Tracking Christopher Nolan's 'Odyssey'

   You've already seen The Odyssey. You've probably seen it many times.  I'm not talking about filmed versions, one in 1954 and another in 1997. I'm talking about movies that -- knowingly or not -- have retold the Odyssey story, if not literally, then by mimicking its structure. 

    You know the drill. A valiant hero is separated from all that's familiar to him. He must overcome many obstacles to achieve a goal that resonates in movies as diverse as The Wizard of Oz and E.T. The hero wants to go home, home representing everything good, stable, and familiar. 

    Put another way, The Odyssey may date to the late 8th century BC, but it created one of the templates for storytellers that endures to this day. 

    Unless you've been living in isolation, you know that director Christopher Nolan has made his version of The Odyssey, opting to avoid literary flourishes that might have struck contemporary ears as unrecognizably florid. At one point, Telemachus, son of Odysseus, calls his mother "mom." I did a double take when I heard Odysseus referred to as "daddy."

    A bit strange, yes, but the heart of the movie involves an episodic account of the perils Odysseus faces on his return trip to Ithaca after the Trojan War.

    As you can guess, there isn't much smooth sailing in The Odyssey. Seas roil and blood is shed. Odysseus' adventures may remind younger viewers of horrors they've encountered in Marvel movies. In Nolan's hands, they serve as tests of Odysseus' character and cunning, with cunning sometimes trumping issues of character.  

     Looking grizzled and battle-worn, Matt Damon, as Odysseus, highlights Odysseus' internal conflicts. How many men must be sacrificed to save most of the loyal soldiers who accompany Odysseus on his journey home? Put another way, Odysseus  — the ultimate pragmatist — constantly wrestles with his conscience. 

    Odysseus’ journey pauses when he washes up on the shores of a secret island inhabited by Calypso (Charlize Theron), an immortal beauty who offers Odysseus a chance to live with her forever. 

     No, says Odysseus; he’d rather be mortal and return to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Embittered and lonely, Penelope has spent the last 20 years warding off freeloading suitors who have invaded Odysseus' home, notably the sly Antinous (a terrific Robert Pattinson).

    Nolan also adds many of the side characters that bring color to the epic story. Eumaeus (John Leguizamo), a blind swineherd, remains loyal to Odysseus throughout his long absence, demonstrating that virtue isn't necessarily confined to those of noble birth.

      All of this plays against a counter story. Telemachus (Tom Holland) leaves home to find the father he doesn't know, although his trip isn't quite as fraught as his father's.

     Nolan presents a narratively complex story in segments, some of which merge easily and others which can make the movie seem a bit discombobulated, particularly at the outset.

   Sometimes, Nolan hurls us into some of the movie's  episodes without build-up, but he brings the story's bits and pieces together in the movie's finale, arguably the best and most commanding part of this gargantuan effort.

    In one of the movie's more engaging episodes, Odysseus encounters Circe (a compelling Samantha Morton), a witch who can turn men into animals, thus exposing what she regards as their essential natures.

     Then there's Menelaus (a strong Jon Bernthal) and his wife Helen (Lupita Nyong'o), both of whom Telemachus visits in hopes of learning his father’s whereabouts. Zendaya turns up as Athena, the goddess who appears to Odysseus, sometimes as a reminder of the pain he has inflicted on others.

       As he customarily does, Nolan minimizes the use of special effects. I’ve read that the fearsome Cyclops was created with a mixture of puppetry, animatronics, and a performance by Bill Irwin. An enormous Trojan horse was built to lay the groundwork for one of the movie's most powerful scenes. A chastened Odysseus witnesses the carnage wrought when he deceived the Trojans, entered Troy, and conquered the city. 

    With victory comes horror and remorse, a twist that might be dubbed "the agony of victory." 

      The Odyssey is worth seeing, but I wasn't swept away by a film that seems targeted for greatness, an A-list production in front of and behind the camera.

     Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema keeps early scenes dark, simulating the look of candlelit interiors. He often presses his camera close to faces, presumably to bring intimacy to the proceedings.

       Production designer Ruth De Jong opts for naturalism rather than period-piece cliche, and Ludwig Goransson's score pumps adrenaline into clangorous depictions of battle, perhaps trying to replicate the thudding rhythms with which Homer’s poetry originally was delivered. 

        A masterwork with ample amounts of blood and gore, the story retains much of its power, even if some of its monsters seem more related to the era of Ray Harryhausen’s artifice (1963's Jason and the Argonauts) than contemporary visual pyrotechnics. 

     Nolan sustains a clear vision, coaxes out several memorable performances, and hits home when it counts, but I was expecting something more encompassing; I wanted a movie in which I could get lost, and got a movie that I tracked with interest.

   Ah, the cyclops. Ah, the whirlpool. Yes, there's Odysseus tied to a ship's past because he insists on hearing the irresistible siren song that could cause him to leap overboard and face certain death.

   The movie seemed best when it didn't feel like a checklist of Odyssey high points bolstered by a strong cast and a commitment to imagery. The Odyssey was filmed with 70mm IMAX cameras that beautifully capture the sandy expanse of beaches and the imposing emptiness of seas at sunset. The Odyssey may not be consistently compelling, but in the stillness of those moments, Nolan writes poetry of his own.

A caper built around Boston bumblers

If you were picking a movie based on its cast, The Instigators would be a good bet. The movie stars Matt Damon and Casey Affleck and utilizes the talents of Michael Stuhlbarg, Alfred Molina, and Ron Perlman in supporting roles. But the cast — no matter how strong — can’t shake the limits of dreary, uninspired material. Director Doug Liman ( Edge of Tomorrow, Mr. and Mrs. Smith,  The Bourne Identity, and most recently, a maligned remake of the movie Road House) brings us to Boston where Damon and Affleck play bumblers lured into stealing big bucks from the city's corrupt mayor (Perlman).  Another member of the larcenous band (Jack Harlow) is too quick to resort to violence. Not surprisingly, the heist goes wrong, taking the story on a stale and disappointing journey. The movie strains to introduce a comic element when Damon's Rory is joined by his therapist (Hong Chau) as the thieves take flight. The joke: Chau's character takes an inappropriately therapeutic approach to Rory's larceny. The big theft has been orchestrated by Stuhlbarg's conniving character with an assist from Molina's Richie, a Boston baker. Ving Rhames signs on as a tough Boston cop engaged by the mayor to retrieve a valuable piece of property taken during the heist. Damon and Affleck don't offer much by way of scintillating banter, and car chases through the streets of Boston add little excitement. The movie, releasing on AppleTV+,  does its best to load up on local Boston color, but the results are drab.

A disappointing 'Drive-Away Dolls'

 

   I'm not sure how to classify Drive-Away Dolls, a solo directing effort by Ethan Coen, half of the great Coen Brothers team. The brothers are now working separately. Coen wrote the screenplay with his wife Tricia Cooke.

   Drive-Away Dolls almost feels like a Coen Brothers movie, maybe the rough draft for one. Remember, I said almost. Intermittently amusing in a deadpan way, Coen's episodic comedy drifts toward disappointment.

  Coen has described Drive-Away Dolls as a "queer" movie, a caper tale centered on two unabashedly gay women, the flamboyant Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and the more reserved Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan). 

  When the movie opens in 1999, Jamie has just dumped her girlfriend, a uniformed cop played by Beanie Feldstein. Jamie departs the apartment they shared as Feldstein's character sobs hysterically and pries a dildo (a gimmicky gift from Jamie) off one of the walls. 

  The story then leaves Pennsylvania, taking to the road as Jamie and Marian head for Tallahassee in a drive-away vehicle they obtain from a low-rent business run by Curlie (Bill Camp).  

