'The Mandalorian' hits the big screen

   In some respects, Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu qualifies as one of the biggest puppet shows ever staged. The creatures who populate The Mandalorian may not look entirely real, but they display the imagination and skill created by a seamless mix of CGI, animatronics, puppetry, and models.

      I guess I'm saying that realism takes a backseat to craft in The Mandalorian and Grogu, a movie that's better than I thought it would be, even if it lacks the super thrills of the best Star Wars movies.

     For those unversed in the Mandalorian world, here are a few essentials:

     The Mandalorian, a.k.a. Din Djarin, works as a hired gun for the anti-imperial New Republic.

      In this case, The Mandalorian is charged with finding and arresting Lord Janu (Jonny Coyne), one of the series' villains. The Republic makes a deal with a couple of Hutts (yes, a duo of the familiar blubbery creatures) to locate Rotta the Hutt and return him to Hutt control.

      Jeremy Allen White gives voice to Rotta. If you're expecting to hear the voice associated with White's character in The Bear, forget it. White's voice sounds as if it has been given an electronic assist.

       Whatever else it is, The Mandalorian isn't a star showcase. The Mandalorian seldom appears without his helmet, which means Pedro Pascal, makes heavy use of voice work.

       Martin Scorsese's jangled delivery as a four-armed food truck operator feels more connected to Scorsese's personality and provides a welcome dash of humor.

       Looking unsettlingly like ... well ... herself, Sigourney Weaver turns up as Col. Ward, the New Republic commander who sends the Mandalorian on the mission that defines the movie's structure: Set a goal, confront an obstacle, stage a fight, and then proceed to the next set piece.

      The movie's emotional core involves father/son issues, a Star Wars favorite. Imprisoned by Lord Janu, Rotta -- son of Jabba-- has attained a degree of stardom as a kind of gladiator. He rejects his father's criminal past, and aims to lead a life of his own, once he escapes Janu's clutches.

      More importantly, The Mandalorian serves as a father figure to Grogu, who's devoted to him, and, who, thanks to one of the movie's better plot twists, eventually is asked to save his surrogate father.

      There's something happily unsophisticated about The Mandalorian, both in its dialogue and characterizations. Although he's responsible for the movie's more tender moments, Grogu offers as much cuteness as clout, underscoring a vibe that feels less like hard-core sci-fi than Disneyesque fantasy.

        Maybe it fits the current moment, but The Mandalaorian works for money rather than for a vision of a free and thriving universe. To ensure that we don't see him as too greedy, the screenplay offers instances in which The Mandalorian doesn't accept payment. If nothing else, he deserves a vacation after engaging in an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) string of battles.

         I should note that I haven't watched the series on Disney Plus and still found the story easy enough to follow.  I didn't expect a deep-space adventure rendered in epic proportions; a bit of Googling primed me for a Star Wars descendant with less imposing villains and lower stakes. That's what I got.

       Scale aside, the battle between the New Republic and the forces of evil imperialism have been dragging on for nearly 50 years. Who knows? Maybe Grogu  one day will no longer rest on The Mandalorian's shoulders, but ....

        Oh, forget it.

         The Star Wars universe is geared for endless battling to save the Republic. One expects the fight to continue. Talk about "forever wars."

Exuberance marks Beatles US tour

 

 Odd thing about youth. You don't really know what it means until you lose it. It's not that you want to go back in time, it's more that you can recall moments before you realized your personal future had an expiration date.

  I thought about that while watching Beatles '64, a documentary made from footage shot by two great documentarians, the late Albert and David Maysles for What's Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A., a documentary released about nine months after the Beatles tour.

  Produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by David Tedeschi, who worked with Scorsese on George Harrison: Living in the Material World, '64 reworks some of the Maysles footage, bringing present-tense immediacy to a bygone moment, along with a bit of reflection and improved sound.

   The Beatles arrived in the US about two and a half moths after JFK's murder. I believe it was John Lennon who later said that the Beatles helped jolt the country out of its post-assassination gloom. Frank Sinatra and Elvis were followed by plenty of screaming teenage girls, but the Beatles reinvigorated fan frenzy.

  In the documentary, the Beatles bring their long hair and impudent charm to New York, Washington, and Miami. Their songs don't so much plumb depths as they burst with what felt like a new kind of energy. It was music with exclamation points. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

 Beatles '64 also chronicles a time before the US was deeply involved in Vietnam, and, in retrospect, it seems like it might have been the last good time before young Americans began dying in a country few of them had ever heard of.

  The documentary includes plenty of shots of the Beatles doing what they seemed to do so well, goof around, often in a posh suite at the Plaza. Rockers' having fun? That's the way it was, maybe because fame had yet to exhaust John, Paul, Ringo, and George.

