One very weird summer vacation

 

   Emerald Fennell's Saltburn skewers those who aspire to the heights of wealth and privilege, with the writer/director indulging her taste for evisceration, exaggeration, and obvious provocation.

    Fennell focuses on Oliver Quick, an Oxford student played by Barry Keoghan. The bookish Quick, whose name sounds as if it were lifted from a Dickens' novel, attracts the attention of one of Oxfords  cool guys (Jacob Elordi). 

     Increasingly comfortable with his newfound acceptance, Oliver tells Elordi's Felix that he won't be going home for the summer, despite the recent death of his alcoholic father. He says he can't bear to be around his mentally deranged mother; he wants to keep his high-achieving life on track.

  Perhaps out of pity or maybe because he's kind, Felix invites Oliver to visit Saltburn, the massive estate where his family lives in aristocratic splendor and where Felix, despite his obvious entitlement,  seems closest to normal.

  Turns out the rest of Felix's family consists of bizarrely drawn characters, all vividly sketched in caricature fashion. Mom (Rosamund Pike) speaks through clenched teeth, launching acidic barbs in all directions; Dad (Richard E. Grant) seems monumentally out of touch; sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) reeks of trouble. Her mother describes her as "sexually incontinent."

  Two additional characters took up residence at Saltburn before Oliver's arrival. These hangers-on include another Oxford student (Archie Madekwe), a young man who's somehow related to the family and a family friend (Carey Mulligan) who insists on spewing repeated tales of the catastrophes that have befallen her. 

  The butler (Paul Rhys) seems to regard himself as superior to one and all. Perhaps he's the referee in a game in which the participants have lost sight of all boundary lines.

   OK, sounds like we're on the road to a broadly conceived comedy of manners but Fennell, who directed Promising Young Woman, has other things in mind. Her movie becomes increasingly bizarre -- perhaps even perverse. That shift gathers force when Oliver, whose creepy leanings already have been established, climbs into the bathtub where Felix recently had been bathing and, by the way, masturbating. Oliver starts to drink the bathwater as it swirls down the drain.

    Clearly, Oliver is not what he seems. You certainly wouldn't want to ask him how he spent his summer vacation.

    The detail about the bathtub might be a spoiler; I include it to ward off the squeamish and to demonstrate that Fennell specializes in sights intended to make us wince, perhaps the equivalent of the queasy responses elicited by graphically repellent gore in horror films.

    I'd be lying if I didn't say that some of this is entertaining and funny -- in a twisted sort of way. 

    Like Promising Woman, Saltburn wraps up with far-fetched twists that continue Fennell's outrageous march through developments that are meant, I think, to encourage us to look back and search for clues that might have tipped us off to where the movie was headed.

     On one level, Saltburn -- by including images that invite averted eyes  -- can be viewed as a movie that dresses for dinner and then throws up on itself. On another, it's a daring comic display of the base motivations that underly class privilege.

    Whatever view you take -- and I'd opt for the latter -- Fennell takes us on a ride that bounces over some wicked bumps. Obviously I can't know her intent, but by the look of things, I'd guess, as was the case in Promising Woman,  that she prefers comedy that leaves bite marks.

A thriller about some really awful folks

 

    It must say something about us, but most of us take at least some delight in watching movies about aggressively unprincipled people who enrich themselves at the expense of others.

    In I Care a Lot, Rosamund Pike plays Marla Grayson, a woman who specializes in bilking the elderly by becoming a legal guardian for them. Marla's ideal candidate is a reasonably healthy older person who will live long enough for Marla to drain his or her assets in what amounts to a shockingly cruel helping of court-sanctioned elder abuse.

   As played by Pike, Marla not only excels at her job, she delights in working with corrupt nursing home folks to generate profits for her company. 

   Eiza Gonzalez plays Fran, Marla's live-in lover and devoted assistant, a woman who has learned the tricks of manipulation from a master. The banter between the two amounts to a crash course in insensitivity.

     Screenwriter/director J. Blakeson sets us up to root against Marla. Who, after all, favors stealing from the helpless? 

    Yes, Marla  preys on the defenseless, but there’s always energy to be found in a well-calibrated scheme and Marla prides herself on dotting every "i" and crossing every "t." 

    The story takes an important turn when a nursing home official identifies an easy mark for Marla -- for a cut, of course.

