Leftovers from the old year

I'm offering brief reviews of two movies (Anaconda and Goodbye, June) to go on record about movies that I hoped might offer diversion (in the case of Anaconda) and emotional heft (Goodbye June). Neither movie did either of those things, so here's my gloss on both them:

Anaconda

The end of the year usually finds critics weighing in on some of the year's more serious offerings, movies that probably will dominate the upcoming awards season. That wouldn't apply to Anaconda. Director Tom Gormican offers the sixth installment of the series, this one starring a usually reliable comedy crew that includes Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Thandiwe Newton, and Steve Zahn. The story revolves around a quartet of  old friends who reunite to rekindle the spark of enthusiasm they felt about the horror movies of their teens. Black, as a director of wedding videos, joins Rudd, as an actor with a dismal career, for a no-budget indie remake of their beloved Anaconda. Along with Newton, as a former high school pal, and Zahn, as another pal and cameraman, the principals head for the Amazon. Selton Mello appears as Santiago, the local hired as the movie's snake handler. Gormican mixes broad comedy and satire about movie cliches, but the movie's laughs may have gotten lost in the jungle, and its additions of horror seem like transfusions of gore into an already lost cause.

Goodbye June

And while we're on the subject of strong casts and weak results, consider Goodbye June, a Christmas movie that marks Kate Winslet's directorial debut. Winslet also appears on screen along with Toni Collette, Andrea Riseborough, and Johnny Flynn. They're siblings dealing with the imminent death from cancer of their mother (Helen Mirren). Dad (Timothy Spall) seems more interested in football and alcohol than in his family. Did I mention that the movie takes place at Christmas time and reaches a sentimental conclusion when grandchildren perform a Christmas play for their dying grandma? This one is meant to jerk tears,  but if I were going to shed any tears, they would be for a cast that deserved better material. No hard feelings, though. These accomplished actors surely will triumph anew.

To see or not to see? A critic's dilemma and two reviews: 'Ibelin' and "Lee'

 In the market where I work, two advance screenings sometimes happen simultaneously. This week's viewing dilemma arose when screenings The Wild Robot and Megalopolis were scheduled for the same evening. I chose Megalopolis because a Francis Ford Coppola opus seems a must for anyone who has been reviewing movies for nearly 40 years. Coppola invested $120 million of his own money in the movie and had been talking about it for decades. Never shy about out-sized ambition, Coppola's movie (reviewed on this blog) took precedence for me. Don't take that as any reflection on Wild Robot. As of this writing, Wild Robot boasted a 98 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I'll have to catch up with it.

  Now for the rest of the week: 

 

Ibelin, a documentary from director Benjamin Ree, surprised me. Generally, when cultural critics discuss gaming, they emphasize the way gaming can isolate young people and discourage personal communication. Ree presents an alternative view, telling the story of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man who died of Duchenne muscular dystrophy at the age of 25.  Lonely in reality and increasingly debilitated, Steen sought refuge in the World of Warcraft, where he assumed the identity of Lord Ibelin Redmore. Steen's body may have betrayed him, but online, he became a muscular character with a well-developed sense of compassion. Ree ably depicts the gap between role-playing and reality. Better, though, he shows how the gulf can be bridged, how two worlds ("the virtual" and "the real," for want of better terms) can nourish each other. Using animation to depict Steen's Warcraft journey, bits from Steen's blog, and interviews, Ree creates a moving story about a young man who couldn't beat the odds, but who did something meaningful with the hand he was dealt: He affected the lives of others.

   

Then there's Lee, a movie about the great World War II photographer Lee Miller, played by Kate Winslet. Directed by Ellen Kuras, Lee tells the story of a woman who began her career as a model and fashion photographer for Vogue before convincing the editor of the magazine's British edition to turn her into a war correspondent. You'd think that by now, filmmakers would have tired of structuring films around interviews. Lee doesn't help itself by tying a chronologically presented story to an interview in which Lee answers questions from a character played by Josh O'Connor. The movie begins with Lee's pre-war days in France, where she spent time as part of an avant-garde circle that included the editor of Vogue Paris (Marion Cotillard). In France, she also met English painter Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard) with whom she developed a long-term relationship. The heart of the movie involves Lee's struggle to gain access to the fighting and later, to German death camps, where she took a career-defining series of photographs. It wasn't easy for a woman to break into the war correspondent ranks. When the Brits refused to give Lee combat credentials, she used her American citizenship to access the fighting. On the French and German fronts, Lee traveled with another American photographer Andy Stamberg's David E. Scherman, who worked for Life magazine. Difficult either to pan or praise,  Lee sheds light on an important career, but a cumbersome structure weighs it down. Winslet goes all in on playing a tough, sexually uninhibited woman who refuses to be deterred, but the movie underlines its themes and feels stuck in a biopic ghetto where its story too often feels locked in the past.