   The dour Curlie insists on not being called “Curlie” even though his name is embroidered on his shirt. First names are too familiar for a first meeting, Curlie insists.

  That should give you an idea about the humor.

  Unbeknownst to Jamie and Marian, a suitcase has been placed in the trunk of the Dodge Aires they're driving. A suave gangster (Colman Domingo) wants the suitcase back. He dispatches two goons  (C.J. Wilson and Joey Slotnick) to retrieve the goods.

  What's in the suitcase? The contents of the suitcase constitute one of the movie's surprises, a joke that you'll have to discover for yourself.

  Qualley dominates as a woman who dedicates herself to freeing the spirit of the more sensible Marian, encouraging her to approach sex with libidinous abandon.

  For the most part, sex is presented with raunchy comic flare as the movie looks to find its footing. A digressive story works its way through stops at lesbian bars, a make-out session with a girls' soccer team, and an eventual face-off with the women's inept pursuers. 

   Matt Damon shows up toward the end as a senator with an interest in acquiring the suitcase.

   Coen's willingness to indulge in the ridiculous offers a degree of fun as he goofs on B-movie tropes, but, in sum, Drive-Away Dolls comes off as a ragged, 84-minute helping of comic overreach.

     The main characters are up-front about their lesbianism or “queerness,” if that’s more appropriate. But like it-or-not assertions of sexuality aren’t enough to keep much of the rest of the movie from feeling stale.

    

Oppenheimer: The story of man and his times

 

    In Oppenheimer, the story of the scientist known as "the father of the atomic bomb," director Christopher Nolan takes a deep look at a complicated man who found himself poised at a pivotal moment of history.

    A theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer led the bomb-making effort in the Los Alamos, New Mexico. Deemed an unlikely choice for the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was supported by Leslie Groves, an Army officer charged with overseeing the project, which employed  some of the world’s most gifted physicists.

    Oppenheimer might be less stylistically self-conscious than such Nolan movies as Inception, but that doesn't mean the movie lacks style. Nolan presents his story in sharply edited narrative bursts that brim with detail and suggestive power.

   Working from American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Nolan builds the story around a politically loaded 1954 closed-door hearing at which Oppenheimer’s security clearance was challenged.

   At three hours in length, Oppenheimer is comprehensive enough to be a compelling account of the invention of the atomic bomb and a character study about a man riven with contradiction. Simultaneously proud of his achievement and aware of the horrific destruction he helped unleash, Oppenheimer was cursed with irresolvable conflict.

    Cillian Murphy brilliantly portrays Oppenheimer from his student youth through his appearance at a closed-door hearing which pitted him against Lewis Strauss. As head of The Atomic Energy Commission, Strauss had it in for Oppenheimer.

     Subtle, reticent and wily, Murphy’s Oppenheimer belongs to a rare group of scientists devoted to pursuits about which most of us remain only sketchily aware. In Oppenheimer's case, quantum mechanics.

    Oppenheimer wasn’t immune from the intellectual arrogance such endeavors can breed. He often held his cards close to the vest, minimizing his liberal/left leanings when necessary. Nonchalant about his association with friends who were members of the Communist party, he ultimately got caught in the backwash that swept the country during the McCarthy era.

     As intriguing as Murphy can be, he receives support from one of the strongest casts to populate a movie in some time. 

    Made-up to the point where he almost disappears, Robert Downey Jr. portrays Strauss, a figure whose presence grows as the film progresses. Downey creates an indelible portrait of a man cast into a world in which he's almost always out of his depth.

      Matt Damon does solid work as Groves. Other performers find featured moments, including Benny Safdie as physicist Edward Teller. 

      The movie's all-star group of scientists and theoreticians includes Kenneth Branagh as Neils Bohr and Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and participant in the Manhattan Project.

      Nolan dips into Oppenheimer’s tangled personal life with performances by Florence Pugh as a politically consumed woman and Oppenheimer paramour and Emily Blunt as Kitty Harrison, Oppenheimer’s wife. The harried mother of his children and a hard drinker, Harrison emerges as a woman who refuses to be bowed by her husband's interrogators.

     The test of the atomic bomb precedes the movie’s third act, which tends to make the remainder of the story feel slightly anti-climactic. 

      Still, scenes at the hearing (in black-and-white) allow for a burgeoning conflict to emerge: Oppenheimer came to oppose the development of the hydrogen bomb, a position that put him at odds with Teller and a defense establishment increasingly mired in Cold War frenzy.

       There are genius strokes: Focusing on Oppenheimer’s face when bombs explode in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. Nolan spares us the sight of nuclear devastation. We know that Oppenheimer knows what he's wrought.

       Nolan also displays a keen understanding of how an academic environment that sheltered so many gifted scientists merged into the country’s war-time agenda. He captures the fervor of men who found themselves moving from the world of theory to the world of practice.

         With help from composer Ludwig Goransson, Nolan masterfully infuses a surfeit of expository scenes with tension and urgency, leaving it to us to debate some of the ethical considerations that probably are more evident today than they might have been during the heat of war.

        A movie about a momentous subject that’s branded as one of the year’s most important releases carries a major burden. Time will tell whether Nolan has lived up to it.

       Meanwhile, Oppenheimer deftly illuminates the allure and dangers of being caught in the sweep of history.

       It's a movie about Oppenheimer, yes, but you remember him in the well-developed context of the movie's cascading scenes and shorthand revelations, a man fully and sometimes dangerously situated at a historical turning point whose implications still reverberate.

An entertaining 'Air' scores big

   It's no surprise that Ben Affleck latched onto the story of how Nike landed Michael Jordan, made him the centerpiece of a landmark marketing campaign, and created a billion-dollar success. 

  With Air, Affleck had hold of a good story -- an underdog signs the big dog when nobody thought his company had a shot. On top of that, the story touches on what has become an all-American obsession: branding.

   Matt Damon stars as Sonny Vaccaro, a chubby basketball devotee tasked with building Nike's basketball division. In the early 1980s, the company was widely recognized for its running shoes but had yet to dent the basketball market.

   Vaccaro wanted to change that.

   The marketing mantra that developed around Vaccaro's efforts: "A shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it."

    Well, not any someone but an athlete whose name evokes stardom of such a high order that the shoe confers its own brand of transformative magic on its wearer.

     Air may not be the most serious of works, but it entertains with a tightly written script, humor, and a lively pace.

   Damon plays Vaccaro as a man with a well-developed eye for basketball talent. When Nike was pursuing Jordan, he already had been  recognized as a player on the verge of a big-time NBA career. But few anticipated just how big MJ would get. Vaccaro did.

     Affleck, who directs a screenplay by Alex Convery, plays Phil Knight, Nike's founder, a running nerd, meditator, and New Agey boss who was ready to give up on the basketball division. Instead, he took a chance -- not so much on Jordan but on Vaccaro's judgment, which the movie portrays as unshakable conviction.

     Kicking off in 1984, Air mixes business and sports, showing how Vacarro decided to concentrate the basketball division's marketing budget, betting its $250,000 allotment on one player instead of on a number of lesser players.

    Adidas, a German company, had been the frontrunner in the Jordan sweepstakes; it had more cash to spend and Jordan initially preferred the Adidas shoe. 

    As the story develops, Vaccaro and cohorts devise a plan to give Jordan his own line of shoes. Hence, the birth of Air Jordans.

    Getting to Jordan wasn’t easy. As it turns out, the road went directly through Jordan's mom (Viola Davis). Jordan's caustically funny agent (Chris Messina) belittles Vaccaro at every opportunity, cautioning him not to call Jordan's mom. 