    Snatched from her home, Dianne Wiest's Jennifer soon finds herself in a facility where she's more prisoner than resident. To Marla, Jennifer is a human ATM, a source of wealth that can be tapped for years.

    Jennifer? She's fed drugs, deprived of her cell phone, and stuck in a nightmare.

   Adept at working the legal system, Marla knows how to convince judges that she's a savior to those who otherwise might perish in isolation. Her office is slick. She dresses to kill and all but licks her lips at the prospect of another scam.

   I won't tell you more, but after a while, we learn that Jennifer may not be quite as helpless as we've been led to believe. 

   Blakeson adds a sinister businessman to the mix. Peter Dinklage plays a gangster who wants to liberate Jennifer from the senior facility where she's being held.  No fair telling why. Know though, that Dinklage's character offers Marla $150,000 to give up her claim.

    No dice, says Marla. She wants more.

   At first, Dinklage sends his lawyer (Chris Messina) to "reason" with Marla. When that doesn't work, he resorts to other methods, allowing Blakeson to up the story’s ante and toy with our rooting interests. By the end, we're not sure that any of the movie's principal characters qualify for redemption.

    Blakeson written a tasty scam movie,  infusing it with the kind of sizzle that sets it apart from more perfunctory efforts and he locks Pike and Dinklage in an exhilarating cage match in which neither is shy about going for the jugular.

    Oh, by the way, the movie may make cost you some sleep when you begin to think about what might happen to elderly folks when age robs them of independence — and others are all-too-eager to take advantage of the situation.

'Radioactive' lacks the charge of authenticity

      Who knew?

     In the film Radioactive, Marie Curie and her husband Pierre go skinny dipping.

     I don’t know whether the real Madame Curie — winner of two Nobel Prizes — enjoyed such liberated pursuits, but little about director Marjane Satrapi's movie convinced me that I was watching something real. 
    In addition to being mired in period trappings, the movie strains (does it ever) to show both the healthy and devastating impacts of radiation. Scenes of Hiroshima, nuclear bomb tests, and a meltdown at a nuclear plant disrupt Curie's story, as does a hospital visit during the 1950s in which radiation helps a boy with cancer.
     The movie was adapted from a graphic novel by Lauren Redniss; a sweeping, time-shattering approach may have worked on the page. Here, it becomes awkward, even a trifle ludicrous at times.

     As played by Rosamund Pike, Marie Curie stands as an obvious avatar for female brainpower. Sam Riley portrays Pierre Curie, Marie's husband. Also a scientist, Pierre helps Marie with her landmark discoveries of radium and polonium. 

    Radioactive can be groan-inducing, falling prey to creative overreach in scenes such as a dream sequence in which Marie views the future of radioactivity, a replay of an already stated theme: Radiation can be used for good or evil.

     Satrapi, who directed the animated film Persepolis, begins by introducing us to the feisty Maria Sklodowska, a fiercely independent Polish emigre living in France, where she battles with the scientific establishment for lab space. Ms. Sklodowska, of course, becomes Mrs. Curie.

     What the movie doesn't underline, it telegraphs. Consider poor Pierre’s fate. He handles large amounts of pitchblende in the attempt to produce radium. We know it’s only a matter of time until he coughs some telltale blood into his handkerchief. 

     Pierre, as history demands, doesn't succumb because of the dangerous substances with which the Curie team worked. He's run over by a horse and wagon while crossing a Parisian street.
     Health-wise, it can’t be a good sign that Marie insists on taking a glowing green vial to bed with her. 

     The movie also spends time showing that Marie wasn’t afraid of being deemed a social outcast. After Pierre’s death, she had an affair with a married lab assistant (Aneurin Barnard), appalling even the live-and-let-live French.

    But wait. There’s more. 
    Late in the movie, Curie accompanies her by-then-grown daughter (Anya Taylor-Joy) to the battlefields of World War I, where the two hope to save wounded soldiers by using Curie’s X-Ray machine, shown here in a cumbersome portable version. Curie's daughter Irene went on to win a Nobel Prize of her own in physics and chemistry.
     If you grew up watching black-and-white TV, you probably remember that Greer Garson played Marie Curie in Madame Curie, a sanitized 1943 version of the Curie story. 

     No one likely will accuse Satrapi of trying to turn Marie Curie into a saint, but the movie's attempts to maintain a serious, high-stakes tone often spills into crippling melodrama or, worse, didacticism.
     In trying to be more than a standard-issue biography, Radioactive winds up being much less.