    Of course, we see the landmark appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and the Beatles' concert at Carnegie Hall, but the Beatles had yet to push the musical envelope as far as they would. It would take two years for the Beatles to release Revolver, the album that featured Eleanor Rigby, Yellow Submarine, and Good Day Sunshine. It would be three years until St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and six years before the Beatles broke up. 

    Yes, there are talking heads, David Lynch, Jamie Bernstein, the late conductor's daughter, and Smokey Robinson of the Miracles among them. Paul McCartney, another of the film's producers, adds perspective. So does Ringo. Both are in their 80s.

    The Beatles excitement about visiting the US, an enthusiasm amply reciprocated by their fans, buoys this infectiously lively doc. Ordinary women -- long past their teens -- still glow when recalling their Beatles' ardor. 

  That's a key: Beatles '64 fires a shot of youthful exuberance. No, it doesn't last, but it's still possible to remember how it felt.

   Beatles '64 will be available on Disney+ beginning on Nov. 29.

Scorsese on two filmmakers

If you're a film enthusiast,  Made in England: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger should rank high on your list. Director David Hinton structures his film around an extended narration from director Martin Scorsese, who became close to Powell late in the director's life. (Powell, who died in 1990, was married to Scorsese's go-to editor, Thelma Schoonmaker). The films of Powell (director) and Pressburger (screenwriter) include The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, and The Tales of Hoffman. Scorsese talks about the influence the Powell/Pressburger collaboration had on his career. Clips and biographical information show how one generation of filmmakers can find itself in conversation with another. I'm not going to rehash the film's content, but it's difficult to find a better guide through someone's filmography than Scorsese. For Scorsese, the films he discusses aren't part of film history: They're as vital to him today as they were when he first saw them, sometimes on TV when he was a kid. That sense of immediacy keeps Made In England from becoming a lecture: It's an informed and passionate appreciation.

Greed and murder on Osage land

  First things first: Credit director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Joe Roth with trying to wrestle David Grann's best-selling 2017 book, Killers of the Flower Moon, into a viable screenplay, not because they have succeeded brilliantly but because they're bound to shine additional light on a neglected chapter of American history.

   Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of a wealthy white man who viewed himself as a benefactor of Oklahoma's Osage people while he schemed to steal the wealth the tribe acquired when oil was unexpectedly discovered on its land in 1897.

    Scorsese teams with frequent collaborators Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio for immersion into a world of betrayal, deceit, and unmitigated greed, taking a deep dive into period-piece trappings thanks to cinematographer Rodrigo Preito and production designer Jack Fisk. 

    The core story is too complex to reiterate in a review, so I'll give only a brief outline:

     De Niro's Bill "King" Hale connives to find a "legal" way to steal oil revenues from the Osage. Hale enlists the help of his nephew Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), a returning World War I veteran who treats his uncle like a mentor.

    Hale tells dim-bulb Ernest that if he were to marry an Osage woman, he'd put himself in line to inherit her wealth should she die before he does. In Fairfax, Okla., marriage bred thoughts of murder among unscrupulous whites.

      As Hale and his cohorts saw it, the Osage needed help dying. 

      A character without a moral center, Ernest falls for Mollie (Lily Gladstone) but soon recognizes that he's married into money. When his uncle leans on him to keep the money in the family, he's not talking about Mollie's family. 

       Mysterious, tender, and balancing life between two cultures (Osage and Catholicism), Gladstone gives a memorable performance. As a diabetic, Mollie spends the last half of the movie languishing in bed, as Ernest injects her with supposed doses of insulin, augmented by drugs Hale says will “calm her down.”

       Flower Moon is littered with murders, all of them prompted by racism and greed. Even at that, the movie doesn't show the full scope of the crimes against the Osage. Many of the Osage took ill with something corrupt doctors mysteriously called "wasting disease."

       Early on, Scorsese shows how the Osage reacted to their newfound wealth, enjoying the same excesses that whites might have indulged in given similar circumstances. Men bought flashy new cars. Women donned fashionable dresses, and a sense of Jazz Age inhibition took hold.

       Mollie's sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers) becomes a wild child of the age, a fiercely independent party girl destined to become a victim.

       Hale's strange blend of  righteous posturing ("a friend to the Osage") and evil make for an interesting combination. De Niro gives Hale a clenched nasty quality, accented by spectacles and button-down period attire. 

       DiCaprio has a more difficult task because he's walking a fine line between Ernest's oft-declared love of money and devotion to his wife and family. Ernest plays a role in the murder of Mollie's sister and her husband and he's generally in league with his uncle.

