'The Bride!' celebrates its excesses

  It's unlikely anyone will accuse Maggie Gyllenhaal of stinting on ambition in The Bride!,  a wild farrago of a movie that resists classification. 

  Is The Bride! a horror movie or a Gothic romance? Is it a feminist reimagining of movies of the 1930s, particularly James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein? Is it a comedy that pays homage to Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein with a rousing rendition of Puttin' on the Ritz?

  Or, is it a showcase for an uninhibited display of ferocity from Jessie Buckley in another fearless performance?

  As it turns out, The Bride! is all those things, a movie that makes no bones about celebrating its excesses, of which there are too many.

   Gyllenhaal's big-screen gamble doesn't entirely, but her  approach yields intermittent payoffs. Perhaps the genre it mostly resembles is one in which two crazy outcasts tear across the American landscape, eventually finding love.

    Buckley appears in two roles, occasionally interrupting the narrative for portentous speeches delivered by Frankenstein's 19th-century author, Mary Shelley, who inspires a manic outburst by Ida, also Buckley, a Chicago moll who winds up dead in the movie's prologue.

    Enter Christian Bale's Frankenstein, a.k.a. "Frank," who visits Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), a scientist who has been experimenting with reanimating the dead. Poor Frank. He's lonely and craves the companionship of a woman who, like him, was created, not born. He yearns for a soulmate.

     Though she expresses reservations, Euphronious helps Frank dig up the recently deceased  Ida. Employing whizzing, flashing equipment that's heavy on old-fashioned dials and gauges, Euphronious jolts Ida back to life. 

     Initially, Ida, who can't remember her past, hardly seems an ideal partner for Frankenstein, played by Bale with a mixture of sincerity and goofiness, punctuated by occasional bursts of violence, mostly to protect Ida.

    Nothing if not loyal, Frank sticks to his lovelorn mission. He and Ida wend their way across the country, making stops at a roaring Chicago party, a sophisticated New York City black-tie event, and a rural drive-in theater.

    The wandering duo frequently attends movies, all of which star romantic lead Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). As we all once did, Frank learned about romance from the movies.

    Irate Chicago mobsters and a detective duo (Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz) pursue the fleeing renegades, as images of Bonnie and Clyde flash through our collective heads.

   Despite efforts to mask his appearance, Frankenstein can't always hide his stitched-together face, and Ida's tousled blonde hair and blood-red lips are accompanied by an ever-present stain on her right cheek, a souvenir from her reanimation. When it's popularized on tabloid front pages, her look turns into a fashion statement.

      I can't say that Gyllenhaal blends the movie's cornucopia of ingredients into a satisfying whole. She creates a mixed-bag of a movie that dashes across the screen, dazzling with its theatricality, amusing with its satiric fillips, and repelling with splashes of body horror. 

    Eclectic to the max, The Bride! practically drowns itself in movie love as it tries to match Buckley's expressions of unrestrained wildness. Say this, though: The Bride! earns the exclamation point in its title.

       

       

     

Covering a tragic Olympics

 

   On September 5, 1972, the Palestinian group Black September began its attack on Munich's Olympic Village. By the time the siege ended, 11 Israeli athletes had been murdered; five terrorists were killed, and one German police officer died. 

   Movies have taken note. In 1999, One Day in September won an Oscar for best documentary. In 2005, Steven Spielberg released Munich, which dealt with fallout from the attack.

   Now comes September 5, a movie focused on how ABC covered an event that presented a real-time challenge for a crew that was ready to cover Olympic competition, not a gripping international news event with life-and-death stakes.

    The strength of Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum's approach rests on the recognition that those covering the Olympics were presented with logistical and ethical challenges for which they had no real preparation. 

   How would an exhausted crew handle the first live TV  broadcast of act of terror? Might such coverage jeopardize the hostages? What standards of confirmation would be employed to ensure the accuracy of ABC's reporting?

