Muscles, menace in a 'noirish' thriller

   

   It would be a serious mistake to mess with Jackie (Katy O'Brian), an Oklahoma woman who has pointed her life toward winning a Las Vegas body-building competition.

   Jackie's the dynamite that propels director Rose Glass's Love Lies Bleeding, a seamy noir tangle set in New Mexico in 1989.

  A convincing Kristen Stewart — as a woman frantically trying to control the unmanageable — plays the central role of Lou, a chain-smoker who works in the grungy gym where Jackie turns up to pump iron. 

 Lou’s duties include cleaning the toilets, which could be read as both an exercise in degradation and an act of penance for as yet undisclosed sins.

  Sex looms as Lou and Jackie tumble into a heated relationship. But Glass (Saint Maud) has more in mind than an obsessive love story; she's out to pump adrenalin into an exaggerated helping of Neo Noir while injecting it with a healthy shot of cult-classic juice.

   A well-selected supporting cast adds to the grimy atmospherics. Dave Franco portrays JJ, a bully who, early in the movie, has sex with an indifferent Jackie. She hopes he'll help her get by. A first-order sleaze, JJ later beats up his wife (Jena Malone), who happens to be Lou's sister. 

  Revenge looms, and Jackie provides it in a gripping scene made more vicious because by the time it arrives, Jackie has been shooting massive quantities of the steroids Lou provides for her.

  Watching Jackie's muscles bulge brings the Hulk to mind; her strength becomes a near special effect. Her fury can't be controlled; her spring-loaded muscles crack to attention. 

 A bit of comic relief arrives in the form of Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), a ditzy woman with an undisguised crush on Lou and a refusal to take "no" for an answer.

  Roid rage and noir make for a combustible combination as Lou's gun-running father (Ed Harris) lurks in the background, gradually assuming a more important role in the story. 

  With stringy hair drooping over the sides and back of his bald dome, Harris goes satanic, creating a stand-out figure, the menacing calm at the center of every storm. 

  When the finale arrives, the film rockets over the top in ways that either will amuse you or put you off, perhaps an inviting mix of both. 

   Love Lies Bleeding may encourage you to expand your thoughts about female bodies, but it's firmly rooted in Glass's desire to blast her way into an overcrowded genre -- and do it with boldness and audacity. 

   

Diana and deadening life among royals

 

   They eat the best foods but take no joy in dining. Surrounded by grandeur, they have become exemplars of stifling  insularity. A funereal solemnity embraces them, suggesting a form of social rigor mortis.

   These are the royals of director Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, a look at three days in the life of Princess Diana. Early on, the princess (Kristen Stewart) gets lost driving a small green sports car to Sandringham House, a mansion where the royal family plans to celebrate the Christmas holiday. With these royals, celebration plays more like commemoration.

   Larraín directed Jackie, a meditative 2016 movie about Jacqueline Kennedy. Larrain's fascination with the interior lives of iconic women pushes realism aside. Larrain introduces Spencer as “a fable from a true tragedy.”  

   No surprise, then, that Spencer becomes an increasingly  subjective chronicle of how Diana experiences the holiday with Stewart fully committing to the task of playing a woman desperate to reclaim her life.

   As Diana, Stewart talks in breathy gasps that, for me, evoked memories of Marlyn Monroe, another women locked in the gilded cage of expectation. Aside from her wardrobe and blonde  hair, little attempt has been made to make Stewart look like Diana, a move that wisely diverts attention from the external to the internal.  

   During three days at Sandringham, Diana is drawn to her old home, a now-deteriorating mansion not far from the royal estate. 

   The point, like many in Steven Knight's screenplay, becomes obvious: Diana longs to retrieve the self that she's supposed to  sacrifice on the altar of aristocratic duty.

   For Diana, everything is double-edged. Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) gives her a pearl necklace. The gift puts Diana in a suffocating chokehold that evokes comparisons to Anne Boleyn, the wife of Henry VIII who lost her head. Diana reads a book about Boleyn and even hallucinates conversations with Henry’s unfortunate second wife.

   The screenplay makes only one fleeting reference to Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s true love, but the point is clear. 

   We wonder whether Diana might have endured the burden of scripted confinement had Charles been an emotional partner rather than someone who, at least in this movie, pushes  his wife to accept a divided self. 

   Diana's supposed to project the royal image while realizing that her public posture never will fully accommodate her  buoyant personality. She must train her body to do things she hates.

   The rest of the characters reinforce the instructions Charles delivers to Diana as the couple stands on opposite sides of a large billiard table, another expression of Diana's terrible isolation.

   Timothy Spall portrays Major Alistar Gregory, whose sole duty involves protecting royals from prying eyes. His face molded into an impressive scowl, Spall talks softly but makes no attempt to conceal Gregory's authority.

  Jonny Greenwood, cinema's most original composer, creates an unsettling jazz soundtrack that drapes over the movie like a shroud and, at times, makes Spencer feel like an exercise in horror. 