      Sporting a perpetual scowl, DiCaprio's Ernest eventually realizes  he's selling his soul. He does it anyway. 

      I'd say that neither actor totally blends into the proceedings; it's almost impossible for them not to dominate the movie.

      The white actors speak with Oklahoma accents that may make you think you've stumbled into a Cormack McCarthy novel;  Scorsese and Roth may try a little too hard to capture the rhythms of the American West.

      Osage women are represented by Mollie's sisters (Jillian Dion,  Meyers, Janae Collins) and by Mollie's mother (Tantoo Cardinal), a woman who makes no bones about mistrusting white ways.

      When an FBI agent (Jesse Plemons's Tom White) arrives to investigate the murders in the movie's third hour, the story gains some much-needed steam. White turns up long after the Osage had begged Washington to help solve crimes local law enforcement, under Hill's sway, ignored.

      The subtitle of Grann's book reads, The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.  The second part of the title doesn't receive much attention here, leaving Plemons to play an ordinary man who gets the best of people who thought they easily could outwit him.

       A through line of the detection, trial and punishment unfolds, albeit with wobbles. After his arrest, Ernest waffles about whether to testify against his uncle, supervised reunions between Ernest and Mollie take place, and other developments slow the march toward legal justice -- or a 1920s attenuated version of it.

        An epilogue in the form of a recreated true crime radio broadcast about the murders takes the movie into another dimension that not only robs the finale of some of its potency but introduces a new subject, media exploitation of crime.

        Scorsese could have devoted more time to the workings of the Osage Tribal Council and to the Osage themselves, and his movie is steeped more in mournful sadness than outrage, which tamps down its overall dramatic fire. 

         I wouldn't discourage anyone from seeing Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese may already have done that by making the movie three-and-a-half hours long, but I wouldn't call the movie a masterwork. Because we're talking about Scorsese and an important subject, that pretty much sums up what I have to say.

         

           

         

          

'The Irishman' -- stories from a hitman's past

Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci have made an epic that reminds us how terrific all of them can be.

I wondered why, at the end of director Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, I felt so sad. The movie concludes — and I don’t consider this a spoiler — with an aging union official, who’s also a hitman, contemplating his demise. Shouldn’t I have felt a sense of satisfaction that the inexorable flow of time was about to do to Frank Sheeran, a.k.a., The Irishman, what he had done to so many others?

The reason for the sadness, I think, is complex. It mixes love for the movies of my younger days with the arc of Frank's story. I'm unable to separate the two, so I'm not going to try.

Frank Sheeran first came to light in a 2004 book by Charles Brandt. Titled, I Heard You Paint Houses, the book included the claim that Frank killed Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster boss who was revered by his membership. (Painting houses evidently is a mob euphemism for carrying out murders.)

For the record — and also in the movie — Frank also said he murdered Joey Gallo, a.k.a. Crazy Joe, a famous mob murder that took place in 1972 at Umberto’s Clam House in Manhattan's Little Italy.

In the movie, Robert De Niro portrays Frank and Al Pacino plays Hoffa. Frank’s closeness to Hoffa made the assassination possible. As someone who seldom seemed troubled by his work, Frank found himself in an uncomfortable position regarding Hoffa. He had to kill a man he admired and with whom he shared a common ethnic background.

Frank’s crime life began in earnest when he met Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), a soft-spoken guy who ran a crime family in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Bufalino took a liking to Frank and recommended him to Hoffa, who eventually made him a union official.

When Hoffa tried to reinstate himself as Teamster president after spending time in jail for jury tampering, the mob got tired of his bravado. They wanted him gone. Hoffa didn’t want to be gone. They decided to make him gone.

But the plot and its revelations about corruption, though carefully detailed in Steve Zaillian’s fine screenplay, aren’t at the heart of what makes The Irishman great.

To understand that, you need to understand that Scorsese, who'll be 77 when The Irishman begins its run on Netflix on Nov. 27, has returned to the gangster turf that spawned his signature work. Only this time, like his aging characters, he's moving at a slower pace. The Irishman runs for three hours and 20 minutes -- and, no, it never seemed too long to me.

In The Irishman, Scorsese seems to take less delight in the colorful way his characters speak and in the way their violence can spark a scene. A more deliberate pace takes the Scorsese's characters beyond amusement and, at times, even makes them seem a little pathetic.

The bulk of the action takes place in the 1950s and ‘60s, which enables Scorsese to use lots of period music. He begins with the Five Satins' In the Still of the Night for an opening that finds Frank old and friendless in a nursing home. He begins talking about his life. In The Still of the Night, the background singers chime in with a telling two-word refrain: "I remember. I remember."

