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.

An adventure that scales major heights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He helped win World War II

The Imitation Game may not be the year's boldest film, but it tells a good story.

Alan Turing never put on a uniform, but his efforts went a long way toward helping the Allies win World War II. Turing, you see, was the mathematical genius who cracked the Nazi Enigma code, thereby hastening the end of the war.

If The Imitation Game -- a new movie about Turing's life -- has it right, Turing was an intensely focused man with limited social skills and no idea about how his behavior effected others. He wasn't mean. He was simply oblivious to the demands of almost any social situation.

Played with brilliant eccentricity by Benedict Cumberbatch (expect an Oscar nomination), Turing isn't exactly an inspirational figure. He often displays the kind of insistence that would drive most of us crazy.

The movie's psychology is handled in sketchy fashion. Turing, we learn in one of the movie's many flashbacks, carried a sense of abiding grief from the loss of a childhood love, an older schoolmate on whom he had a crush.

Clearly, we're meant to see Turing as an unrecognized groundbreaker whose life ultimately was destroyed by the British legal system. Turing's work went unacknowledged until the 1950s, and he suffered at the hands of cruelly archaic British laws regarding homosexuality.

Director Morten Tyldum does his most interesting work in Bletchley Park, the estate where Turing developed his so-called Universal Machine. Turing was certain that this early computer would be better at cryptography than any human, a view not shared by all his colleagues.

Turing's principal adversary turns up in the form of Commander Denniston (Charles Dance), an army officer who runs Bletchley with a spit-and-polish attitude that's ill-suited to supervising a bunch of chess-playing mathematicians.

In what the movie treats as an emotional turning point, co-worker Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode) rallies support for Turing, who's on the verge of losing his position. Until then, Alexander hadn't been much of a Turing fan.

Keira Knightley plays Joan Clarke, a math whiz recruited by Turing for his project. He proposed to her as a matter of convenience, although the movie makes it clear that Turing had real feelings for her, and she for him.

The Imitation Game has been criticized for taking a middlebrow approach to its source material, Andrew Hodges's 1983 biography about Turing. Some have criticized the movie because Turing's homosexuality is more alluded to than shown.

Fair comments, I suppose, but there are interesting ethical implications in the story.

If knowledge of the broken code had been overused, the Germans would have known that the code had been cracked. As a result, information obtained from code-breaking was employed sparingly.

Sacrifices were made so that the information obtained from the Germans could be put to maximum use.

Tyldum, mistakenly I think, sets the story against an awkwardly employed framing device in which a police inspector (Rory Kinnear) questions Turing after his arrest. The misguided detective is trying to determine whether Turing spied for the Russians.

Because of his homosexuality, Turing was found guilty of "gross indecency." He submitted to hormone therapy as an alternative to prison. He committed suicide a couple of years later. He was 41.

Those familiar with the story will know that the filmmakers have taken a variety of liberties in telling it, but the core of the yarn remains intact.*

At its best, The Imitation Game stands as a fascinating look at the singular accomplishment of a strangely obsessive man.

*If you want to know more about discrepancies between Turing's real story and the movie, this article from the New York Review of Books is a good place to start. But keep in mind that movies long have valued dramatic imperatives over historical accuracy.

A forgettable, lightweight 'Laggies'

A young woman suspended in the limbo between adolescence and adulthood.

The fact that poor, college-educated Megan (Keira Knightley) feels at odds with her life as it's unfolding -- something I learned in the first few minutes of Laggies -- didn't strike me as especially compelling.

My predilections aside, it's Megan's generalized malaise that provides a backdrop for director Lynn Shelton's mildly amusing but ultimately negligible comedy.

Fearful of marriage to her devoted but drippy boyfriend (Mark Webber), unsure about a career path, and out of synch with her life-long friends, Megan refuses to be swept away by the felicities surrounding the impending wedding of one of her gal pals (Ellie Kemper).

What's a young woman to do? Pursue a career? Make wedding plans of her own? Fit into the group profile being carved out by friends who (thanks to mobile media) are in constant touch with one another?

Megan's answer is a good one: None of the above.

But Laggies is less an incisive character study than a medium-grade, Seattle-based comedy that's slightly elevated by a couple of its performances, notably from Sam Rockwell (as an attorney and the father of a teen-age daughter) and Chloe Grace Moretz (as that rebellious but ultimately good-hearted adolescent).