   The score also underlines the impression that Spencer is driven, at least in part, by Larrain’s affinity for disharmonious notes. It also mirrors what's going on inside Diana's head.

  The approach is not without costs, the primary one being a sense of airlessness. From the opening, the message already seems clear: Life's being drained from this young woman. In a sense, nothing remains but for Larraín to tighten the vice grip of propriety around Diana's delicate neck.

  Because Spencer has a gloomy undertow,  an aura of unreality pervades the movie. In works such as Netflix’s enormously popular The Crown, royals don’t always seem like figures borrowed from a wax museum. Not here.

   Only Maggie (Sally Hawkins), Diana’s dresser, sees the princess as a human being and Charles sends her away, depriving Diana of even momentary possibilities for intimacy.

   Diana suffered from bulimia and Larraín uses her malady metaphorically, a dubious choice, I think. She can’t stomach the royal food that nourishes so much rigid conformity. When her liberating break-out arrives at the film’s end, she  takes her sons (Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry) for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Apparently, she’s willing to give up a seat at the royal table to consume the food of the people. 

   Larrain uses his considerable skills to create a change-resistant world in which, as someone puts it, there can be no past or future, only a ceremonial sameness. I guess that makes Spencer a sophisticated movie with a simple point: No one should be expected to endure the horrors of so much suffocating  isolation.

‘Underwater’ plumbs the depths of movie junk

Kirsten Stewart races about in a thriller that can’t freshen a familiar formula.

Much of Underwater takes place ... er ... underwater. Now, we’re not talking azure waters where fish display themselves in glorious technicolor. No, we’re talking the forbidding darkness of bottom dwellers; i.e., ocean depths as great as nine miles.

In this water-logged adventure, both characters and the camera grope to find legible images to support what apparently was intended as an exercise in breathtaking excitement.

You’ve probably read that Underwater is another Alien knockoff, a movie about a desperate crew that tries to survive the destruction of its deep-sea diving station and an attack by a monster, glimpsed mostly in quick cuts, but eventually revealed to have razor-sharp teeth. I’m waiting for a monster that torments its victims by gumming them to death.

Is the sea taking revenge for man’s insistence on exploiting its bountiful resources or is this an opportunity to see Kristen Stewart — her close-cropped hair, dyed blond — race about in her underwear, much as Sigourney Weaver did toward the end of Alien.

A knockoff? Maybe. But director William Eubank should have watched Alien more closely. Rather than building toward deadly encounters, he races through them, dulling any chance of providing tension that lives up to the movie’s pounding score.

Underwater demonstrates only minimal interest in characterization as the survivors of this deep-sea disaster pick their way through the rubble in hopes of reaching evacuation vehicles. We're left to wonder which members of this small group have a chance of surviving.

As you might expect, the script could have been written on the back of a napkin, but in this case, one that had been used to sop up a wine spill that made it seem as if all the story beats had run together.

To further burden the actors, they’re often asked to wear industrial-strength diving outfits that obscure their humanity and make them look as if they might have been at home in some misbegotten helping of 1950s sci/if.

Amid images so dimly lit, it’s not always easy to tell what we’re watching, we meet the crew members who accompany Stewart’s Norah on her survival quest. These include the outfit’s captain (Vincent Cassel) and the resident wise-ass (T.J. Miller), as well as another woman (Jessica Henwick) who also will scurry about in her underwear before the movie ends.

Employing an editing style that turns the movie’s images into a kind of visual shrapnel doesn’t help sustain interest. Massive amounts of CGI probably were required to create this underwater environment. The end result for me: a glub and a half.

A look at the life of Anton Yelchin

Even if you're not a fan of the late Anton Yelchin, who died in 2016, you may find something of interest in Love, Antosha, a documentary about the young actor's too-brief life. Yelchin was 27 when his Jeep Grand Cherokee rolled down his driveway, a freak occurrence that resulted in his suffocation when his car trapped him against a fence. Despite his youth, Yelchin boasted a heavy resume; he’d been acting since he was a kid — with relatively few breaks. He appeared in a staggering 69 films. Director Garret Price's documentary paints a portrait of a young man of varied interests and with acting chops that seemed universally admired by those who worked with him. There are no nay-sayers in Price’s look at Yelchin which includes interviews with his parents, with friends, and with fellow actors: Chris Pine, Kristen Stewart, and Zachary Quinto among them. Although he suffered from cystic fibrosis, Yelchin didn’t allow the illness to slow his roll. When he wasn’t acting, Yelchin thought about directing, took photos of Los Angeles’ seamier side, wrote, and worked as a musician. Some of Yelchin’s writings are read by Nicolas Cage. In sum, Love, Antosha explores the life of a serious young actor who may not have lived long, but who left colleagues and friends with indelible memories. He also left little doubt that any moment of his short life remained unlived.

Why did Lizzie Borden wield her ax?

