A weird, unsettling tale — in a good way

    

   It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

   If you lived through the ‘70s, you probably recognize this admonition as a line from an often-seen margarine commercial.

   A trivial beginning to a review, yes, but it helps to summarize the lesson that might be gleaned from Lamb, an Icelandic movie that hovers somewhere near the borders of a folk tale.

   Lamb probably should be approached without much foreknowledge, so I’ll try to limit any plot descriptions, which is in keeping with the film's spare approach.

   The success of Lamb has much to do with director Valdimar Johannsson's key stylistic choice, which involves rooting his incredible story in a setting so palpably earthy you almost feel the land's mud and moisture.

   Here’s the story in brief: Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Guonason) and his wife (Noomi Repace) operate a farm in an isolated rural setting. Eventually, we'll learn that the couple lost a child. When a strange lamb is born, Rapace's Maria takes the lamb in her arms and treats it as an infant, even naming it for the lost baby. 

   Johannsson shows us the development of this odd replacement “child,” sometimes giving it human features — a hand, an arm, a rear end, but always maintaining the head of a sheep.

   Initially, I hardly knew whether to laugh or cringe, but gradually, the strange occurrence becomes part of the movie’s world or maybe we just buy in because the film has a way of making us temporarily complicit in the delusions of its characters.

   Eventually,  Ingvar's wayward brother (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) turns up. He has eyes for Rapace’s character and tries to encourage his brother back toward sanity. But he, too, becomes enthralled with little  Ada, who walks upright and has been dressed like a little farm girl.

   And … well … that’s enough.

   At times, Lamb has the eerie strangeness of a horror film. At other times, it feels like a Biblical story about sibling rivalry, and at other times, it doesn’t feel like anything we've seen before.

   For some, these variations may be taken as indecision, but for me, they’re the source of the movie's strength; Johannsson's uneasiness with genre keeps viewers on edge as the story works its way toward a shocking conclusion.

   My opening line makes clear that I view Lamb as a weird cautionary tale, a film so firmly set in the harsh physicality of the Icelandic landscape that it creates an unsettling pull.

   Thanks to Johannsson and his cinematographer Eli Arenson, we’re also asked to examine our assumptions about animal behavior. Do we ever see animals or is nearly everything we think about them colored by anthropomorphism?

   Whatever the case, Johannsson has found ways to turn the gazes of sheep into near accusatory stares from a natural world that we always seem to be trying to control.

   Or maybe I’ve gone too far. Maybe it’s best to just let Lamb work on you and sort it all out later — or not at all. 

Hardy, Gandolfini carry 'The Drop'

The most powerful guys in The Drop , a tasty new crime movie set on the urban fringe, don't get much screen time. They're Chechen gangsters who have taken over gambling from Brooklyn thugs who used to be somebodies, but now are pretty much old news.

Cousin Marv's bar, where much of the story takes place, still bears Marv's name, and Marv still smokes incessantly at a corner desk, but everyone knows that Marv lost the neighborhood joint to Chechens who now use the place as one of their many drops for gambling money.

The bar's dingy, over-used look makes it seem as if you almost can smell the sour odor of cheap rye, and in a movie such as this, atmosphere counts.

Adapted by Dennis Lehane from his short story Animal Rescue, The Drop takes us into the lumpen world of low-level thugs, mob wannabes and at least one guy who's just plain crazy.

Directed by Michael R. Roskam, the Belgian director best known for the movie Bullhead, The Drop features strong performances from Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini.

Gandolfini plays Marv, and Hardy portrays Bob Saginowski, Marv's cousin, a bartender who doesn't come off as the brightest of lights. Bob works for Marv, and seems reasonably content with what appears to be a fairly meager lot.

The story begins when Bob finds a battered bull-terrier puppy in a garbage can. He rescues the dog, and later receives puppy-care advice from Nadia (Noomi Rapace), a woman who gradually warms up to Bob, who's not a pushy sort. She encourages him to name the puppy Rocco.

Because Bob may be getting played by some very dangerous people, you keep fretting about the dog's safety, and that gives the movie an extra layer of tension.

Lehane (Gone Baby, Gone and Mystic River) usually sets his stories in Boston, and I'm not sure what he gained by moving this one to Brooklyn.

