Convicts on a mission in the wild

 The Weight begs comparison to the Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 French classic Wages of Fear, remade in 1977 as Sorcerer by director William Friedkin. Like his predecessors, first-time director Padraic McKinley offers a stripped-down Depression Era story about men facing perilous conditions as they transport gold through the wilds of Oregon. An action-oriented plot kicks in when the warden of a camp prison (Russell Crowe) offers Ethan Hawke’s Murphy an opportunity to win a pardon. Wrongly convicted and eager to reunite with the young daughter who has been sent to foster care, the widowed Murphy selects a gang of cohorts for a mission that will take them through rough terrain. The prisoners are accompanied by guards (Sam Hazeldine and George Burgess) who leave the heavy lifting to the convicts.  At one point, they must get the gold across a rope bridge that can only support the weight of one of them.  McKinley builds suspense into the movie’s set pieces and adds flavor with supporting characters, notably troublemaker Rankin (Austin Amelio) and a native-American woman (Julia Jones) who joins the prisoners’ foray. Played by a grizzled-looking Hawke with fierce determination, Murphy emerges as a natural leader who dominates the proceedings. Does The Weight measure up to its predecessors? Not quite, but it offers a serviceable helping of tension as its characters confront one danger after another. And, yes, when it comes to gold,  you can bet that deceit and greed will be in play.

A psychiatrist at Nuremberg

 

  In Nuremberg, Director James Vanderbilt benefits from a trial that remains relevant and compelling 80 years after it captured the world's attention, the Nuremberg trials of 1945.

  The subject is not new to movies; Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) stands as one of the best-known dramas to deal with Nazi war criminals.

   Vanderbilt tells a real-life story that's less familiar, basing his movie on the experiences of Douglas M. Kelley, a lieutenant colonel assigned an unusual task. A psychiatrist by trade, Kelley was ordered to evaluate Nuremberg's prisoners, including Hermann Goring, Hitler's second in command.

   Meeting with Nazis in dank cells in a bombed-out city was no easy task. Though certain to be sentenced to death, Goring -- played by Russell Crowe -- remained calm and cunning. Crowe plays him as self-assured and arrogant, a man who believes that his inherent power can't be taken away by lesser mortals even in captivity. 

   Rami Malek portrays Kelley, an Army psychiatrist whose professional ethics are tested when the military asks him to provide "confidential" information that could be used to undermine Goring at trial.

    Eager to establish his reputation, the somewhat naive Kelley plans to write a book about his experiences at Nuremberg. Goring accuses the aspiring author of hitchhiking on the infamous reputations of high-ranking Nazis, principally Goring himself. Kelley knows Goring isn't entirely wrong about that.

  Kelley's book -- 22 Cells in Nuremberg -- details some of what occurred between Kelley and imprisoned members of the German high command. Kelley hoped to identify the cause of their evil. Surely, such horrendous crimes couldn't have been committed by ordinary men.

   The movie, however, isn't based on Kelley's book but on Jack El-Hai's The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Herman Goring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII. That's a long title, and it's matched by a two-hour and 28-minute movie that features Michael Shannon as Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court justice who believed the Nazis should be tried rather than summarily executed. Not everyone shared Jackson's views.

    As the movie unfolds, Kelley develops a relationship with Goring. The psychiatrist visited Goring's wife (Lotte Verbeek) and young daughter and treated them sympathetically. He brought Goring letters from his wife and seems shocked when he discovers the depths of Nazi depravity, a reaction that mirrors the way many felt immediately after the war.

    We don't get to know a great deal about Kelley, and Jackson receives less attention, although Vanderbilt deals with the political maneuvering required to ensure that the trial was more than the US versus the Nazis. He wanted it to seem as if the world was standing in judgment.

   As if to emphasize this point, Richard E. Grant portrays Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, a British deputy chief prosecutor who comes to Jackson's rescue when the American prosecutor is about to be bested by Goring during a tense moment of testimony.

    The movie's dramatic high point, the trial, includes real footage from Hitler's death camps, horrific no matter how many times we may have seen such images.

    Perhaps to add topical flair, Vanderbilt includes obvious dialogue about the dangers of power-hungry leaders and autocracy. It's as if he's underlining points that are ingrained in the story he's telling. They hardly needed elaboration. 

  I don't think Nuremberg is the great movie such a momentous subject requires. It can bog down in exposition that tends to be instructional, something on the order of Nuremberg 101.