She looked into the eye of war

Rosamund Pike portrays a journalist who couldn't say no to war.

A Private War tells the real-life story of Marie Colvin's life at work. Of course, a day’s work for Colvin, an award-winning war correspondent, upsets any notion of jobs as tedious, office-bound activities. Colvin made her living reporting from some of the world's worst war zones. She lost her left eye as the result of an explosion in Sri Lanka and ultimately died in Homs, Syria.

Colvin's great achievement in Homs was to put the world on notice that Syria’s embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, was not only bombing military targets but also was obliterating the city’s civilian population. Telling that story cost Colvin her life.

Directed by Matthew Heineman, previously known for documentaries, Private War quickly lays out the rationale for Colvin’s willingness to put herself in harm’s way. She argues that the world must know about the suffering bred by war. It must hear the stories of those who suffer.

Private War will be hailed for Rosamund Pike’s portrayal of Colvin, a skilled and confident reporter who couldn't escape war-born demons in the form of PTSD and alcoholism, two conditions she was unwilling to acknowledge.

Colvin wrote for the British Sunday Times but grew up in Long Island. Pike, who’s British, masters an American accent. More importantly, she captures Colvin’s no-nonsense approach to her job and her possibly self-destructive refusal to opt for safer forms of journalism even after she was forced to wear an eye patch from her Sri Lanka wounds.

At a party in London, a friend (Nikki Amuka-Bird) suggests that Colvin seek help. She can’t break through Colvin's addictive cycle: war reporting followed by troubled respites in London.

Colvin's editor (Tom Hollander) doesn't push her to take a desk job. She's too good at what she does. He jokes about her writing for the gardening section as if the only forms of journalism were those involving extreme danger and those relegated to the sleepy nether regions of feature sections.

Heineman structures the film as a series of harrowing war tours interrupted by glimpses of Pike’s life away from the battles she covered. He includes an underdeveloped relationship with Tony Shaw (Stanley Tucci), a wealthy businessman who says he’s interested in sexual adventures rather than one-night stands.

Colvin maintains her strongest relationship with a freelance war photographer played by Jamie Dornan, bearded and close to unrecognizable after his work in the Fifty Shades of Grey movies. Photographer and reporter are bonded by the hardships they endure as a team.

Always eager to set her own path (she sneered at embedded journalists), Colvin knew how to stay a step ahead of other reporters as she worked in ravaged countries such as Iraq and Syria. In Libya, she interviewed Gaddafi just before his fall. She was a go-to journalist when it came to war.

Heineman and his team put a great deal of effort into making authentically vivid scenes of battle chaos, civilian suffering and the obscene destruction of war.

Like Colvin, Heineman must have wanted to drive home the brutality of wars, particularly its impact on hapless civilians. Scenes of mayhem are luridly convincing -- if a bit numbing after a while.

A Private War certainly has its virtues, but there’s something a little off about the movie: Heineman has a point to make but not much story to tell: Without people such as Colvin, however flawed she might have been as a person, blood would be shed without outside scrutiny.

That's a powerful statement, but I wondered whether it might have made a more fitting tribute to Colvin to take one of her strong stories and turn it into a movie. What made Colvin great, I think, was that she had more interest in the stories she so compulsively told than in her self. So much so that she died telling them.

