‘Black Widow’: action, humor, wobbly accents

 

   Black Widow, the eagerly awaited next helping of Marvel mayhem, isn't exactly the kind of movie that redefines a genre or challenges you with unexpected depth.

   But -- you knew a "but" was coming, didn't you? -- the movie uses its Avengers heritage to good effect and, damn, if it doesn't include some agreeable humor, not the winking self-reflexive kind (at least not entirely) but laughs that stem from watching an unsettled family try to define itself.

    Right there, in the middle of a Marvel superhero movie, a kind of twisted family sitcom to go along with a story in which the heroes battle a villain who controls the minds of women.

    Black Widow begins in Ohio, introducing us to what seems like a typical suburban family. There's a catch: When Dad (David Harbour) arrives home, he tells his wife (Rachel Weisz) that they have an hour to leave town with their two young daughters (Ever Anderson and Violet McGraw). The year: 1995.

   Australian director Cate Shortland wastes no time leaping into action, sending a message that whatever else Black Widow will offer, it's not going to skimp on chases, fights, globe-hopping, and a plot that feels as if it might have been gleaned from a James Bond out-basket.

   About that family. After their escape and a quick landing in Cuba, they're separated. The film then leaps ahead 21 years. 

    In these 21st Century scenes, we learn that the family has been torn apart by Dreykov (Ray Winstone), a Russian mega-baddie who has been building an army of automaton warriors by taking over the brains of kidnapped girls trained in a facility known as The Red Room.

   Daughter Natasha (Scarlett Johansson), already an Avenger, is living on her own in trailer with help from a guy (O. T. Fagbenle) who brings her supplies.  She's running from US Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt) — at least I think that’s what’s happening. 

    Because few of us would want to watch a movie about a fugitive living in a trailer in Norway, the movie quickly contrives to put Natasha (a.k.a., The Black Widow) into motion. 

    For those who haven't pressed every Avengers movie into their book of memories, an assurance: I, too, had to read up: The movie takes place at a time when the Avengers have broken up; i.e., in the interim between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War. 

    Johansson has done her Widow bit in other Avengers movies, but keeps things humming in this semi-solo effort. 

   Happily, the movie adds Florence Pugh to the mix. Pugh plays the grown-up version of Natasha's younger sister Yelena,  a Russian-trained assassin who, like Natasha, must decide whether the ties of early years still have meaning.

    Yelena, by the way, has acquired an antidote that can reverse the control Dreykov has over the core of stolen children he has raised to kill, but as is the case with many of these Marvel movies, the plot strikes me as little more than a necessary bother — like wearing a tie to a job interview.

    The movie gives the two women a chance to play sibling rivalry games and also reunites them with their mother and father, both of whom have gone their separate ways, as well.

   This part of the movie affords Harbour an opportunity to do an amusing comic riff on being a superhero. He's the Red Guardian, once a true believer in Soviet myths and now a somewhat paunchy guy who looks nothing short of ridiculous in his superhero outfit.

   One of the movie's major set pieces involves breaking Harbour's Alexi out of a grim Russian prison? Cue the avalanche.

    For her part, Weisz plays things straight as Melina, a wily woman who always seems to know more than she lets on.

   The underlying motivation is simple enough. Natasha and Yelena want to find the Red Room, destroy it, and kill Dreykov, the fiend has ruined the lives of so many young girls.

   Of course, the finale is scaled large.

   The movie's variable Russian accents might be a key to understanding the whole enterprise. They're funny, a bit botched, and not without charm. 

   Even non-Marvelites will get the gist and you don't need to know anything about the Avengers to enjoy the way the movie pokes fun at BlackWidow's trademark pose. 

    Before striking, she looks like an Olympian about to launch in a speed-skating event, fitting for a movie that’s agile enough not to fall through thin ice.

A court corrupted by ambition

The Favourite features fine performances by three actresses and bravura work by its idiosyncratic director, Yorgos Lanthimos.

The moral decadence of an aristocracy has been carried to ridiculous (and, yes, instructive) extremes in director Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite. Set in the 18th-century court of Britain's Queen Anne, The Favourite laces an irresistible story with strong doses of intrigue, sex, betrayal, lust, and power. All that makes for a meal that should satisfy the most voracious of thematic appetites.