    At one point during the 15-hour broadcast, the crew received a report that the hostages were safe. ABC broadcast the news and later aired a correction. The report was false. 

    The incident raises a key issue about journalism conducted on the fly: the conflict between the pressure to be first and the responsibility to be right.

    ABC sports chief, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), fought to keep the story away from ABC's news division. He thought his crew was up to the task. John Magaro portrays Geoff Mason, the producer who found himself directing ABC's coverage; it was Mason's first day on the job. 

    Leonie Benesch plays Marianne Gebhardt, a German crew member who became invaluable because none of the others spoke German. Ben Chaplin plays Marvin Bader, the executive in charge of Olympic operations. 

    While tensions ripple through the control room, Arledge finds himself jockeying for satellite time. As questions about competition arise, Arledge must decide whether to give ABC's live feed to CBS when that network takes control of the satellite, which was being shared.

   Looking back on it, the events of September 5 seem more significant than the coverage, but for millions around the world, Munich became inseparable from what they saw on TV. Live coverage already had insinuated itself into news, but Munich ratified it, leaving us with a question we still haven't answered: How much do we need to see when the worst things happen? And who decides? 

    

A haunting, complex look at motherhood

 

    Count me among those who consider Olivia Colman indispensable.

    Colman has played Queen Elizabeth in The Crown and has taken on a variety of other characters in a growing body of work.

    If you can think of a time when Colman’s performance missed the mark, leave a comment. I can’t.

    Colman stars in The Lost Daughter, a film in which actress Maggie Gyllenhaal makes her directorial debut.

    Adapted from a novel by Elena Ferrante — best known for My Brilliant Friend — Lost Daughter establishes itself as a fearless exploration of motherhood with all its deep affections and charged resentments.

   Colman’s performance skillfully embodies the movie's themes without ever asking for sympathy. She creates a character who can be chilly and difficult, an academic capable of insight and cruelty.

   Slowly and in carefully calibrated fashion, Gyllenhaal moves through the story — although not without leaving disturbing traces of an irresolvable conflict. The Lost Daughter isn’t about resolving conflict; it’s about learning to live with it — or not.

    We soon discover that Leda has taken what appears to be a working vacation. She’s gone to a small Italian beach town, ostensibly to concentrate on her work.

    Inevitably, she meets other tourists, as well as a handyman (Ed Harris) and the local bartender (Paul Mescal). 

    An uneasy relationship develops between Leda and Nina (Dakota Johnson), a wife and mother who has traveled to Italy with a small family group from Queens, New York. Nina begins to fixate on Leda as a possible role model.

    Leda shows the ferocity of her independence when, on the beach, she denies a request by Nina to move her beach chair so that her family can spread out a bit. Leda's refusal intrigues Nina, who’s having her own issues with the demands of motherhood.

     At one point, Nina’s young daughter is lost along with her favorite doll. Leda finds the girl, calming the girl’s frantic mother. Leda also finds the doll, which becomes the centerpiece of a revealing and provocative turn.

     Leda's most important relationship may be one she can’t dodge, the connection to her youthful self. Leda’s younger days are seen in flashbacks in which an impressive Jessie Buckley portrays Leda as a young mother who’s constantly being distracted by two demanding daughters. She can't get any work done at home.

   In these flashbacks, Gyllenhaal presents a small but telling portrait of a marriage under stress. Leda’s husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) tends to his own career and disappoints his wife in bed.

   At an academic conference, Leda begins an affair with a colleague (Peter Sarsgaard) who greatly admires her ability to translate poetry.

   Work, independence, and sex provide Leda with much-needed fulfillment— but also leave her grappling with guilt about maternal insufficiencies. She reveals herself when she tells Nina that children can be a “crushing responsibility.” Underline the word “crushing.”

    You can spend productive time unpacking the symbolic importance of dolls in the movie but, in broadest terms, they suggest a side of womanhood that Leda both needs and disdains.