   Still, Vanderbilt's conventional telling of the story is compelling when it needs to be. It also encourages thought about an observation that's not new to the movie or to anyone familiar with Hannah Arendt's oft-cited coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which occurred 16 years after Nuremberg, and gave rise to Arendt's key phrase, "the banality of evil."

    Search as one will, it's impossible to identify traits of malignant exceptionalism that lead ordinary men to such monstrous behavior. Not everyone agrees, but it's still worth pondering.

    A footnote: Goring escaped the noose, swallowing a cyanide capsule he had hidden from his captors shortly before he was to be hanged.*

*I've used the spelling of Goring used in the credits, but couldn't figure out how to add the umlaut over the "o" that German requires. 

A cop who has lost his memory

I can watch Russell Crowe in almost anything and not feel cheated. And, yes, I've seen The Pope's Exorcist. Crowe has traveled a long way from his Gladiator days; he now seems immersed in pure character work with little emphasis on heroism. In Sleeping Dogs, a jumbled noir thriller, Crowe plays a retired homicide detective who's suffering from Alzheimer's. Crowe's Roy Freeman has been given an experimental treatment to help jar his memory back to life. The story kicks in when a death row inmate (Pacharo Mzembe) asks Roy to revisit a case in which he helped get a conviction. The former detective struggles to rebuild long-ago events involving the murder of an academic (Marton Csokas) who had a sexy femme fatale research assistant (Karen Gillan). Roy asks his one-time partner and drinking buddy (Tommy Flanagan) to help. Some of the story is told in flashbacks that introduce us to an aspiring author (Harry Greenwood) who falls for Gillan's character.  Crowe gives the movie a solid center but it's not enough to keep incredulity at bay. A surprise twist of an ending fails to shock (you probably will see it coming) and Sleeping Dogs winds up squandering Crowe's efforts. 

Love, thunder, and a ton of silliness

     Director Taika Waititi follows his last Marvel outing, Thor: Ragnarok, with Thor: Love and Thunder and achieves pretty much the same result. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

    This edition of Thor adds more winking fun to a Marvel Universe that sometimes takes itself too seriously.

    Thor, of course, is a god. In case you’ve been wondering, gods do suffer. In this case, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) has been pining over a lost love, Natalie Portman's Jane Foster. 

   Love aside, the story wisely begins by introducing its villain, a character with one of the better marvel names, Gorr, The God Butcher (Christian Bale under a ton of prosthetics that make his head resemble a rotting hard-boiled egg.) 

    What's troubling Gorr? He hates the gods for not answering his prayers and saving his dying daughter. He decides that the best way to avenge himself is to kill every god.

   After acquiring a magical sword that will help him destroy the gods, Gorr gets to work.

    Of course,  other characters populate this shamelessly over-stuffed movie.

   Although his role isn't large, Russell Crowe brings an enjoyably odd accent to the role of Zeus. I've seen the accent described as "Mediterranean." Whatever it is, Crowe gives the movie a strange, campy quality that he underscores when Zeus playfully flounces the skirt-like garment he wears under his armor.

    If you judge only by the trailer, Love and Thunder isn't much to look at: Waititi and his team give Zeus's godly realm a gaudy golden grandeur and splay the story across a variety of sets ranging from low-rent to elaborate. 

    Tessa Thompson plays the movie's other main character, Valkyrie, a woman who runs a theme park version of Asgard, one of nine realms that ... Oh, who cares? 

   Only Marvel obsessives can keep track of all these characters, universes, and crossover features. I've given up even trying.

    Know, though, that the Guardians of the Galaxy make an appearance in Love and Thunder. Moreover, Korg, the rock creature voiced by Waititi, appears in what amounts to an extended cameo.

    In a possible bow to feminism, Portman's Jane Foster -- also known as The Mighty Thor -- wields Thor's hammer,  a task made more poignant by the fact that in her human incarnation Jane, an astrophysicist by trade, has terminal cancer.

   God? Human? Human who can assume godlike qualities? Let's just say Jane goes through changes.

   The movie has a mild emotional kick, but for me, it's saved by its unashamed silliness. Could we have done without it? Sure. But at least this disheveled bit of Marvel mayhem leaves you (or at least it left me) smiling.

   Maybe that's because Waititi knows how to be silly without being stupid.

