served his country offers him no protection from the wrath of the police.
That's a powerful observation.

It also helps to remember that many of the current and well-publicized incidents of questionable police conduct did not take place under violent duress; racism hardly needs riots as an excuse to express itself. Sometimes, all it takes is a traffic stop.