The Favourite doesn't pass muster as accurately portrayed history or entirely caustic drama; it exists in a world that floats between those two poles, dispensing amusement and rue as if they were party favors at a festival of human folly. Lanthimos has created a world that conjoins conniving ambition with the preening excesses of a court where the events of the day (a war to name one) are kept at an antiseptic distance.

One aristocratic faction opposes the continuation of a war with France on monetary grounds. The anti-war nobles have grown weary of financing it. Another faction sees the war as vital to the kingdom's security.

Issues of the 18th century aside, The Favourite seems particularly attuned to the current moment, reminding us that politics often eschews substance as it wallows in baser impulses of vindictive self-interest.

The story centers on three women. Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) becomes an object to be manipulated: She's a childish, impetuous monarch who falls victim to her moods and to her physical maladies. Her gout makes her moan, cry and walk with a limb.

Rachel Weisz portrays Lady Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, confidant and chief adviser to the queen, as well as her lover.

Last, but by no means least, is Emma Stone's Abigail, a Churchill cousin who arrives at the court in gravely reduced circumstances. Abigail becomes a protege of Lady Churchill and eventually tries to surpass her in influence.

Sex, as seen here, relates neither to love nor lust: It has become currency to be dispensed when necessary in the quest for personal advancement or to secure one’s position.

Colman, in one of the year's best performances, creates a queen of deep sadness and flighty temperament. Every now and again, Anne remembers that she's in charge and issues an irrefutable order, probably to remind herself that she’s at the top of this aristocratic heap.

Weisz's Churchill mixes sharp intelligence and cunning into a poisonous cocktail that shows trace elements of actual conviction. Stone follows suit in the most difficult role, an ingenue who knows how to keep her talons concealed. Abigail eventually connives to marry an empty-headed young man (Joe Alwyn) for reasons that serve her ambitious purposes.

Beautifully upholstered in foppish finery, the court becomes an arena in which these noble souls compete, perhaps because without intrigue their lives would choke on vapidity and boredom. The men in The Favourite come across as powdered peacocks who strut about while ostensibly fretting about weighty matters of state.

Lord Harley (Nicholas Hoult) sports rouged cheeks and a wig. He's angling to advance his political position as chief opponent to the war with France.

At one point, we see the nobleman behaving like silly fratboys, tossing oranges at one their naked companions, who attempts to dodge the splatter. They also engage in indoor duck racing, a sport that happily did not survive the 18th century.

The queen has her own preoccupations: She keeps pet rabbits that run around her chambers, furry substitutes for the 17 children she lost to death.

Lanthimos heretofore has been known for The Lobster and The Killing of the Sacred Deer, movies that many found indigestible in their strangeness. By comparison, The Favourite comes off as quite accessible, although closer observation will reveal much of the weirdness that has defined Lanthimos' work, this time emphasized with fish-eye lenses and a mood of sustained madness.

Steeped in human dereliction, The Favourite certainly can't be accused of dreariness. Screenwriters Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara keep the story moving and don't stint on expressions of profane wit.

All of this is brought to an astonishing conclusion with close-ups, one of Queen Anne's face on which Lanthimos practically bets the entire movie. He asks Colman to reveal the queen's mental and emotional state after so much plotting and deceit. Colman more than makes Lanthimos' bet pay. Anne's look at the end of this engaging, disturbing and gleefully malicious movie proves unforgettable.

Love and conflict in a Jewish community

Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams play lesbian lovers battling major obstacles in Disobedience.

Sebastian Leilo, who directed the Oscar-winning foreign-language film, A Fantastic Woman, moves from his native Chile to Britain to tell the story of a love affair between two women, one of whom is married and living in a small Orthodox Jewish community in North London.

This description may sound as if Leilo's Disobedience wants to pose yet another argument for acceptance and tolerance while vilifying an Orthodox community for its myopic vision. Thankfully, the movie does neither of those things.

Instead, Disobedience spreads the lives of its characters across chasms of contradiction that aren't easily traversed: The movie seems less interested in taking sides than in bringing its principal characters to points at which they must make critical personal choices.

Whatever you make of Disobedience, it’s difficult not to recognize the fine work of Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams as women who find themselves trying to come to terms with their pasts in what appears to be an impossibly conflicted present.

Weisz's Ronit had an affair with Esti when the two were much younger. Ronit then fled the community in which she grew up to pursue a career in photography. She now lives in New York. McAdams's Esti remained in London and has since married.

Ronit's return to North London for her father's funeral lights a fuse of love and desire between the two women that burns throughout the movie.