Sans her British accent, Knightley does her best to bring a bit of luster to a character who's essentially depressed.

Rather than allowing Laggies to find its own rhythm, Shelton relies on the awkward contrivances of Andrea Seigel's screenplay.

By chance, Megan runs into Moretz's Annika outside a convenience store. Annika implores Megan to buy liquor for her underage buddies. Megan does, one of the many questionable decisions she makes.

In need of a week of evasion from personal pressures, Megan crashes at Anika's house. She makes up a story that convinces Rockwell's Craig to let her stay.

An underused Gretchen Mol shows up as Anika's mother, a woman who left her husband to pursue a career as a lingerie model, thus turning Craig into a single dad.

It doesn't take much insight to guess that Megan, who already has accepted her boyfriend's proposal, is going to fall for glib but lonely Craig.Skipping over the real issue, Laggies winds up being a so-so romcom that left me in the position a critic least wants to occupy: I shrugged.

Begin again? -- not exactly

Director John Carney, who gave us the irresistibly charming quasi-musical Once, trods on familiar turf with Begin Again, a movie about two characters seeking rebirth and authenticity in the often brutal music business.

Mark Ruffalo provides the most compelling reason to see Begin Again -- which represents a mild falloff from its predecessor, which went on to become an award-winning Broadway play.

Ruffalo mixes rage and ruin in his portrayal of Dan, a down-on-his-luck music producer who once had a big career.

After Dan, who's drinking his way toward total failure, is fired from the record company he helped found, he hooks up with Gretta (Keira Knightley), a singer/songwriter who's trying to recover from a broken relationship with her boyfriend (Adam Levine), a singer whose career is on the rise.

Gretta, we fear, may become a cliche, the totally supportive girlfriend who's left behind by her boyfriend's success.

Dan's marriage already is in the tank. His former wife (Catherine Keener) seems chilly toward him, and his teen-age daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) isn't wowed by him either.

A cheerfully amusing James Corden plays Gretta's only real pal, a street musician.

There's no shame in gimmickry in a movie such as Begin Again, so it didn't bother me that Dan decides to make a record with Gretta. Improbably, all of the tunes are recorded on location in Manhattan using lots of ragtag equipment.

Begin Again was screened a while ago, and, frankly, I don't remember much about the tunes, something that wasn't true of Once.

Carney deserves credit for avoiding the worst romantic cliches, but Begin Again feels ever-so-slightly corny and out of tune. I wouldn't expect to see another Broadway musical, but then who'd have thought the Dublin-based Once -- which had the advantage of taking us by surprise -- would become a theatrical hit?

Jack Ryan lives -- again

Chris Pine tries to breathe new life into an old franchise.

I wish I had $5 for every improbable plot twist in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, a new thriller starring Chris Pine as author Tom Clancy's famed CIA agent. I might not be rich, but I'd sure as hell be eating at more upscale restaurants.

Still, it's January, and you take your movie pleasures where you find them.

Credit Pine for bringing welcome emotional vulnerability to the role of Ryan in an action-oriented movie directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also plays the movies arch villain, a misguided Russian patriot named Victor Cherevin.

Trying to reboot a Cold War series for present-day action spawns a plot that pays too little attention to veracity, stranding the movie somewhere between hard-core realism and James Bond fantasy -- with a little Mission Impossible tossed in for good measure.

No surprise there. David Koepp, who co-wrote the screenplay with Adam Cozad, also wrote the 1996 version of Mission Impossible and has a variety of additional action movies under his belt, including Spider-Man and Jurassic Park.

Shadow Recruit begins by explaining how Ryan becomes a CIA operative. A student at the London School of Economics when 9/11 hits, Ryan immediately joins the Marines. After being gravely injured in Afghanistan, he returns to the U.S. to recuperate and to be recruited by the CIA's Thomas Harper, Kevin Costner in full stolid mode.

Unlike other spies, Ryan is no womanizer. During his painful rehab, he falls for his physical therapist (Keira Knightley), a woman who soon becomes a doctor and who moves with Ryan to New York, where he works undercover as a financial analyst for a big Wall Street firm.