     Davis adds backbone to the movie. Jordan, who isn't seen much, becomes an almost marginal figure. Mom must be convinced, and she's anything but a pushover. 

     Steely and serious, Deloris Jordan was responsible not only for deciding to go with Nike but for negotiating to obtain a percentage of every shoe sale, something that evidently had never happened prior to the Nike/Jordan alliance.

     A well-cast Nike crew supports Vaccaro. Jason Bateman  has a nice turn as Rob Strasser, Nike's head of marketing. Chris Tucker portrays Howard White, a Nike exec who encouraged Sonny when others didn't.

      Matthew Maher takes on the role of shoe designer Peter Moore,  and Marlon Wayans plays George Raveling a coach who offers Vaccaro insight into Jordan as a person and as an athlete. 

     As much fun as the movie can be, it leaves you wondering whether you've been faked out. You will,  after all, have spent 112 minutes rooting for a variety of people to become billionaires, for the elevation of the humble sneaker to a magisterial throne.  

     Making us forget about that reflects a kind of genius. Affleck and Convery keep the spotlight on Vaccaro, turning Air into the story of a true believer who triumphs. They almost make you forget that Nike is a major corporation with a board, shareholders and everything that goes along with American mega-business. 

     Sure, the movie refers to Nike’s board and how it might react to the Jordan deal, but Affleck smartly maintains focus. He’s not interested in a Succession-like story about corporate in-fighting. He’s interested in the mixture of faith and perseverance that underlie a good story.

      As I said at the outset, Affleck has hold of just such a story and he knows how to tell it.

      

A 14th Century fight to the death

 

   Brutal and dedicated to depicting the harshest Medieval realities, The Last Duel drags its sword through the muck, igniting sparks here and there as it advances toward the climactic battle of the title.

  Based on a real incident in 14th Century France, Last Duel finds director Ridley Scott working from a screenplay by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Nicole Holofcener. Scott divides the story into three acts, first telling about rape from the vantage point of an aggrieved nobleman (Damon) whose wife (Jodie Comer) says she was raped by Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver). 

   Not surprisingly, Le Gris -- in his second act version --  claims to have been seduced. He also serves to highlight the archaic notion that the rape is an offense to de Carrouges, women of the time being regarded as little more than property.

    Finally, Comer's Marguerite gets an opportunity to give her rendition of events.

    Breaking the story into three sections sometimes functions as a burden on a movie that lacks the mind-bending impact of Akira Kurosawa's classic multi-vantage point story, Rashomon.

    The story begins in earnest when Comer's Marguerite de Carrouges tells her husband that she was raped by Le Gris, a knight and former best friend of Damon's Jean de Carrouges.

   A land dispute instigated by Count Pierre d'Alencon (Affleck) further complicates matters. Damon's Jean Carrouges believes he's been swindled out of land that he was promised as part of Marguerite's dowry.

   The performances tend to be a bit strange. Looking like a Medieval warthog, Damon begins the movie as a stalwart warrior but soon is revealed as a dolt. Driver's Le Gris excels in cunning and narcissism. Sporting blond hair and a goatee, Affleck portrays a nobleman who relishes debauchery and greed, viewing them as feudal entitlements.

    Of the main performances, Comer's lands hardest; her Marguerite burns with conviction and a sense of righteousness. 

   Because Marguerite's story arrives last it comes close to saving the movie from some of its more risible aspects: variable accents, mud- splattered battles, and near-ubiquitous grime.

   At two and half hours, the movie becomes a bit of a slog as we await the great duel, which Scott presents with merciless brutality. 

    The two combatants square off in a walled rectangular setting and fight to the death with lances as they ride toward each other at full speed. 

   The idea: The winner will be judged to have been telling the truth. The loser dies and, in the case of Marguerite, will be put to death for perjury.

    The screenplay sometimes seems too on the nose with its feminist leanings, but Scott also weaves welcome intrigue into the story of men who seem more interested in themselves than in anything else.

     Based on a book by Eric Jager, the movie follows the book's subtitle, dutifully unfolding a story of "crime, scandal and trial by combat." I guess that also describes an uneven, intermittently engrossing movie that seems to be trying too hard to trample any lingering romanticism about the period in which it's set.

Matt Damon meets Marseille in 'Stillwater'

 

    In Stillwater, Matt Damon gives one of his best performances as a determined father who wants to free his daughter from a French prison. 

    The young woman (Abigail Breslin) was studying in France when she was convicted of murdering her girlfriend. Once all over the story, the French press has lost interest. Breslin's Allison is in the fifth year of a nine-year sentence.

    An unemployed oil-rig worker, Bill travels from Oklahoma to Marseille where he might have become the proverbial fish out of water had he not been so intensely focused. With a drawl and a jumbo-sized helping of politeness, Bill almost seems afraid that any slip-up might cost him his recovery from alcoholism, as well as from his own stint in prison.

   The city of Marseille co-stars, lending the movie texture and grit. A rich sense of location penetrates nearly every scene. The protocols for visiting a French prison, the feel of a coffee shop frequented by the city's large Arab population, and the cramped quality of the modest apartment in which Bill eventually lands all help create authenticity.

    Director Tom McCarthy (Spotlight) tries to take a meaningful look at what it means to be a guy like Bill, an American who says he didn't vote for Trump but qualifies the statement by pointing out that as a former prisoner, he couldn't vote at all.

    Bill's a good ole boy who wasn't always on his best behavior.

    Things don’t always go well for Bill in France. In his search to clear his daughter, he winds up in the inhospitable Kalliste neighborhood where he's beaten badly enough to land in a hospital. He's looking for Akim (Idir Azougli), a guy who might hold the key to his daughter's release. 

    Bill receives help when he meets Virginie (Camille Cotton of Netflix's Call My Agent), an actress who lives with Maya (Lilou Siauvaud), her eight-year-old daughter. 

     Both Cotton and Siauvaud give performances that feel as lived-in and real as the city itself.

   A single mom, Virginie translates for Bill and winds up renting him a room in her apartment. He begins to develop a tender relationship with Maya, clearly compensation for the many years in which he neglected Allison. 

   It’s difficult not to notice the story's resemblance to the highly publicized Amanda Knox case -- but Allison's guilt or innocence almost seems beside the point. It's Bill who gives the story its focus.

    Written by McCarthy, Thomas Bidegain, and Marcus Hinchey,  Stillwater may best be viewed as a character study that probably would have benefited from a few less strains, a little less reliance on coincidence and contrivance.

    And not all the movie's themes are adequately explored.  At one point, Virginie is put off by Bill's insensitivity toward Arabs, but McCarthy isn't interested in the political gap between an Oklahoma oil worker and a cosmopolitan French woman.

    Even in the movie’s less credible moments, Damon completely inhabits the role of a man battling to move beyond a past he regrets. Bill wants to expand his stunted emotional horizons with Virginie and her daughter. Damon makes us feel Bill trying to change -- even when he doesn't know quite how.

    Maybe that's why it doesn't seem implausible when the relationship between Bill and Virginie takes a romantic turn.

    I wish Stillwater were a sharper movie, but Damon -- looking bulky and thick -- fully commits himself to a role that gives him a chance to do some of the strongest work of his career. 

An exiting movie about a Le Mans race

Matt Damon and Christian Bale rev up their performances in an entertaining Ford v Ferrari.

As a person who doesn't know much about auto racing, I can't say I approached Ford v Ferrari with any kind of rooting interest. But good movies about specialized areas draw us into their worlds so that we don't mind listening to the characters when they discuss the technical aspects of building a better race car, in this case, Ford's GT 40 MK II.