But Lehane's plotting holds up, and the actors make us forgive dialogue that sometimes tries too hard to be ripe.

Hardy, the British actor last seen in Locke, is terrific when used correctly, and he's used to great effect here. It's impossible to look at him without thinking of Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, but Hardy's not doing a Brando imitation. He's creating a character that's all his.

It's difficult to say just how good Hardy is without including a spoiler, so I'll say nothing more than it's best to reserve judgement about Hardy's shambling performance until the picture's done.

Familiar from the Swedish version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Rapace works equally well as the tough but wary Nadia, and Gandolfini is superb as a guy whose authority has been reduced to worrying about the few free drinks that Bob occasionally dispenses.

Gandolfini's Bob has lost some of his spark, but seems just smart enough to make us worry. Marv lives with his sister (Ann Dowd).

Matthias Schoenaerts, who appeared in Bullhead, gives another notable performance. Schoenaerts plays a wild-card character, a psychopath who claims to be the dog's original owner.

Roskam, whose Bullhead dealt with cattle smuggling and the illegal hormone trade, does a solid job, laying on the right amount of grit and keeping the performances on track.

You'd think a Belgian director, a British actor and a Swedish actress might take some of the sting out of a grimy little U.S.-based crime movie, but a powerhouse cast turns this trickily plotted thriller into a lowlife fable that's steeped in just the right amount of sadness.

And, yes, some of that sadness stems from knowing that this was Gandolfini's last movie and wishing it weren't so.

A lukewarm serving of 'Passion'

Director Brian De Palma's latest, a sometimes silly thriller.

If you want to understand something about the important differences between Brian De Palma's Passion and the French movie that De Palma has re-made -- Alain Corneau's 2011 Love Crime -- think about the difference between Rachel McAdams and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Thomas projects the sophistication, maturity and canny intelligence required for a Dangerous Liaisons-style battle set in the high-stakes world of corporate intrigue. McAdams doesn't project that kind of depth, at least not in De Palma's overtly kinky version of a movie that even Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier couldn't entirely pull off.

Here's the basic set-up in De Palma's movie: McAdams plays the ambitious head of the Berlin branch of a global advertising agency. Noomi Rapace, the Swedish actress familiar from Prometheus and the original The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, portrays an advertising acolyte who finds herself in a quasi-erotic, intensely competitive relationship with her unscrupulous boss (McAdams).

If McAdams doesn't entirely convince, neither does Rapace, who seems to have difficulty finding the core of a character that never quite computes, and, by the movie's end, De Palma has added the kind of twists that can be as confounding as they are revealing.

The French version focuses on a less-then-glamorous agro-business that's interested in expanding into new markets. De Palma chooses advertising, which affords him ample opportunity to play around with ideas about image, reality and the ways in which sleek surfaces can conceal savage impulses.

The cast is augmented by Paul Anderson, as Christine's lover and accountant, and by Karoline Herfurth, who appears as a loyal assistant to Rapace's Isabelle.

At times, Passion seems to be aiming for the kind of augmented suspense that De Palma has displayed throughout a career that has produced mixed results -- from Carrie (yea) to The Black Dahlia (nay) with stops at movies such as Scarface and The Untouchables in between.

De Palma's work deserves to be taken seriously, but Passion makes for a forgettable (and sometimes silly) entry into the director's expansive filmography. As someone who respects De Palma, I wish it were otherwise. And, yes, I find something a little sad about a late-career movie that's not likely to gain De Palma much traction.

Murky plot sinks 'Dead Man Down'

A disappointing thriller from a strong collection of talent.
If you're interested in movies, Dead Man Down seems difficult to ignore. The movie marks the U.S. debut of Danish director Niels Arden Oplev, who directed the Swedish edition of the enormously popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. On top of that, the movie stars Noomi Rapace, the gifted actress who worked with Oplev to create the pivotal (and unforgettable) character of Lizbeth Salander in the original Dragon Tattoo series.

The rest of the movie's cast -- Colin Farrell, Terrence Howard, Isabelle Huppert, F. Murray Abraham and, very briefly, Armand Assante -- suggests we're in for a movie with strong performances and a multi-national flavor.