There's no sense trying to summarize all of the intricacies of a plot that advances both a terrorist threat and a Russian scheme to undermine the U.S. dollar.

Branagh's Victor Cherevin masterminds the plan. Ryan is sent to Moscow to thwart it. Perhaps to add more menace, the screenplay finds Knightley's Cathy following Ryan to Moscow to surprise him with her presence.

Of course, she doesn't know that he's in the CIA, and her impromptu visit complicates his mission. Not only must Ryan save the Western world, he must keep his girlfriend alive, as well.

Thankfully, the script doesn't turn Knightley's Cathy into a total cipher; it's clear that she's capable of thinking for herself. She even plays a real role in advancing the plot.

Branagh does a serviceable job with the movie's action, which takes an unsuspecting Ryan by surprise. While in Moscow, he's learning the ropes of being a CIA operative, a far more dangerous job than he initially expected.

Fortunately, Ryan's a remarkably quick learner. One minute he's fretting about not knowing his way around Moscow; the next, he's driving a car at breakneck speeds through the city's streets. The script doesn't allow much time for Ryan to make the transition from brainy analyst to lethal operative, but Pine does his best to make the leap as convincing as possible.

The same can't be said for the movie's wrap-up, which finds Ryan, Cathy and a CIA team flying to back to the U.S. and figuring out the rest of the plot at astonishing speeds. Oh well, what's the point of logic when the fate of the world's at stake?

Pine makes a better Ryan than his predecessors, which include Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck. If the series continues, he'll be able to put another franchise on his resume, already having landed the role as Captain Kirk in the revived Star Trek series.

Shadow Recruit mostly holds its own, but it could have been a lot better. No one asked me, but next time out, I hope the filmmakers opt for a plot that allows Ryan to ply his trade in more credible fashion.

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.

Romance at the end of the world

Steve Carell and Keira Knightley eventually create some chemistry on the road to oblivion.

Do filmmakers know something we don't? I ask this because of late we've seen several end-of-the-world films. Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Abel Ferrara's 4:44 Last Day on Earth top the most recent list. Before that, we saw a big-screen adaptation of Cormack McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, and long before that On the Beach, director Stanley Kramer's earnest 1959 cautionary tale about the dangers of nuclear warfare.

Genre fans can make their own lists, but one thing's clear: Hollywood has an on-again, off-again love affair with the demise of absolutely everything.

Now comes Seeking a Friend For the End of the World, a tonally addled movie that can't seem to decide whether it's a biting black comedy, an offbeat romantic comedy or a drama about the virtues of reconciliation and love. Seeking a Friend, which stars Steve Carell and Keira Knightley, winds up being all of those things and none of them, a curious hybrid of a movie that never quite finds a believable niche.

In the early going, Seeking a Friend threatens to ignite a spark of genius. Carell plays Dodge, an insurance agent. For Dodge, the approaching Doomsday feels like a form of cosmic piling-on. Dodge's wife has decided to leave him rather than spend her last days in his company. He has no luck finding solace among his friends, either. They all seem to have taken to shooting heroin and indulging their libidos.

At a party, one of those friends (Patton Oswalt) finds the proverbial silver lining in this gargantuan cloud. With the end fast approaching, women have become far less discriminating, he says. His final days have turned into an impromptu orgy, fulfillment of a macabre but still welcome (at last to him) dream. To Dodge, everything seems futile.

Alone and depressed, Dodge eventually is thrown into contact with a flighty young neighbor with an affinity for vinyl records (Knightley's Penny) and the boyfriend (Adam Brody) that the script quickly sheds. At that point, first-time director Lorene Scafaria holsters most of her satirical guns and tries on a variety of road movie ploys.

Dodge and Penny flee a riot-plagued New York City, he in hopes of contacting an old high-school girlfriend, she because Dodge promises to help locate a pilot who'll be willing to fly her to Britain to spend her last days with her family.

Along the way, our mismatched couple runs into William Petersen (as a man who has hired someone to assassinate him so that he at least won't know when the end is coming) and Derek Luke (as a former boyfriend of Penny, a survivalist who thinks he can out-macho the apocalypse).

If there's a comic high point in Dodge and Penny's road-warrior adventures, it arrives when they stop at Friendsy's, a restaurant where a giddy staff has become helpful in a nearly berserk sort of way that parodies a variety of well-known eateries.