To further complicate matters, Ronit's father -- known in the movie as The Rav -- led the community in which much of the drama takes place. Esti's husband Dovid (Alessandro Nivola) is in line to take over the late rabbi's position.

Weisz makes it clear that Ronit loved her father, even though he denied her existence once she left home and Orthodoxy, an act he would have seen as a betrayal of everything he valued, perhaps even an affront to God.

Working from a script that he wrote with Rebecca Lenkiewicz and based on a novel by Naomi Alderman, Leila carefully uncovers the agonies the women endure. Although he receives less attention Esti's husband Dovid has conflicts of his own. The rabbi took young Dovid under wing and made him his chief disciple, which means that, in their youths, Dovid and Ronit shared a kind of brother/sister relationship. Dovid doesn’t know how to embrace the rebellious Ronit yet he can’t bring himself to reject her, either.

Esti can't (and ultimately doesn't) deny her sexual desires. En route to its conclusion, Lelio includes a scene in which Ronit and Estie renew their sexual relationship. The scene leans toward the explicit, but the movie would have been meaningless without it. The desire and love these women feel for each other had to be made tangible.

But to McAdam's credit, she also understands that Esti is not fundamentally at odds with the beliefs of her community. She's nourished by them.

The Jewish life Leilo presents can seem a bit austere and I've never been to a synagogue in which prayers were sung in perfect harmony, as they are here, but Leilo makes us eager to find a resolution for his characters, each of whom earns some sympathy.

Disobedience remains true to its basic concerns about the relationship between choice and responsibility. I'm not entirely sure that the material is always up to the task, but Weisz, McAdams, and Nivola make the inner lives of these characters vivid, real and affecting.

A romance burdened by melodrama

Light Between the Oceans seems trapped by its austerity.

In The Light Between the Oceans, his most conventional and commercially oriented movie to date, director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines) casts Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander as a husband and wife living on a remote slab of rock off the Australian coast.

The story begins when Fassbender's Tom Sherborne, an emotionally scarred veteran, arrives in a small Australian coastal town toward the end of World War I. Riven with guilt about having survived the carnage so many of his fellow combatants did not, Tom takes an isolating job as a lighthouse keeper.

Even with some heavily applied atmospherics, watching a man tend to a lighthouse doesn't make for much of a drama, so a story kicks in.

Cianfrance, who wrote the screenplay based on a 2012 novel by M.L. Stedman, quickly brings Tom together with Isabel (Vikander), the daughter of the man who oversees activities at the lighthouse.

Attractive and glowing with vivacity, Vikander's Isabel breaks through Tom's emotional armor. She wins Tom's heart, and soon becomes the lighthouse keeper's wife.

Isabel desperately wants to become pregnant, but she suffers through a couple of miscarriages that demoralize her and tarnish the glow of romance.

Then, the improbable happens. A lifeboat boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a still-living infant. Isabel implores Tom to keep the child.

Tom knows Isabel's request will open the door to moral and legal difficulties, but love compels him to bury the dead man and allow Isabel to raise the child.

Young Lucy becomes the object of Tom and Isabel's mutual affection, and for a time, they live as a happy family -- until, of course, they don't.

For those who don't know the story, I'll say no more except that Rachel Weisz shows up about midway through in a role that helps give a sagging story some real humanity.

Heavily reliant on close-ups that allow the camera to study the actors' faces, Cianfrance's approach doesn't quite mesh with increasingly melodramatic material that revolves around Tom's attempts to unburden himself of the guilt he's been carrying.

Fassbender captures the stoic control with which Tom approaches his post-war suffering, and Vikander conveys Isabel's misguided willfulness, but, as I suggested, they're both outdone by Weisz, as a grieving, tormented woman.

The rest of the story concern's Tom's attempt to make things right, before the movie finds an ending (a postscript, really) that's more sentimental than one might expect from Cianfrance.

Despite Cianfrance's attempts at infusing every moment with an aura of importance and depth, The Light Between Oceans can't disguise the fact it's a certifiable weepy -- only one that's a too austere and self-absorbed to give the tear ducts a proper workout.

When the absurd becomes normal

The Lobster takes us to a strange hotel where the guests search for mates.

If you're looking for the kind of movie that dutifully works its way toward a conclusion you can see coming from several multiplexes away, you may want to skip The Lobster, a film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. Lanthimos marches -- or in the case of The Lobster -- crawls to a different drummer, immersing us in worlds that slowly reveal their secrets.