Russell Crowe rages in 'Unhinged'

Russell Crowe always interests me, even when I’m unenthusiastic about the movies in which he appears. That’s certainly the case with Unhinged, which seems less a fully developed movie than a 90-minute expression of uncontainable rage.
     Having put on some pounds (who hasn’t?), Crowe portrays a nameless man who makes his first appearance on screen by smashing in the door of a Los Angeles home and beating at least one of the occupants to death with a hammer that looks as if came from lethal weapons aisle of the hardware store.
     Not content with such startling violence, 
The Man -- as he's referred to in the credits -- sets the whole place on fire.
    Aside from the fact that this is not a guy you’d want to invite over for drinks, you'll quickly understand that Unhinged plans to barrel through scenarios that build on quickly sketched urban aggravations: gridlocked traffic, single-mom frustrations (more on this as we go) and, the rage that ordinary people can develop when they find themselves behind the wheel of a car.
    Director Derek Borte arrives at the launching point of his drama when a young woman (Caren Pistorious) becomes irritated. Already late taking her son (Gabriel Bateman) to school, Pistorius's Rachel winds up at a red light behind the pick-up truck  The Man is driving.
    In movies, a big pick-up driven by a big, bearded man might as well have a personalized license plate that reads, "Ominous."
    When the pick-up doesn't move quickly enough to keep Rachel from fuming at having to sit through another red light, she leans on her horn instead of offering what The Man calls "a courtesy tap."
    The issue of “courtesy taps” sounds like something that might fuel an entire episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm but that doesn't mean a movie as single-minded as Unhinged brims with creative possibilities.
    As the movie proceeds, Borte creates wincingly effective car chases, putting the violent pedal to the brutal metal:  Crowe's character evidently likes to set things and people on fire and he believes it's his job to teach Rachel a lesson.
    Unlike Falling Down, a similar movie that starred Michael Douglas and which was directed by the late Joel Schumacher, Unhinged isn't about a character who seems to have been bred by the cumulative frustrations of a dysfunctional society.   
   He's not an everyman who has lost his moorings. He's a monster who's waiting to spill his anger on the first available target. I wondered, though, how Unhinged might have looked had Crowe's madman gotten into a road-rage conflict with man.   
     Too often we excuse Hollywood’s worst excesses by putting a B-movie stamp on a film. We argue that a movie such as Unhinged isn’t supposed to do much more than leaves us gasping at its sneering audacity. 
      Motivations, even suggestions that the demented firestorm at the center of Unhinged may be brooding over a divorce, are beside the point.
     But movies also connect to the moments in which they appear and a movie about rage might be the last thing we need at the moment, particularly one as streamlined and unremitting as Unhinged.

A young gay man confronts conversion therapy

Lucas Hedges shines as a young man caught between his family and his sexual identity.

The skills of Lucas Hedges are on display in three highly anticipated fall movies: Mid-90s, Boy Erased and Ben is Back. In Boy Erased, the second of these movies to reach the nation's screens, Hedges plays Jared, a young gay man whose religious parents send him to conversion therapy. In Ben is Back, due in December, Hedges portrays a drug-addicted kid whose mother (Julia Roberts) desperately wants to get him off his self-destructive path.

Although his role in the skateboard movie Mid90s is a small one, Hedges -- nominated in 2016 for a best-supporting actor Oscar for Manchester by the Sea -- clearly is having a moment. He deserves it: He should be contributing to movies for a long time.

Boy Erased casts Hedges as the intriguingly conflicted Jared Eamons, a character who can't reconcile his desire to be a normal kid with this sexual inclinations. Sensitive and vulnerable, Hedges never loses touch with the essence of Jared's character: He's a kid who wants to please by doing the right thing.

Jared has been brought up in a fundamentalist Christian environment by his homemaking mother (Nicole Kidman) and his pastor father (Russell Crowe). Unrebellious by nature, Jared takes his faith background seriously.

Boy Erased focuses on what happens when Jared's parents learn that he might be gay and send him to Christian conversion therapy, something he initially approaches with the hope that it will work. Jared wants to be "cured" and he harbors no apparent ill will toward his parents.

Based on a memoir by Gerard Conley -- the model for Jared -- Boy Erased spends much of its time following Jared through conversion therapy where he's guided by Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton). Part cheerleader and part disciplinarian, Sykes bases his actions on the notion that gayness is a choice that can be unchosen with hard work and rigorous applications of faith.

Sykes is assisted by Brandon (Flea), a guy who approaches his job as if he's a drill sergeant charged with yelling the gay out of the young people who find themselves in this program.