Jon Hamm anchors a thriller set in Beirut

An intricately plotted thriller set in the roiling heart of the Middle East during the 1980s, Beirut delivers much of what we expect from movies that dip into volatile political situations -- a discernible pulse and an atmosphere rife with intrigue. Jon Hamm anchors the movie as Mason Skiles, an able US negotiator whose life falls apart when his Lebanese wife (Leila Bekhti) is murdered during a terrorist attack. Not surprisingly, the attack undermines Mason's faith in nearly everything, particularly because the murderous assault on Mason's beautiful Beirut home resulted from an act of beneficence. Living in Lebanon in 1972 - prior to the country's descent into civil strife and violence -- Mason and his wife had taken a 13-year-old orphan (Yoav Sadian Rosenberg into their home. As it turns out, the boy’s older brother (Hicham Ouraqa) led the terrorist attack in which Mason's wife died. The screenplay by Tony Gilroy (the Bourne movies) reveals all of this in a jittery prologue and then leaps ahead 10 years, the time just prior to Israel’s war in Lebanon. By this time, Mason has returned to the US where he works as a small-potatoes negotiator and tries to drink away his pain. He’s pulled back into the Middle Eastern fray when he’s asked to return to Lebanon to negotiate the release of a former pal and CIA agent (Mark Pellegrino) who has been captured by the PLO. Meanwhile, the adult Karim (Idir Chender) has become an active terrorist working with the PLO. Reluctantly dragged back to shattered Beirut, Mason finds himself in the company of a supporting US crew of characters played by Dean Norris, Shea Whigham and Rosamund Pike. Each of these characters has an agenda that may have little to do with saving a valued CIA agent but which adds a cynical gloss to the story. Hamm’s predictable transition from drunk to a man in command of his skills may not be entirely credible, but his bestubbled presence helps keep the film on track. Although Beirut probably sometimes confuses complexity of plot with insight, director Brad Anderson (The Machinist) keeps the story moving. Beirut is never anything less than watchable, even if it's ultimately short on thematic clout.

A recreation of a daring Israeli raid

7 Days in Entebbe isn't a bad movie, but it doesn't dig deep enough to be memorable.

In 1976, Israel launched Operation Thunderbolt, a daring raid in which a small group of IDF soldiers rescued 102 Israelis who had been passengers on an Air France plane that was hijacked by two Germans and two Palestinians.

7 Days in Entebbe, a movie about the hijacking and subsequent Israeli action, arrives nearly 42 years after an event that riveted world attention. Daniel Bruhl and Rosamund Pike headline the cast as German radicals who initially thought they were leading the charge but who quickly were surpassed by Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The Palestinians took charge once the plane arrived in Uganda, after a refueling stop in Benghazi, Libya. Once in Entebbe, hostages were housed in a decaying airport terminal that was no longer in use.

Movies such as 7 Days raise an obvious but unavoidable question. Why are we being asked to look at an event that since has been eclipsed by so many other events involving terrorist actions that put innocent civilians in harm's way? In part, the question can be answered with one sentence: Such events are inherently exciting and suspenseful.

But for a movie to succeed, it must get beyond that surface and dig deeper? As directed by Jose Padilha, 7 Days fails to function as more than a cinematic outline, offering quick looks into the motivation of the story's various players.

No stranger to tough, action-oriented movies, Padilha directed the Netflix series Narcos and made Bus 174, a documentary about hostages trapped on a bus in Rio. He also directed Elite Squad, a compelling Brazilian police drama. In 2014, Padilha tried his hand at a Hollywood reboot, a much-derided version of RoboCop .

7 Days emphasizes the importance of the moment at which the hijackers separated Jews from the non-Jews, evoking memories of Holocaust selections in the minds of the Jewish passengers and among the Israeli public.

The highest levels of the Israeli government also took note of the separate treatment of Jews as issues pertaining to saving the hostages were debated. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) and Defense Minister Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) took different sides.

Rabin knew he had to do something but wasn’t entirely sure that he should dismiss the possibility of negotiating with the Palestinians, something that went against Israeli policy forbidding talks with terrorists. Perez favored military action.

At one point, Uganda's Idi Amin (nicely played by Nonso Anozie) gets involved. He’s able to persuade the Palestinians to release the French hostages.

Padilha’s strangest decision involves the use of the Batsheva Dance Company which does a jarring musical version of Echad Mi Yodea (Who Knows One), a song usually sung at Passover seders. Staged by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, the dance -- seen in rehearsals and eventually in a performance -- proves compelling but because it opens the movie, it tends to upstage the rest of the story and it's never entirely clear why Padihla includes it.

To justify the dance sequence, the screenplay must introduce a superfluous tangent, a relationship between a dancer and one of the Israeli soldiers on the Entebbe raid.

Whatever Padihla was attempting to accomplish, he winds up looking a bit ridiculous when he alternates between a performance of the dance and the movie's climactic end-of-picture rescue.

There’s not much by way of character development among the crew and passengers, aside from a crew member (Denis Menochet) who tries to reason with Bruhl’s character, a publisher of radical books who already has his doubts about the role he’s chosen for himself as a German who may be called upon to kill Jews. The screenplay assigns Bruhl's character a role in saving the lives of the Jewish passengers.

Even Pike’s character, a Baader-Meinhof veteran and the more hardened of the two Germans, eventually admits she might have made a wrong choice.

