‘Greatest Hits’ misses the mark

For a movie about unbearable grief and loss, The Greatest Hits turns out to be a surprisingly forgettable affair.

   Lucy Boynton plays Harriet, a woman who's. unable to recover from the death of her boyfriend Max (David Corenswet) in a terrible auto accident. 

    To make matters even more painful for Harriet, the songs she and Max once loved transport her to the past, episodes she insists are real. Now, if only Harriet could go back to the exact moment when she and Max met, she might be able to save his life. Suppose they had never done more than exchange a glance? 

   Harriet, who wears noise-cancelling earphones to avoid unwanted flashbacks, eventually meets David (Justin H. Min), a young man who falls for her. She's attracted to him but can't break the shackles of the past. 

   Austin Crute plays Harriet's best gay friend (of course, she has one); he urges her to move on.

    Director Ned Benson  (The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby) can't keep Harriet's visits to the past from feeling repetitive.

    In service of its title, the movie's time travel episodes are accompanied by a playlist that includes Ryan Lott, Roxy Music, Jamie xx, and Nelly Furtado. 

    Treating Harriet's problem literally (we watch as her present-day self relive moments in the past) diminishes the story's psychological potential as it moves toward a predictable conclusion.

     Put another way: Proust got more value from a single madeleine than this movie gets from all its songs together. Too highbrow a reference for a quasi-romcom? Probably, but if the pastry fits .... 

A little known composer gets his due

 

   A flamboyant biopic about Joseph Bologne, Chevalier tells the story of a little known Caribbean-born black man (Kelvin Harrison Jr) who became a virtuoso violinist and composer in 18th Century Paris.

 Eager to declare its boldness, the movie opens with a bristling scene in which Bologne upstages none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Joseph Prowen) in a battle of dueling violins.

  This dramatic overture signals the movie's ardent approach. Director Stephen Williams shakes off musty period-piece trappings, serving up swelling arpeggios of emotion, sex, bigotry, and ambition.

   Against all odds, Bologne rises in French society, having been awarded the rank of Chevalier by an admiring Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton) in the days just before the outbreak of the Revolution.

  While preparing for an audition to become director of the prestigious Paris Opera, Bologne falls for Marie-Josephine de Montalembert (Samara Weaving), a singer who defies her racist husband (Martin Czokas) by taking the lead in Bologne's opera. 

      She also becomes the lead in Bologne's romantic life.

     After Bologne's mother (Ronke Adekoluejo) is freed from enslavement in Guadeloupe, she turns up in Paris. By this time, Bologna believes that his musical superiority can topple any barrier. He doesn't fully embrace the woman his white plantation owning father bedded. 

     In an earlier flashback, we learned that Bologne's father brought him to Paris as a boy and left him at a school for budding musicians.

     Harrison conveys Bologna's talent, arrogance, and charm in a role that could turn him into a bankable leading man, and the supporting cast -- notably Weaving and Boynton -- fills both costumes with style and assertion.

      The arc of the story is clear. Inevitably, French society will rebuff the Chevalier, reminding him that a title and talent aren’t sufficient to overcome bigotry. 

     Learning that he'll never be accepted as a quintessential Frenchman, a chastened Bologne finally listens to his mother and finds comfort among his fellow Caribbeans. 

    Recognizing ambitions larger than his own, he also joins the revolutionary ranks.

      Chevalier seldom meets a beat it doesn’t underline. You half expect the characters to break into arias of triumph, suffering, and romance as the plot unfolds.  

      But Harrison's performance engages, the social dynamics of the story (though broadly drawn) ring true, and the movie proves entertaining -- even if it doesn't quite attain the level of significance that the subject seems to demand. 