Directed by Craig William Macneill, Lizzie showcases the work of Chloe Sevigny as Lizzie Borden, the 19th century Massachusettes woman who purportedly killed her stepmother and father with an ax. Sevigny gives an unnerving performance in which her face can show either rigid determination or the unraveled fury of a woman who has unleashed a terrifying rage. Sevigny's Lizzie finds herself in the middle of a tale of repression so severe, only the most violent assertion can break its hold. Sevigny is aided by Kristen Stewart, who plays Bridget, a diffident Irish maid who works for the Borden family and who becomes Lizzie's lover. Jamey Sheridan exemplifies all the worst qualities of patriarchy; he portrays Andrew Borden, a man of punishing cruelties that may be intended to mask his own sexual desires. Fiona Shaw plays Lizzie's stepmother -- not quite wicked but acquiescent in her husband's sadism. Denis O'Hare portrays uncle John, an unscrupulous facilitator of Mr. Borden's business life. Slowly paced, Lizzie ultimately delivers the bloody goods with a naked Lizzie chopping her way into American criminal lore. Carefully appointed and photographed, Lizzie ultimately suffers from its one-note insistence on turning Lizzie into a warrior against patriarchy. The movie juxtaposes period-piece pacing with a contemporary reading of the Borden story. The mixture doesn't always work, but there's no denying Sivigny's commitment to the role; she cuts through the movie's lumbering pace with a bluntly expressed but towering rage.

I didn't buy 'Personal Shopper'

Kristin Stewart reunites with director Olivier Assayas for a ghost story.

Director Olivier Assayas worked with Kristen Stewart in the well-received Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), the story of a young woman working as a personal assistant to a famous actress (Juliette Binoche). Now, Assayas has reunited with Stewart for Personal Shopper, a movie that does its best to defy description.

Assayas tries to combine various genre elements, most notably those of a ghost story, those of a philosophical thriller and those pertaining to the portrait of a grief-stricken character at loose ends.

Stewart's Maureen is haunted by grief after the death of her twin brother, Lewis, a young man with whom she shared a heart defect and with whom she made a pact. Brother and sister agreed that whoever died first would contact the other from the great beyond. We're told that both Maureen and her brother were mediums.

Stewart's Maureen lives in Paris where she works as a personal shopper for an apparently famous model (Nora von Waldstatten). Maureen, who doesn't seem to fit into Paris or perhaps into any known surroundings, travels around the city on her motor scooter. She's looking for items that might please her mostly unappreciative boss.

Sometimes, Maureen tries on her boss' clothes, something she's not supposed to do. Assayas treats these clothes-swapping incidents as if Maureen's violating a taboo, reinforcing the idea by having Maureen masturbate in her absent boss's bed.

Maureen also spends time at the house where her brother passed away. She encounters various noises, but not getting a clear message from the next world, although Assays shows us a computer generated shimmer that we assume is the late Lewis's ghost.

Once in a while, Maureen Skypes with her boyfriend (Ty Olwin), a young man who's working in cybersecurity in London.

More importantly, she begins receiving text messages (well-handled by Assayas over the course of 20 minutes) from an unidentified man who seems to know her every move. The ghost? A stalker? Someone menacing? Someone helpful?

Stewart plays an unhappy 27-year-old woman of frustratingly spare expression. That makes her a perfect match for Assayas's maddeningly spare approach. He's big on showing us glossy interiors, but doesn't seem all that interested in human interiors.

Say this, though, Stewart manages to look entirely of the moment even when her character is bored.

Assayas steadfastly refuses to define his movie, which isn't made any clearer by the addition of a brutal murder. You can take all this as irritatingly or provocatively French, depending on your taste.

I don't mind ambiguity, but there's a difference between ambiguity and vagueness. For me, Personal Shopper blurred the line. Put another way: Personal Shopper feels arty and pretentious, but left me unsure about what its pretensions even were.

A lukewarm helping of Woody Allen

Allen travels back to the 1930s for Cafe Society.

There was a time when a Woody Allen movie felt as if it were entirely of its moment. Anticipation for each new Allen movie ran high whether the director was operating in comic or serious mode. Then came scandal, the onslaught of age and a changing movie environment.

These days, a Woody Allen movie seldom feels like an occasion marked by urgency, so it's probably not surprising that Allen's latest -- Cafe Society -- retreats into the 1930s for a story split between Los Angeles and New York.

Though hardly a knockout, Cafe Days qualifies as a showcase of sorts, less for Allen than for his production designer, Santo Loquasto, and his cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro. Between them, they create a Los Angeles blessed by pre-pollution light and fashionable ease.

Allen's screenplay doesn't exactly break new thematic ground as it toys with issues involving love, infidelity, betrayal, guilt and navel gazing about mortality.

The story centers Bobby Doorman (Jesse Eisenberg), a Bronx kid who travels to California in search of a career. Bobby hopes that his Uncle Phil (Steve Carell) will help him get his feet on the ground.

Phil, you see, is one of Hollywood's top agents, a guy who knows everyone.

Bobby's parents (Jeannie Berlin and Ken Stott) disagree about whether Phil will be of much help. Mom says, "yes." Dad is skeptical, but his wife dismisses him as "stupid."