During Jared's conversion therapy, he stays in a motel with his mother, who offers support and who watches the impact the "therapy" has on Jared.

The movie, which marks Edgerton's second directorial effort after 2015's The Gift, doesn't spend a lot of time on the other young people who have been sent to Love in Action, the program in which Jared has been enrolled. Troye Sivan plays a curly headed blonde who tells Jared that he should fake his conversion, get out of Love in Action in one piece and then decide how he wants to live. Britton Sear appears as Cameron, a kid with no ability to articulate what he's going through.

For all of its sincerity in trying to deal with the devastating impact such therapy can have on young people, the movie's most interesting and vividly drawn characters are pushed to the periphery: As Jared's mother, Kidman backs her husband in his faith decisions; she's spent her life as a supporting player in her husband's drama. Gradually, she begins to understand that her heart has room in it for two loves: God and her son.

Crowe receives less screen time but wastes none of it. A Baptist pastor who also owns a Ford dealership, Crowe's Marshall Eamons can't break through the boundaries that have defined his life. When he tells his son that he can't live in his house as a gay man, he's not threatening, he's simply stating what he sees as a bedrock fact of his existence.

Crowe has a strong final scene with Hedges that wisely refuses to resolve this difficult father/son relationship.

Boy Erased isn't the first movie this year to deal with conversion therapy. This summer saw the release of The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which starred Chloe Grace Moretz as a young woman pushed into a program like the one in which Jared finds himself. That movie focused on the way Moretz's rebellious character found kindred spirits to help her survive brainwashing by people who present a friendlier front than those in Boy Erased.

Though quite different in their style and tone, both movies are credible -- if unexceptional -- dramas. The path through conversion therapy offers few surprises. Still, a high-powered cast adds distinction to Boy Erased. Kidman and Crowe do memorable work and Lucas adds another strong performance to his already impressive resume.

'Water Diviner' dilutes its power

Russell Crowe moves behind the camera for his first directorial effort.

World War I cost Australian farmer Joshua Connor everything he held dear. Three of his sons were killed in the Battle of Gallipoli. His beloved wife was so crippled by grief and shock that she took her own life.

Feeling that his existence had lost all purpose, Connor decided to travel to Gallipoli to search for the bodies of his sons. He had promised is late wife, he would bring the boys -- or at least their bodies -- home.

Russell Crowe found Connor's story interesting enough to move behind the camera and direct his first movie, The Water Diviner.

Perhaps knowing that Water Diviner would be a hard sell without a star, Crowe also plays the lead role. He's Connor, a character who appears in nearly every frame of a film that's trying to be ... well ... many things: a robust adventure, a grim story about the horrors of war, an encouraging look at friendship across a cultural divide, as well as a romance.

That's a bit much for any movie. The overload may explain why The Water Diviner turns into a mixed bag of movie that works better in some parts than in others.

Connor, by the way, gives the movie its title. He's unusually adept at discovering water, using divining rods to show him where to dig wells.

The story gets rolling when Connor reaches Turkey. The British army (hated in Turkey) doesn't want Connor to travel to the ravaged battlefield of Gallipoli to search for his sons' bodies. He must fight the military bureaucracy while dealing with the culture shock of being in a country that's entirely foreign to him.

Upon arrival in Turkey, Connor finds a hotel where he's befriended by the son (Dylan Georgiades) of the hotel's owner (Olga Kurylenko). Crowe keeps the romance between Connor and Kurylenko's Ayshe at subdued levels, but it's still a pro forma affair and not nearly as interesting as the brutal war footage (shown in flashback) or the adventure that ensues when Connor hooks up with a Turkish officer (Yilmaz Erdogan) to travel deep into Turkey.

This Turkish officer helps Connor, and paves the way for the movie's big twist, which is both horrific and heartbreaking.

If you know nothing about the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915-16, you may find the movie's politics a bit confusing. British and French troops fought at Gallipoli along with Australian divisions and the New Zealand Army Corps. The Ottoman Empire was allied with the Germans.

Whatever you know, you certainly can follow Connor on an adventure that's layered with grief over a war's massive casualties.

Crowe's well-crafted period piece would have done well to dispense with elements that feel as if they've been added to make the movie more user friendly: The romance between Connor and Ayshe and the surrogate father/son relationship between Connor and Ayshe's son deplete the movie's power rather than adding to its richness.