As Frank remembers his life, dozens of characters come and go. Scorsese’s large cast includes Ray Romano, as Bill Buffalino, a Teamster attorney; Bobby Cannavale as a gangster Felix 'Skinny Razor' DiTullio; and an incendiary Stephen Graham, as Tony Provenzano, a New Jersey-based hot-head who challenged Hoffa’s Teamster leadership.

The connection to movies proves inescapable. It’s not only Frank who's dying: It’s a certain kind of gangster film; it’s the period in which De Niro, Pacino and later Pesci rose to prominence. The Irishman might be Scorsese’s goodbye to a part of his own big-screen life -- and maybe to his youth.

This is not to say that anyone in The Irishman plans to retreat from the screen. But I can’t imagine that they’ll ever make another film like The Irishman, an epic tale of corruption and color that reminds you that De Niro, who has been in a lot of questionable movies, still can be great, that Pacino’s flare and bombast can imbue a character with brute power, and that Pesci, the movie’s true revelation, can find a quiet resolve in himself, a sense of proportion that allows him to steal the movie. Bufalino asserts his power with a spirit bordering on resignation.

To allow his characters to appear youthful in early scenes, Scorsese employs a de-aging technique that can be a little disorienting, making the faces of his characters look slightly unreal at times. But somehow it works and the acting is so strong that the de-aging becomes part of the atmosphere Scorsese creates, one of estrangement and distance.

At one point, Bufalino and Frank drive across the country with their wives (Kathrine Narducci and Kate Arrington). They're en route to a wedding in Detroit, but the trip really is a cover for something more sinister. The drive crops up from time-to-time as Frank narrates a story full of vividly recalled memories that still feel anchored in the past.

I loved that sense of fading time about The Irishman, which also has plenty of the expected ingredients: violence, bloodshed, and the gangster grit that Scorsese’s moving cameras have been spreading across screens for years.

The Irishman may impress you as somber, particularly as the story nears its resolution. The feeling is reinforced throughout by Frank’s relationship with Peggy, one of his four daughters, played as an adult by Anna Paquin. She knows her father and rejects him. Forget the law. She's his judge.

Peggy and also time. Mobsters, union leaders, violent men, and blowhards are all subject to the same destiny. All of them eventually will die and be forgotten.

Frank doesn’t relish the idea. At one point, he talks to a priest. Frank is too honest to say he feels remorse. He says he feels nothing about the things he's done. One thing he does seem to feel — and De Niro’s performance reflects it — is a reluctance entirely to vanish. Frank wants his body housed in a vault because it strikes him as a little less final than burial or cremation.

It’s the last futile hope of a gangster, the idea that somehow he’ll be able to evade — if only by a shade — the one hitman that can’t be beaten.

Two priests suffer in 17th century Japan

Martin Scorsese takes his long-awaited crack at a novel by Japanese author Shusaku Endo..

If director Martin Scorsese chooses to grapple with questions of doubt and faith, he should at minimum be commended for the singularity and intensity of an interest that seems to have marked much of his cinematic career, perhaps his entire life.

So it's no surprise that after 30 years of trying, Scorsese finally has taken a crack at the Japanese novel Silence in what some are calling the third in his trilogy of overtly "religious" films. The first two being The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun.

Written by Jay Cocks and Scorsese, the movie takes place in 17th century Japan at time when the country is being purged of its burgeoning Catholic population. The Japanese authorities are intent on staving off this first salvo of encroachment from the West.

Working from a 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo, Cocks and Scorsese create a grim world of suffering. The Japanese use a mixture of rigorously polite cajoling and brutal torture to persuade Christians to renounce their faith.

The most common form of renunciation involves stepping on a bronze tile or fumie that has been engraved with a religious image, thus marking an outward and incontrovertible sign of rejection of an abhorred western theology.

Silence weaves a story around its many torture sequences. Two Portuguese Jesuits (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) sneak into Japan to find their mentor Cristovao Ferreira (Liam Neeson). They can't believe what they've been told: Ferreira has renounced his faith and taken a Japanese wife. He lives contentedly in Nagasaki.

Before they leave for Japan, their superior (Ciaran Hinds) warns the two priests that Catholics are being tortured and killed in Japan. He cautions them against what surely will be a life-threatening journey, but they insist on proving that their mentor didn't betray his faith, a task that's doubly important for them because they took their faith cues from Ferreira.

Visually, Garfield and Driver couldn't be more different. Looking increasingly Christ-like or at least like a movie version of Christ, Garfield's Rodriguez has doubts, expressed by his inner voice and prayers. His experiences in Japan test his faith, and he posses the questions that are supposed to drive the movie.