    Presented in a plain, unadorned style in which the flashbacks sometimes feel abruptly inserted, The Lost Daughter stands as a courageously truthful depiction of a struggle many women face but which seldom receives on-screen. 

    The movie doesn't indulge in simple or even complicated solutions; it's a challenging look at what it means for Leda to face the consequences of choices that haunt her. 

     Only an actress of Colman's caliber could make this work.

A journalist documents the crimes of Stalin

     In Mr. Jones, Polish director Agnieszka Holland turns her attention to a little known story about a Welsh journalist who worked to expose Joseph Stalin’s murderous crimes in Ukraine. 

      James Norton portrays Jones, a dedicated reporter who early on is dismissed from his job as secretary to prime minister Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham), a man who tried to ignore Jones’s admonitions about the growing threat of Nazism. 

     After losing his job with George, Jones began working independently, turning his attention to the Soviet Union. He wanted to interview Stalin, an ambition that exceeded the reality of the young journalist's connections. 
     Upon arriving in Moscow, Jones sought help from New York Times journalist Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard), a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter who showed no interest in exposing the truth about Stalin’s treatment of farmers in Ukraine. As depicted here, an imperious Durante seems too immersed in his dissolute life to challenge the official line.

        It's worth remembering that in the pre-war days in which the story unfolds, some western enthusiasts on the left were lauding the Soviet experiment as an estimable march toward progress. 
           Vanessa Kirby impresses as a writer who tries to warn Jones that he's treading on dangerous ground by insisting on traveling to Ukraine.

       Mired in a variety of intrigues and storylines, the movie often feels scattershot, further muddled by scenes involving George Orwell (Joseph Mawle),  who's working on the novella, Animal Farm.  

     Other plot threads flutter in the winds of a movie that doesn’t become memorable until Jones reaches Ukraine. There he discovers the horrific famine that Stalin inflicted on the populace as punishment for their resistance to collectivization.

     Stalin stole and sold their wheat to finance a five-year plan meant to catapult the Soviet Union into modernity.  Images of terrible suffering, brutal cold, and even famine-induced cannibalism are so hauntingly vivid they tend to put the rest of the movie to shame.

Intriguing setup, limited payoff

Peter Sarsgaard headlines a story about a man who's obsessed with sound.

I’ve always been interested in obsessive characters who operate within a narrow range of behavior. In The Sound of Silence, we find one such character, a New York City man who calls himself a house tuner. Peter Lucien (Peter Sarsgaard) examines homes and tries to find the noise responsible for debilitations such as insomnia and depression.

A good night’s sleep might depend on something as simple as junking an old toaster and purchasing a newer model.

When he's not working with clients, Peter embarks on a far more ambitious project. Armed with tuning forks, he travels around the city to create a sound map. He's obsessed with searching for patterns. He's looking to see how sound shapes the lives of residents of a particular area.

Contrary to what you might expect, there’s nothing obviously freakish about Peter. He dresses neatly, treats his clients with respect and seems devoted to helping people.

Director Michael Tyburski brings a lonely woman (Rashida Jones) into the mix. Newly single, Jones's character asks Peter to help her deal with her insomnia.

Does she want something more from him? If so, is Peter capable of giving her more or is he too wrapped up in his pursuit of sonic revelations?

Tyburski widens the movie’s scope with other developments: At one point, Peter is courted by a tech firm that tries to convince people it can help bring harmony to their lives. He also struggles to find acceptance in the academic world, where he hopes the purity of his ambitions will earn him respect.

Despite a smart start, Tyburski and screenwriter Ben Nabors aren’t able to develop their movie into something rich and satisfying. Like the sound of the tuning forks Peter uses, the drama in The Sound of Silence starts strong and then fades out.

The ordeal of an iconic First Lady

Natalie Portman stars in director Pablo Larrain's Jackie

The day of President Kennedy's funeral, I and several college pals were positioned directly across from the White House. We'd driven from New Jersey to arrive in DC in time for the somber spectacle. We saw the horse-drawn caisson that carried the president's flag-draped coffin. We heard the hollow sound of hoofs on concrete as the caisson rolled past. We heard the Navy band playing Chopin's inexorably grim funeral march. We saw the riderless horse, a backward boot in its stirrup.

