The thief who lived in a toy store

   Roofman, the story of a thief who broke into McDonald's restaurants, gaining entry from their roofs and hauling off a small fortune, leans heavily on Channing Tatum. Tatum's challenge: to create a smart, appealing criminal who's considerate of those who fall into his sphere. 

   Tatum's Jeffrey Manchester doesn't use politeness as a branding gimmick. He's not trying to dub himself as  "The Thief who Cares." He's aware that he's stepping out of bounds, but has no desire to hurt anyone. 

   Based on Manchester's real-life story, Roofman requires Tatum to remain likable throughout. I'd say he succeeds in what might be his most memorably appealing screen performance yet.

    The story doesn't dwell on Manchester's larceny. Early on, Manchester is caught in North Carolina. He's sentenced to a whopping 45 years in prison, partly because of kidnapping charges stemming from one of his signature moves.

    If they happened to be present, Manchester locked McDonald's employees in store freezers. He sometimes gave them coats so they wouldn't freeze. In the movie, he calls 911 to arrange for their rescue as soon as he flees.

   Working from a screenplay he wrote with Kirt Gunn, director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines) respects the basics of Manchester's story, but his movie intrigues with a tone that falls between unadorned realism and lighthearted absurdity.

  Once imprisoned, the keenly observant Manchester contrives a clever escape. He then flees to Charlotte, where he holes up in an unlikely spot, a Toys R Us store. 

    Manchester's ingenuity blossoms. He learns how to survive in the store by eating lots of candy. He sets up his own surveillance system using baby monitors while disarming the store's video recording capabilities. He builds a comfortable enough hideout to keep him in the store for six months, a long time to spend in the company of Tickle Me Elmo dolls.

   Eventually, Manchester ventures out of the store. He's attracted to one of the its employees (Kirsten Dunst's Leigh), a single mom who's struggling to make ends meet.

    Manchester quickly becomes enmeshed in Leigh's life, attending her church, donating toys (stolen, of course) to the church's Christmas drive, and eventually impressing her daughters. It takes time, but he even wins over Leigh's balky teenage daughter by buying her a seriously used car and teaching her how to drive.

   He's discovering the joys of family, and he's good at it, perhaps by way of atoning for having become estranged from his former wife and three kids.

   Additional support comes from Peter Dinklage as the martinet manager of the Toys R Us store. LaKeith Stanfield signs on as one of Manchester's former Army pals, a character who figures in some late-plot maneuvering. 

    Other actors come off as drop-ins. These include Uzo Aduba, as one of Leigh's churchgoing friends, and Juno Temple, as the girlfriend of Stanfield's character.

   Set in 2005, the movie includes a few retro touches, but Cianfrance gives it a lived-in feel that allows the chemistry between Tatum and Dunst to grow during the time that Manchester lives without being recognized. A hide-in-plain-sight kind of guy, he never alters his appearance.

  Manchester, of course, puts himself in a terrible bind. Using a fake name, he deceives people he cares about. The point is made without underlining. His ruse isn't without cruelty. Maybe that's Manchester's biggest flaw; he's sincere but not perceptive enough to fully understand the impact he's having on those he encounters. He's not good at consequences.

    Interviews with the real people from the Manchester tale pop up during the end credits, mostly confirming the story's slant about a good guy who committed crimes. Roofman isn't up for moral finger wagging. That may trouble some, but it makes Roofman a welcome oddity, an enjoyable movie that avoids the usual true-crime cliches.

Carnage at home in ‘Civil War’

   A bit of background on director Alex Garland's Civil War before we plunge ahead. When the movie opens, Texas and California already have seceded from the Union. Florida lags closely behind.

  Armed conflict has broken out between the two-state Western Forces and the US government which is led by a president who has violated the constitution by taking a third term and disbanding the FBI.

  As a result, a brutal civil war has pitted American against American in ways so chaotic it has become difficult distinguish friend from foe or even to tell what's at stake.

   What exactly caused this catastrophe and what has turned parts of the country into battlefields remains a mystery. Garland evidently wants us to see the movie's vicious conflict as a warning, a flashing red light about the dangers of venomous division.

  What transpires is startling. If I had to pick a single word to describe Civil War, it would be "shock." 

   The movie chronicles the horrors of war by following a quartet of journalists: a battle-hardened war photographer (Kirsten Dunst), her reporter partner (Wagner Moura), and an aspiring young photographer (Cailee Spaeny) who regards Dunst's Lee as role model. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a grizzled New York Times reporter, rounds out the quartet.