Padilha knows how to give a realistic pulse to action, and the movie offers an important footnote at the end. Yonatan Netanyahu (Angel Bonanni), the only Israeli soldier to die in the raid, was the brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current prime minister.

Eventually, the movie tells us that if peace ever is to be achieved, Israel must swallow hard and negotiate. 7 Days in Entebbe does little to make that conclusion feel like more than a faint hope, an afterthought rather than a genuine expression of conviction.

Scars of hatred and the American West

Christian Bale portrays an embittered soldier in Hostiles.

Sometimes, in straining to grapple with deep issues, a film can show more strain than grapple. That struck me as the case with Hostiles, a Western that wants to explore the impact of genocidal behavior -- not so much on its Native American victims -- but on the US soldiers who fought the many battles that led to the near-destruction of the indigenous populations of the West.

From the outset, director Scott Cooper makes his position clear. He begins with a chilling DH Lawrence quote that serves a tone-setter for what's to follow: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted," Lawrence wrote.

In the world Hostiles imagines, whites hate Native Americans and Native Americans return the favor, each group seeing the other as murderous savages. Of course, if victory has anything to do with savagery, the whites are the greater offenders.

Christian Bale plays Captain Joseph Blocker. A grizzled veteran of the so-called Indian wars, Blocker hates the Native Americans who have taken the scalps of many of his comrades in arms. Perhaps in an attempt to balance the scales, a visiting Eastern writer accuses Blocker of having taken more scalps than Sitting Bull.

But -- or so the argument goes -- for Blocker, killing is the job that he's sworn to do.

Blocker faces a challenge when he's ordered to escort a dying Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) and his family from New Mexico to Montana. On orders from the president Benjamin Harrison, the Army must make it possible for the imprisoned Yellow Hawk to die on land that he calls home.

A staunch believer that Native American savagery knows few bounds, Blocker makes little attempt to conceal his disdain for Studi’s Yellow Hawk, a man who has killed his share of white men. Both men fought at Wounded Knee.

Not long after the journey begins, a woman whose family is massacred by Comanche warriors (Rosamund Pike) in the movie's brutal prologue, joins the group. Pike's Rosalie is stunned and bereft and Blocker treats her with a tenderness that suggests that he may not be quite as hard-hearted as we've been led to believe.

The movie’s major question becomes obvious from the start: Will Blocker come to some sort of appreciation for the fact that Yellow Hawk and his family are human beings, no less wounded and embittered than he? Both men are deeply scarred, but Yellow Hawk seems to have done a better job of carrying his burden.

Ben Foster turns up as a soldier whose wanton disregard for life makes him one of the movie’s only true savages. Blocker shows him no mercy, although Foster's character insists that, as soldiers, they are kindred spirits.

Cooper tries to add some complexity, distinguishing between various tribes. At one point, Yellow Hawk helps the soldiers fight off a group of vicious Comanches that he likens to rattlesnakes, vipers who will destroy whites and Native Americans alike.

I’m not sure Cooper knows how to resolve the gaping contradiction that occurs when racism and humanity begin to clash in the same characters. In addition, those who argue that the movie represents another attempt to use indigenous people to redeem a white character shouldn’t entirely be dismissed.

It’s difficult to shake the feeling that Cooper isn’t so much telling a story as he’s applying contemporary sensitivities to the nagging problem of how whites can resolve the undigested shame that results from the way the US has treated Native Americans. He turns the film into a kind of social laboratory that often strands its actors in self-conscious silences.

The characters in Hostiles are laconic and, to cite Lawrence, hard and isolate, but when it comes to articulating the movie's points, they also seem to speak in ways that hit too many points squarely on the nose. Whatever the case, Hostiles doesn’t quite find its way through the rough thematic course it sets for itself.

Their love spurred an international affair

A United Kingdom stars David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike as an interracial couple in the midst of a political storm.

For most American audiences the story of the romance between Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams will be an unfamiliar one. The two met in Britain in 1947 when Khama was preparing to assume the tribal throne of his people in Bechuanaland, now Botswana and, at the time, a British protectorate. Their interracial relationship become ensnared in global politics, both in Britain and in Khama's homeland.

The British, who had multiple interests in the region, were very much against a high-profile, black/white relationship at a time when South Africa was instituting its odious apartheid policies. Not that the British, a people well-schooled in colonialism, needed an excuse for racism.