But Seeking a Friend lacks the fortitude to laugh all the way to oblivion.

Late in the proceedings, Dodge takes Penny to meet his father (Martin Sheen), a man he hasn't seen in years. As fortune and script contrivance would have it, Sheen's Frank is a pilot with his own plane. But before any trans-Atlantic travel can be discussed, Dodge must vent a bit about the father who left home when he was still a kid, and Sheen must slip into apologetic mode.

As the depressive Dodge, Carell can be a little bland, and Knightley works her character's eccentricity as hard as she can, but Carell and Knightley deserve credit for increasing their chemistry quotient as the movie progresses.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World has its comic moments and also a few that prove touching, but here's another movie that asks us to chew on scraps of satisfaction rather than savor an entire meal. Moreover, the movie's lachrymose undertow doesn't always make it easy to take.

And what's up with all these end-of-the-world fantasies anyway? There's an almost sickening indulgence to these movies as if an aging baby-boom generation can't imagine that life will go on without it. As I dipped in and out of the various moods of Seeking a Friend, I began to miss the uncompromising satire of bravura end-of-the world movies such as Dr. Strangelove.

In that classic, we were stupid enough to destroy ourselves. These days we seem content to fantasize about the end of a bland run caused by some sort of cosmic collision which feels more like the cancellation of a forgettable TV series than the apocalyptic conclusion of ... well ... everything.

Oh well, there's one truly great thing about end-of-the-world movies. No matter how much we might crave second helpings, they don't allow for sequels.

A surprisingly safe "Dangerous" movie

It features lots of interesting period-piece trappings, but David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method is an unsatisfying piece of work.

In David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method – an adaptation of a Christopher Hampton play called The Talking Cure – Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung, Viggo Mortensen portrays Sigmund Freud and Keira Knightley takes on the role of Sabina Spielrein.

Jung and Freud presumably need no introduction; Spielrein on the other hand, may not be familiar to most audiences. She was a patient of Jung’s who went on to become an analyst of some repute and who also was one of Jung’s mistresses – at least according to Cronenberg’s talky period piece.

Try as I might, I seldom got past the sense that all three actors were playing characters rather than deeply inhabiting them, an impression that’s reinforced by the fact that Jung, Freud and Spielrein eventually become advocates for different – if overlapping – views of human behavior.

The screenplay, which was written by Hampton and based on a book by John Kerr, revolves around an interesting conflict, although the movie tends to make its clash of ideas seem less than urgent. I’ll risk a bit of reductionism to put it this way: Freud insisted that sex was at the core of human behavior. Jung believed there was more to humanity than sex; he affirmed what he saw as humanity’s inherently religious impulses.

A Dangerous Method might be the least Cronenberg-like of recent Cronenberg movies, a stylistically straightforward piece that sprinkles conversations (some vaguely interesting) over a variety of Swiss and Austrian locations, many shot by cinematographer Peter Suschitzky with tasteful rigor.

The movie’s sense of caution comes as a bit of a surprise because sex (and its importance) lies at the heart of the drama, as well as at the core of a growing conflict between Jung and Freud, who – for a time – thought Jung would inherit his mantle as head of the psychoanalytic movement.

Cronenberg fans needn't totally dismay; the movie is not without a bit of kinky behavior. As it turns out, Knightley’s Spielrein achieves her greatest sexual kicks by being spanked, a pleasure Jung obligingly provides, although he seems determined to show that he’s not having a good time doing it.

Jung seems to be torn between a conformist commitment to his marriage (perhaps made easier by the fact that his wife was wealthy) and the unleashing of his more libidinous drives.

Although I had difficulty totally buying either Fassbender or Mortensen, neither has the annoying impact of Knightley, who enters the picture screaming as she’s being carried into Jung’s hospital in Zurich. In portraying Spielrein’s hysteria, Knightley juts out her jaw and contorts her facial muscles as if her body is being jolted by high-voltage shocks.

I don’t know if this is a “realistic’’ portrayal of severe hysteria, but I do know that in movie acting suggestion sometimes can be more powerful than demonstrative assertion. Put another way, Knightley’s performance may drive you a little crazy.