These questions are stated -- often whispered by Garfield as queries about why God doesn't seem to hear the cries of the suffering faithful -- but they don't animate the movie or give it a sense of urgent, necessary life. Some of that may result from Garfield's inability to penetrate the depths of Rodriguez's tortured soul.

Driver, who's less seen because the two priests eventually split up, is an unusual looking actor, but here, he's been given the face of a gargoyle, otherworldly and strange.

Now, when it comes to torture, the Japanese are portrayed as adept and serious. They drip boiling water on bare flesh; they tie people to ocean-side posts and let them drown as the tide crashes in; they behead people; and they wrap people in straw and set them on fire. As a kind of piece de resistance, Christians are hanged upside down, their heads stuffed into holes in the dirt. Small incisions are made on their necks so that their blood slowly drains out of them.

The Japanese characters are strangely problematic, sometimes cartoonish. The Inquisitor who engineers all this torture (Issey Ogata) has a caricatured look. I've seen Ogata's performance described as comic. It's certainly weird and unexpected.

At one point, he hears disconcerting news and his body nearly deflates, something in the manner of air released from a balloon. Very strange.

Yosuke Kubozuka plays Kitchijiro, a self-confessed sinner who sometimes guides the priests and who has become something of an expert on what it means to renounce one's faith. He's a repeat offender.

Oddly, the movie lacks an exalting climax. I can't say more about this without revealing what should be discovered in a theater, but I'll also say that the issues Scorsese takes from Endo aren't general issues of faith in the face of terrible suffering, but issues pertinent to Catholic ideas about faith, martyrdom and apostasy as Endo (and subsequently Scorsese) interpret them.

Torture, of course, is an obviously condemnable form of coercion and watching it is appropriately appalling, but I don't know why we should be more interested in this particular part of Japanese history than we are, say, in the Spanish Inquisition that preceded it by several centuries.

Still, this is where Scorsese has landed to make a film that has been bracingly shot by cinematographer Rodrigo Preieto, whose images have staying power and depth.

It's not easy to reach a solid conclusion about Silence. As intellectually fraught as the movie can be, it also can be boring and stilted. At 161 minutes, it may seem nearly interminable to those who aren't caught in its sway.

For a movie that seems to want to explore questions about the nature and obligations of faith, Silence feels as if it has veered off into an exotic and foreign territory from which it has excavated a story full of gruesome sights and narrowly focused preoccupations.

Like the character Garfield plays, Silence too often feels like it's living in a world of its own and talking mostly to itself.

Hitchcock/Truffaut, an illuminating duo

A documentary that takes us inside the mind of a master.

Most serious film lovers are familiar with Hitchcock/Truffaut, a book first published in France in 1967. The book offered a meticulously edited version of a week-long conversation between two very different directors, Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut.

In this essential volume, Hitchcock not only reveals his ideas about cinema, but engages in detailed discussions of how he achieved some of his most notable effects.

Unlike many books, Hitchcock/Truffaut can be opened almost anywhere and still yield abundant rewards. Credit Truffaut -- who began his career as a critic for the vaunted French publication Cahiers du Cinema. Truffaut venerated and understood Hitchcock, and was intimately familiar with his work.

Now comes director Kent Jones's documentary of the same name, another essential work that either will serve as a welcome amplification for devotees of the book or an introduction to it for cinema newbies.

Using segments of the recorded conversation between Hitchcock and Truffaut, well-selected clips from Hitchcock's films and commentary by a variety of current directors, Jones has assembled a film that deserves to become part of every film lovers collection.

Happily, those commenting on the films are not the usual suspects, aside from director Martin Scorsese, who always adds something valuable to any film about film in which he appears.

Jones also includes insights from other directors, notably James Gray, David Fincher, Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Schrader.

Of course, few can do a better job of describing Hitchcock's work than Hitchcock himself, and he does so with the kind of candor and generosity that he might only have been able to achieve with another filmmaker.

At the time of the book's initial publication, Truffaut hoped that a comprehensive look at Hitchcock's work would help change the view that some held of the "master of suspense." Truffaut believed that in the U.S., Hitchcock was regarded as a talented entertainer who made commercially successful thrillers. No more.

That view seems remarkably dated now: Few knowledgeable filmgoers would dispute the inseparability of Hitchcock's visual and narrative mastery, and most of us are willing to acknowledge that art and commerce needn't be irreconcilable enemies.

It's encouraging to hear a new generation of filmmakers talk about what they learned from watching Hitchcock's movies. Gray marvels at the perverse genius of Vertigo, for example.