The movie takes place in what looks like the near future. Newly divorced David (Colin Farrell) has taken his dog to a hotel that imposes strange rules on its guests. The main rule allots each guest 45 days to find a mate or be turned into an animal -- of his or her choosing, of course.

The pressure on hotel guests can be felt from the start because in this society, being single has been classified as a crime.

As near, as we can tell, the transformations from human to animal aren't meant to be taken on a strictly metaphorical level. At various times, we see animals wandering the hotel grounds. We, of course, realize that we're looking at former guests who didn't make the cut.

Somewhere near the hotel, there's a city, which Lanthimos later will visit. Life there proceeds in reasonably normal fashion, but only married people are allowed to live in the city.

At the hotel, David meets two additional male guests, equally miserable fellows played by Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly.

When not thinking about finding a mate, the guests hunt with tranquilizer guns. Their prey: loners who live in the woods beyond the hotel, people who -- if shot -- give the successful hunter an important extra day to continue searching for a spouse. And, oh yes, mates must share at least one common trait, like being short-sighted, for example.

It may occur to you that The Lobster wants to be a weird commentary on mating and dating, which transpires in near-mechanistic fashion at the hotel; everything feels depersonalized.

There's more to the plot, but I won't reveal it here, except to say that at one point, David joins the loners who are led by a woman of severe temperament (Lea Seydoux). She tells them that loners may masturbate at will, but aren't allowed to touch one another. With awful punishments looming, no one wants to get crosswise with the leader.

Among the loners, short-sighted David meets a short-sighted woman played by Rachel Weisz; a romance begins to take shape.

Now, it may not sound like it, but deadpan humor runs through the movie; Lanthimos wrings emotion out of human interaction in ways that are both bizarre and funny.

When Reilly's character is caught masturbating, he's punished by being forced to insert his hand into a toaster. It's so weird that we chuckle, even as we wince. People actually submit to this?

Farrell does a fine job as David, going soft around the middle and maintaining an even -- if morose -- keel. If David doesn't find a mate and must be turned into an animal, he selects a lobster. He says they live long and remain fertile throughout their existence. Thus, the movie's title.

If you check the credits, you'll see that some of the characters have been named for their defining characteristics, as in Reilly's Lisping Man and Whishaw's Limping Man. Angelika Papouila raises the movie's fright level as one of the hotel's most successful hunters, a woman with no feelings. Her name: The Heartless One.

Olivia Colman shows up as the hotel's manager, a host whose crisp efficiencies suggest a cross between a school principal and a prison warden.

It's impossible to predict whether you'll enjoy The Lobster or be driven crazy by it. Lanthimos (Dogtooth) may not care into which group you fall.

The movie's insistent strangeness throws human relationships into a Kafaesque stew and stirs, letting us know what happens when humans (both the hotel guests and the rebel loners) are jammed into a world governed by absurd rules.

Comparisons to known realities probably are encouraged.

Alpine elegance and aging prostates

The images are impressive, the performances are good, but Paolo Sorentino's new movie brims with art-house familiarity..

What happens when a group of smart, privileged people gather at a beautiful European Alpine resort? Do they enjoy the doting service, beautiful views and rarified air? In reality, maybe. In movies -- particularly those that slip into art-house terrain -- they suffer.

Welcome to the world of Paulo Sorentino's Youth, the follow-up movie to the director's Academy Award winning Great Beauty.

I took Youth as a highly stylized -- if occasionally amusing -- form of whining that focuses on two characters: a retired composer (Michael Caine's Fred Ballinger) and a writer/director of films (Harvey Keitel's Mick Boyle).

Ballinger seems to have given up on pretty much everything. Boyle, who still has a bit of hope, has gathered a team of youthful subordinates in hopes of finishing a script that he regards as his "testament," the final statement of a Hollywood survivor.

A variety of additional characters circle our two principal sufferers, satellites affixed to these two waning moons.

Rachel Weisz portrays Ballinger's daughter Lena. Lena, whose marriage breaks up during the course of the film, manages her father's affairs, which seem to consist of saying "no" to everything.

An American movie star (Paul Dano) smokes cigarettes and carries himself with aloof poise. A Miss Universe (Madeline Ghenea) glides through the premises. A very fat man with a portrait of Karl Marx tattooed on his back occasionally turns up.