Phil gradually accepts Bobby as a trusted ally. Blood ties, after all, are stronger than the tenuous threads that stitch Hollywood alliances together.

Meanwhile, the story keeps a foot in New York, where it follows the development of Bobby's older brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a gangster whose power grows along with the number of bodies he buries in the cement of metropolitan area construction sites.

Allen -- again with Storaro's help -- has done something I didn't know was possible. He has made Kirsten Stewart, who portrays Phil's secretary, look like a movie star from another era. I don't think anyone has ever made Stewart look more classically beautiful.

Predictably, young Bobby falls for Stewart's Vonnie. The complication: Vonnie is the midst of an affair with her married boss, Carell's Phil. Will Vonnie realize that Bobby is the perfect man for her or will she cling to Phil?

Blake Lively enters the movie late; she plays Veronica, a woman who captivates Bobby -- at least briefly -- when he returns to New York to run Les Tropiques, a nightclub that his older brother Ben has acquired through thuggery.

All of this is narrated by Allen, making Cafe Society seem like one of Allen's New Yorker short stories. The movie passes easily, except for a couple of clinkers. A riff about one of the character's 11th hour conversions to Catholicism (it has an afterlife, Judaism doesn't) and an early-picture bit in which Bobby meets with an inexperienced hooker fall flat.

As the stand-in for the kind of character Allen once played, Eisenberg does well enough; Carell conveys Phil's self-assurance along with bouts of torment, but it's Stewart who emerges as the prize in Allen's ensemble.

Allen eventually unites the New York and Los Angeles parts of the movie, but the dramatic stakes seldom seem high enough to elevate Cafe Society above a lukewarm period piece about a couple of characters who obsess over the lives they might have led.

Different costumes and new actors can't disguise the fact that for Allen, Cafe Society is more of the same -- and the lesser for it.

'Equals' adds up to boredom

Welcome to another dystopian future. Although it surely wasn't intended, director Drake Doremus' Equals goes a long way toward providing an effective cure for insomnia. A deeply boring romance between two characters who live in a futuristic society where emotions are suppressed for the good of something called "the Collective," Equals suffers from a pervasive lack of verve. In the movie's world, people aren't supposed to touch. Humans still propagate, but conception has been turned into a chore. Not everyone in this society has managed to stamp out feeling, though. Some have been diagnosed with SOS (Switched On Syndrome). Most SOS people eventually are eliminated, but a few pretend to abide by The Collective's norms. They're called "hiders." Nicholas Hoult plays a diagnosed victim of SOS who falls for a "hider" portrayed by Kristen Stewart. Let's just say that their love affair plumbs new depths of listlessness. Guy Pearce and Jacki Weaver offer minimal support as two additional "hiders," those who fake the numbed-out look that their society requires. Doremus floods the screen with whites (interiors and clothing), a choice that only adds to the monotony. Some end-of-picture suspense ignites a small spark, but, by then, it's too late. Rigor mortis already has set in.

When everything is over-the-top

Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart team in a cartoonish movie that revels in its violence.

Set in a West Virginia backwater, American Ultra is a comic-book movie that has the distinction of not being based on a comic book. Silly, violent and unashamedly over-the-top, American Ultra makes for a late-summer oddity -- fun but not too much.

In trying to enter cult-movie territory, director Nima Nourizadeh manages a neat trick: He casts Jesse Eisenberg in an action-oriented role in which he seems less agitated than he did in such recent movies as The End of the Tour. (If you haven't seen End of the Tour, it's worth catching Eisenberg as a writer who sweats his way through interviews with novelist David Foster Wallace.)

Here, Eisenberg plays Mike, a neurotic underachiever with a job at a convenience store. Mike's so prone to bouts of anxiety that he can't even get on a plane for a trip to Hawaii with his live-in girlfriend (Kristen Stewart). Mike had planned to propose on the beach.

As it turns out, Mike is no mere pot-smoking slacker with anxiety issues. He's been programmed by the CIA as a sleeper agent. With his memory wiped clean, Mike has no idea that he's a CIA "asset" in waiting.

Mike surprises himself with sudden bursts of butt-kicking physicality after he's activated by a sympathetic CIA agent (Connie Britton) who wants to keep him from getting killed.

Mike isn't being pursued by a foreign enemy, but by a newly appointed CIA boss (Topher Grace).

Caught in a bureaucratic middle, Mike is part of a program that Grace's character opposed and which Britton's newly demoted character championed.

Working from a script by Max Landis (Chronicle), Nourizadeh spares no effort in demonstrating that he's making an entertainment in which violence frequently is given a comic spin. Dustpans become lethal weapons, for example.

American Ultra delights in refusing to take aim at a single target. Put another way, the movie is an eclectic hodgepodge. John Leguizamo shows up as a low-level criminal who sells illegal fireworks. For no particular reason, Leguizamo sounds as if he's auditioning for a role in Straight Outta Compton.

In keeping with a comic-book tone, Walter Goggins plays The Laugher, a CIA-programmed killer who breaks into laughter without provocation. He relentlessly pursues Mike.