Besides, we need no instruction to know that driving at speeds exceeding 150 miles per hour, sometimes in the rain, puts life and limb at risk, particularly in a grueling 24-hour race such as Le Mans.

Director James Mangold's movie succeeds, at least in part, because he puts a strong cast behind the story's wheel. Matt Damon portrays Carroll Shelby, a Le Mans winner, who reluctantly retired from racing (health issues) and later was invited by Ford to help develop a car that could win Le Mans, something Ford hadn't been able to do on its own.

Damon's Shelby turns to Ken Miles (Christian Bale), a skilled British driver with a knack for engineering. As it turns out, Miles and Ford are not an ideal fit. Independent and headstrong, Miles has no interest in team play. As a result, Shelby finds himself forced into the role of mediator, trying to placate image-conscious Ford executives while preserving Miles' involvement in the Le Mans project.

Bumps in the road are hit as the movie showcases its various personalities.

Notable among these is the prime mover behind Ford's build-up to the 1966 Le Mans race. Looking as if he's channeling Bale's performance as Dick Cheney in Vice, Tracy Letts creates a Henry Ford II who has little interest in Le Mans until Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) humiliates him. Ford approached Ferrari about a merger. Not only does Ferrari snub Ford, but he also belittles the American motor czar.

At the time, Ferrari had become a habitual winner at Le Mans; Ferrari couldn't believe that Ford, which (ugh!) mass-produced cars, could mount worthy competition.

Mangold, (Logan, The Wolverine, 3:10 to Yuma and Walk the Line) knows how to keep a movie moving, which is good because Ford v Ferrari runs for two and a half hours. And, no, I didn't think the movie needed to be that long.

Still, the two main performances are never less than watchable. Damon plays a confident, savvy Texan who specializes in boldness. As Miles, Bales knows when to rev his motor to the right degrees of intensity.

Miles' supportive wife (Caitriona Balfe) never stands in the way of her husband's passions. When Shelby and Miles fight outside of the Miles' home, Mrs. Miles pulls up a lawn chair and watches with amusement. Miles' son Peter (Noah Jupe) follows his dad's races with the kind of admiration an adoring son has for a heroic father.

Mangold makes sure that the race footage hums with excitement. He also sustains backstory tension, keeping just enough off-track focus on the rivalry between Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari when the story arrives at Le Mans. Ferrari disdains the American who sometimes allows his marketing guy (Josh Lucas) to gum up the works, as marketing guys are wont to do in movies about men for whom racing isn't a promotional activity but a way of life.

For those unfamiliar with this true-life story, the movie may seem to cross the finish line in a way that's more downbeat than you'd expect, a slight veering from the formula line that Mangold deftly toes.

To its credit, though, Ford v Ferrari seems to know exactly what kind of movie it wants to be; that makes it an entertainment that should deliver for both racing and non-racing fans.

Tiny people produce small payoff

After a clever start, the pleasures of Downsizing begin to shrink.

Let's get the movie's premise out of the way. Downsizing, director Alexander Payne's latest semi-satirical effort, imagines a world in which it's possible to shrink people to a height of five inches. Why would anyone submit to such diminishment? Because those who shrink can buy their way into the good life with very little money. Small people help society, too. They can consume all they want without devouring obscene amounts of the world's dwindling resources.

The first hour of director Alexander Payne's Downsizing has been made with cleverness and nicely executed effects, but what starts as an imaginative and amusing look at the ways in which a scientific "advance" can be commercialized eventually degenerates into a morality lesson for the main character who must be schooled in the ways of life and love.

Payne begins in bravura fashion when we meet Dr. Jorgen Asbjornsen (Rolf Lassgard), the inventor of downsizing. I won't spoil the reveals of these early scenes, but they give Payne an opportunity to play with scale in ways that surprise and amuse. Lassgard's Asbjornsen is a true believer: He thinks downsizing can solve the world's ecological problems.

The story then shifts its focus, introducing us to Matt Damon's Paul, a disaffected occupational therapist whose ambitions have been thwarted. Paul's wife Audrey (Kristin Wiig) wants to move into a better house, but Paul can't afford to pay for Audrey's dreams. As a result, Paul and Audrey are stuck living the drab life in the Omaha house Paul inherited from his late mother.

The idea of "downsizing" begins to take on more appeal for Paul and Audrey when they meet a downsized couple (Jason Sudeikis and Maribeth Monroe) at a school reunion. Sudeikis' Dave sings the praises of Leisureland. The residents of Leisureland may be small but their happiness is expansive, in part because they've left all their financial worries behind.

Once Paul and Audrey decide to downsize, the movie hints at a conflict that threatens to lift the story out of the thematically limited sphere of middle-class self-satisfaction that Payne so easily skewers.

At a bar after their pre-downsizing party, a drunk sneers at Paul and Audrey. Why should small people receive the same social benefits as large people? After all, small people contribute so much less to the economy. Aren't they ciphers?

Despite the tongue lashing, Paul and Audrey proceed to the downsizing station: Scenes at the reduction center are well executed and funny in a dry way: Payne treats this amazing process in a matter-of-fact fashion.

But Payne, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jim Taylor, has more in mind than a looming clash between resentful big folks and happy little people. He enlarges the movie by raising the stakes to say something even bigger and, in so doing, allows the movie to deflate.

The movie takes a turn away from itself with the introduction of some new characters: Christoph Waltz) portrays Dusan, an escapee from Eastern Europe, who seems savvy about life in Leisureland. Waltz's Dusan and his pal Joris (Udo Kier) are party animals who devote themselves to sensual pleasure and shady entrepreneurial efforts. Dusan's credo: Tomorrow be damned. Party on.

After one of Dusan's epic parties -- at which Paul samples his first hallucinatory drugs -- Paul meets one of the Vietnamese women (Hong Chau) who arrives with a crew to clean up the previous evening's mess.

Hong's Ngoc Lan Tran was transported from Vietnam to Leisureland against her will, something to do with her role as a staunch dissident. A shabby prosthetic device has replaced the leg Lan Tran lost during her ordeal. For a hot minute, Lan Tran was a political celebrity in Leisureland. Now, she runs a cleaning crew.

It's just here that the movie loses steam. Lan Tran introduces Paul (and us) to the Third World aspects of Leisureland, impoverished people who are even further removed from life's luxuries than Paul. Leisureland, we learn, has slums and some of its residents die for a lack of medical care.

Much is made of Paul's last name. He's Paul Safranek. No one seems to be able to say Safranek without mangling it, a running bit that suggests Paul's inability to establish himself in the world. Paul ultimately affirms his identity through exposure to those less fortunate than himself, folks who seem to be either Latino or Asian.

Speaking in a clipped style, Hong Chau becomes a jarring voice in the midst of Leisureland's soothing prosperity. Hong's expressiveness and determination in the face of her character's limited language skills can't quite overcome the stereotypical nature of the character she's playing.

As the movie progresses, Payne tries to deal with environmental catastrophe and the kind of love that's expressed by caring for others, turning the self-serving delusions of Leisureland on their head.

I guess that Payne wanted to transcend satire and find something human, but in the attempt, the movie loses touch with its resourcefulness. It becomes ... well ... downsized.

Satire sinks in Clooney's 'Suburbicon'

Finding the right tone for dark comedy might be one of the most difficult things for a director to achieve. Case in point, Suburbicon, a mangled George Clooney-directed comedy about the nightmares that bubble beneath the surface of America's suburban dream.