But perhaps the best thing about Hitchcock/Truffaut is that it reaffirms what it means to take a serious approach to film -- not pompous, overly academic or self-impressed, but one that delights in rich analysis and deep appreciation.

As a result, Hitchcock/Truffaut provides us with abundant and durable pleasures.

Boys will be boys -- on Wall Street, too

Scorsese and DiCaprio whip up excitement, but where's the depth?

If director as talented as Martin Scorsese tackles the subject of Wall Street greed, it's probably appropriate for us to expect a little greatness, a movie that puts its finger on the pulse of something deep and important in the American moment. We want (or at least I want) a movie that scores a thematic bullseye.

That's not what we get with The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese's hopped-up look at the wheeling-dealing world of corrupt brokers whose piles of money grew tall, but whose ambitions remained distressingly shallow.

Don't get me wrong: The Wolf of Wall Street -- which is based on a true story -- can be wildly, even rudely, entertaining. In one surprisingly funny scene, Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio -- as swindler Jordan Belfort -- demonstrate an unexpected facility for slapstick: Belfort tries to function after Quaaludes have brought him to a state of near-paralysis.

Beyond such antic moments, Wolf of Wall Street brims with the kind of whirling energy that reflects the unbridled hedonism of its central character and his gang of eager cohorts.

Working from a script by Terrence Winter, Scorsese uses his considerable powers to immerse us in a gleefully amoral world of drugs, cocaine, sex and wanton spending. It's the 1990s, and money and libido rule.

Judging by the movie, Belfort's greatest (and perhaps only) insight may have been his realization that it's more lucrative to swindle the wealthy than to mess with working stiffs. He elevated his game from a low-rent clientele to the upper reaches of society. He called his company Stratton Oakmont.

Belfort and his unscrupulous cronies got rich by driving up the price of obscure penny stocks. They unloaded shares they controlled at the high point, forcing those same stocks to tank. They reaped obscene profits; unwary customers were hit with big losses.

In a performance that must have required every ounce of energy he possesses, DiCaprio turns Belfort into a cheerleader for self-interest. In a series of fervent speeches to the brokers who work for him, he creates a frenzied atmosphere. He feeds their appetites with encouragement, motivational blather and occasional visits from hookers.

Less a carefully shaped drama than a feverish accumulation of comedy and excess, Wolf of Wall Street begins when a naive Belfort learns the ways of Wall Street from a seasoned broker (Matthew McConaughey), a guy who might be an older version of what Belfort's destined to become.

The ethos espoused by McConaughey's character is as simple as it is jaded: The point of working on Wall Street isn't to make money for clients, it's to make money for oneself. This means snaring customers in a trap in which irresistible promises blur all reason. One stock sale is supposed to lead to another.

Although the firm he initially works for goes belly up after the Black Monday collapse of 1987, Belfort finds his way to a boiler-room brokerage operation on Long Island. There, he learns that he had an uncommon gift for selling penny stocks.

Belfort brings what he learned about big-time Wall Street hustling to a disreputable portion of the market. He eventually strikes out on his own, establishing his first operation in a converted garage.

He does this with help: Sporting a set of false teeth that transform his face, Jonah Hill gives what might be a career-changing performance as Donnie Azoff, Belfort's partner in dissipation and crime.

Azoff sometimes plays bad cop for Belfort. At one point, he swallows an employee's live goldfish: The poor sap has had the audacity to clean the fish's bowl while the staff is supposed to be preparing to take a hot new company -- fashionable Steve Madden Shoes -- public.

Hill makes Azoff crassly funny in ways that would be repulsive if it weren't for his apparently boundless lack of self-consciousness.

As is usually the case with Scorsese movies, milieu dominates. Wolf of Wall Street is not populated by MBA-wielding sharks; it's full of lower middle-class guys, strivers from New York's outer boroughs trying to strike it rich.

I wish Scorsese had done more to emphasize this Wall Street class gap: It might have helped more fully to explain Belfort's motivations and to give events in the movie some useful context.

Belfort sees his ascendance as an expression of his right to maximize opportunity. He talks about money as if were a territory, a land to be conquered and claimed. Those too timid for the task will be left behind, assigned to lives dominated by Ford Pintos and wives growing wide in the bottom. Belford made sleaziness seem heroic.

Scorsese makes sure that debauchery arrives in epic proportions, reaching its height (no pun intended) on an orgiastic airplane flight from New York to Las Vegas.

Scorsese's supporting cast is mostly dwarfed by DiCaprio and Hill. Australian actress Margot Robbie impresses as Naomi Lapaglia, the blonde model for whom Belfort dumps his first wife (Cristin Meloiti).