Early on, a representative of the Queen of England arrives with a request. The queen would like Ballinger to conduct his signature composition -- it's called Simple Song, No. 3 -- at a concert celebrating Prince Philip's birthday. Citing personal reasons he prefers to keep murky, Ballinger refuses.

Those familiar with Sorentino's work know that he's heir to Federico Fellini's creative spirit. La Dolce Vita informed Great Beauty; hints of 8 1/2 waft through Youth.

This is not to say that Sorentino lacks for original talent: His images can be archly witty, and he's able to create mood with a single shot.

Watching a group of folks filing through the spa in their white bathrobes suggests an assembly line of submissive sheep en route to their slaughter.

Death becomes the unseen character in Youth, coloring everything about the movie, including its sense of elegant ennui.

If Ballinger and Boyle (would have made nice law firm, no?) are any indication, Youth wants us to remind us that the most creative among us have their moments -- but even they die.

And even if they're not instantly forgotten, what does it matter to them: They've joined the anonymous ranks of the formerly living.

This kind of supernal detachment gives the movie a feeling of doomed grace that impacts its imagery. At times, though, I half wondered whether Sorentino and his cinematographer Luca Bigazzi were engaging in an exercise in which they were required to bring as much visual invention as possible to a movie shot on a single location.

Smoothly edited and languid in its pretensions, Youth can be genuinely beautiful, although its sense of visual invention isn't always matched by a script whose tropes suffer from art-house familiarity, grapes that have been pressed too often, and, therefore, robbed of bite.

Surely, there were better ways to have two aging men lament about their diminishing powers than by having them chat about their difficulties with urination. Caine's character also jealously wonders whether Boyle ever slept with a woman that they both desired when they were younger men.

In examining a list of credits on IMDb, I noticed that a good many of the characters aren't given names but are referred to by function or some other general descriptor: escort, Buddhist monk, South American, South American's wife, bearded screenwriter, etc.

Perhaps that's fitting because most of these characters are little more than props in Sorentino's visual stroll through the wrinkled, withering manhood of his main characters.

Amid an atmosphere ripe with defeat and resignation, two explosive moments stand out.

At one point, Weisz's Lena unloads on her father, puncturing any delusions he might have about having been a decent parent. Later, Jane Fonda shows up to deliver a blistering rebuke of Keitel's character.

Fonda plays Brenda Morel, an aging actress who has starred in many of Boyle's movies and whose presence is necessary if Boyle has any hope of financing his swan son.

Caine and Keitel play an intriguing duet, but at the same time, I can't say I totally believed in either of their characters. In the hands of two lesser actors, Ballinger and Boyle might have come off as mere shadows, weary confirmations of the trials of aging.

Frequent images of Caine receiving massages struck me as emblematic: At times, it feels as if Sorentino is massaging the audience, winning it over with smooth edits, eye-opening shots and pacing that can seem hypnotic for those who fall under its spell.

Youth's final scene -- which blends into the end credits -- is a true beauty. For fear of spoilers, I won't describe it here, except to say that it floats past us, lifted by swells of Ballinger's music. It's like watching the curlicues of a skilled skywriter whose images impress and then evaporate into nothing, leaving you to wonder why you're still looking.

This journey to Oz misses greatness

A prequel to the Wizard of Oz has its enchantments -- but flaws, as well..
It takes more than a little moxie to revisit the big-screen world that was so beautifully created by director Victor Fleming in The Wizard of Oz. To go "all-in" with a big-budget, 3-D extravaganza takes even more guts. So no faulting Disney or director Sam Raimi for an lack of daring.

Raimi -- perhaps best known for his contributions to the Spider Man series -- attempts to serve up a visually ambitious prequel to the 1939 classic, a movie that still attracts viewers when its shown on TV and which still scares adults and kids some 76 years after its 1939 release, thanks mostly to those hideous flying monkeys.

Moxie aside, Oz the Great and Powerful turns out to be a hit-and-miss affair with some serious drawbacks, not the least of which revolves around James Franco, the likable actor who begins the movie as a two-bit carnival magician named Oscar Diggs.

Franco flashes a toothy grin to convey the phony sincerity of a small-time con man, but doesn't do much more with his character. Early on, Diggs is swept by a tornado from Kansas to the magical world of Oz. There, he's greeted as the living fulfillment of a prophecy that calls for a wizard to save Oz from tyranny.