We also saw dignitaries pouring out of the White House, where the funeral procession had traveled after leaving the Capitol: Jacqueline Kennedy, Bobby and Teddy, of course. But I most remember the diminutive Haile Selassie of Ethiopia walking next to the towering Charles de Gaulle, one of the world's great physical mismatches.

The deep sadness and magisterial pomp of the moment was so incredible, none of it felt real.

Somehow we sensed that the nation not only was burying a president, but its belief in a reality protected from extremes. From that moment on, we knew we could discount nothing.

All of that came flooding back to me while watching director Pablo Larrain's Jackie, a movie in which Natalie Portman plays the First Lady whose brave and composed public presence told the rest of us how we were supposed to respond to the unthinkable demise of a president we viewed as invincible and robust.

Larrain uses his camera to turn Jackie into a floating, near spectral presence while at the same time trying to make her as real as the presidential blood that spotted her pink Chanel suit, the one she wore with a pillbox hat. There's a near ethereal quality to Portman's performance, the sense of a woman in the midst of shock, grief and the isolation that came not only from losing a husband, but from living inside the Kennedy mythology.

The movie begins in Dallas and carries through to the state funeral that Jackie planned. Its story is built around a shop-worn contrivance. A journalist (Billy Crudup) travels to Hyannis Port, Mass. to interview Mrs. Kennedy at the Kennedy compound. I couldn't make sense out of Crudup's performance, which seems to lack a great deal of compassion for Mrs. Kennedy and which seems out of synch with the way the country responded to the events of November, 1963.

Mrs. Kennedy tells Crudup's character her version of the events surrounding the assassination. She sometimes reacts in revealing ways that she insists must be kept out of print. She's doing her duty to protect what she knew would become a legend.

The movie makes reference to a famous 1962 televised tour that Jackie gave of the White House in which she sounded doll-like and light-headed. It may help younger audiences to know that comedians used to make fun of Jackie's voice.

Larrain has gone to great lengths to replicate the interior of the White House; he certainly succeeds in creating a credible environment.

Alas, not all of the casting functions in the same way. John Carroll Lynch looks nothing like Lyndon Johnson. Peter Sarsgaard is even less convincing as Robert F. Kennedy. We see glimpses of JFK, who's played by Danish actor Caspar Phillipson.

These missteps are important because for the movie consistently to work, we must believe we're watching real people -- not half-cooked, shadow-play representations.

If there's a point here, it has to do with the notion that during the Kennedy days, the White House was regarded as a modern Camelot, a place where art was respected and people comported themselves with dignity and grace. It was the grandest of illusions, and Jacqueline Kennedy helped to create and sustain it.

There's unquestionable allure in getting behind the scenes -- in seeing a partly speculative account of what led to the moment when I found myself across from the White House.

But it's not always clear what Larrain is after: He gives us a scene in which Jackie meets with a priest (John Hurt), who advises her that the big questions with which she's grappling may be unanswerable. You also may feel you're watching what happens when a heretofore supporting player suddenly finds herself thrust into a central role in a very public drama.

At times, it also feels as if the movie is about the weight of emptiness inside Camelot after the king has died.

Jackie may be about all those things: I suppose Larrain wants us to think that Jackie knew that Camelot was an illusion but somehow managed to believe in it anyway.

An experiment creates controversy

Experimenter takes a creative look at the work of a psychologist.

At least two experimenters are involved in Experimenter, a movie whose principal events unfold during the 1960s.

Experimenter 1: Psychologist Stanley Milgram, the movie's real-life subject.

In the early 1960s, Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) conducted a series of controversial experiments at Yale. Dubbed the "obedience experiments," Milgram's work was inspired by his interest in Nazi behavior during World War II.