  The journalists drive from New York toward Washington, DC., taking a roundabout route through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia. A disquieting variation on familiar genre ensures, a road movie -- only this with bullets and blood.

   Henderson's Sammy wants to reach Charlottesville, VA, the front line in this ill-defined war. The others want to interview the president (Nick Offerman) who has avoided the press for 14 months and who opens the movie rehearsing a duplicitous speech about the government's impending victory.

    Evidence of war and plunder scar the countryside. Garland deftly creates the kind of ravaged landscapes we've become accustomed to seeing in movies set on foreign soil: a badly damaged JC Penny's, a football stadium housing refugees, and a roadside attraction called Winter Wonderland, now the setting for a sniper fight.

   In its most disturbing scene, the journalists encounter a uniformed soldier (Jesse Plemons) whose eyes are hidden behind red sunglasses. The solider terrorizes them in ways that suggest a rogue form of extreme right-wing insanity. 

  Generally, though, the movie has little to say about politics or political views. Garland must be betting that a series of horrific episodes will establish the movie's bona fides as a cautionary, anti-war tale that's sufficient unto itself.

   Asking a movie to explain a Civil War might be too much. But asking "how" the events of the movie came about seems fair. How did the Western Force become a well-equipped and well-trained army? Is it composed of  rebellious members of the US military who have seized everything from armored vehicles to helicopters?

   Rather than dealing with such questions, Garland  focuses on the journalistic psyche. Dunst's Lee tries to school Spaeny's Jessie about the dangers of emotional involvement, even as her defenses begin to crumble. Moura's Joel craves the adrenalin rush of combat, and Sammy functions as the movie's sage.

   The performances strike the right notes, notably Dunce's. Lee tempers her cultivated disengagement from horror with concern for Jessie, a young woman who quickly loses her innocence. Jessie learns to accept the job's prime mission: Get the photograph.

   When it comes to fear and tension, Garland's movie proves devastatingly effective but the violence has some of the same impact on us as on the movie's journalists; it holds our emotions in check.

  I wondered about another aspect of the movie. These journalists are witnesses to horror. But for whom? Infrastructure has been impaired. Internet connections surely have become patchy. Who will see  the photograph we see, Lee's in color, Jessie's in black-and-white?

   Or is that the point? Are we watching journalists running on automatic pilot because they don't know what else to do? Are they covering the war or are they action junkies who have no convictions about the fighting? Do they use press credentials to shield themselves from harm while leaving questions of moral responsibility to others?

  Garland goes all-in on vivid depictions of the havoc wrought by an ill-defined war in which nearly everyone seems armed with an automatic weapon. 

   But to achieve anything approaching greatness, the movie needed to do more than turn familiar American geography into scenes of horror and estrangement. 

    Garland's vivid picture of war culminates with shattering action in the streets of Washington, but we probably should have learned more about the people who are fighting and the journalists who are covering them.

    Civil War has undeniable attention-riveting power. Maybe it's asking for more than is possible from a movie that lives in a world of disordered immediacy,  but I wish I hadn't found Civil War more harrowing than heartbreaking.

Too restrained for its own good

Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled : lost in an arty haze.

There's an alarming gap between style and substance in Sofia Coppola's new movie, The Beguiled, a remake of a 1971 Clint Eastwood film about a wounded Union soldier who finds refuge in a Virginia school for girls during the waning days of the Civil War.

In a sense, Coppola has taken grade "B" material and given it an "A"-grade artistic gloss that sometimes threatens to suffocate the movie's dramatic life.

Not surprisingly, the soldier's presence among these women prompts turmoil as students and teachers try to adjust to a male presence. Some of the students -- notably a character played by Elle Fanning -- are just beginning to discover their sexuality, making the movie a hothouse of suppressed and overt desire, as well as of trust and mistrust.

Too often, though, The Beguiled is a hothouse in which someone forgets to turn up the heat.

Three performances stand out. Colin Farrell plays soldier John McBurney as a cagey fellow with anger simmering beneath a solicitous surface. An excellent Nicole Kidman brings subtle levels of calculation to the role of headmistress Martha Farnsworth, the woman who washes the soldier's partially naked body when he's brought to the school.

Kirsten Dunst's excels as Edwina Danny, a teacher for whom McBurney represents liberating escape from an impending spinsterhood.

Coppola eliminates one of the characters found in director Don Siegel's earlier version, an enslaved woman. That means that Coppola mostly ignores the perverse undercurrents of racism. If you wanted to push the point (and some have), you could call it an elegant form of denial.