Eisenberg and Stewart, who worked together in 2009's Adventureland, whip up some genuine romantic chemistry, even as the movie goes overboard trying to show just how clever it can be with its ample displays of violence.

Still, Eisenberg and Stewart are game to be battered and bruised, and when the animated closing credits roll, American Ultra confirms what we already knew: It's not to be taken seriously.

Hey, if we hadn't seen movies like this before (remember Kick-Ass?), American Ultra might have had more kick.

Life is tough -- even for stars

Clouds of Sils Maria examines the woes of an aging actress.

There are two important characters in Clouds of Sils Maria -- and only one of them is human.

The latest collaboration between director Olivier Assayas and actress Juliette Binoche revolves around an aging actress who's being pushed from center stage. She's the obvious human in this drama.

Then there's the other character: time, a relentless accumulation of years that's pushing the actress out of the spotlight.

Binoche plays Maria, an accomplished middle-aged French actress who spends most of the movie in the company of her impressively efficient assistant (Kristen Stewart).

In addition to handling Maria's affairs -- everything from an impending divorce hearing to press requests -- Stewart's Valentine also interprets an increasingly youth-oriented culture for a skeptical Maria.

The movie opens on a train with Maria and Valentine headed for a tribute to the director who launched Maria's career. In the midst of the trip, they learn that the director has passed away, turning the pending tribute into a sad affair.

At what was to be a celebration, Maria meets an actor with whom she once had an affair, but on whom she has soured. The movie then slips away to Switzerland, where Maria and Valentine ensconce themselves in a mountain home owned by the late director's wife.

Clouds of Sils Maria has backstage allure. Assayas takes us into Maria's private world. She's capable of putting on good front, but her laugh reveals a bit of desperation, as well as the wear of too many cigarettes.

Despite various digressions, Clouds revolves around a single event. A hot-shot director (Lars Eidinger) offers Maria a part in a stage production of The Maloja Snake, the movie that established her career.

This time, though, Maria must play the older of two women engaged in a love relationship that falls apart as the younger woman becomes increasingly assertive.

The more incendiary role has gone to Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moritz), a youthful actress who can't seem to keep her face out of the tabloids. Jo-Ann, who has appeared in sci-fi blockbusters, is either a Hollywood A-lister or about to become one.

Stewart's character occupies a middle ground between Maria and her youthful challenger. She respects Maria, but appreciates Jo-Ann's gift, an admiration that's revealed when Maria and Valentine go to a theater to watch one of Jo-Ann's 3D, sci-fi extravaganzas.

When Maria and Valentine run lines from the upcoming play, it becomes clear that they're also acting out portions of their complex relationship, sometimes in ways that seem too on-the-nose.

It may help to know that the movie has an insider component: Binoche and Assayas worked together on Rendez-vous (1985), an Andre Techine-directed movie that Assayas co-wrote and which helped bring Binoche to prominence. They also teamed for 2008's Summer Hours.

After her fine work in the Alzheimer's drama Still Alice, Stewart continues to impress. She plays the least defined and, therefore, most interesting of the three women.

Assays is no speed demon when it comes to pacing, and he isn't exactly breaking new ground here. Clouds sometimes seems to be drifting, and the insular world of these performers can narrow to the point of off-putting self-absorption.

It's also not clear why Assayas made Binoche, who's 51, into a 40-year-old for his movie. Perhaps he wanted to emphasize that show business so values newness and youth that 40 is considered old for an actress.

As for Maria and Jo-Ann, they're jockeying for position -- not only with each other -- but, in Maria's case, with the inevitability of advancing time. Her tragedy, one supposes, is that she's smart enough to know that she's not going to beat the clock.

Julianne Moore's devastating 'Still Alice'

A brilliant professor tries to cope with an Alzheimer's diagnosis.

Julianne Moore is on track to win a best-actress Oscar for her heartbreaking performance in Still Alice, the story of a Columbia University linguistics professor who's diagnosed with Alzheimer's and finds herself slipping into the fog of vanishing memory.

If you're of a certain age, it will be impossible to watch Still Alice without wondering about those little lapses of memory you may from time-to-time experience, moments of disorientation when you walk into a room and have forgotten exactly what brought you there or the frustration of having to dig through mental files to remember the name of someone you know quite well.

Confusion falling across her face like a sudden shadow, Moore evokes the pain of early-onset Alzheimer's; i.e., the prospect of losing everything that her character regards as vital to her identity.

Even worse, the character Moore's playing -- Alice Howland -- is only 50 when she's diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer's that's genetic in origin.

To their credit, directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland have not made a disease-of-the-week weepie. They resist any temptation to garnish the story with sentiment, and they bring Alice's family dynamics into play in the movie's background.

Alice's husband (Alec Baldwin) also works at Columbia, where he's a biological researcher. The couple have a son (Hunter Parrish) who's attending medical school and two grown daughters (Kate Bosworth and Kristen Stewart).