Set during the 1950s in the fictional community of Suburbicon, Clooney's movie struggles (but ultimately fails) to link a story about family hypocrisy and horror to the racism that pervades a carefully designed community that has been marketed as a mid-century utopia.

The story focuses on a family in which Matt Damon plays Gardner Lodge, a father who contrives with his sister-in-law (Julianne Moore) to murder his wife (also Moore), a woman confined to a wheelchair after an automobile accident.

To carry out his foul plan, Lodge hires a couple of thugs (Glenn Flesher and Alex Hassell) to invade his home. Gardner's six-year-old son Nicky (Noah Jupe) functions as the movie's innocent witness to the horrible deeds that unfold around him, and, at times, your heart aches for this tormented young actor. What's he doing in movie that treats his character so cruelly?

Joel and Ethan Coen are listed among the film's writers, and traces of the Coens' work reveal themselves as the story unfolds. Clooney and Grant Heslov also take writing credits, but the overall result is a hodgepodge that Clooney can't unify. Worse yet, Clooney plays some of the movie straight. The result: scenes that feel as if they were lifted from a low-grade thriller.

The harassment of Suburbicon's African-American family (Karimah Westbrook, Leith M. Burke, and Tony Espinosa) supposedly was inspired by a real-life, 1957 case in which William and Daisy Myers were subjected to terrible race-based abuse in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Suburbicon's easy-target approach to racism consists mostly of showing sneering expressions of hatred by the supposedly upright residents of Suburbicon.

Moreover, a baseball-related friendship between Nicky and the African-American kid next door (Espinosa) sees like a transparent effort to add symbolic and emotional resonance.

The only actor who finds precisely the right tone for Suburbicon is Oscar Isaac, who shows up midway through as an insurance claims investigator with his own sleazy agenda.

The cast does its best to keep the story tracking, but scenes that are intended to be funny don't produce the expected laughs and the satirical point (Lodge is the real menace, not the town's only African-American family) doesn't resonate the way it should.

Maybe Clooney wanted to expand a small story about the underbelly of suburban life by offering a sidebar about the racism that underlies America's shining facade. Whatever he was thinking, he mostly missed the mark.

Putting Jason Bourne back into action

Matt Damon returns as an assassin without memory as director Paul Greengrass extends his action set pieces to preposterous extremes.

If you want to spend a couple of hours watching Matt Damon play a character who's running for his life, Jason Bourne -- the latest in the series about an amnesiac spy -- might be the movie for you.

If you're looking for something more, you'll probably have to look elsewhere. We all know that the world seems to be gripped by chaos, but reproducing that chaos on screen doesn't always result in a satisfying movie experience.

With director Paul Greengrass returning to the helm and Damon jumping back into the Bourne saddle, the movie turns into a dizzying attempt to build a story around a reveal in which Bourne learns more background about himself that has been hidden from him by the CIA.

Bourne, you'll recall, has been programmed to kill by the CIA. Aside from quick flashbacks from his past, Bourne has no memory of his pre-espionage life. He often finds himself being chased by the very agency that turned him into a lethal weapon.

When Bourne resurfaces in Greece, a CIA chief (Tommy Lee Jones) tries to "put him down," i.e., Jones' Bob Dewey wants to assassinate Bourne with the help of a ruthless killing machine called "the asset" (Vincent Cassel.)

Dewey receives additional assistance from Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), an ambitious CIA tech genius who seems to be able to locate Bourne whether he's in Greece, Iceland, London, and ... well ... I think stopped caring after Berlin.

The action set pieces tend to be so interminable, I wondered whether Greengrass was trying to set records. And, of course, Greengrass' approach expectedly races over-the-top.

That means logic doesn't always prevail. If Bourne makes a five-story flop onto concrete, don't fret. He'll be on his feet before you can say, "Splat." Like a politician who won't take "no" for an answer, he keeps on running.

The movie opens with Bourne earning his keep as a bare-knuckle fighter in Greece. It doesn't take long for him to wind up on the CIA's radar.

As the story develops, we also meet a tech whiz (Riz Ahmed), a hotshot whose company has been compromised by the CIA. Ahmed's character allows the movie to raise issues about privacy in a time of pervasive on-line activity, but we don't sense that we're supposed to take any of this seriously.

Much of the action takes place in front of CIA surveillance cameras, giving the movie a kind of fractured vision. CGI-enhanced car carnage comes into play, particularly in a ridiculous Las Vegas-based chase involving Bourne and a formidable SWAT vehicle.

In a movie that moves this quickly, acting tends to be more suggestive than deep. A bulked up but deadly serious Damon makes the movie feel like an aerobics workout. Looking as serpentine as ever, Jones tosses off a few off-kilter line readings, and Vikander opts for lots of furrowed-brow concern.

Julia Stiles makes an early picture appearance as Nicky Parsons, a former CIA agent with an agenda of her own.

Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93 and a couple of previous Bourne movies) disorienting approach to action has its fans, and I've been one of them. He can edit a sequence into smithereens and still have it make some sort of sense, but -- in truth -- I got sick of it in this outing.

No matter how much urgency the actors try to bring to their work, the movie's kinetic charge takes precedence as the story works its way toward an expected and slightly depressing possibility: another sequel.

It would have been nice, though, if the filmmakers had been able to make this Bourne revival better than the movies that spawned it.

Can this botanist be saved?

Ridley Scott's The Martian puts a premium on smarts.

In 1979, Ridley Scott made his first journey into to space with Alien, a landmark movie that spawned sequels and turned the universe into a source of abiding terror.

Rather than harboring wondrous possibilities for communication with alien life (see Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Alien , introduced us to acid drooling monsters that hatched inside human bodies.

In 2012's Prometheus, Scott returned to space with a competent movie, but one that failed to gather Alien's cultural steam.

The same might be said about Scott's The Martian, but it's a much better movie than Prometheus, and its view of what awaits us in space may be more realistic; i.e., nothing but hardship and emptiness.

The story centers on a mission to Mars in which an early picture twist leaves botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) abandoned on the planet's desolate surface.

Believing Watney to be dead, his companions on the Ares III mission head back toward Earth. Watney must use all his scientific knowledge and ingenuity if he's going to have a chance at survival.

Despite its stark setting, the resultant film goes against the dystopian grain that distinguishes most contemporary sci-fi. The longer The Martian goes on, the more it becomes clear that Scott is making his ode to science. Brain power not brawn gives Watney a chance.

I don't know if the science in The Martian will make scientists happy. I'm hopeful that astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson will weigh in on the subject as he did on Gravity, a movie he didn't like.

But Scott has gone to great lengths to make the movie feel scientifically plausible, and from a dramatic point of view that's more important than turning the screen into a 3D science lesson.

Based on popular novel by Andy Weir, the story also makes us aware of what's happening on Earth. The head of NASA (Jeff Daniels) tries to figure out how to keep his program viable while hatching a rescue plan.

Daniels is joined by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Kristen Wiig in his efforts to determine whether Watney can be saved.

From time to time, we also check in on the crew that's headed back to Earth under the guidance of Commander Lewis (Jessica Chastain). Also on board the spaceship that fled the Martian storm believed to have killed Watney are astronauts played by Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan and Michael Pena.

Watney, who talks to himself for a long time before he discovers how to communicate with Earth, narrates some of the story. These "chats" add self-reflective humor to the proceedings and don't really intrude on the story, which addresses three important questions: How will Watney deal with problems revolving involving diminishing supplies of food, air and water?

As a piece of filmmaking, The Martian is more clear-eyed than visionary. and it's weighed down by an unnecessary epilogue that follows tense finale with enough white-knuckle potential to satisfy action junkies.