The story is not without political overlay: An increasingly concerned Freud fears that Jung’s interest in such matters as mysticism will undermine the scientific aura that's essential to the acceptance and growth of psychoanalysis.

These arguments too often make it seem as if the movie exists to articulate various points of view rather than to deeply probe the nature of its characters. At one point, though, Vincent Cassel shows up as Otto Gross, a brilliant psychoanalyst who believes all repression represents an unhealthy limitation of freedom. Cassel's welcome presence pushes the movie away from the neatly intellectualized debate between Freud and Jung.

Of the movie’s trio of principals, Mortensen probably provides the most interesting interpretation. His Freud has a deep and cagey sense of self-assurance – at least as it applies to the psychoanalytic domain over which he presides. A Dangerous Method, however, really has more to do with Jung than with Freud, who is absent from long stretches of the movie.

Maybe that’s why Mortensen’s performance wasn‘t enough to make me buy into A Dangerous Method, a movie that seems to unfold on a distant planet where talk about sex and dreams tends to become absurdly dispassionate. In the introduction to his book, Kerr talks about the ways in which Freud and Jung became the first thinkers to live with “that peculiarly intense burden of self-reflection that distinguishes the psychology of modern man.”

Maybe, but intense self-reflection isn’t necessarily the best place to begin a drama, and neither Cronenberg nor Hampton has been able entirely to liberate the material from the confines of the stage – other than by ensuring that the film’s conversations take place against a variety of elegant European backdrops.

In a time when the talking cure seems to have been supplanted by the dispensation of pills, the issues in A Dangerous Method don’t readily spring to life. They seem to swirl inside the embryonic and insular world of psychoanalysis, which – at least in this outing – provides no satisfying dramatic conclusion.

'Never Let Me Go': sensitive -- but remote

Mulligan, Knightely and Garfield in a rare happy moment.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, seemed an unlikely candidate for big-screen adaptation. That hasn’t stopped director Mark Romaneck, working from a screenplay by novelist Alex Garland, from attempting to bring Ishiguro’s carefully calibrated novel to the screen.

If ever a movie wanted to be taken seriously, it’s Never Let Me Go. Tastefully made, quietly presented and bathed in arty attitudes, Never Let Me Go look as if has been tailored for art-house consumption.

That's not necessarily a bad ambition, but too much of the time, the movie proceeds as if in a trance, unfolding in languid fashion while suggesting deeper meanings that, upon reflection, may not seem quite so deep.

The movie’s problem may be simple: Ishiguro told the story as a first person account from a 31-year-old woman named Kathy, played here by Carey Mulligan. Kathy recounted her days in school with strange precision and with ominous hints about what might be in store for her and her classmates.

Despite the intermittent use of an off-screen narration delivered by Mulligan, the story deadens when viewed from the outside, the only perspective an audience has. That’s why some of its most heartbreaking moments don’t drip with emotion.

I’m not sure that Never Let Me Go can be written about without spoilers. All I’ll say is that the three main characters are not facing a happy future. They’re also involved in a mild love triangle. Both Kathy and Ruth (Keira Knightley) are taken with Tommy (Andrew Garfield). Followed through stages of their lives, these three act like normal kids, then inquisitive teenagers and finally young adults. No matter how ordinary they seem, a sense of quiet strangeness surrounds them.

No faulting the performances, but Never Let Me Go winds up feeling as remote as it is finely honed. The more we learn, the more we wonder why none of the characters bothers to rail against his or her lot in life, something I didn’t feel while reading the novel. Maybe that’s the point Romaneck (One Hour Photo) is trying to make: He’s telling us about the way powerlessness is bred into people. And I suppose it’s true that most of us accept things the way they are. Our minds can be as gray as the sweaters worn by the students at Hailsham, the school where much of the story -- perhaps its best parts -- is set.

If you see Never Let Me go, you’ll realize that the movie has a sci-fi connection: Romaneck (like Ishiguro) probably wanted to play down the sci-fi aspects of his story and raise a philosophical question that can’t be stated here without spoiling more of the movie.

All I can say is that at the point at which my heart should have been breaking, I felt as I’d fallen into a kind of trance. The movie ultimately seems purposed to serve as an arty encouragement, a call to embrace life to the fullest because death looms for one and all.

It’s a lesson this artful, sensitive but emotionally reticent movie would have done well to heed.