Crowe isn't afraid to temper his portrait of Connor with bitterness, but as I watched The Water Diviner, I couldn't help wondering whether he too often flinches from the story's hardest truths with the introduction of obvious movie ploys.

'Noah' didn't totally float my boat

Darren Aronofsky makes an intermittently arresting Bible movie.

Early on, director Darren Aronofsky's Noah looks as if the director of movies such as The Black Swan, The Wrestler and The Fountain wants to turn a familiar Bible story into a bit of second-rate sci-fi.

What else to think when watching Aronofsky reprise the Genesis story in bite-sized visual chunks. If that weren't enough, Aronofsky later introduces giant rock creatures called Nephillim, fallen angels who stomp about the Earth like refugees from a Michael Bay movie.

Part spectacle, part attempt to wrestle with Big Questions (capital letters intentional) and part the story of a family in crisis, Noah provides Aronofsky's take on a tale in which God -- always called The Creator in the movie -- decided that mankind was too corrupt to preserve.

You pretty much know the story. Noah (Russell Crowe) is the last good man in a rotten world. Here, he's presented as a kind of proto-environmentalist who suspects that the world is doomed. Noah doesn't speak directly to God, but he reads signs and omens -- flowers that sprout magically in an instant, for example.

Understandably troubled by the prospect of global annihilation, Noah gathers his family, and sets out to visit his great-grandfather Methuselah, Anthony Hopkins as a kind of Old Testament Yoda. Perhaps Methuselah will know what to do.

Noah's accompanied on his journey by his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) and this three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth (Douglas Booth, Logan Lerman and Leo McHugh Carroll).

En route, the family picks up a young woman whose life Noah saves, Emma Watson's Ila.

Religion aside, the movie gods must be served. Perhaps that's why we're only about 10 minutes into the movie when Noah finds himself wielding a cudgel against barbaric bad guys.

Noah, we learn, is a descendant of Seth, Adam and Eve's third son: The murderous Cain, a better-known son of the first couple, also produced offspring, a group of carnivorous, self-serving louts led by Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone).

Needless to say, Noah pours on the special effects when it comes to the flood (death by CGI) and the arrival of the animals that Noah has been charged with saving.

The creatures show up on their own, proving that Noah was the first to understand the now-popular bromide: Build it, and they will come.

Aronofsky is at his most daring when dealing with the post-flood Noah.
Motivated by his faith, Noah goes off the deep end, turning into a zealot who (like most zealots) goes too far.

Noah thinks God has appointed him as the man responsible for wiping out all humanity and restoring the universe to its original purity; i.e., a place with no people.

Other themes rise with the flood waters: The movie pits humanity's boundless hubris against a vegetarian Noah's deeper understanding of man's more humble place in the universe.

In an attempt to bring this already obvious conflict into even sharper focus, Aronofsky's speculative screenplay -- written with Ari Handel -- finds Tubal-Cain stowing away on the ark, and trying to involve Noah's resentful son Ham in a mutinous plot.

Tubal-Cain functions as the proponent of the dark side: The Creator has abandoned the world. He and man no longer are on speaking terms. Man, therefore, is justified in grabbing anything he can. It's not the heavens that rule the world, but man's will.

Noah, on the other hand, understands that man can't despoil the planet without consequences, and at one point, he even wanders through what look like the ruins of an industrialized society, demonstrating that Noah is not taking place in what we might commonly call "the real world."

Those who have seen The Fountain shouldn't be surprised that Aronofosky frequently attempts to operate in full visionary mode. He shows us Noah's prophetic dreams, the snake that tempted Eve and even summarizes the evolution of humanity in a segment that seems a heady mixture of Cosmos and the Bible.

The movie does attempt to answer several nagging questions:

Q: How did Noah care for all those animals?
A: He put them to sleep by waving incense-like smoke over them.

Q: How did humanity continue if Noah had only three sons?
A: Enter Watson's character, who has a romance with Shem. (In the biblical account, Noah's three sons all were married and took their wives on the ark.)

Q: How did Noah build the massive ark, which looks like a giant floating shoe box?
A: Those massive rock creatures helped.

We know from the outset that a message awaits: The movie finally pronounces that mercy and love are important balancing virtues to justice. A dejected Noah finds renewed hope.

The acting doesn't amount to much. An increasingly grizzled Crowe does what he can with Noah. He's playing a character who must read the divine tea leaves. Noah finds himself in a frenzy as he approaches a pivotal incident that seems to have been inspired by the story of the sacrifice of Isaac.