An eccentric detective at West Point

 

A great cast can't save The Pale Blue Eye, a gloomy melodramatic story about a detective (Christian Bale) who investigates the murder of a cadet who was hanged before his heart was cut from his chest. Adapting his screenplay from a novel by Louis Bayard, director Scott Cooper delivers a chilly drama that brings a historical figure -- Edgar Allan Poe -- into a plot weighted with secrets. Poe (Harry Melling) did attend West Point, but the story is pure fiction. Bale's Augustus Landor invites Poe to join him in trying to solve a crime that has the Academy on edge. In addition to Bale, the movie casts Gillian Anderson and Toby Jones as a husband and wife whose son (Harry Lawtey) also attends West Point. Their daughter (Lucy Boynton) catches Poe's eye. Charlotte Gainsbourg portrays a waitress at a local pub who carries on an affair with Bale's Augustus Landor. Yes, that's Robert Duvall as an expert on witchcraft whom Landor consults. Suggestions of the paranormal waft through the wintery depictions of West Point, where Timothy Spall takes a turn as the school's embattled superintendent. A moody depiction of 19th-century life turns Cooper's movie into a mystery that's a bore or perhaps "chore" is the better word. The gothic environment Cooper creates is credibly somber but the drama feels freeze-dried.

A mostly subdued helping of horror

Here's a horror movie with an intriguing pedigree: The Blackcoat's Daughter was directed by Osgood Perkins, son of Anthony Perkins, an actor who's still most remembered for his indelible performance as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. In addition, the film's music was written by Elvis Perkins, Osgood's brother and another of Anthony Perkins' children. Pedigree aside, Perkins' film stands as its own helping of quietly engineered horror. Blackcoat's Daughter focuses on two girls (Kiernan Shipka and Lucy Boynton) who remain at their private Catholic school during a break in which the other students have headed home. Shipka's character is the weirder of the two, a girl with a spooky affect and a look of eerie determination. (You may recognize Shipka as the girl who played Don Draper's often sullen daughter on Mad Men.) Boynton's Rose seems more normal, although she's grappling with a difficult issue: She's pregnant. Later, we meed Joan (Emma Roberts), a young woman who escapes from a mental institution and is given a ride by a married couple (James Remar and Lauren Holly) who are heading toward the school. The movie's brooding score and its somber, snow-covered images leave little doubt that something awful will happen before the film concludes. It takes time for the inevitable violence to arrive, but that's part of what makes the film effective. No sense over-praising Perkins' debut accomplishment, but this small hunk of horror shows more than enough promise to make us look forward to his next outing.

'Sing Street:' a familiar song

Director John Carney has invented his own genre, movies that gently poke their noses into social issues while building stories around young, aspiring musicians. Carney's latest, Sing Street, follows a pattern you'll find in Begin Again (2013), the movie that followed his first (and still best) movie, Once (2007).

Sing Street centers on 15-year-old Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a high school student who starts a band as a means of worming his way into the life of a pretty, 16-year old girl (Lucy Boynton). Boynton's Raphina hangs out on near Conor's school, looking desirable and unattainable, an irresistible combination.

As luck would have it, Conor quickly learns to sing. He also takes on a new rocker's persona, calling himself "Cosmo" instead of Conor.

With the help of a runty manager (Ben Carolan) who happens to be a classmate, Cosmo recruits a band of kids who actually have skills.

The group begins developing what can sound like a boy-band repertoire, although sometimes its music sounds a bit more punkish. More polished than you'd expect, the music becomes the centerpiece of a mildly gritty look at Irish youth during the 1980s.

Troubles loom from the start. The movie begins with a family meeting about financial problems: Money issues force Cosmo to leave the relative comforts of a Jesuit school for a less expensive but tougher Christian Brothers institution, where he's bullied and where the head priest might be inclined toward sexual abuse.

To add to the family's money woes, Cosmo's parents -- Aidan Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy -- are going through a bad patch; their arguments occasionally can be heard in the background of scenes set in Conor's home.

Cosmo's older brother (Jack Reynor), a drop-out from a previous generation of rockers, smokes pot and coaches his younger brother. He may be the movie's most sensible character.

Troubles aside, the band's development tends to dominate the proceedings. Cosmo offers dream girl Raphina, who says she's a model, a part in a video he's shooting with the band. She agrees, and the band members gather to make videos that seem considerably more amateurish than the music they play. The band's signature song: "Drive It Like You Stole It."

Costume designer Tiziana Corvisieri gives band members -- a genial group of characters -- a succession of evolving looks that become part of the fun.

Carney has yet to match what he achieved with Once, but his commitment to a genre populated by young people with dreams proves as durable as those dreams themselves.