Sights and sounds dominate new 'Avatar'

 

  You almost can write a review of Avatar: The Way of Water without seeing the movie. In the hands of director James Cameron, you can be sure the movie will boast an abundance of visuals that dazzle and delight.

  In this case, kudos to Cameron for underwater footage that features beautifully imagined sea creatures and flora. If you see the movie in 3D, you may feel as if you can touch what you're watching.

   When it comes to the technical aspects of imaginative expression, Cameron excels, and his mixture of live and digital imagery unfolds seamlessly.

   You also know that, in broad terms, the movie, like the first installment, will pit environmentally oriented tribal creatures of the planet Pandora (good) against the military/industrial forces of people from the dying planet of Earth (bad). 

    You also know that Cameron will freshen the story, in this case focusing on the children of Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a trio of kids who are also befriended by Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), a girl whose mother Grace (also Weaver) appeared in the last installment. 

    I’m not going to get into the genetic history of these characters because ... well ... beats me.

    Not surprisingly, the movie's third act offers a tremendous jolt of action, and, unlike what you'll find in the work of some of his contemporaries, Cameron's combat proves legible. You can tell what’s happening. Really.

    In full awed-by-nature mode, Cameron also pays homage to whale-like creatures — here called tulkuns —- giant sea mammals who are intelligent and helpful. 

    The tulkun are linked to a newly introduced tribe, the Metakayina, Pandora island folks who can swim underwater for long periods and who have developed an ethos based on their relationship to the sea and its creatures. 

    The plot begins moving when Sully and his family take refuge among the Metakayina, who are ruled by Ronal (Kate Winslet) and Tonowari (Cliff Curtis). The children of this royal pair interact with Jake and Neytiri's kids, giving Cameron an opportunity to explain Metakayina culture while offering some fairly typical teen conflict.

   You also know that Sky People (Earthlings) will be greedy and brutal. The Sky People have devised a way to use the memories of the previous military characters to create clones that appear to be Na’vi. So Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the last movie's villain, has a tail and a narrow Na’vi physique.

    Of course, he's still a jerk.

    Motivated by something akin to revenge, Quaritch wants to destroy Jake, ostensibly because Jake has become the leader of the rebels. 

   Every time, Quaritch opens his mouth, the movie sounds as if it's channeling a Vietnam war movie, complete with episodes in which soldiers attempt to brutalize the local population of Pandora's islands.

    All this means that The Way if Water has been engineered to generate big-time box office returns by filling the screen with  better realized visuals than can be found in the first edition — and those were pretty impressive, too.

   Shifting the focus to teenagers and turning Jake into a stern but worried dad adds a more juvenile flavor, but most adults probably won’t mind. 

    Look, if you’re searching for a sophisticated story, eloquent dialog, and revelatory thinking, Avatar probably is not the place to start. 

     Cameron aims for immersive experience, so much so that when you visit a new environment, you may feel like you’re entering another terrifically designed attraction in the Cameron collection of theme parks.

    I don’t mean that as a criticism but as a way of suggesting how it feels like to watch a spectacle-oriented movie, which has an ending (several actually) in which Cameron keeps trying to top himself and often succeeds. 

   In the idyllic world of my imagination, The Way of Water wouldn't  be an event movie that's poised to break records for popcorn sales. But in the real world governed by spinning turnstiles, we probably should be grateful that The Way of Water comes from Cameron, a filmmaker who gives audiences what they pay for — richly realized journeys to other worlds.

    The Way of Water, if you haven't heard, is three hours long, but I wasn't much bothered by its length. It did, however, give me time to think. During an underwater battle involving a sinking vessel, for example, I couldn't help asking myself, "What? Cameron didn't get enough of this with Titanic?"

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.

This 'Wonder Wheel' turns lame

Woody Allen's latest sinks toward the bottom of the director's large filmography.