The Howland offspring must work through their relationships with their mother. They also must decide whether to be tested to determine if any of them has inherited the genetic time bomb that eventually will result in the disease.

The movie's key relationship involves Alice and her youngest daughter (Stewart), a young woman who has moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actress. Alice long has wanted Stewart's Lydia to attend college, perhaps to enhance the intellectual luster of what appears to be an exceptionally accomplished family.

As developed throughout the movie, the relationship between Lydia and Alice proves honest and touching. Stewart -- who has taken more than a few lumps for her work as Bella Swan in the Twilight movies -- holds her own as a character trying to chart a path in life while dealing sensitively with her mother's decline.

None of the issues raised by Still Alice are treated melodramatically. They unfold in the quiet, respectful style such a movie demands.

Glatzer and Westmoreland aren't interested in vilifying anyone. They respect their characters, paying some attention to the frustrations and needs of each. Only the son is somewhat neglected.

Still, this is Moore's movie -- and she rises to the occasion.

Without underling or italicizing anything, Moore conveys every bit of the torment experienced by a brilliant woman who's losing her grip. Alice gets lost in the middle of lectures, forgets where she is while jogging and experiences even worse indignities as the disease progresses. She's watching her life be erased.

You may have read that Glatzer insisted on continuing with the movie, even after being diagnosed with ALS. He obviously was able to bring heightened identification to the project, but in their adaptation of a novel by Lisa Genova, Glatzer and Westmoreland avoid sledgehammer emotional effects. Alzheimer's is frightening enough on its own.

This is not to say that Still Alice has been turned into an Alzheimer's horror show. Still Alice takes a well-observed look at the transformation wrought by a terrible disease.

At one point, Alice says that she'd trade her Alzheimer's for cancer. It's to both Moore's and the movie's credit, that we understand exactly what she means. She knows that she's saying goodbye to herself. It's like dying without actually being dead.

A small drama about a big issue

Kristen Stewart of the Twilight movies stretches a bit in Camp X-Ray, a drama about a young soldier working as a prison guard at Gitmo. Stewart's Private Cole is a small-town, unsophisticated soldier who wants to do well at any job to which she's assigned. A somewhat monotonous story focuses on the initially hostile but increasingly sympathetic relationship between Cole and a particularly rebellious prisoner (Payman Maadi). Did I say "prisoner?" The guards at Gitmo are instructed never to call their charges prisoners but to refer to them as "detainees." Writer/director Peter Sattler muddies the waters a bit with a digressive episode in which a non-com (Lane Garrison) sexually abuses Cole, who then must pay a price for her resistance. Essentially a two-hander built around Stewart and Maadi, the movie proves intermittently effective as it builds toward a soft-hearted conclusion that doesn't quite fit with the screenplay's more clear-eyed intentions; i.e., assessing the impact Gitmo has on the humanity of both guards and detainees.

Bye Bye Bella: Farewell Edward

Before the screening of the final chapter of the Twilight series -- The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part II -- I chatted with a devotee of the Stephenie Meyer novels, who encouraged me to read the books, which she preferred to the movies for a variety of reasons that I'm in no position to judge. I haven't read any of Meyers's books, and, despite encouragement from a perfectly nice fan, I plan to keep it that way.

On screen, the series wraps with a multitude of soggy scenes that build toward a climactic final battle as Hollywood bids farewell to Bella and Edward, who, by this time, have been joined in matrimony.

The movie begins with Bella awakening after her conversion from human to vampire. It seems that Bella and Edward also have become parents of a daughter, Renesmee. It's just here that the movie sinks its teeth into the semblance of a plot: The Volturi -- nose-in-the-air vampires who reside in Italy -- want to snuff out poor Renesmee because they think kiddie vampires are so uncontrollably destructive, they're likely to give more decorous vampires a bad name.

But Renesmee is only half vampire. She's not immortal. And it's up to the Cullen clan of vamps either to persuade the Volturi that Renesmee poses no threat or to battle them to the death, with a little help from werewolf friends. Or something like that.

I find it nearly impossible to pay close attention to the story points in these movies because I'm too busy waiting for what have become a series of obligatory audience responses -- oohs, ahs and screaming, not at the horror of a vampiric threat, but at the sight of Taylor Lautner revealing his carefully sculpted abs.

This time, Lautner's Jacob -- a werewolf -- spends a lot of time hanging around the Cullen clan because he has "imprinted" himself on young Renesmee, who grows to maturity at an alarmingly fast rate. It takes Bella time to accept the fact that Jacob will retain a lifetime connection to her daughter.

The movie has a full plate: It must somehow settle things between Bella and her father; it must set Renesmee on some sort of life course, and it must let us know that Bella and Edward will remain undead in some perpetual happily-ever-after.

Director Bill Condon has some fun showing how Bella discovers her vampiric powers. Her senses are heightened. She develops extraordinary strength. Like other vampires, she also can move at hyper-speeds. My favorite lesson: Bella has to learn how to make believe that she's breathing so that she can pass as a human when necessary.