But Dead Man Down -- which was written by J.H. Wyman and which is set in New York City -- proves to be a murky affair, an overly complex story that revolves around Manhattan real estate, mobsters (domestic and Albanian), explosive violence and an odd, evolving relationship between Farrell's Victor and Rapace's Beatrice, a beautician whose face has been badly scarred in an automobile accident.

Dead Man Down puts a variety of revenge-driven forces into play, turning itself into a puzzle of a movie that bets that we'll stick with it until its loose-ends are tied at the end. But in this case, we're asked to make our way through a thick pile of narrative sludge as Dead Man Down heads toward its ultra-violent resolution.

Part of the problem involves the characters. Farrell, who's in almost every frame, portrays an emotionally withdrawn, recessive man who works for a mobster named Alphonse (Howard). It takes time for the screenplay to get around to explaining what Victor really wants, and Farrell can seem as inert as he is mysterious.

Victor and Beatrice live in separate but neighboring apartment buildings. She watches him from her balcony and decides -- with encouragement from her mother (Huppert) -- that she ought to meet this mysterious fellow. As it turns out, Beatrice has a vengeful agenda of her own, which can't be described here without adding significant spoilers.

Suffice it to say that the movie's dreary mood extends to the performances. Rapace fares better than the others, remaining interesting despite the fact that she's playing a character that doesn't compute, but Howard, whose work I almost always enjoy, never seems to find a handle on his character.

Huppert portrays a happy woman who speaks more French than English, Assante is limited to one scene, and an equally underutilized Abraham pops in an out of the story as Victor's uncle.

The movie tries to make use of the fact that Victor -- a native of Hungry who was trained as an engineer -- has technical skills, but little about the character sticks, and in the end, Oplev resolves the plot's many conflicts with an overblown and preposterous display of violence.

Although Dead Man Down generates a bit of visual interest, it's noir musings mostly come off as leaden, unbelievable and more than a little confusing.

Disappointing as it is, Dead Man Down does boast at least one distinction: It may be the first neo-noir movie to figure out a way to work Tupperware into its plot.

'B' movies just keep getting bigger

A stunning opening, some intelligence and plenty of action make Prometheus decent, but Ridley Scott's latest doesn't deliver the knockout punch.

At the age of 74, director Ridley Scott has gone back to the turf he so ably mined with 1979's Alien. Alien, of course, spawned a franchise that included entrees by such important directors as James Cameron (Aliens) and David Fincher (Aliens 3).

Scott's initial movie, which has stood the test of time, caught moviegoers by surprise with its high-voltage suspense, terrifying creatures and cynicism about what might happen if humans encountered alien life forms. Alien arrived in theaters as a welcome antidote to the awed optimism epitomized by movies such as Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

In the world Scott created, space no longer represented a final frontier where mankind might find salvation, but a lonely expanse filled with unrelenting terror.

Although Prometheus marks Scott's return to outer space, it can't steal the fire of cultural relevance that marked the director's initial attempt to shed Earth's gravitational pull. Prometheus makes use of lots of spiffy new technology -- notably the improved 3-D that seems to have become a mandatory part of every summer movie -- but the movie feels as much like an embellishment of recognizable themes as a bold journey of discovery.

Scott has applied a taste for the monumental to a lurid B-movie, sci-fi scenario about a voyage to a distant planet, and for a time, it works. But when the crew faces its predictable eve of destruction, vague aromas of familiarity begin to waft over the proceedings.

It's telling that Prometheus's collection of characters includes only one real standout and that this most memorable of characters is a robot played by Michael Fassbender, an actor whose lightly expressed sardonic wit can be as subtle as one of his character's raised eyebrows. Fassbender's David is a humanoid variation of 2001's HAL, a machine that develops its human style by watching Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. Nice touch.

Those who see Prometheus will not enter an idea-free zone. I have mixed feelings about whether that's a good thing. The screenplay tries to pit creationism against Darwinism and then stand both of them on their heads, but the movie's "serious" talk doesn't always synch with the expected and often well-delivered shocks.

The greatest of these jolts occurs during an automated operation undergone by Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, played by Noomi Rapace, still best known for her work in the Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy. I'll say no more about this bit of surgery, but it's probably destined to become the movie's most talked about scene.

Dr. Shaw, who wears a neckless from which a cross dangles, subscribes to the notion of a created universe. Her faith-based position contrasts with her lover Dr. Charlie Halloway (Logan Marshalll-Green), a staunch Darwinian.