Coppola's overly decorous approach elevates atmospherics. Her movie includes a couple of gruesome events but doesn't seem entirely committed to them. No more can said without spoilers.

Every character in The Beguiled, I suppose, must react to a war-time situation in which norms have been upset, but the movie could have used a little more of the bile that ultimately begins to flow.

Another adaptation of a Highsmith novel

I'm not sure where The Two Faces of January ranks in the work of novelist Patricia Highsmith, whose work has enriched the movies with the Ripley stories and also with Strangers on a Train. In the hands of director Hossein Amini, the Iranian-British writer who's making his directorial debut, the big-screen adaptation of Two Faces comes off as a mixed achievement. Amini tells the story of an older man (Viggo Mortensen) who's traveling in Greece with his young wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst) in 1962. There, they meet a knock-about tour guide named Rydal (Oscar Isaac). Mortensen's Chester MacFarland has a dubious financial history. Rydal, whose morals aren't rock solid, either, begins to fall for Colette. Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind does right by locations in Athens, Crete and Istanbul, but the movie probably needed more volatility beneath its surface. Amini, who wrote the screenplays for Snow White and the Huntsman, Drive and Wings of the Dove, proceeds intelligently enough, but never brings the movie to sufficient boil. The performances, particularly from Mortensen are a plus.

Class, madness, murder: A family story

When charm curdles, so does the marriage. So what does it mean when the wife disappears?

It's immediately interesting that All Good Things is the first dramatic feature from documentary filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, known to movie audiences for the mesmerizing Capturing the Friedmans, which told the story of a Long Island child molestation scandal. * Jarecki, whose provocative documentary proved that he knew something about dysfunctional families, turns his attention to another strange collection of relatives in this generally interesting take on a story based on the life of Robert A. Durst, heir to a New York real estate empire. Durst was convicted of a slaying in Texas, and more to the movie's point, was suspected of murdering his wife Katie, who disappeared in 1982. * Jarecki has attracted a powerful cast to his dramatic debut: Ryan Gosling plays David, the character based on Durst. Frank Langella portrays his businessman father, and Kirsten Dunst portrays Katie, a young woman who initially is charmed by David, but who increasingly becames frightened of him. * The movie takes its name from the health food store that David and Katie open in Vermont during the early days of their marriage. But David eventually is lured into daddy's business, which has its shady aspects and which seems to bring out the worst in him. * Gosling appears in Blue Valentine, a much better portrait of a troubled marriage, but he gives his usually effective performance, and Dunst makes us understand Katie's conflicted attitude toward her husband. * Jarecki uses the movie to speculate about what happened to Katie, and he does a nice job illuminating class distinctions between Katie and the family into which she marries. But the movie's sum never exceeds the strength of its parts, and All Good Things winds up an also-ran in the plethora of year-end releases that's spilling over into 2011.

The advantages of being organized

A dual blast of conscience -- feminism and unionism -- in a feel-good movie from Britain.

Made in Dagenham is an easy movie to knock. Predictably designed to create feel-good vibes in its intended audience, the movie stands as a prime example of the kind of British cinema that wears its social conscience on its sleeve. * I hadn't thought of myself as belonging to the group that cherishes such movies, but I must admit that Made in Dagenham's pro-labor stance gave me a lift in these days of high unemployment and rampant corporate profit. * Director Nigel Cole (Calendar Girls) may not be the most nuanced of filmmakers, but he employs a strong cast and benefits from the easy union of dual causes: unionism and feminism. * Focusing on a 1966 strike at a Ford plant in Dagenham, England, the movie tells the story of women who demanded the same pay scale as the plant's male work force. * Sally Hawkins, familiar from Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, plays Rita O'Grady, the leader of the strike who must battle the male hierarchy of her union, as well as a recalcitrant Ford management.* Bob Hoskins portrays a union official who encourages the women, and Daniel Mays appears as Rita's mostly supportive husband. * Perhaps to show that feminist causes cross class lines, the script introduces us to Lisa (Rosamund Pike), the wife of a plant manager who sides with the workers. * Hawkins ably holds the movie together. Look, too, for a nice turn from Miranda Richardson as Barbara Castle, a government official who meets her match in Rita. * Yes, Rita has the entirely expected assortment of colorful co-workers, and, yes, the story isn't exactly loaded with surprises, but Made in Dagenham harkens back to a moment when we could derive good feelings from expressions of solidarity, as opposed to overwrought individual triumphs.