By now, the cast has become comfortably familiar. Robert Pattinson's Edward gets gets to watch as Kristen Stewart's Bella evolves as a vampire, but he's still capable of falling into moments of swooning adoration. Stewart grows Bella's confidence as she masters a new skill set.

As head of the Volturi, Michael Sheen gives the movie's most archly entertaining performance.

The Twilight series has proven itself critic proof. Its fans don't care what critics think -- and they've turned out in large enough numbers to create a phenomenon that has sustained high box-office levels since 2008.

The most enduring lesson I learned came in the final chapter when it became apparent that vampires can be killed by ripping their heads off and throwing them into a fire. No stakes through the heart for these folks.

As for love between Bella and Edward -- which oozes adolescent ache like an overripe piece of fruit that's being squeezed too hard -- I bid it a fond, if relieved, farewell. Unlike the movie's legions of fans, I have no desire to see it go on forever.

A dark and beautiful 'Snow White'

First off, I can't imagine that the world breathlessly awaits another version of the Snow White story, even one set in a Medieval world that provides fertile ground for some of the best special effects of a still-burgeoning summer.

So it's up to the makers of Snow White and the Huntsman to convince us that their movie is not just another link in a long chain of pointless summer diversions, particularly when we've already seen Mirror Mirror, another attempt to revive and reinterpret the Snow White tale.

If there's a compelling reason for Snow White and the Huntsman, it can be found in the many imaginative ways director Robert Sanders puts real darkness back into Snow White, a fairy tale mostly associated with the Brothers Grimm, who knew how to give kids the willies, and with Walt Disney, who knew how to create cuddly dwarves, seven of them in fact.

This Snow White has no dwarves named Happy or Sleepy, and never winks at the audience. Playing almost every scene straight, Sanders tells the story of how Evil Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) takes over a kingdom, imprisoning Snow White (Kristen Stewart) in a castle tower.

Daughter of the king Ravenna murdered and rightful heir to throne, Snow White, of course, escapes. With the help of several allies, Snow White stages a comeback in which -- after being resurrected from the dead -- she dons Joan of Arc-like armor and leads a band of displaced warriors into a brutal battle with the queen and her army.

In one of its neatest tricks, the movie plays games with scale, employing a notable crew of British actors to portray the dwarves, a surly bunch of bandits who help validate Snow White's claim to the throne, a spot that rightfully belongs to someone with a pure heart.

Among the dwarves, look for Ray Winstone, Toby Jones, Bob Hoskins and Ian McShane. And, yes, you will wonder what brand of digital sorcery Sanders and his cohorts employed to make grown men seem as if they were a mere four feet tall.

So what motivates the queen? Once abused by a lover, she's been striking back ever since. When Ravenna looks into her prized mirror to ask the key question about who's the fairest of them all, the mirror melts into a golden statuesque figure that speaks to her in deep Vaderesque tones.

The queen's evil brother and toady-in-chief (Sam Spruell ) joins The Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) as he tracks the fleeing Snow White. The Huntsman -- who has been duped by the queen -- quickly changes sides and becomes Snow White's principal protector, with help from rival William (Sam Claflin), a devoted friend from Snow White's childhood.

Working from a script by a quartet of credited writers, Sanders produces some wonderful effects as Snow White's quest takes her through a dark forest, a village populated by women and an enchanted forest where fairies dwell. There, Snow White receives the blessing of a majestic white elk, a moment that underlines her unity with the natural world.

The Queen, of course, stands in opposition to the natural way of things: To sustain her youthful beauty, she sucks the life out of young women. She fears nothing more than the ravaging onslaughts of age.

Sanders, who's making his feature debut, would have done well to ask Theron to tone down her performance, particularly in moments in which the queen rages at the nearest lackey. Stewart, of Twilight fame, doesn't project the pristine beauty that has become a pop-cultural cliche when it comes to Snow White, but she's up to the task of transforming into a young woman who gradually understands the weight of responsibility she's carrying. Hemsworth, best known for playing Thor in the Avengers series, does well as an embittered widower. And Spruell is appropriately obnoxious as the Queen's brother.

All of this goes on too long, but if Sanders isn't great at building momentum or varying the movie's tone, he sure knows how to take side trips. Even as I thought about how I might trim 20 minutes from the movie's 127-minute running time, I maintained interest in a story that's lavishly and alluringly dark. This Snow White is at its best when it's most attuned to courtly spectacle, mysterious forests, and enchanted landscapes, vital ingredients of many a well-created fairy-tale world.

'Twilight' series nears the end

If you care about the nuptials of Bella and Edward, Breaking Dawn has something for you. If not, you may be overwhelmed by the preposterousness of it all. .