At times, Woody Allen's Wonder Wheel feels more like a play than a movie -- and not a very good play at that, something along the lines of cut-rate Eugene O'Neill.

As with most Allen movies, a nicely composed surface masks the paucity of the drama. Put another way, the peripherals are top notch. Vittorio Storaro's cinematography and Santo Loquasto's production design skillfully blend beauty and nostalgia in creating the world of Coney Island during the 1950s. Visual competence goes only so far, and the overall effect of Wonder Wheel tracks toward abiding unpleasantness.

Allen breaks little new ground as he tackles familiar themes in this aggressively retro setting: love, betrayal and the way sexual desire and love can blur, creating uncomfortable emotional smudges for all involved.

If you want to spend time wondering how all this relates to Allen's well-publicized private life, have it. But taken on its own terms, the movie represents a misbegotten journey into a lower-class hell of the 1950s. The movie feels strained, artificial and tawdry.

Wonder Wheel revolves around a massively disappointed woman named Ginny (Kate Winslet). After a disastrous first marriage (she cheated), Ginny married Humpty (Jim Belushi). Humpty provides Ginny with stability and safety. He more or less tolerates Ginny's young son (Jack Gore), who happens to be a pyromaniac. The kid likes to set fires.

The arrival of Humpty's daughter (Juno Temple) from a previous marriage upsets Ginny's applecart, which isn't all that sturdy to being with. Humpty, a raging alcoholic who's no longer drinking, still manages to rage. He's Ralph Kramden without the laughs.

Juno's Carolina has been estranged from Humpty, but she fears reprisals from the mobster husband she's fleeing. Humpty warned his daughter against marrying a mob guy, but Carolina didn't listen. It doesn't take long for Humpty to crack; he loves Carolina too much permanently to reject her. Besides, she has no place else to turn.

All of these characters are penned up in a shack overlooking the Coney Island boardwalk, where Humpty operates the merry-go-round and Ginny works as a waitress in a clam house.

Allen sets us up for a kitchen sink drama that's intermittently narrated by a Coney Island lifeguard (Justin Timberlake), a dreamer. Timberlake's character aspires to be a playwright. He also starts an affair with Ginny, who once had acting ambitions and who imagines that she might find a better life with Timberlake's Mickey. She separates herself from reality by claiming that she's only "acting" the part of a waitress.

The actors are often stuck with dialogue that might better have suited Allen's contemporary New York characters, but, in this instance, turns them into labored fictional creations. Temple does her best to be young and flighty. The usually wonderful Winslet elbows her way into an unappealing version of a Blanch DuBois-scale unraveling. Timberlake does his best to portray an Army veteran who dropped out of NYU but doesn't take easily to the role. Belushi either pleads Humpty's case or bellows like a wounded ox.

I'd put Wonder Wheel near the bottom of Allen's abundant filmography. The story isn't very good and it leaves a bad aftertaste when it's done. I'd call that a double whammy of badness.

Struggling to survive -- the movie, that is

Idris Elba and Kate Winslet are stranded in the mountains. In this case brrr is bad.

I've been searching what's left of my movie-saturated brain trying to find something (anything, really) positive to say about The Mountain Between Us, a survival adventure starring Kate Winslet and Idris Elba and directed by Hany Abu-Assad, the Dutch/Palestinian director who gave us two Oscar-nominated works, Paradise Now and Omar.

It's not an easy task, but I came up with two things, and I'll share them before I proceed to tell you that The Mountain Between Us qualifies as a major disappointment, a movie that shatters credibility before shifting gears and making an ill-advised turn from formulaic adventure to formulaic romance.

So about those positives: To begin with, it's a pleasure to see the gifted Elba in a lead role as an accomplished man, in this case, a neurosurgeon who's trying to get to reach a patient in need of his skills.

Another positive? Fair to say that Abu-Assad does a decent job with the plane crash that strands the movie's two principals near the film's beginning.

OK, I'm out of positives. Now for the negative side of the ledger:

Winslet plays Alex Martin, a photographer with war-time experience. When the movie opens, Alex is trying to reach Denver for her wedding, scheduled to take place the next day. She's frustrated when she learns that all flights have been canceled because of bad weather. She notices that another passenger -- Elba's Ben Bass -- faces the same problem and proposes that they join forces, hire a private plane and remain on schedule.