Both Shaw and Halloway are participants in a mission prompted by their early-picture discovery of cave drawings that suggest that an alien life form may have had something to do with the origin of life on Earth. When the movie heads into space, we learn that the mission has been taken over by a corporation whose on-board rep (Charlize Theron) is an ice princess and the movie's resident bitch. The vessel's captain (Idris Elba) is a hard-boiled guy who who tends not to focus on big questions.

As the story progresses, Rapace's performance becomes increasingly focused, a display of ferocious determination. And, of course, a variety of lesser characters become fodder for many hideous-looking monsters that seem to have been designed to ensure that the movie fulfills its obligations as a summer slimefest.

With a couple of amazing exceptions, Scott's use of 3-D proves less than spectacular and some of the movie's visual creations -- an alien spaceship that looks like a giant bagel from which someone has taken a healthy bite -- are more impressive for their size than for their imaginative design.

During the movie's stunning prologue, I scribbled a note to myself; I wondered whether Scott had begun so amazingly that nothing in the rest of his movie could live up to what transpires during the opening credits. I was sort of right about that, although Scott can't be faulted for not adding enough bells and whistles. If you sit through the closing credits, you'll discover that Prometheus's technical crew takes up nearly as much space as half the London phone book.

Should you see Prometheus? I certainly wouldn't try to talk you out of it. Prometheus is a decent helping of sci-fi that's probably a shade more intelligent than most of what we'll see this summer, but ... and this is a major "but" -- it is not the knock-out for which I had been hoping, and as a colleague eloquently expressed after the movie, Prometheus , which eventually does become a kind of prequel to Alien, diminishes in the mind the more the furor around it subsides.

'Sherlock Holmes,' the Franchise Continues

As a version of Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows doesn't cut it. As a big movie action contraption, it's passable.

Forget the Sherlock Holmes once known as a detective with a keen and unforgiving intelligence. That Holmes -- a creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- has vanished inside a much more contemporary creation: a kick-ass movie franchise.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows -- the second movie starring Robert Downey Jr. (as Holmes) and Jude Law (as Dr. Watson) - seems less interested in celebrating Holmes' legendary powers of deduction than in flexing as much action-movie muscle as possible.

So it should come as no surprise that the plot doesn't much matter, except to say that it pits Holmes against arch rival James Moriarty, played here by a bearded, confidently evil Jared Harris.

In the early going, Holmes frets over Watson's impending marriage. Few other renderings of Sherlock have flirted so openly with Holmes and Watson's infatuation with each another, and this one goes so far as give them an improbable comic scene in which they waltz together. If I remember correctly, Holmes leads.

If you saw the first installment, you pretty much know director Guy Ritchie's game. Ritchie sees Holmes as a disheveled detective who's as quick with his fists as he is with his wits. For his part, Downey lives up to this image of Holmes, seldom looking as if he's not in need of a bath.

The banter between Holmes and Watson doesn't exactly reach Noel Coward levels, and there's no enjoying Game of Shadows if you don't revel in amped-up action, including the firing of some very heavy artillery.

Even taken on its own terms, the movie is not without miscalculation: Noomi Rapace, the brilliant Swedish actress who created the role of Lizbeth Salander in the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is entirely wasted as gypsy woman who's shoehorned into the movie for plot reasons.

Surely, Rapace could have made larger contribution; her role is the dramatic equivalent of a guy who holds another guy's coat during a fistfight.

Stephen Fry fares better in a genuinely amusing role as Holmes' diplomat brother, Mycroft Holmes. Fry's comic talents are used to best effect in a scene in which he appears nude. (No, we don't see enough of Fry to challenge the movie's PG-13 rating.)

When not busy changing costumes, Holmes' tries to get to the bottom of a mystery that has something to do with arms sales and with setting various European countries at one another's throats. But let's be honest: There's nothing much at stake here aside from getting to the next action set piece and maintaining the scaffolding of characters and effects that keeps the series from toppling.

Game of Shadows does that - and so it probably should be regarded as a passable addition to a successful franchise. I didn't love Game of Shadows, but I didn't mind Ritchie's latest action contraption, either. Perhaps because nothing about this helping of Sherlock Holmes needs to be taken seriously - and Ritchie seems to know it.