Scott makes witty use of Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive and other '70s disco music, and receives a strong assist from cinematographer Darisuz Wolski, who makes reasonable -- if not dazzling -- use of 3D.

For the most part, Scott maintains focus. He doesn't suggest that science will save us, but builds an exciting entertainment around the notion that some problems are best solved by knowledge, cooperation and courage bred of necessity.

No weapons required. I'd call that both a profession of faith and a relief.

On the mad road to meaninglessness

Terry Gilliam's latest abounds with creativity -- and chaos.
Let's call Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem a wildly ambitious and sometimes invigorating mess.

Only an imagination as fertile as Gilliam's could create a movie that playfully poses the biggest of questions: Is the entire universe heading for oblivion, thus rendering all human activity meaningless?

To aid in this out-sized inquiry, Gilliam concocts a dystopian world in which a man named Qohen (Christoph Waltz) receives an assignment from a character called Management (Matt Damon).

Qohen's job: to find a mathematical equation that proves that all life adds up to nothing -- or something like that.

Not surprisingly, the assignment drives poor Qohen batty as he encounters a variety of strangely colorful characters: his supervisor (David Thewlis), a woman (Melanie Thierry) sent by Management to arouse Qohen sexually, and a whip-smart teen-ager (Lucas Hedges), who happens to be Management's son.

At one point, the distressed Qohen engages in a form of therapy with a virtual therapist played by Tilda Swinton, unrecognizable in the recent Snowpiercer and almost as unrecognizable here.

Near the beginning, Qohen -- who refers to himself either as "we" or "us" -- requests permission to work at home: It seems he once received a phone call from someone purporting to explain the meaning of life, but the connection was lost. He's hoping the mystery caller will get back to him.

Ridiculous? Of course, but with Gilliam, it's not so much the story he tells that matters, but the world he creates.

Working from a screenplay by Pat Rushin, Gilliam drops characters into the middle of a tipsy world to see how they'll react.

This time, Gilliam creates a funky reality that mixes high tech gadgetry and low-tech grunge. Qohen lives in an abandoned, rotting church (think metaphorically), where he plies his trade in front of a large screen.

It's possible to see The Zero Theorem as an extension of Gilliam's work in the much-admired Brazil, although devotees of that movie may not find this one quite as appealing.

The Zero Theorem overflows with boundary-pushing visual invention: a crucifix in which the head of Jesus has been replaced by a security camera, for example.

Moreover, the actors are game for anything Gilliam throws at them, including some of the year's most preposterously amusing costumes from designer Carlo Poggioli.

The lack of a compelling story eventually takes its toll, but Zero Theorem is the kind of visual feast that Gilliam fans will tolerate better than those who haven't joined the club.

For those fans, even a Gilliam failure may be better than someone else's run-of-the-mill "success."

'Monuments Men' misses the mark

Intriguing subject short-changed in Clooney-directed movie.

In his sixth directorial effort, George Clooney has made a middle-of-the-road movie about an intriguing subject, the attempt to rescue priceless art seized by the Nazis during World War II.

The Monuments Men of the title are a group of aging academics and art specialists charged with saving paintings, sculpture and monuments from Hitler's rapacious legions. Upper-echelon Nazis wanted to appropriate most of western art for a gargantuan museum to be named after the Fuhrer. Pieces that didn't make it into Hitler's art mausoleum would find their way into the private collections of Nazi bigwigs.

Clooney also stars in the movie: He plays Frank Stokes, an art historian from Harvard's Fogg Museum: Stokes leads the culture-saving effort after assembling his team in what amounts to a subdued Dirty Dozen style.

Matt Damon plays James Granger, an art expert from the Museum of Metropolitan Art in New York; Bill Murray portrays architect Richard Campbell; John Goodman appears as a sculptor; Jean Dujardin portrays a French art dealer; and Bob Balaban plays Preston Savitz, a character whose professional skills weren't entirely clear to me. British actor Hugh Bonneville takes on the role of a British art expert who's trying to rehabilitate his reputation as a drunk.

Cate Blanchett has a smaller role as Claire, a French woman who works at a Paris museum, and who has been forced to assist the Nazis in their pilfering. It takes a while for Damon's character to convince Claire, who also has ties to the Resistance, to help find hidden art treasures: She's fearful that the U.S. will appropriate masterpieces in much the same way as the Germans have done.

A couple of major tensions break through the movie's somewhat frozen surface. First, there's an on-going argument about whether any piece of art is worth a human life. That raises additional questions about the importance of culture, even during war-time duress.

Early on, Clooney's Stokes asks President Roosevelt -- a leader for whom art was not a top priority -- what the war will have meant if, at the end of it, Michelangelo's David has been reduced to rubble.

The Monuments Men also race to keep important art objects out of the hands of the advancing Russians, who are portrayed as eager to get their hands on landmarks of Western civilization.

As it turns out, much of the stolen art was hidden in German mines, but the movie's discoveries have a plodding feel. The men's various missions proceed without much vigor.

That seems a major miscalculation: The Monuments Men is like a caper movie -- only without the caper.

The screenplay by Clooney and Grant Heslove (based on a book by Robert M. Edsel) makes some attempts at humor, most of it italicized by one of the most disappointing musical scores in recent memory, a shock since it was written by the gifted Alexandre Desplat, whose work I've almost always admired.

The movie attempts to differentiate among the characters in broad ways, but, as depicted here, these are not the most interesting group of people. Moreover, Clooney doesn't find enough ways to demonstrate either the men's passion for art or their expertise.

Ironically, the movie could have benefited from more talk about art. Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges turns up, as does a famous Ghent altar piece, but for a movie about the enduring importance of art, Monuments Men pays too little attention to it.

Oh well, call it a miss by some very talented people: This little-known and clearly fascinating story deserved more than the shrug The Monuments Men induces.

Strong start, then collapse for 'Elysium'

Elysium could have been so much more than it is.

Recently, I was riding my bicycle through one of the Denver area's more expensive neighborhoods, the kind in which once modest homes have been conquered by mini-mansions that probably are priced in multiples of millions. Who, I wondered, can afford to live in such places? What do the residents of these palaces do that enables them to take literally the old axiom that a man's home is his castle?

The growing divide between the rich and the rest of us is the basis for Elysium, a sci-fi spectacle from director Neill Blomkamp, who made waves with his gritty first feature, 2009's District 9.

Set in the late 21st century, Elysium imagines a time when the rude and scoffing multitudes live on devastated planet Earth. Those with major money have moved to Elysium, a giant, circular space station that orbits the Earth. Think of Elysium as the ultimate gated community, a refuge from hardship.

Elysium's residents live well, and have access to medical technology that can cure just about anything.

Of course, someone eventually was bound to crash the high-end party. Enter Matt Damon as Max, an Earth-bound factory drone who receives a massive dose of radiation at work. Max is given five days to live. The only way he can save himself is to sneak into Elysium, and avail himself of its life-saving technology, machines that look like CAT scans, but can diagnose and cure a person in one go-round.

Max's predicament brings him into contact with Spider (Wagner Moura), a criminal who knows how to smuggle folks into Elysium. Of course, there's a condition: Max can go to Elysium only if he agrees to a scheme in which he'll download data from the brain of a wealthy businessman (William Fichtner).

This requires Max to have a coding device of some sort implanted directly into his skull. Spider wants to use the data Max obtains to undermine the two-tier system that has separated humanity into two major groups -- the super-rich and everyone else.

On his initial visit to the hospital after he's radiated, Max reunites with Frey (Alice Braga)) a doctor who had been a childhood pal. As it turns out, the doctor has a terminally ill daughter (Emma Tremblay). Frey hopes that Max will take her child to Elysium, where she can be saved.