A little Bible story here? A little Bible story there? What's the difference?

Oddly, the only character who seems to operate with palpable conviction is Winstone's Tubal-Cain. But he's also mildly extraneous. With God wiping out almost all of humanity, did we need a big-screen bad guy for added melodrama?

I get the problem, though. Without a little something extra what would Noah and his family do once the Earth -- made as bleak and forbidding as possible -- is flooded? Play canasta and wait for the waters to subside?

Overall, Noah stands as a decidedly mixed achievement, less a compelling story than an attempt by Aronofsky and cohorts to illustrate cosmic ideas.

And sometimes, even Aronofsky's considerable visual skills fail him, as when he references The Creator by tilting his camera skyward.

Oh well, this strange mishmash of a movie considerately shortens the purported 40 days and nights of rain, and certainly doesn't feel like any other Bible movie. Maybe I'd have felt better about the whole thing had it begun with these words, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

Action filled, but less than super

Instead of being a renewed helping of Superman, Man of Steel feels like one more summer blockbuster.

Despite a ton of action -- some of it impressive, some merely clangorous -- Man of Steel just didn't feel like a Superman movie to me.

It wasn't just that Henry Cavill, the British actor who plays Superman, looks a bit like a young John Travolta -- only buffed to the max. And it wasn't that many of the touchstone events marking Clark Kent's evolution to Superman pass without appropriate fanfare. And it wasn't that lovable stock figures such as Daily Planet editor Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) have been drained of vitality or even that spunky Lois Lane (Amy Adams) knows Superman's true identity from the start. They even smooch.

Those things don't help, but none of them prove fatal.

But by flooding the Superman story with blockbuster-style action and by presenting it in distinctly darker hues, director Zack Snyder (Watchmen) has deprived Man of Steel of the innocence, humor and moral certainty on which Superman thrives.

And by updating the series to the present day, the filmmakers are forced to abandon some of Superman's trademark flourishes. In the age of the cell phone, Clark Kent would be hard pressed to find a phone booth in which to change into his trademark outfit, form fighting tights and a red cape. Even Superman's suit has been rendered in a darker shade of blue than those of his predecessors, suggesting a super hero for an era consumed by global gloom.

And that "S" on Superman's chest? You might have thought it stood for Superman; it's really a symbol of hope from his home planet, Krypton.

Snyder & company treat Man of Steel as an origins story. In much of the movie, Superman is referred to as, Kal-el, the name he was given by his father Jor-el (Russell Crowe) on Krypton.

This young superhero has yet to discover his destiny, which eventually will cast him as a Christ-like savior for a needy planet, providing, of course, you can imagine a savior whose battles can result in the wanton destruction of whole cites.

At the movie's end, Metropolis becomes the stage for a fierce battle between Kal-el and General Zod (Michael Shannon), a villain who escapes imprisonment, along with a handful of dedicated followers after the planet Krypton self-destructs. The planet's core gives way, much like the center of this highly anticipated re-start.

In case you think I'm exaggerating about the connection between Superman and a more widely acknowledge savior, consider this: The movie includes a scene in which a troubled Clark Kent talks to a priest. A stained-glass figure of a kneeling Jesus provides an obvious symbolic backdrop for the conversation, which takes place moments before Superman makes an appearance in his trademark cape.

Perusal of the supporting cast gives you a quick idea about the way Man of Steel unfolds. Kevin Coster appears as Superman's earthly father, the dad who doesn't want his adopted son to reveal his powers lest the wary residents of Earth turn on him.

Diane Lane -- unconvincingly aged during the proceedings, plays Clark's mother -- and a group of mostly indistinguishable actors portray General Zod's evil devotees.

Zod plans to destroy humanity and reconstruct the planet Krypton on Earth, thus ensuring the survival of his race. To do this, he must tamper with the Earth's gravity and take possession of a Codex, a device in which all the genetic codes of Krypton have been implanted.

Man of Steel doesn't skimp on action. When Superman, still a drifting Clark Kent, saves the crew of a burning oil rig, the large scaled imagery proves impressive. So do CGI images of a monster tornado that sweeps over Smallville.

And for those who like pulpy views of alien planets, early depictions of Krypton may prove interesting. Of course, these also devolve into showers of fiery pyrotechnics.