I'm not going to rattle on about The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part I. My strongest impression of the movie came from watching the security people -- on hand to guard against piracy -- walk across the aisle separating the upper and lower seats in the large auditorium where a preview screening took place. From where I was sitting, it was both distracting and weird. The silhouettes of security guards, along with a steady stream of viewers scurrying to find seats, made it seem as if a parade of ghostly intruders were passing in front of the screen. The flow eventually stopped, allowing me to put my full attention on a movie with so much built-in fan appeal that it hardly needs reviewing. The latest edition -- directed by Bill Condon (Dreamgirls) -- qualifies as the creepiest of all the Twilight movies, and I don't necessarily mean that in a good way. By now, you either don't care or already know that a still-human Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) marry. You also know that Bella also becomes pregnant in this installment, the penultimate movie. After the nuptials, Breaking Dawn resolves into a waiting game in which the vampires try to talk Bella out of having a baby that's growing so fast, it's destroying her body. Jacob, the werewolf and Bella admirer played by Taylor Lautner, tries to figure out which side he's on, while a group of his irate cohorts threatens to devour what they believe will be Bella's evil spawn. If you stop to think about it -- and I suggest you don't -- you may find a strange bias against sexual activity in Breaking Dawn, which does offer some boldly vivid imagery (blood coursing through Bella's veins) to go along with scenes of pure ridiculousness (wolves talking to one another in throaty, growling English). The blood becomes a little more repulsive in this edition, which may seem exceptionally preposterous to anyone outside the Twilight cult. But, then, no one outside that group is likely to venture into the movie anyway.

'The Runaways' serves up 'jailbait rock'

Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart as hard rockers.

There's something disturbing and even a little unseemly about The Runaways, a hard-eyed look at the teen-girl band that launched Joan Jett's career in the mid-1970s. Watching Kristen Stewart (as guitarist Jett) and Dakota Fanning (as lead singer Cherie Currie) makes you wonder whether the movie's main characters aren't awfully young to be on a collision course with fame and ruin.

Members of The Runaways fell into the usual traps during the band's two-year existence. Sex and drugs became synonymous with rock 'n' roll. Currie inspired jealousy among her band mates when she began to grab too much of the limelight. As depicted in the movie, the group's manager seemed to be part genius and part pig. I'm not sure why, but watching these kids go through their triumphs and catastrophes put me in mind of the title of Nicholas Von Hoffman's seminal book about the '60s, We Are the People Our Parents Our Parents Warned Us Against. Currie seemed to be the most self-destructive of the bunch.

Directed by first-timer Floria Sigismondi, the movie presents The Runways as the first all-girl entry into the testosterone-fueled madness of hard rock. The Runaways specialized in what Currie, in a recent interview, called “teen-age jailbait rock.” And although those unfamiliar with the real story may have difficulty buying into the movie's downward teen spiral, I've read that some of the toughest episodes – a rape and an abortion, for example – have been excised.

Sigismondi -- who hails from the world of music videos – does a capable job of telling an old story with new faces. You know the drill: Rebellious girls form a band. Things begin to click. The girls – particularly Currie – hit the skids. We're made to understand that the environment surrounding The Runaways – who toured in both the United States and Japan -- was totally chaotic.

Best known for her work in the Twilight movies, Stewart captures the sullen seriousness of Jett, a teen-ager who opens the movie by buying a leather jacket that might as well have "Don't mess with me" printed across the back. Put another way, Jett wasn't the kind of musical kid likely to have shown up at band camp. If Fanning in any way shrank from the more difficult parts of her role, I didn't notice -- although you sense she may be working a little too hard. But here's the deal on the movie's seamy side: If there's something distasteful about watching Fanning play an overtly sexualized teen-ager, maybe that's how it was supposed to be. Currie was 15 when she joined The Runaways. Her breakthrough song was entitled “Cherry Bomb.” She was asked to flaunt a defiant brand of teen sexuality.

Fanning, who's now 16, has some quieter scenes with Currie's twin sister, nicely played by Riley Keough. But the spotlight falls on Currie and Jett, one wild, the other more disciplined – at least as far as music is concerned. At one point, the two young women share a kiss that goes beyond friendship. Just part of the scene, the movie seems to say.

The girls are helped in their rise by Kim Fowley, the promoter who teaches the band to regard rock 'n' roll as a “blood sport.” As played by the mesmerizing Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road), Fowley is a wild-eyed creep who understands how to push The Runaways toward fame. He gives them outlandish advice, and encourages them to commercializes their adolescence.

Jett, for whom rock 'n' roll became a kind of religion, went on to have a career with a band called The Blackhearts. At the end of the picture, we're told via title cards that Currie, now clean and sober, has become a chainsaw artist. Make your own jokes if you feel the need. The movie's script – also by Sigismondi – is based on Currie's book, Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story.

Stewart and Fanning do their own singing, and their on-stage presence proves convincing. This may have had something to do with the fact that Jett was one of the movie's producers. Rock 'n' roll stagecraft isn't the only thing that seems authentic. From the grubby trailer in which the girls rehearse to the trashed-out hotel rooms of their various tours, the movie feels as if it has been steeped in genuine grunge.

The Runaways isn't one of the great rock 'n' roll movies, but it offers plenty of grit, providing you don't mind watching a group of 15 and 17-year-olds wallow in the kind of dissolution that at least should await the arrival one one's 21st birthday. Or maybe I'm just being old fashioned.