Having described the movie as a survivalist adventure, you already know that the plane goes down in the forbidding mountains of northern Utah. This, after the pilot (Beau Bridges) has a stroke while flying, never a good.

Alex, Ben and Walter's dog, an animal that Abu-Assan occasionally uses for inappropriately cute reaction shots, survive.

If you're going to get into this wilderness ordeal, you'll have to forgive some inconsistencies. At one point, Ben suddenly turns up with a nice pair of hiking boots. A small matter, but you can search for others on your own.

Initially, Ben and Alex argue about the best course of action. He's prone to logical thinking: She's more willing to follow her instincts. Should they stay with the plane or try to walk to safety, a difficult proposition because Alex's leg is broken and neither of them has a clue where they are or how far they might have to travel in to reach a point of survival?

Neither Winslet nor Elba need any selling when it comes to acting ability, but they're not well served by inane dialogue, an obviously stated moral (stronger together) and a late picture, eye-rolling conversion to romance that throws us into a whole other genre.

Adapting a novel by Charles Martin, screenwriters J. Mills Goodloe and Chris Weitz move through plot points like a hiker negotiating deep drifts without the benefit of snowshoes. As is the case with many movies, this one may have begun as someone's labor of love; it turned out to be ... well ... just laborious.

Death, love -- and a waste of time

A strong cast can't make anything credible out of weepy Collateral Beauty.

Burdened by a whopping contrivance, Collateral Beauty -- a movie that wants to talk about unbearable grief and the need for human connection -- resembles a luxury passenger liner that sinks soon after leaving the dock.

The luxury reference has to do with the presence of an A-list cast featuring Will Smith, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, Helen Mirren and Keira Knightley. They're all fine actors, but Collateral Beauty blows the opportunity for great ensemble work by putting the cast into one credibility-challenging or maudlin scene after another.

The story might be viewed as a fable grounded in what may have been intended as a plausible reality, the world of New York advertising.

Smith plays Howard, a hot-shot advertising executive who loses his six-year-old daughter to a rare form of cancer. Mired in grief, Howard completely shuts down. Not surprisingly, his near-catatonic state threatens the life of the agency he founded with his partner (Norton).

The plot's big twist arrives when Norton and two of his colleagues (Winslet and Michael Pena) decide to hire a trio of actors (Mirren, Knightley and Jacob Latimore) to visit the dejected Howard as the embodiment of three abstractions: Death, Love and Time.

Why Death, Love and Time? In the movie's prologue, Howard tells his staff that these are the vital ingredients in selling products. Moreover, since the death of his daughter, Howard has been writing and mailing letters addressed to Death, Love and Time. The letters give voice to Howard's anger at the way all three have betrayed him.

Howard's colleagues have two objectives: They want to save Howard from his depression, and they also want to have him declared incompetent. They'll then be able to sell the company, of which Howard is the majority owner, to an eager buyer.

To achieve their goal, this trio of ad execs also hires a private investigator (Ann Dowd) to photograph Howard talking to Death, Love and Time; the execs then will have these figures digitally removed so that it looks as if Howard is ranting to himself.

When it's not focusing on Howard, the movie doles out other forms of pain. Winslet's character wonders whether she hasn't sacrificed the chance to have a family by spending too much time at the office. Pena's character deals with a recurrence of a long-dormant cancer, and Norton's Whit worries about fixing the screwed-up relationship he has with his young daughter. She won't talk to him because he cheated on her mom.

Putting all of these fine actors into one movie must have seemed like a casting bonanza to director David Frankel (Hope Springs and The Devil Wears Prada). Too bad Allan Loeb's screenplay doesn't play to the cast's strengths: It falls to young Latimore to give the movie's most (and perhaps only) compelling performance.

If all of these actors weren't enough, the movie adds Naomi Harris as a woman who leads a group of parents who've lost children.

The drama comes to a head on Christmas Eve making Collateral Beauty an offering for the season that's intended to mix laughs, tears and greeting card wisdom. Who knows? It might have worked had Frank Capra tried it during the 1930s.

Today, Collateral Damage looks precisely like what it is: a concept that never develops into a real or convincing movie.

Backstage with Steve Jobs

Jobs launches three new products and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin tries to explore human themes in a high-tech world. .

Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network and whose new movie Steve Jobs now goes into wide release, capitalizes on our bottomless interest in the founder of Apple. At the same, time -- and perhaps in contradictory fashion -- Sorkin asks us to accept that he's not trying to give us a factual portrayal of Jobs' life.

Of course, artists are entitled to take license with the facts as they search for larger truths, but -- let's be honest -- had Sorkin focused his movie on a tremendously successful but often callous executive named Barney McBride -- his project might never have been greenlit.

I say all this by way of telling you that I can't totally buy into Sorkin's approach (expressed in a Charlie Rose interview) that he's not replicating real people, but creating characters -- within limits, of course. Sorkin's screenplay draws on Walter Isaacson's much-lauded 2011 biography, Steve Jobs.

Whether Steve Jobs reflects the reality of the real person in full or only in part can be assessed business historians, but Sorkin's screenplay -- brought to the movies by director Danny Boyle -- charts a lively, if not entirely satisfying, course during three clearly demarcated acts.

Those three acts are constructed around backstage events preceding the launch of three products: the Macintosh computer in 1984; the NeXT cube in 1988 and the iMac in 1998.

Sorkin script spends a lot of time on the fraught relationship between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and his daughter Lisa.

It's not that Jobs' relationship with Lisa (he initially denied paternity) is irrelevant to understanding the man (or the character in the movie), it's more that Sorkin may be off base in thinking that this father/daughter tug-of-war is the most telling thing about Jobs. It's a telling thing.

We also get a little too much of Jobs' irritation at being asked for money by Lisa's mother (Katherine Waterston).

Sorkin's great strength is dialogue, so Steve Jobs includes lots of conversations that take place with the rapid fire insistence of a mouse click as we meet the characters who most interest Sorkin:

These include John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the Pepsi executive who took over Apple and who fired Jobs in a dispute over the company's direction. (Twelve years after leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs made a triumphant return to the foundering company. He's credited with turning Apple into one of the most profitable businesses in the world.)

There's also Joanna Hoffman, Apple's marketing genius, who's portrayed by Kate Winslet. Hoffman seems to be the one character who's able to speak truth to Jobs' power.

If the corporate aspects of the movie have a moral center, it belongs to Steve Wozniak, played with patience and determination by Seth Rogen, a nice piece of casting. Woz, as he's called, constantly asks Jobs to do the right thing by acknowledging the team that created the Apple II, the computer that kept the company profitable for a long time.

Fassbender approaches Jobs as a control freak who must juggle 50 different balls at one time, all in the high-stakes atmosphere of a product launch. To this end, Fassbender ably conveys Jobs' focus, intensity and intelligence.

The movie's product-launch backdrop may be the most telling thing about it. Sorkin and Boyle (Slum Dog Millionaire) make it clear that Jobs understood theatrics.

He launched new products in large auditoriums. In front of eager audiences, he shared the spotlight with new Apple products. He gave his user-friendly devices a near celebrity aura, creating a sense of specialness that somehow was supposed to transfer to the consumers of Apple products. (And, yes, I'm one of them.)

I suppose that's part of the point: Jobs could humanize high-tech products, but not himself.

By the movie's final act, Jobs has donned the jeans and black turtle necks that became something of a trademark. He has refashioned himself as a kind of god who brings products down from the digital mountaintop and reveals them to the masses.

Steve Jobs is worth seeing because Sorkin is a clever writer, because the performances are sharp enough to match the brisk pace that Boyle sets, and because much of the byplay is entertaining.

I love the fact that Sorkin takes a shot at Jobs' vaunted design sense when, in the final going, Lisa -- now a Harvard student played by Peria Haney-Jardine -- compares the first iMac to a child's Easy-Bake oven.

Apple users may get more excitement out of a real Apple product launch than they do from a movie that follows on the heels of a documentary about Jobs (The Man in the Machine) and a 2013 bio-pic that cast Ashton Kutcher as Jobs.

Ultimately (and perhaps unfortunately) Sorkin underscores the movie's message: In a climactic scene, he has Woz tell Jobs that it's possible to be both a genius and a compassionate person at the same time. "It's not binary,''says Woz.

Those words needn't have been spoken. They're like an exclamation point on a conclusion that Sorkin should have let us draw for ourselves, and they made me wonder whether the movie shouldn't have been given a subtitle: Steve Jobs, The Nagging of a Genius.

'Divergent' has a derivative feel

Latest young adult sci-fi has limited payoff.