Milgram designed an experiment that was supposed to determine whether ordinary people could -- through suggestion and rules -- behave sadistically. Would otherwise decent people administer punishment to others -- in the form of electric shocks -- simply because they were told it was part of an apparently legitimate experiment?

Experimenter 2: Director Michael Almereyda

Known to American art-house audiences for directing Ethan Hawke in a modern-day adaptation of Hamlet (2000), Almereyda creates a purposefully abstract environment in which to study Milgram, his experiments and their ethical consequences.

Unafraid to take risks, Almereyda, uses black and white photos as backdrops, obviously artificial sets and other tricky conceits to tip us off to the fact that he's interested in both Milgram and in the human capacity to accept illusion, even when little attempt is made to conceal it.

At a couple of points -- perhaps to make clear that he's blurring the line between the real and imaginary -- Almereyda shows Milgram being followed by an elephant as we walks down a corridor, discussing his experiments.

We speculate about that obvious elephant in the room? Could it be an unacknowledged question: Is Milgram himself acting sadistically?

Milgram, a young Jewish researcher whose parents emigrated from Hungary in advance of the Nazi onslaught, governs himself with dispassion. He observes people under duress, and he's played by Sarsgaard with quiet commitment and a belief in his objective rigor.

Almereyda opens the movie by introducing us to Milgram's signature experiment, one in which no electric shocks actually were given, something the subjects administering the shocks didn't know.

The movie goes on to raise questions that it's never going definitively to answer; i.e., "Is Milgram violating academic ethics by putting subjects under too much stress? And does this artificially created situation really have any equivalency with what happened in Nazi death camps?

Almereyda gives Milgram ample opportunity -- in whispered comments from his diary or in remarks delivered directly to the camera -- to make his conclusions clear: Hideous behavior is situationally determined. Given the right circumstances, most people will submit to an authority that encourages them to behave badly or even sadistically.

Almereyda includes biographical details: We meet Milgram's wife Sasha (Winona Ryder) and follow the course of an academic career that saw Milgram move from Yale to Harvard, where he was denied tenure. He then was hired by City College of New York, where he was awarded a full professorship.

Intellectually challenging and tricky, Experimenter operates on low dramatic voltage. It's a subdued provocation that's designed to throw us off balance by raising fundamental questions about choice: Those made by Milgram, those made by his subjects, and, presumably, those made by us, as well.

Depp puts ice water in a movie's veins

Black Mass , a gangster movie played in a very minor key.

Those of us who've been hoping that Johnny Depp would take a break from Pirates of the Caribbean-style clowning have gotten our wish.

In Black Mass, Depp gives one of his strongest performances as Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, the character who inspired Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello in director Martin Scorsese's The Departed.

For better and sometimes for worse, The Departed casts a shadow over Black Mass, so much so that the movie can be seen as a commentary on its 2006 predecessor.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it turns Black Mass into a gloom-shrouded reflection on life in South Boston, an area that spawned its share of Irish-American criminals in the 1970s and '80s.

With his hairline made to recede and his teeth made to look rotten, Depp uses his face as a frightening mask. He portrays Bulger as a man who easily could put a forgiving arm around someone who insulted him and then fire a bullet into the guy's head.

In scene-after-scene, Depp gives Bolger -- head of the notorious Winter Hill Gang -- his scary best.

That's not to say that Depp's performance becomes monotonous. Bulger could be respectful of older women in his neighborhood; he doted over a son who died at the age of six; and he remained loyal to his younger brother (played here by Benedict Cumberbatch).

Cumberbatch's Billy Bulger became a state senator and later the president of the University of Massachusetts, a job he ultimately lost because he communicated with Whitey after the gangster had become a fugitive.

Told in chronologically delivered chunks as various of Bulger's henchman rat him out to the feds, the story hinges on an "alliance" between an ambitious FBI agent (Joel Edgerton) and Bulger.

Edgerton's John Connolly protects Bulger from prosecution in return for information that supposedly helps topple Italian mobsters from Boston's North End.