Aside from the freshness of the story, the movie seeks to score by casting David Oyelowo as Khama and Rosamund Pike, as Williams.

Oyelowo, who also produced, gives the movie a solid moral center. Loving and patient, his Khama believes that he can win the confidence of his people when he returns to Africa.

As portrayed by Pike, Williams may not know exactly what she's in for, but she clearly loves Khama, and wants to make a life with him. As time passes, she makes a sincere effort to win over resistant Africans. She's an ordinary woman who, under different circumstances, might have led a typical English life as a wife and mother.

Director Amma Asante (Belle) brings a solid, conventional style to Guy Hibbert's screenplay, but unlike Hibbert's tautly compelling Eye in the Sky, United Kingdom tends to drift toward dullness without quite surrendering to it.

For the most part, the British come across as cruel imperialists (including an unseen Winston Churchill). Tom Felton embodies the British attitude of entitled indifference to Khama's pleas.

The African characters show the opposite side of the racial coin. Khama's sister (Terry Pheto) resists accepting Williams for a long time, as does his aunt Ella (Abena Ayivor).

Vusi Kuene portrays Khama's uncle -- the man who raised him and who groomed him for royal ascendance. Kuene's character cannot reconcile himself to his nephew's marriage.

Not surprisingly, Oyelowo -- who played Martin Luther King in Selma -- has a major uplifting speech toward the movie's conclusion. The story ends optimistically with Botswana abandoning monarchy in favor of democracy. Khama became the country's first president.

A United Kingdom doesn't shrink from presenting explosive racial issues, but the movie remains a rather dry telling of an incendiary tale.

She's gone -- but to where?

Director David Fincher takes on a bestseller with lots of trashy but entertaining twists.

In the beginning, the marriage seems idyllic. An attractive young magazine journalist teams up with a gorgeous woman who earns her living writing quizzes for magazines. They live in New York City, and appear to be clued to a power-couple track.

Then, comes the derailment.

He loses his job: She doesn't have a whole lot happening in her life. They decide to abandon New York City and head for his hometown in Missouri. There, he'll run a neighborhood bar, and she'll have entirely too much time to wonder what happened to her life.

So goes the setup for director David Fincher's eagerly awaited adaptation of Gillian Flynn's 2012 best-seller, Gone Girl, which stars Ben Affleck as the husband and Rosamund Pike as his wife.

Gone Girl is the kind of movie about which much can't be said. To discuss the plot in any detail puts one knee deep into spoiler territory.

For those who haven't read Flynn's book, all that really needs to be known is that Affleck's Nick Dunne arrives home from work on the day of his fifth anniversary to discover that his wife is missing.

Signs of violence suggest that he should call the cops: The rest of the movie concerns the search for Pike's Amy as Fincher provides us with various views of the marriage at the film's tricky heart.

After a slow and somewhat awkward start, Fincher eventually gets down to business, playing with our sympathies as Nick comes under suspicion in his wife's disappearance.

One minute, we feel Nick may be getting a raw deal. The next minute, we're leaning toward Amy's version of things and wondering whether Nick isn't a monster who killed his wife.

Each character gets a turn at narrating the story. We hear Nick in voice-over fragments: Amy's view is presented in the form of excerpts from her diary (read by Pike).

Affleck's performance isn't showy, but it's effective. He's playing a guy whose life is spinning out of control. Affleck's Nick does his best to cope and to combat what seems to be a long-standing depression.

Pike confronts a different problem: Amy tends to be more of a sketch than a fully drawn character -- albeit the sketch gets more interesting as the movie progresses.

The supporting cast is first rate. Kim Dickens, familiar from HBO's Treme, does nice work as a detective in the Francis McDormand, Fargo mode, and Patrick Fugit (who starred in Almost Famous as a kid) plays her skeptical sidekick, Officer James Gilpin.

Tyler Perry nails his role as an attorney whose confidence stems from his unquestionable slickness. He specializes in defending accused husbands. Neil Patrick Harris portrays one of Amy's former boyfriends, a preppie type who never gave up his crush on her.

Carrie Coon deserves special mention: She plays Nick's twin sister, a woman who's entirely devoted to him, but who also knows his weak spots.

Fincher (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network, Zodiac and Se7en) is not a breezy director: He moves deliberately, and he may be guilty of letting an hour and half's worth of movie stretch into two hours and 25 minutes.