Blomkamp does a better job depicting an earthly dystopia than in showing Elysium's abundance, but he does outline the political structure of Elysium. The place has a president, but the real power lies with a ruthless security official (Jodie Foster).
I didn't keep precise track, but I'm guessing that for about an hour Elysium really clicks. At its best, the movie qualifies as an unusually smart helping of sci-fi, a convincing picture of an economically fractured future.

The visual environment (Max lives in a ravaged Los Angeles) is vividly imagined, and, in general, the special effects have top-of-the-line appeal.

Once the movie reaches Elysium, though, it starts to fall apart, sacrificing its intelligence for a more typical payload of futuristic gunplay and violent mayhem.

The performances are uniformly good, although Foster's character is so one-dimensional that she tends to come off as brittle, a woman with a close-cropped haircut and a disapproving look, as if an impudent journalist has dared to ask Foster about something she'd rather not discuss.

Damon does a good job as the sort of everyman who has special qualities of character and a bit of soul.

By its conclusion, Elysium leaves you disappointed and bemused; there's plenty of talent on display and enough obvious intelligence to have elevated the film had the obviously gifted Blomkamp -- who also wrote the screenplay -- been able to follow his best instincts to the finish line.

No dramatic bounty in 'Promised Land'

Credit Matt Damon, who co-wrote the new movie Promised Land with actor John Krasinski, for tackling a difficult subject. Too bad, Damon and Krasinksi didn't come up with a stronger, more credible script for their movie about issues facing a small rural town when a natural gas company starts dangling major money for fracking rights.

Granted, it's difficult to make a dramatic feature about a subject as controversial and complicated as fracking, but the details in Promised Land don't always compute and a less-than-credible late-picture plot twist limits the movie's power.

Promised Land reunites Damon with director Gus Van Sant, who directed Good Will Hunting (1997), a movie that won screenwriting Oscars for Damon and his then partner Ben Affleck. Van Sant also directed Gerry (2002), a movie that Damon wrote with Casey Affleck and Van Sant.

This time, Damon -- who has appeared in all the movies he's written -- plays Steve Butler, a representative for a natural gas company. His assignment: buying drilling rights from economically stressed farmers. On the verge of a major promotion, Steve is one of the company's best closers, a guy known for achieving success while offering farmers rock-bottom prices. Needless to say, Steve doesn't say much about dangers posed by fracking.

Steve's success stems from his ability to relate to farmers. He grew up on an Iowa farm, and understands that most small farmers are struggling to make ends meet. He views his company's offers as a kind of salvation for farmers -- and, to the movie's credit -- there's some truth in Steve's pitch. Why should farmers sacrifice the future of their families for some romanticized, and in Steve's view, misplaced loyalty to the land?

Steve plies his trade with a down-to-earth partner (an underutilized Frances McDormand), a good-humored, no-nonsense woman for whom the work is just that -- a job, a way to support her son and earn a living. An eye-on-the-ball gal, McDormand's Sue doesn't waste time entangling herself in moral issues.

All seems to be going well for these representatives of Global Gas in their latest assignment until a town meeting at which a high-school science teacher (Hal Holbrook) raises questions about dangers associated with fracking. Holbrook's Frank Yates also wonders whether the promised rewards aren't being exaggerated.

Damon, Krasinksi and Van Sant have a feel for small-town life in an agricultural community and for how reps for a natural gas company might operate. When Steve and Sue arrive in town, they stop at a local store to buy clothing that they hope will make them look more like the town's residents.

But the movie falters when it comes to other details and perhaps even in the way Damon's character develops. First off, I found it difficult to believe that a born-and-bred Iowa farm boy such as Steve wouldn't know how to strive a stick-shift car; the movie uses Steve's difficulty with stick shifting as a running joke.

And when an environmentalist (Krasinski) shows up to warn the townspeople that fracking can result in dead live stock and poisoned land, the movie starts to feel contrived.

Obviously, the script builds toward a crisis of conscience for Steve, but that, too, stuck me as a stretch. This isn't Steve's first rodeo. You'd think he already would have worked out any moral issues stemming from the work he does. He seems a little too naive.

Are we supposed to believe that Steve begins to see new light because he meets an appealing woman in town (Rosemarie DeWitt)? Or is he thunderstruck when he receives revealing new information about the mammoth company that employs him? Maybe he never entirely abandoned his farm-boy roots.

You get the picture. Good intentions don't always make for a good movie, and although Promised Land captures some of the informalities of small-town life and, commendably, tries to find a bit of balance, it falls short both as a character study of a conflicted oil rep and as an expression of agitated social conscience.

They bought a zoo, but not much of a movie

Matt Damon plays a man who buys a zoo in a family-oriented film that's never especially believable.

>We Bought A Zoo is an Americanized adaptation of a memoir by British author Benjamin Mee. I’ve skimmed Mee's book, and it seems significantly smarter than this Cameron Crowe-directed movie, an entertainment made palatable by Matt Damon’s likability as the man who buys the zoo and Scarlett Johansson’s down-to-earth turn as the zookeeper who helps him run it. You also may find that some charm accrues to the movie as a result of its story, the tale of a recent widower (Damon) who climbs out of his grief by buying a rundown zoo and learning something about the zoo business. Damon’s Benjamin not only discovers the world of animals, but breaks through to his angry teen-age son (Colin Ford). In case all that's not enough, we get shots of Benjamin's cute-as-a-button daughter (Maggie Elizabeth Jones). The supporting cast includes Thomas Hayden Church (as Ben’s older, more skeptical brother), and Elle Fanning (as a teen-ager who falls for Ford’s character). Crowe, whose last movie – Elizabethtown – tanked in a big-way flirts with after-school-movie blandness in a movie that never feels believable enough. Granted, there's something undeniably intriguing and even a little cracked about a story that puts some old-fashioned resolve into the task of trying to save a foundering zoo. Know this, though: We Bought A Zoo is long way from Crowe's best work in movies such as Say Anything, Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous.

Damon, Blunt can't save 'Adjustment Bureau'

A misguided blend of romance and sci-fi.

The work of novelist Philip K. Dick has tempted many filmmakers – from Steven Spielberg (Minority Report) to Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall) to Ridley Scott (Blade Runner). So it hardly would be surprising if sci-fi fans are licking their chops in anticipation of The Adjustment Bureau, a new movie based on a 1954 short story by Dick. To them, I say, “Slow down.” By the end of this generally disappointing movie, you may well be licking your wounds.

The Adjustment Bureau is a misguided trifle that teams Matt Damon and Emily Blunt in a romance that’s constantly facing obstacles.

Dick’s ideas about free will and fate ultimately play second fiddle to romance, and writer/director George Nolfi even tosses in some feel-good sentiment at the end, perhaps as a way of appeasing those who've been put off by the movie's overly glum approach.

Damon plays Daivd Norris, an attractive young man who’s running for the U.S. Senate. When the New York tabloids expose one of Norris’ indiscretions (an immature but minor incident), he loses his lead in the polls. On the night of his election loss, Damon’s David winds up talking to himself in the men’s room of a Manhattan hotel. Suddenly, Blunt’s Elise emerges from a stall. It’s an unlikely but interesting meeting, and it successfully establishes some real chemistry between an affable Damon and an unfettered Blunt.

The script then proceeds to clobber Damon and Blunt with obstacles, most supplied by bland-looking men in fedoras. These men, who work for something called The Adjustment Bureau, look like bored mid-level executives. It’s impossible to say much more without spoilers, so I’ll leave it at that.