If we hadn't seen any of The Hunger Games movies, Divergent might have felt fresher, less like a medium-grade helping of dystopian sci-fi built around a young female character who learns to kick butt.

The fact that we have seen The Hunger Games may explain why Shailene Woodley, as the star of Divergent, sometimes seems to be standing in for Jennifer Lawrence, star of The Hunger Games.

It also may help us understand why a test that divides 16-year-olds into factions based on personality seems to be substituting for the lottery in Hunger Games.

You get the idea. It's difficult to watch Divergent, an adaptation of a 2011 novel by Veronica Roth, without making comparisons to The Hunger Games, the big-screen version of Suzanne Collins's 2008 novel.

Both books involve a rigidly divided society, a strong female main character and an oppressive social order. The stories, of course, are different, but on screen, Divergent has trouble staking out new turf.

To make matters worse, this first adaptation of Roth's trilogy of novels takes a long time reaching what feels like too paltry a payoff.
Set in a dystopian Chicago of the future, Divergent focuses on Beatrice Prior (Woodley), a young woman who has reached the age at which she must decide which of five factions she wants to join.

Youngsters are asked to choose one of five factions: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless or Erudite, depending on whether they're judged to be self-sacrificing, friendly, honest, brave or smart.

A rare case, Beatrice doesn't fit into any category. That classifies her as a Divergent, someone who doesn't belong.

Instead of turning her in, Beatrice's tester (Maggie Q) tells her to pick a faction and do her best to fake it. Beatrice opts for Dauntless, the warrior faction that serves as the city's army and police force.

Beatrice's choice surprises her parents (Tony Goldwyn and Ashley Judd), well-meaning folks who are part of Abnegation. Once part of Dauntless, Beatrice takes the name Tris.

Beatrice's brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) also raises eyebrows. He chooses Erudite, a faction that the Prior parents suspect is plotting to take over the city, all that's left after a war that devastated the rest of the country.

The Erudite faction is led by Jeanine Matthews (a blonde and icy Kate Winslet). Matthews tells young people to choose freely, but is so obviously authoritarian that there's little suspense about her character. We know from the start that she's to no damn good.

The movie focuses primarily on Beatrice's training to become a full-fledged member of Dauntless. She does this under the tutelage of the handsome Four (Theo James) and the mean-spirited Eric (Jai Courtney).

Setting all this up requires a fair amount of less-than-thrilling exposition. Although the early training sequences can be exciting, the three-stage development of Dauntless recruits doesn't generate enough episode-to-episode tension.

Most of the training seems to involve throwing recruits into sink-or-swim situations. We seldom see anyone receiving anything resembling instruction. The point may be to create a survival-of-the-fittest atmosphere, but it hardly seems the best way to develop future combatants.

Those who wash out of the Dauntless program, by the way, are relegated to living in the streets, part of the mass of folks who are factionless and, therefore, excluded from society's largess.

Woodley ably hints at Beatrice's delight in discovering her new aggressiveness and physicality, but isn't entirely convincing when she swings into action. James's character tends to be a trifle bland.

A prolonged finale is compromised by obvious dialogue about individual freedom and conformity that restates points director Neil Burger (Limitless) already has made.

Now that Divergent has broken the ground with this two-hour and 19-minute version, it's possible that the big-screen adaptations of the next two installments will be fleeter and deeper. Let's hope.

'Labor Day' asks us to take a big leap

It might be the most congenial hostage situation ever.

I'm talking about the premise of director Jason Reitman's Labor Day, a movie about an escaped convict and the mother and son he takes as hostages.

Reitman isn't interested in a situation that grows increasingly bizarre, but in one that becomes more ordinary as the movie unfolds. I guess that qualifies as a counter-intuitive approach, but it results in a movie that strains credibility.

Those familiar with Reitman's resume -- Thank You For SmokingJuno, Up in the Air and Young Adult -- will realize that with Labor Day, the director has taken new direction. He has turned his attention to a drama that's cleansed of the kind of quick-witted ironies that have characterized his best work.

Beautifully photographed by cinematographer Eric Steelberg, everything about Labor Day suggests a movie that demands to be taken seriously -- everything that is except a story that derives from Joyce Maynard's 2009 novel.

Reitman, who also wrote the screenplay, takes us to a small New Hampshire town in 1987. There, we meet Henry Wheeler (Gattlin Griffith), a teen-ager who lives with his depressed and isolated mother Adele (Kate Winslet).