But in the end, Gone Girl's many twists and turns -- Flynn wrote the screenplay -- carry the day, turning the movie into fun with a trashy tilt.

Beyond that, Fincher lands some nice -- if obvious -- satirical blows to the media solar plexus: In the 24-hour news cycle, commentators often treat crime stories as morality plays that demand constant blameworthy targets.

To be honest, I wasn't sure that Fincher didn't take the material more seriously than is warranted: In some ways, Gone Girl struck me as glorified and bloodier version of some episodic TV shows, and it's probably unwise to generalize about the state of marriage from what see of Nick and Amy.

Still, Gone Girl provides enough mordant humor and intrigue to keep us engaged right up until the movie's provocative and, I suppose, cynical finale. It's a movie for anyone who's ever said the words "I love you" through clenched teeth.

Another loner, another show

Tom Cruise fights his way to justice as Jack Reacher.

Somewhere along the line, it became mandatory for a certain kind of male hero to display as little emotion as possible, to become an icon of don't-mess-with-me toughness. As played by Tom Cruise, former soldier Jack Reacher -- the main character in a series of popular books by British novelist Lee Child and the title character in Cruise's new movie -- is one such man: decisive, physically fit, brutal when necessary and unencumbered by possessions. Reacher has only one shirt to his name, travels by bus and always seems to keep moving.

Jack Reacher, a new movie adapted from Child's 2005 novel, One Shot, takes place in in Pittsburgh and kicks off with a harrowing shooting. Positioned in a parking garage, a sniper picks off five people in what appear to be random acts of senseless murder.

The sniper (Joseph Sikora) is quickly arrested. Evidence against him seems overwhelming and irrefutable. Of course, in movies, a scenario such as this only can mean one thing: The guy didn't do it. It doesn't take long for the shooter's attorney (Rosamund Pike) to become embroiled in an attempt to discover why Sikora's character has been made into a patsy.

She has help. Just before slipping into a coma, Sikora's character scrawled one sentence on a legal pad, "Get Jack Reacher."

Pike's Helen hires Reacher, who turns up in Pittsburgh for reasons of his own, to help figure things out, a task for which he's well-suited because he's a former military policeman known for his brilliant investigatory powers. You know the drill: Reacher's the kind of guy who can visit a crime scene and notice things that the police always seem to overlook.

The cast of characters drawn together by the murders includes the Pittsburgh District Attorney (Richard Jenkins), who happens to be Helen's father, a man with whom she has long-standing but ill-defined tensions. David Oyelowo plays the lead detective on the case. Neither the DA nor the cop can understand why Helen insists on wasting time on such an unambiguous situation.

Looking a little gaunt in the face, Cruise does his version of the tough, mysterious loner, and the rest of the actors do little to compete with him. How tough is Reacher? He can take out five guys in a fight outside a bar.

The villains in Jack Reacher offer the only hints of personality. They're led by Werner Herzog, a director who spends most of his time behind the camera. Herzog brings just the right amount of sadistic intensity to the proceedings. He's not playing a villain, but Robert Duvall -- in a late-picture appearance as the owner of a shooting range -- adds life to a story that's not without a few dull spots.

The mystery at the heart of writer/director Christopher McQuarrie's screenplay isn't especially compelling, and Jack Reacher builds toward a shoot-out at a construction site that doesn't exactly represent a high point in the history of imaginatively presented action.

McQuarrie, who wrote the screenplay for Cruise's Valkyrie, receives a major assist from cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who gives Pittsburgh an appropriately noirish sheen, and who has fun with a woozy car chase, the movie's best action set piece.

But there's something tired and lame at the core of Jack Reacher, which doesn't exactly break fresh cinematic ground.

I know there's nothing new under the sun, so there's no shame in telling a story about another tough guy who'll let nothing stop him from exercising his own brand of justice. But unlike the best of Cruise's Mission Impossible movies, Jack Reacher isn't enough fun to make you overlook its flaws. And you can't take it all that seriously, either.

'Barney's Version' needed more bite

Giamatti's in peak form, but he can't bring this adaptation of a Mordecai Richler novel fully to life. fully to life.

Barney's Version, the late Mordecai Richler's final novel, has been brought to the screen with Paul Giamatti in the title role, a seemingly perfect match between player and character. Avid and hungry, Barney travels from the faux Bohemianism of youth to the well-established affluence of middle age, supporting his excesses from success as a producer of a crappy but popular sitcom in Montreal.