John Slattery, familiar from TV's Mad Men, and Anthony Mackie, who garnered high praise for his work in The Hurt Locker, are among the "adjusters" (my word, not the movie's) who race around Manhattan, sometimes using extra-normal powers to keep David and Elise apart.

Writer/director Nolfi does well enough with some scenes, but he doesn’t seem to have figured out how to make the whole enterprise credible. The Adjustment Bureau is a romantic fantasy and sci-fi meditation that never quite jells.

Perhaps the movie’s best visual ploy involves the way adjusters are able to move from one environment to another simply by opening doors. Open the door to a boardroom and they may find themselves in the substrata of a Manhattan street or, better yet, in the middle of Yankee Stadium, a spacious view that provides relief from what can be the movie's airless environment.

The Adjustment Bureau forces Damon and Blunt to fight against the film’s contrivances, which, alas, don’t make a whole lot of sense. Worse yet, the mystery Nolfi builds drains away when characters stop to explain things, always a bad sign. The more we know, the less interesting The Adjustment Bureau becomes.

No matter how much Damon and Blunt look and act like lovers who can’t keep their hands off each other, they can't turn The Adjustment Bureau into something that feels urgent and real. I suppose there's an irony in that: Two lovers spend the whole movie reaching for each other, but the movie holds us at arm's length.

An even truer helping of 'Grit'

It's not the tale; it's the telling.

Keep that in mind as you watch True Grit, the Joel & Ethan Coen remake of the 1969 western that won John Wayne his only Academy Award. The original was directed by Henry Hathaway - no slouch when it came to westerns - but the Coens have surpassed him in every way that counts: artistry, humor and a feeling for the sorrowful landscapes of the west.

The movie introduces us to 14-year-old Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld), a teen-ager who hires a drunken marshal named Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to hunt down her father's killer (Josh Brolin), a wastrel who has hooked up with a thieving gang led by Lucky Ned (Barry Pepper). Cogburn's joined in his search by Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, Matt Damon in the role Glen Campbell played in the original.

In adapting (maybe "re-adapting: is a better word) Charles Portis' 1968 novel for the screen, the Coens create an odd mixture of authenticity and exaggeration that's evident in the nooks and crannies of nearly every face in the movie. When the characters speak it's as if their florid declamations offer compensation for the lonely stretches of country captured in muted colors by cinematographer Roger Deakins.

Speaking in a voice that sounds as if it's being filtered through gravel, Bridges freshens the portrayal of one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, who -- in an iconic image created by Hathaway and repeated with slight revision by the Coens -- rides into a gunfight with his horse's reins stuck between his teeth.

Bridges emphasizes Cogburn's matter-of-fact approach to killing, an activity the movie regards with casual ease, perhaps because it's rooted in an environment where justice sometimes takes on an improvisational flavor. Cogburn's bouts of drunken sloth are interrupted by occasional forays into law enforcement. He's serious when he needs to be.

The language in the Coens' script exudes the kind of self-consciousness that demands to be noticed. That works in strange and not always beneficial ways: It makes the movie enjoyable even as it distances us from the characters and turns them into bizarre curiosities.

"Goodbye, Reuben, the love of decency does not abide in you."

So says Rooster, when disclosing his ex-wife's parting words to him.

In an oddly random aside, Cogburn offers this gem: "I'd give $3 right now for a pickled buffalo tongue."

Once he gets going, Rooster tends to rattle on in ways that almost qualify as annoying. Steinfeld's portrayal of a determined teen-ager serves as a counterweight to Rooster's rambling. She's as direct as a dart in a bull's-eye, and will not be deterred from a mission she regards as righteously just.

Because True Grit might be one of the least typical Coen brothers' movies yet, it's tempting to think that if you didn't know the movie was made by the team that brought us No Country For Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, Miller's Crossing and more, you might not guess that the brothers were involved.

Still, you can feel their presence in the movie's fascination with the oddly turned phrase, in the austerity of its look, and in the way its characters tend to accept eccentricity as commonplace. Case in point: Ed Corbin's Bear Man. I'll say no more lest I ruin a sight that should be discovered in a theater.

I admired and enjoyed True Grit, but a slight, nagging doubt kept pulling at the coattails of my appreciation. Exactly why did the Coens want to remake a movie like this? Even in improved form, True Grit probably didn't need revisiting, but maybe that adds something, as well - a noble sense of futilely pursued goals that might have roused even Rooster from one of his legendary stupors.

More about the "here" than the "after"

A moment from one a most remarkable sequence.

It's nothing if not daring to begin a movie with its most remarkable sequence. In fact, the opening of Hereafter -a vivid depiction of the tsunami that struck Thailand in 2004 - is one of the most amazing sequences of the year, a gripping combination of special effects and speeding camera work that hits the screen with tidal force.

Fair to say that little following in the wake of this re-created natural disaster has similar power, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the rest of Hereafter - a movie that marks a great leap for director Clint Eastwood --- boasts some of the year's gentlest filmmaking. Still surprising at 80, Eastwood hits some of the loveliest notes in what's become an astonishingly varied directorial career.

Hereafter may posit the existence of some sort of after-death experience, but it's no tricky supernatural thriller. Rather, it's a movie about the ways in which two characters cope with death in their lives and the way in which another tries to come to terms with his troublesome psychic abilities.

Eastwood, wisely I think, understands that the important hereafter is not the one that follows death, but the one these characters will pursue once they've found their share of peace and resolution.

It's not uncommon for movies that attempt to tell three distinct stories - which Hereafter does - to stumble as they switch inelegantly between various plot threads. Eastwood manages the transitions smoothly, uniting the three strands only at the movie's end. He also keeps the movie's rhythms subdued, a directorial choice that stops Hereafter from feeling exploitative or sensationalized.

To the extent that Eastwood shows the afterlife, it looks dull enough to make you wonder whether you'd really like to wind up there. But supernatural kicks aren't what Eastwood's after. I have no idea what Eastwood believes about death and the hereafter, but he's respectful of the journey on which his characters have embarked, which is precisely what the job requires.

As for those three stories...

One involves a San Francisco psychic (Matt Damon) who views his abilities as more curse than gift. Damon's George Lonegan wants to live a normal life, but his brother (Jay Mohr) hopes that he'll use his powers to turn a profit. Grief-torn customers will pay for the comfort of receiving a message from a lost love one. Wanting no part of the commercial psychic's life, George works in a factory and lives in relative isolation.

Scenes between Bryce Dallas Howard and Damon, who meet in an Italian cooking class, are built around a quietly evolving but palpable sexual chemistry. But George knows that his exceptional abilities can sabotage relationships and return him to isolation.

Then there's the eminently successful French TV journalist Marie LeLay (Cecile De France), enmeshed in an affair and caught in the tsunami that opens the picture.
Finally, we meet twins Marcus and Jason (played by real-life twins Frankie and George McLaren). They're conspiring allies in an on-going battle to keep London social workers from taking them from their drug-addicted mother.

The McLaren twins give the movie's best and most moving performances. I wasn't entirely sure how to take Damon's deeply wary portrayal of George, and there's unfortunate redundancy in George's constant insistence that he's done with the psychic life.

Screenwriter Patrick Morgan's script avoids sentimentality, but hardly qualifies as a treasure trove of psychological subtext. It's content to tell a story that's less interested in convincing us that there's an afterlife than in exploring something that turns out be more credible: what might happen to characters who hold such beliefs. It's hardly surprising that Eastwood - as down-to-earth a director as there is -- ultimately casts his lot more with the "here" than with the "after." Hereafter could be the most determinedly grounded "supernatural" movie yet.