Having been raised in Southie, Connolly believes in the loyalty of the streets, which -- of course -- is the kind of loyalty that lasts until it doesn't. The threat of prison has turned many a "loyalist" into a "rat."

Director Scott Cooper surrounds Depp with a fine supporting cast that includes Kevin Bacon (as an FBI agent who's at odds with Connolly); Peter Sarsgaard (as a low-level, drug-addicted thug); and Rory Cochrane (as another of Bulger's henchmen).

Corey Stoll makes a late-picture appearance as a no-nonsense prosecutor who wants to unravel the law enforcement web that enables Bulger to conduct his business unimpeded.

This isn't the world or the movie in which to look for heavy contributions from women, but Dakota Johnson has a nice, small turn as Lindsey Cyr, the mother of Bulger's child; Juno Temple does stand-out, cameo work as a prostitute; and Julianne Nicholson portrays Connolly's increasingly frustrated wife.

It falls to Nicholson's character to peer into the darkest corner of Bulger's plenty dark soul in a scene that brims with sexual menace.

Cooper (Out of the Furnace) brings grim steadiness to a narrative that ultimately leads to Bulger's disappearance from Boston in December of 1994.

Bulger, who hid from authorities for 16 years, was captured in California in 2011. He's now serving two consecutive life terms plus five years for involvement in 11 murders and for racketeering.

We've seen movies about the Boston criminal milieu before. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) still tops my list. And like it or not, The Departed (over-rated in my view) probably defines Boston crime drama for most contemporary audiences.

All of this means that Black Mass can feel shackled to the past. Moreover, Cooper's avoidance of the rise-and-fall energies that drive most gangster movies doesn't always pay off.

Still, Black Mass unfolds to disquieting effect. Much of the credit for that goes to Depp. Like a winter plunge into an icy Charles River, Depp's performance leaves you chilled and unsettled.

Bobby Fischer's twisted world

Tobey Maguire portrays Bobby Fischer as a man caught in a propaganda war between the U.S. and the Soviets.

I'm not a chess enthusiast, so I can't totally appreciate Bobby Fischer's accomplishments at the chess board. From what I've read, it seems Fischer was a genius when it came to chess and reprehensible in many other ways: a Jew who became a vocal antisemite, a demanding diva of the chess world who never appreciated those who helped him and a competitor so ruthless, he might have made Donald Trump cringe.

The new movie Pawn Sacrifice provides a look at Fischer's development as a chess virtuoso, but gathers most of its steam by focusing on the 1972 match between Fischer (Tobey Maguire) and Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber).

If you're looking for a documentary approach to Fischer's life, you may want to try Liz Garbus' 2011 documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World. If you're looking for a movie that builds tension without a deluge of pyrotechnics, director Edward Zwick's often intense Pawn Sacrifice should do the trick.

Two young actors (Aiden Lovekamp and Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) portray Fischer as a self-contained kid who was put off by the lifestyle of his single mother (Robin Weigert).

Weigert's Regina Fischer's devotion to sexual freedom and communism -- beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1950s -- may have inspired Fischer's abiding contempt for the Soviet Union. For him, the political and personal seem to have merged.

Maguire takes over the role as Fischer approaches adulthood, and begins to establish himself as a world-class player.

No stranger to controversy, Fischer walked out on matches, accused the Soviets of conspiring to keep him from taking the world title in 1962 and became increasingly adept at making sure the world understood that he made no bows to convention.

Along the way, two men take an interest in Fischer's career. The always excellent Michael Stuhlbarg plays Paul Marshall, a lawyer who believed in Fischer and who also saw the symbolic value in using Fischer to make an anti-Soviet statement. If Fischer could beat the Soviets at a game they cherished, he'd serve as living proof that the Communist system had failed.

That may seem a bit far-fetched today, but it perfectly reflects the heated logic of a Cold War period steeped in mistrust and mutual hostility and in which both the Soviets and the U.S. were hungry for symbolic triumphs.