During a shopping expedition to a local store, Henry and Adele are confronted by an escaped convict (Josh Brolin).

Brolin's Frank forces himself into the lives of mother and son, insisting that they take him to their home. He needs a place to hide until he can figure out his next move.

But here's the twist that challenges both expectation and perhaps common sense. Nice guy Frank, quickly assumes the role of father figure to Henry, who badly needs one. He also develops a slow simmering relationship with the love-starved and sexually deprived Adele.

The escaped con becomes an idealized savior: handsome, sexy and totally competent at household repairs. Frank even knows how to bake a peach pie. In a sensuously photographed sequence, Frank shares his baking artistry with Adele, who (to borrow a phrase from T.S. Eliot) eventually dares to eat a peach. She falls for Frank.

Movies have a way of creating their own realities, which is to say that they needn't be entirely credible to keep us involved. That's why it's possible to go along with Labor Day, which features an attractive cast and pulls us into the lives of its characters. I guess I'm saying the movie is never less than watchable.

Some of the credit for that accrues to the actors. Brolin conveys Frank's anxieties as well as his boundless capacity for being a helpmate. Winslet is convincing as Adele, a woman whose pain isolates her from the world, and Griffith makes a credible adolescent, a young man who has become an accomplice in his mother's insistent isolation.

Once Reitman aligns our sympathies with Frank and Adele, the movie's major tension revolves around whether Frank will be caught. Will the couple be able to continue their strange romantic idyll, preferably beyond the reach of the law?

I won't spoil the ending, but there's another sort of tension here: the unease that derives from our knowledge of other films and maybe even from the real world. Suffice it to say that few films could take this kind of scenario and turn it into an affirmation of family, devotion and the power of love.

Reitman rounds out the stories of Adele and Frank with flashbacks that can be a bit confusing, and a couple of side trips turn out to be unimpressive: Henry meets a new girl in town (Brighid Fleming). Trouble arises when a neighbor leaves her handicapped son in Adele's care.

Look, families and other tightly knit groups have a way of manufacturing their own realities. Labor Day understands that, but -- in the end -- I had trouble buying a story about a likable convict and the woman whose emotional life he saves.

When the lights came up, I found myself asking whether what I'd been watching -- though well-crafted -- really made sense.

'Carnage' draws blood, but only a trickle

What happens when the parents are not all right?

Carnage, a big-screen adaptation of a play by Yasmina Reza, struck me as Edward Albee light, 79 minutes of burgeoning sarcasm and spewed venom that's supposed to deprive its characters of all their civilized pretexts.

But instead of feeling like a scathing revelation, this semi-satirical drama seems only to be putting its characters through a lot of pre-determined motions. The game feels rigged, and it's not all that interesting anyway.

The story is simple. Two sets of New York parents meet after the son of one has attacked the son of the other with a stick, knocking out a couple of teeth. One set of parents seems determined to use the incident as a teaching moment; the other seems vaguely conciliatory, but we know from the outset that the initially hopeful mood will give way to something far less polite.

The acting, alas, struck me as variable. Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz portray Alan and Nancy Cowan. She's an investment adviser; he's an attorney. The Cowans visit the apartment of Michael and Penelope Longstreet (John C. Reilly and Jodi Foster), parents of the boy who was clobbered.

To some degree, Carnage aims at satirizing middle-class pretensions. Only Waltz's Alan Cowan, a lawyer who's representing a pharmaceutical company in the midst of a crisis, seems reluctant to play the role of deeply concerned parent. He's too busy taking calls on his cell phone, much to the annoyance of his wife and also, I'm afraid, the audience.

Of all the actors, Winslet struck me as most convincing -- with Reilly bringing up a reasonable second. Foster, on the other hand, seems miscast as a mother who carries her liberal values with stiff determination and self-righteous fury. Foster's performance vacilates between brittle and shrill and, at times, she seemed so overwrought I feared her head might explode.

Credit director Roman Polanski for keeping the proceedings fleet and for preventing the movie -- set almost entirely in one Brooklyn apartment -- from feeling boxed in.

Reza's play, first staged in France, came to Broadway starring James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis. I can imagine that being in the company of the actors would give this material a considerable boost. But on film, Carnage comes across as not terribly insightful and only fitfully amusing.