You'll find cameos from a group as diverse as director Spike Jonze (as a boiler room broker) and author Fran Leibowitz (as a judge).

Rob Reiner has a nice turn as Belford's hot-tempered father. Jon Favreau portrays a lawyer. Former New York cop Bo Dietl appears as himself. Jean Dujardin, familiar from The Artist, plays a Swiss banker who's knowledgeable when it comes to money laundering.

Some scenes are first rate, notably a confrontation between Belfort and a canny FBI agent (Kyle Chandler). The scene takes place on Belfort's yacht and leaves little doubt that Chandler's character can't be seduced or bought, two of Belfort's specialities.

Is the movie watchable? You bet.

But like nagging second thoughts after you've made a big purchase, questions ultimately arise. How much sex and drug-taking do we need to see before we get the point? Does Winter's script -- evidently embellished by a fair amount of improvisation from the actors -- ever get around to expressing a viewpoint about's taking place? Has Scorsese given his raving romp any real depth? Does he ever get beneath the movie's libidinous surfaces?

I think you already know how I'd answer those questions.

At three hours in length, Scorsese's wild opus is never boring, but it seems to have been made with the same kind of irrepressible smile you might see on faces at a reunion of aging, former frat brothers, all of them sitting around a bar, happily and a little too eagerly recalling the shameless excesses of yesteryear.

And one more thing: Let's say we're meant to be appalled by the cartoonish carnality of Belfort and his wild-living bunch. Would it have been better if they had used their ill-gotten gains to buy critically acclaimed art work? Should they have been more community minded and given money to charities or endowed a chair at a major university?

What are we supposed to see as their worst crime, that they may have ruined a lot of lives or that they had hopelessly boorish tastes?

'Hugo," a dreamy triumph for Scorsese

Director Martin Scorsese makes a kids' film (sort of) -- and in 3D no less.

If you don't believe life is strange, consider this: Martin Scorsese, master of Mean Streets, Goodfellas and Raging Bull, has made a kids' movie - and not just any kids' movie, but a beautiful helping of 3-D that might make Steven Spielberg jealous.

Sure that seems out of character for Scorsese, but as you dig deeper into Hugo, Scorsese's elegant adaptation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret - a 2007 children's book by Brian Selznik - it becomes increasingly apparent why Scorsese chose to become involved.

In addition to being a first-rate director, Scorsese is also one of the most knowledgeable film lovers in the world, and Hugo brings him back to the time when movies had naïve innocence, and no one was quite sure whether moving images were more than a passing fad.

We're talking about the time, say, of the Lumiere brothers, a wonderful moment when audiences could be startled and thrilled by the simple sight of a train arriving at a station.

Don't be put off. Hugo is not an arcane helping of cinema history designed to impress buffs. It's a film in which a jaw-dropping mastery of craft is matched by a celebratory spirit about what movies can do.

The story revolves around Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphaned boy who lives in the walls of a train station in Paris where he has taken it upon himself to wind the station's clocks. Hugo also has a talent for fixing things, and he sustains himself by stealing bits of food and outwitting the station's police inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen).

Hugo has one remaining link to the father (Jude Law) he lost in a fire at the museum where Dad worked: an automaton, a wind-up creation with a passive face, clockwork innards and a skeletal frame.

Hugo hopes to activate the automaton, an aspiration that brings him into contact with a variety of characters: Georges (Ben Kingsley), the sour-faced owner of the station's toy booth; Georges' wife Jeanne (Helen McCrory); and their adopted daughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz).

The performances range from good to excellent, but the real star of Scorsese's movie may be the movie itself.

I don't think I've seen a film that has made much better use of 3-D than Hugo. Every shot seems to have been composed to maximize the capabilities of 3-D cameras. Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson move those cameras through the station's labyrinth of cogs, gears and wheels, through its bustling waiting room and through the streets of Paris in the 1930s.

The station itself is a triumph of production design, an urban hub that flirts with nostalgia without entirely succumbing to it.

All of this (and more) make Hugo a bona fide technical triumph. And that may be part of the point Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan are making. They're not interested in gadgetry for its own sake; they're interested in the equipment that helps make dreams real.

That brings us back to where I started: The love of cinema.

It turns out that Kingsley's Georges is none other than Georges Milies, a famous early filmmaker whose 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon, featured an iconic shot of a rocket landing directly in the eye of the Man in the Moon. By the time, Hugo begins, Milies has grown old, and his work mostly has been forgotten. Thanks to a late-picture development, a film historian (Michael Stuhlbarg) helps reconnect Milies with a part of himself he thought he'd lost.