Giamatti does Barney justice. He captures Barney's boundless skepticism, filtering it through the dawning realizations of a man who thinks he may have wasted his life. Giamatti understands Barney’s competitiveness, as well as his capacity for vindictive sarcasm. Barney is a man who can turn an inadvertent slight into a grudge match.

Of course, Barney drinks too much. Of course, he spends too many evenings planted on bar stools watching his beloved Montreal Canadians. Of course, he’s perpetually resentful.

Unfortunately, Giamatti’s performance can’t quite keep the movie from looking like an imitation of Richler’s novel rather than a full-bodied drama. On screen, Barney’s Version feels sketchy and episodic, a story in search of something to say.

The movie's title suggests a problem that surely would have confronted any filmmaker trying to adapt Richler's acerbic and very funny novel. Barney's Version was written in the first person. Mired in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, the always cynical Barney Panofsky reviews a life in which he made bundles of money, married three women, and, at one point, was suspected of murdering his best and most admired friend.

All of that worked well in a novel of caustic density. But director Richard J. Lewis can’t find a dramatic equivalent for the tug and bite of Richler's prose, which gave full vent to Barney’s every prejudice. What we get here is not Barney's version of events, but an outsider's view of Barney.

Barney, as someone in the novel says of him, is a collector of grievances. He also treats his impulses as if they were virtues. What else can be said of a guy who decides to fall in love with a stranger during his own wedding reception? Clearly, Barney is not afraid to court disaster. Maybe he even craves it.

Like Philip Roth, Richler, who died in 2001, sometimes found himself at odds with the Jewish community, perhaps because he seldom saw his characters through veils of sentimentality. He had a feeling for rough-and-tumble Jews who weren’t afraid of a fight, smart guys who didn’t always know how to get out of their own way.

On screen, though, some of Richler’s characters come off as caricatures. Barney's second wife (Minnie Driver), for example, is too much a spoiled brat of Montreal’s Jewish upper crust.

The pragmatic Panofsky men – particularly Barney’s father --stand in opposition to the privileged Jewish world that gave birth to Driver’s character. Dustin Hoffman, who's becoming a master of small roles, plays Izzy Panofsky, a retired Montreal detective of happily crude temperament. (A familial note: Hoffman's son Jake turns up late in the movie; he plays Barney's son.) Izzy may not be the world’s most self-aware person, but that’s precisely what makes him tolerable. He’s unashamed.

Barney's life revolves around three women: his first wife (Rachelle Lefevre) is a sexually advanced, free wheeling painter Barney meets as a young man during a period when he’s hanging around with artist and writer friends in Rome. (In the novel, this interlude takes place in Paris). Barney’s second wife (Driver) represents the life Barney’s supposed to lead. Lower middle class kid marries money, does all right for himself, improves his standing.

The love of Barney’s life, played by the beautiful and sophisticated British actress Rosamund Pike, seems detached from the class distinctions that ripple through Montreal’s Jewish community. Like most of the women in the movie, Pike’s Miriam never seems fully realized. She becomes Barney’s third wife.

Throughout the story, Barney tries to maintain his friendship with his dissolute but brilliant pal Boogie Moscovitch (Scott Speedman), a promising young writer whose life increasingly is dominated by drugs and alcohol. Even at his worst, Boogie never entirely surrenders the air of superiority that both attracts and repels Barney.

During the course of the movie, Barney's youth gives way to age. His life is tarnished by error, the onset of Alzheimer's, and the dissolution of his marriage to Miriam, thanks to a night of infidelity.

Marital disaster probably loomed anyway; Miriam already had begun to express a desire for self-realization, seeking to return to her pre-marital career as an NPR-style radio interviewer. She's supported in this ambition by a vegan producer (Bruce Greenwood), a man Barney immediately and thoroughly detests. And, yes, this part of the movie feels clichéd, a gesture toward passing time and trends, not unlike the long hair the characters sport in the movie’s Rome segments.

Some of Lewis’ scenes are vibrant and alive, and his movie stands as an often-interesting look at a man with enough appreciation of irony to name his production company, Totally Unnecessary Productions.

For all it gets right, Barney’s Version misses much of Richler's invaluable raucousness and rancor. It’s Barney’s story, but with a little too much of the bite removed from the incessant musings of an old dog who probably thinks he never really had his day.