But Franco's performance isn't the only issue. There's also a notable lack of characters to provide the level of entertainment associated with The Tin Man (Jack Haley), the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) and the Cowardly Lion (Burt Lahr).

I know. That's an awfully high bar, but what's the point of flying off to Oz without trying to match or jump over it? On top of that, Dorothy (Judy Garland) was a more interesting and involving character than a crackpot magician who must kill a wicked witch in order to save Oz and, not incidentally, gain access to its piles of golden treasure.

Having said all that, I don't want to leave you with the impression that Oz the Great and Powerful is a total disaster. It's a medium-grade helping of fantasy enhanced by some skillful animation, a few spectacular sets, some decent set pieces and dollops of humor.

Raimi wisely begins by following in the footsteps of the original with a black-and-white prologue that's presented in the old-fashioned 1:33 aspect ratio. When the story reaches Oz, Raimi expands to wide-screen and color.

Look, it's clear that Raimi (and a vast special effects team) was trying for a feeling of sustained enchantment, and when Franco's character discovers the land of Oz or gets his first glimpse of the Emerald City, Raimi seems to be on the right track.

The new movie gives the emerging wizard some new companions, a flying monkey named Finley (voiced by Zach Braff) and a China Doll -- she's called China Girl -- voiced by Joey King. Finley, who's dressed as a bellhop, becomes a beast of burden, carting the faux wizard's bag all over Oz. Although he manages some cuteness and humor, Finley simply doesn't have either the weight or memorability of any character from the original.

And China Girl might have been more affecting had the character been played a real girl instead of a CGI stand-in.

All of those flaws might have receded into obscurity had the witches (there are three in this edition) provided more kick. Mila Kunis portrays Theodora, a young woman who begins as a good and trusting witch but transforms into the Wicked Witch of the West. Michelle Williams appears as Glinda, the irrevocably good witch, and Rachel Weisz plays Evanora, the witch responsible for handling much of the movie's villainy.

None of them are as frightening or as commanding as the great Margaret Hamilton, the original (and in reality the "only") credible Wicked Witch of the West. Raimi and screenwriters David Lindsay-Abaire and Mitchell Kapner pay brief homage to Hamilton and try to create a variety of other (mostly minor) connections to the best-known big-screen adaptation of L. Frank Baum's classic story.

Now, about those flying monkeys. This version offers a more obviously fearsome version of the airborne simians, but employs them to lesser effect. These razor-toothed creatures fly at the audience, generating more by way of jolts than creepiness. The monkeys may be emblematic of the way Raimi employs 3-D throughout, more for thrill-ride impact than for the subtlety and depth that has marked the best recent 3-D, notably Life of Pi.

The mix of live-action and effects isn't always convincing, either. Too often, we're aware that animation is being employed, although some of it is beautifully colored and alluring.

I appreciated the gargantuan effort that went into Oz the Great and Powerful, and the movie may please younger audience while giving them a few scary kicks in the pants.

But "not bad" is not what we expect from a movie of this magnitude and with this lineage.

Oh, and by the way, Oz the Great and Powerful makes room for Munchkins, but not for Toto or any other dog. Pity.

Running in Bourne's footsteps

Revamped with a new hero, the The Bourne Legacy is only semi-successful.

Goodbye Jason Bourne. Hello Aaron Cross.

Right there, you can see part of the problem with The Bourne Legacy, a semi-successful attempt to perpetuate a franchise with Jeremy Renner taking over for Matt Damon. Renner plays Cross, one of nine chemically enhanced Treadstone operatives. He's like Bourne, but he's not Bourne.

Damon's absence can't help but be felt because we've come to identify the Bourne movies with (here's a shocker) a character named Bourne.

In the hands of director Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Dan, The Bourne Legacy proceeds in fits and starts, possibly because it's forced to establish its Bourne bona fides with lots of references to its predecessors. (The movie takes place at roughly the same time as the end of The Bourne Ultimatum.)

Familiar from The Hurt Locker and more recently from Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Renner is an explosive actor. He looks and acts tough enough for a globe-hopping thriller, and in this outing he has a snub-nosed intensity that makes him a credible action hero -- if not a franchise figure.

We meet Cross while he's conducting a solo training exercise in Alaska. We quickly learn that he's a super-operative who can go one-on-one with a snarling wolf. We also discover that he's being hunted by his own super-secret agency, which -- thanks to threat of exposure and possible public outrage -- is being closed.