Peter Sarsgaard proves equally good as William Lombardy, a chess grandmaster and Catholic priest who coached Fischer and who, in this telling, understands that there's more to life than chess games.

Zwick sets up the international dynamics of the Fischer/Spassky match in ways that insure that the chess scenes have augmented force.

When Fischer arrives in Reykjavik, Iceland, for his fateful match with Spassky -- actually the second time the two had squared off -- he begins making demands. He refuses to play in front of an audience, insists on preternatural quiet (even the hum of cameras was too noisy for him) and expresses a deep paranoia about everything the Soviets might be doing, including bugging his hotel room.

Throughout these scenes, Maguire never shrinks from making Fischer semi-intolerable, a man whose indifference to what others think borders on the pathological.

The movie's exceptionally able cast handles the story in convincing fashion, although we don't get much about the reclusive but vitriolic latter days of Fischer's life. He died in 2008.

Still, Zwick effectively tailors the drama to accommodate both the personal and geopolitical levels of Fischer's story. He also made me think another movie might be in order, the one in which Schreiber again plays Spassky, and we see the story from the Russian master's point of view.

A suspensful drama about eco-terrorism

To appreciate Night Moves -- the story of three Oregon-based eco-terrorists intent on blowing up a dam -- you have to be willing to accept a bucket full of unsettling and sometimes unsatisfying ambiguities. Director Kelly Reichardt casts Jessie Eisenberg as an uneasy environmentalist who's committed enough to pursue a destructive form of protest, but doesn't come off as an ideologue. Eisenberg's Josh joins forces with two others: a former marine (Peter Sarsgaard), who has planned the operation and a disaffected young woman (Dakota Fanning). Fanning's Dena may have been recruited because she's considered a good bet for convincing an agricultural supplier to sell enough ammonia-drenched fertilizer to make a bomb. The cause makes sense: The dam provides water for unbridled development, but the characters and their actions don't always add up. Sarsgaard's Harmon lives in a trailer; Eisenberg's character works on a cooperative farm; and Dena has found employment at an upscale health spa. Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy) may want to define the characters by showing how they react to the evolving situation. That means we don't get much background. Reichardt generates a fair amount of tension when it comes to blowing up the dam, but minimizes anything by way of cogent explanation. Josh -- in particular -- remains mysterious, a loner whose motivations may stem as much from confusion as conviction. It's not easy to tell what he wants, probably because he doesn't know himself.

A robot becomes his best friend

Frank Langella provides the main reason to see the sometimes sentimental Robot & Frank -- a movie about an aging man whose son buys him a robot, a machine that's meant to help Langella's character cope with an increasingly debilitating case of dementia. Langella's Frank spent most of his adult life as a jewel thief, and only recently has gotten out of the slammer. Fearing that Frank will do harm to himself, his son (James Marsden) arranges for Frank to have a robot that cooks and cleans for him, as well as generally organizes his life. It doesn't take too much foresight to know that the robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) is going to develop an odd-couple relationship with Frank, who's as haphazard in his ways as the robot is fastidious. The twist: Initially reluctant to accept assistance, the crusty Frank begins to change his mind when he realizes that the robot can help him plan a heist. The robot reluctantly goes along with the scheme, thinking Frank will benefit from an activity that really involves him. The movie takes place in the near future, but director Jake Schreier doesn't overdo the futuristic touches. The town librarian (Susan Sarandon in a lovely small performance) is being asked to get rid of books and go electronic, but mostly the movie looks very much like the present. Liv Tyler makes a drop-in appearance as Frank's daughter, a young woman who, on principle, opposes robot help. Amid all of this, the movie manages to deal with aging and a loss of memory that's more frightening to us than to Frank, who seldom acknowledges the severity of his deficits. No need making too much of Frank & Robot, but the movie deserves credit for coming close to turning a comic fantasy into a sensitively realized look at the sadness of aging.