It's possible that Hugo, which makes skillful use of film footage from Milies, Harold Lloyd and others, will prove more of a delight to adults than to children. But I'd take kids to see it because they'll be watching a story that has been beautifully assembled, because the kids at its center are smart, brave and sincere, because Hugo might teach them something about a cultural inheritance they didn't know they had, and because the movie doesn't debase itself by pandering to what it thinks kids might want to see.

Those familiar with Scorsese's passions will understand and appreciate the fact that Hugo also becomes a bit of a commercial for film preservation, one of Scorsese's prime concerns. He does this not by shortchanging the story of a lonely boy who's captivated by movies, but by enhancing it.

To his credit, Scorsese makes it clear that restoring old films is about more than finding bits and pieces of bygone footage in unlikely places; it's about the restoration of lost dreams.

Scorsese's way creepy 'Shutter Island'

There's no shortage of gloom on Shutter Island.

The quickest way to sum up Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island is with a mild distortion of a cliché every writer is encouraged to avoid: It's one hell of a dark and stormy movie. Drenched in weirdness and flooded with water (in the form of hurricane-driven rains and bobbing seas), Shutter Island makes you feel as if reality is receding as steadily as an outgoing tide.

I can't say I totally believed what was happening in Shutter Island, but that may be part of Scorsese's strategy. In its own creepy way, the movie delves into the elusive nature of reality. It also finds an impressively strange setting in which to conduct its inquiries: A prison and mental hospital for the criminally insane located on a lonely island off the coast of Massachusetts.

Working from an adaptation of a Dennis Lahane novel, Scorsese has devoted his obviously substantial talents to creating an encompassing world of entrapment and dread. True to its name and location, Shutter Island definitely floats away from the mainland. It's always dangerous to speculate about a filmmaker's motivations, but I'm guessing Scorsese wants us to lose our grip.

In his fourth major collaboration with Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio plays U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels. It's 1954, and Daniels and his new partner (Mark Ruffalo) have been summoned to Shutter Island to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Rachel Soldano, a woman who murdered her three children, but who has insisted throughout her incarceration that her kids are still alive.

As they investigate, DiCaprio and his partner are met with a series of confounding revelations. First off, the island seems escape proof. Soldano vanished while locked in her room. Orderlies she would have had to pass on her way to any exit claim they never saw her leave. So where the hell did she go?

The always crisp Ben Kingsley plays Dr. Joseph Cawley, the shrink in charge, and Max von Sydow, as severe as ever, portrays another psychiatrist. Von Sydow's Dr. Naehring seems to wield ultimate authority on Shutter Island, a place where prisoners are referred to as “patients” and where lobotomy looms for the most intractable of the island's residents. Cawley insists that he's more interested in helping his patients find a measure of peace than in turning them into harmless, post-lobotomy blobs. Could he be up to something more nefarious?

It should come as no surprise that Scorsese whips up a fair measure of bravura filmmaking. In a brilliant opening, a seasick Daniels and his partner approach the island on a ferry. What we first take as the ferry's fog horn morphs into the musical score in brilliant, ominous fashion. A hurricane that strikes the island is presented with palpable force, and even scenes in which Daniels thinks he's seeing his late wife (Michelle Williams) have an eerie imbalance. The same goes for flashbacks to Daniels' war-time service in which he helped liberate Dachau, the German concentration camp.

It's difficult to think of a recent movie that has made such distinctive use of music. I was conscious of the music – normally not a good thing – but it began to feel like one more element in the environment of dislocation that Scorsese successfully creates. With a potent assist from musical director Robbie Robertson, Scorsese makes use of lots of contemporary classical works from notables such as Krzysztof Penderecki, whose music (The Dream of Jacob, I think) will give you a major case of the willies.

If you're looking for some previous movie references you'll find evocations of Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. And Dante Ferretti's production design – particularly for the hospital's dreaded Ward C – virtually defines the world “dank.”
Although the filmmaking in Shutter Island, which is based on a novel by Dennis Lahane, is as good as you'd expect and DiCaprio offers Scorsese an able assist, the movie suggests more than it's ultimately able to deliver. The payoff doesn't match the promise, and the story – which occasionally seems to be stumbling in the island's wilderness – begins to feel as if it's taking too long to find its way to a conclusion you may at least have glimpsed before it actually arrives. The ending? Well, we'll talk later.

Shutter Island poses a question that's wedded to the surface of things: Is seeing really believing? Scorsese makes us wonder, and keep on wondering after we've left the theater, but he doesn't dig deeply into the most perilous corners of the human heart nor does shake us to the core.

Think of how you felt after watching Taxi Driver or Raging Bull, and you'll know exactly what I mean.