Making Zod the villain tends to turn Man of Steel into a second-rate space opera that's equipped with ominous spaceships that resemble giant bugs that perhaps should have been fought with mega-blasts of Raid.

A booming display of CGI dominates a protracted finale that features so much destruction, you might think that Snyder hired Michael Bay (of Transformers fame) as a consultant.

There had been hope that the participation of Christopher Nolan (of Batman fame) as one of the film's writers and producers would add a compelling contemporary sensibility to the Superman story. But looked at with the benefit of hindsight, a more serious Superman represents a major miscalculation. The same goes for the memory-trigged flashbacks that reveal Superman's childhood.

Kal-el remembers a youth in which he tried to restrain his super powers, prompting an identity crisis that pervades the movie. This Superman really is an alien on Earth.

We're all locked into our personal cultural prisons. In the case of Superman, the walls of mine were built from the comic books I read as a kid when my parents weren't looking, from the early TV show starring George Reeves and from the better Superman movies in which Christopher Reeve found a signature role.

This edition -- which no doubt will smash as many box-office records as it does Metropolis skyscrapers -- seems to lack deep affection for Superman. To me, Man of Steel seems more like a medium-grade summer movie than a convincing revival. I missed the character whose claim to fame involved leaping tall buildings at a single bound and moving faster than a speeding bullet.

But even if you accept Snyder's action-dominated 143 minutes, you may have have to admit that the movie might have benefited from some narrative Super Glue. Are scene-to-scene transitions a totally forgotten art?

Only the movie's final scene offers a hint of the winking chemistry that Superman needs. Yet, it too can seem weirdly misguided. Clark Kent lands a job at the Daily Planet, thus making him one of the few people in any galaxy who doesn't know that the newspaper business is foundering. Bad career choice, Clark.

Man of Steel -- which offers enough action to induce motion sickness -- can't be accused of lacking an interpretive slant. (I didn't like it, but at least it has one.) And, yes, it makes a hell of a lot of noise.

What's missing? How about a major helping of fun? How about a clear sense of yearning for the simple virtues Superman so reliably embodies? By the end of this edition, Superman not only had rocketed through Earth's atmosphere, he'd basically flown the coop.

'Broken City' touches familiar bases

A thriller that may be OK for January, but isn't as good as its cast..

A justice-seeking cop takes matters into this own hands. A long-time New York City mayor works the system and might on occasion dip into his hand into vats of corruption. An opposition candidate says he wants to bring the fresh air of reform to the city. These are some of the ingredients in Broken City, a thriller steeped in so much urban malfeasance that it feels like the recurrence of a chronic disease. To moviegoers, the symptoms are drearily familiar.

Starring Mark Wahlberg as a former NYPD lieutenant who has taken up work as a private investigator, the movie's strong supporting cast includes Russell Crowe (as the reigning New York City mayor); Catherine Zeta-Jones (as his wife); Jeffrey Wright (as New York's police commissioner) and Barry Pepper (as a reform candidate who's opposing what appears to be the mayor's umpteenth run for office).

In this outing, director Allen Hughes (Menace II Society, Dead Presidents and The Book of Eli) makes his first solo effort, operating without his brother, Albert, with whom he usually collaborates. Like the screenplay by Brian Tucker, Hughes's direction isn't always vice-tight, and although his movie qualifies as decent January fare, its characters and observations seem to have fallen off the library shelf marked "Urban Rot."

Wahlberg is the kind of actor who can occupy the center of a movie with an ordinary-guy vibe, and he does that here. His Billy Taggert is a hot-headed ex-cop and struggling alcoholic who left the police force after being acquitted of murder. A court ruled that Billy acted in self-defense, but an unexpected development threatened to cloud the waters, and Billy was forced to take one for the team.

Seven years after leaving the force, Billy has been reduced to taking surreptitious photos of philandering spouses, and trying to collect back fees from deadbeat clients.

Billy returns to mainstream action when Crowe's Mayor Hostetler hires him for a hush-hush job. Billy's told the city's First Lady is having an affair. The mayor wants to know who's poaching on his territory -- and that's only the beginning of what turns into a festival of back-stabbing.

A plump-looking, pumpkin-faced Crowe doesn't quite conquer a New York accent, but he tries to jam as much color as possible into an off-the-rack urban character. Zeta-Jones brings cool beauty and intelligence to her role; and Wright, always good for an off-balance performance, makes the police commissioner difficult to pin down.