That means that Cross must be killed, a project that's being led by a retired Air Force Colonel played by Edward Norton, who -- like every other actor in the movie -- spends most of his time looking seriously grim. Norton's character is a proponent of the notion that some things are morally reprehensible but essential to U.S. security. In a dirty world, survival depends on playing dirty. That's where guys like Bourne and Cross come in.

The plot eventually contrives to bring a fleeing Cross into contact with a scientist (Rachel Weisz) who has been working on the project that develops the chemicals that give Treadstone agents their heightened powers. Cross and Weisz's Dr. Marta Shearing spend the rest of the movie trying not to be killed.

Blame recent events -- shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin -- but for me, the most disturbing scene in the movie involves a shooting in a lab. It's staged for maximum impact by Gilroy, who directed and wrote Michael Clayton and Duplicity. What makes the lab scene so horrific is that there's no hail of bullets: A gunman picks off his victims one by one, each shot ringing with chilling clarity.

Gilroy does a decent job with the rest of the action, but a lengthy motorcycle chase in Manilla -- the film's climax -- leans toward the outrageous and makes it clear that Gilroy and company are making a summer movie with a capital "S." The longer the chase went on, the more it smelled of pandering to me.

The movie's ending isn't especially satisfying, leaving one with the impression that the filmmakers have huffed, puffed and blown down a lot of houses without getting much of anywhere. The series, we suppose, is meant to continue.

Audiences should find enough action and exoticism in Bourne Legacy to give it box-office life, but I wonder whether future movies will continue to put the Bourne name into the title, will let Cross move forward under his own banner or will switch to one of the other agents that are running around the dangerous world that novelist Robert Ludlum imagined when he created the Bourne series.

The Cross Ultimatum? Doesn't sound right, does it?

Terence Davies: More poetry of pain

A look at what happens when a woman chooses sex over security.

If Terence Davies had made no other films but Distant Voice, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), he would have established himself as both a master craftsman and a ranking poet of existential sorrow. Davies, who grew up in Liverpool during the 1950s, turned his two semi-autobiographical movies into beautifully realized portraits of a moment in his life and in British history.

Many years ago, Davies came to Denver during what then was called the Denver International Film Festival and which since has been renamed the Starz Denver Film Festival. I did a filmed interview with Davies that I (as well as everyone in the room) still remembers, not because of me but because of the director's vulnerability and candor. Davies talked about the pain of being a gay man, something that no doubt was far more severe during his formative years than it is today. Now 66, Davies by no means has finished exploring pain and the lives of those who must endure it.

Davies's The Deep Blue Sea -- a belated adaptation of a 1952 Terence Rattigan play -- isn't nearly as powerful as the director's more autobiographical work, but it's steeped in just as much pain -- this time embodied in a woman (Rachel Weisz) who gives up everything to pursue her passion with a man who's incapable of reciprocating.

The story of Weisz's Hester Collyer, who leaves a well-established upper-class husband (Simon Russell Beale) for an affair with a former pilot (Tim Hiddleston) with no apparent future, probably had more shock value during post-war years when Britain was trying to regain its balance after a devastating and costly war.

And even supporters of Davies' work may have to admit that The Deep Blue Sea is burdened by a deep and nearly crippling languor, as if Davies wants every frame to weep for a character that never entirely gets her due.

As played by Weisz, Hester is both brave and doomed, a woman made to suffer for choosing sex over security. Poor Hester. She's abused by Hiddleston's Freddie Page, a man who can't seem to get past the trumped-up bonhomie of his war years. Freddie has no appreciation for the sacrifice Hester has made.

As played by Beale, Hester's husband tempers his initial jealousy with understanding. He makes his case to her, begging her to return for her own good; i.e., for material comfort and social ease. But Hester, who opens the movie with a suicide attempt, is not about to capitulate.

Those familiar with Davies's movies will note the presence of one of his trademark touches: At one point, the lower middle-class characters break into song at a neighborhood pub, a central gathering place and source of escape for them.

Davies isn't interested in condemning either of the men in Hester's life. It's possible that he regards Hester as someone born in the wrong time. Twenty or so years later, her choice would have seemed neither shocking nor especially fateful.

As Davies did with his more personal movies, he treats Hester's painful existence as a source of cinematic poetry. The Deep Blue Sea isn't entirely successful, but Weisz yields herself courageously and unreservedly to the material, and Davies slowly runs a finger over the kind of emotional wounds that never really scar over.