Alona Tal impresses as Billy's sassy secretary, and Natalie Martinez appears as Billy's actress girlfriend. Martinez finds herself at the heart of a mostly unnecessary script detour.

The plot can feel as dense as New York traffic, and at one, point, Hughes even tries his hand at a New York City car chase. Let's just say it doesn't measure up to the standard set by William Friedkin in the French Connection.

If you sit through the end credits, you'll notice that some of the movie was filmed in New Orleans. Whether this had anything to do with a nagging sense that something's missing from this New York City-based drama is anybody's guess. Broken City tries hard to be gritty and savvy, but we've seen enough movies to already know what it spends considerable energy discovering.

A dark, melodramatic 'Les Miz'

You may find imperfections, but the big-screen version of Les Miserables ultimately proves stirring.

The voices sometimes seem to be straining. An abundance of extreme close-ups tends to give the movie a feeling of cramped intimacy. Although filmed mostly on sets, the movie steeps itself in gritty 19th century realism. It's a musical with dirt under its fingernails.

I'm talking about Les Miserables, the big-screen adaptation of the much-revered musical that made its debut in Paris in 1980 and seems to have been in production somewhere ever since.

Melodramatic, operatic and seen through cinematographer Danny Cohen's dark lens, Les Miserables bypasses its imperfections, ultimately getting where it needs to go. It's less a story well-told than a production massively mounted, but that may be precisely what the material needs.

Based on an 1862 Victor Hugo novel, Les Miserables thunders its way through nearly three hours of suffering, death and melodrama, frequently miring its cast in mud, muck and -- as the title promises -- the kind of bone-deep misery that might have roused envy even in Dickens, himself no slouch when it came to injustice and suffering.

As directed by Tom Hooper (The King's Speech), Les Miserables is top heavy with marquee names, including Anne Hathaway, who tackles the role of the tormented Fantine in a performance in which emotion seems to spill from her every pore.

I'm not going to provide background for every character in Les Miz, but Fantine, you may recall, is a single mother, a status that caused her to be scorned and persecuted for profligacy in France of the 1800s. And, yes, it might be advisable to bone up on Hugo's story before you go because plot points breeze by as if propelled by wind machines.

The story centers on poor Jean Val Jean (Hugh Jackman), the ex-convict who violates his parole and spends a lifetime fleeing Javert (Russell Crowe), a lawman who applies justice like a lash. Amanda Seyfried turns up as Fantine's daughter, Cosette, a woman who eventually is sheltered by Jean Val Jean.

All of this takes place against a post-revolutionary historical backdrop in which the monarchy has been restored in France, and the people are suffering under the weight of too much regal indifference.

The movie's third act deals with the revolt of 1832, introducing us to Marius (Eddie Redmayne), a revolutionary who's smitten by Cosette. Be assured barricades will be stormed. The spirit of the people will be aroused. You will be stirred.

To heighten the feeling of emotional urgency, Hooper had his actors sing their numbers as the cameras rolled rather than relying on lip-synching. The technique is employed to mixed result.

Jackman, who has a history in musical theater, carries it off convincingly, as does Hathaway. Crowe, who has a background singing with rock bands, is only moderately successful. Trussed up in the costume of a 19th century lawman, Crowe moves around as if encased in plaster. Javert's a rigid guy, but Crowe never seems entirely comfortable playing him.

Hooper doesn't quite suffocate the production, but I wish he had let it breathe some, and I got tired of watching close-ups of the singers. Hooper must have wanted his camera to bring us close to the performances, but the face of a singer -- particularly when grappling with heavy emotion -- isn't always a thing of beauty.

The major numbers in Les Miserables -- At the End of the Day, I Dreamed a Dream and One Day More -- are effectively performed, and there's even a bit of comic relief. Sacha Baron Cohen makes an appropriately despicable and conniving Thénardier, an inn-keeper who for a time takes charge of Cosette. Baron Cohen receives an able assist from Helena Bonham Carter -- now a specialist in playing grotesque-looking women -- as Madame Thénardier. Samantha Barks makes a bit of splash as their daughter, Éponine.

I'm not a particular fan of musicals, and Les Miz involves wall-to-wall singing with almost no spoken dialogue. I can't exactly say that Les Miserables left me humming any of its tunes. But whatever problems the big-screen version has, I mostly enjoyed it and even felt a slight tingling of the spine during its finale. Put another way, Les Miserables has genuine theatrical power.