Whodunit? No matter, the actors are fun

     We're in the 1950s and London audiences are flocking to a stage  adaptation of Agatha Christie's Mousetrap, so much so that the production has just celebrated its 100th performance. 

   Always eager to capitalize on a bona fide success, Hollywood has taken note: A film production looms. 

   At a party celebrating the play's success, the cynical director who has been asked to make the movie is murdered. The age-old question arises: Whodunit?

    In the case of See How They Run, it hardly matters who committed the crime. The movie is less a mystery than a genre spoof  that clearly knows the game its playing.

     Working from a screenplay by Mark Chappell, director Tom George allows his movie to run on winking humor and the pleasure of watching actors "sell'' characters that border on the parodic.

     First, there's Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody), the obnoxious and newly murdered movie director who we learn had been feuding with the movie's screenwriter, the mincing Melvyn Crocker-Norris (David Oyelowo). 

     Two policeman anchor the story. Demonstrating a flare for character comedy, Saoirse Ronan portrays Constable Stalker, a novice cop who's eager to prove her worth.  

     Sam Rockwell joins Ronan as Inspector Stoppard, a veteran detective who's entirely too fond of drink and who's prone to falling asleep on the job. Rockwell doesn't overdo the English accent but still conveys disbelief and rueful judgment as he and Stalker set about solving the crime.

     Ruth Wilson as the play's producer and Reece Shearsmith as the aspiring producer of the movie both do fine work. Harris Dickinson finds laughs as Richard ("Call me Dickie") Attenborough.

     No need offering a cast roster but everyone seems to have understood the nature of material that may remind audiences of Knives Out, which, I suppose it must be said, was better.

    Comparison to other movies, as well as expectations associated with Glass Onion, director Rian Johnson's follow-up to Knives Out,  shouldn't detract from a movie that (bless its soul) finds a lane and occupies it well -- or at least, well enough.

    So who did it? Why, the actors, of course. They're largely responsible for delivering the generally snappy goods.

A haunted study of ambition and class

The Little Stranger proves absorbing yet the movie ultimately fails to satisfy.

In reviewing Sarah Walters' novel, The Little Stranger, the British newspaper The Guardian noted that the author "operates in the queasy borderlands between the supernatural and the psychological" and that Waters navigates this territory with "supreme ease." The same could be said of the big-screen adaptation of Waters' 2009 novel -- at least for a while.

Director Lenny Abrahamson (Room) delivers a carefully constructed, meticulously acted and deliberately paced movie that ultimately fails to sharpen any of its potentially resonant themes. Both a ghost story and a view of a crumbling British class structure after World War II, Little Stranger creates significant interest but fails to build toward a totally rewarding payoff.

Domhnall Gleeson portrays Dr. Faraday, a physician who's summoned to a dilapidated country estate to look into the illness of 14-year-old Betty (Liv Hill), a teenager who serves the once wealthy Ayres family. Turns out Faraday had been to the estate as a boy in 1902; i.e. before its glory had begun to fade.

Slowly, Faraday's fascination with the decaying estate emerges; to him, the place, though rundown, still represents ascendance into a class that he has been forced to observe only from the outside and to which he very much aspires.

As the movie develops, Faraday immerses himself in the lives of the Ayres family. Roderick Ayres (Will Poulter) has returned from the war, his body badly burned and his spirit scarred; Mrs. Ayes (Charlotte Rampling) does her best to maintain the appearances of the family's former stature; and Caroline Ayres (Ruth Wilson) attempts to run the place.

Perhaps seeing her as a gateway to this aristocratic paradise, Dr. Faraday pursues Caroline in what surely qualifies as one of the screen's least romantic love stories.

All the while, paranormal occurrences (banging, clattering and strange scrawl on walls) appear, suggesting that the house is occupied by a malevolent presence that's intent on destroying the family. As the purported rationalist in the crowd, Gleeson portrays Faraday with an expressionless, steady hand that's a trifle boring. Wilson, who knows how to create interest and ambiguity, portrays a woman with an odd, lumbering walk and a fondness for corduroy pants.

Abrahamson presents the story in a quiet way that some viewers (myself included) may find absorbing. But roughly three-quarters of the way through The Little Stranger, it's difficult not to begin hoping that a narrative kick in the pants will provide something resembling satisfaction.

Unfortunately, the movie drifts away, creating anticipation that remains mostly unfulfilled.

The story behind 'Mary Poppins'

Emma Thompson proves the highlight of Saving Mr. Banks

The late Walt Disney was no stranger to the public eye. As the regular host of many of his company's TV shows, Disney became an avuncular presence in America's living rooms: He was the super nice neighbor, the friendly guy at the corner store, as well as the man who helped sell America on dreams.

In the new movie -- Saving Mr. Banks -- Disney is played by Tom Hanks, who tries hard to be as Disneyesque as possible. But it's not really Uncle Walt who occupies the center of a movie about how author P.L. Travers's Mary Poppins became a Disney classic.

That spot belongs to Travers, played with a major helping of disdain by Emma Thompson.

From the start, Thompson's Travers expressed disbelief and mistrust about Disney's motives. She very much doubted that Hollywood would do justice to her story.

But Travers also needed money, and her agent pushed her toward Disney, warning her that she might lose her London home if she didn't make a deal.

Travers agreed, but insisted on having final script approval. She also ruled out the inclusion of any animation. (Here, Disney bested her: He managed to get a chorus of animated penguins into the movie, which starred Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews.)

Disney and Travers couldn't have been more different. True to his folksy ways and easy informality, Disney insisted on calling Pamela Lyndon Travers by the diminutive, "Pam." Travers was appalled. She insisted that Disney call her Mrs. Travers.

Even with Thompson expressing Travers's distaste for all things Disney, the screenplay by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith comes off as a somewhat bland and sanitized version of Hollywood history. Disney, who died of lung cancer, tried to hide his addiction to cigarettes from the public. The film acknowledges Disney's nicotine cravings, but not much more.

The movie is at once a rudimentary guide to the making of a much-beloved family movie and a look at Travers' difficult early life in the Australian outback.

Her charming father (a fine Colin Farrell) was a hopeless alcoholic: Her mother (Ruth Wilson) became his unlucky wife. Annie Rose Buckley plays the younger Travers in flashbacks that alternate -- often in ungainly fashion -- with the story of Disney's fitful attempt to bring Mary Poppins to the screen, a goal he accomplished in 1964.

If there's any compelling reason to see this movie, Thompson supplies it. She's flinty and aloof as Travers, although she she does thaw by the end, at least a litte. Travers eventually overcomes some of her resistance to the cuddly Disney machine, partly because she strikes up a friendship with her Disney-supplied chauffeur (Paul Giamatti). He has a disabled daughter who loves Travers's books.

Travers objected when Disney proposed turning her story into a musical, so it's no surprise that she exasperated Robert and Richard Sherman (B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman), the brothers hired by Disney to write the Mary Poppins' score.

Despite Thompson's performance and a bit of behind-the-scenes allure, Saving Mr. Banks -- directed by John Lee Hooker (The Blind Side) -- is only intermittently entertaining and not entirely devoid of that once inevitable hallmark of many Disney efforts: sentiment.

Those who've been hankering to know exactly how Chim Chim Cher-ee entered the big-screen musical vocabulary will find out -- along with a variety of other things that rank low on the scale of cosmic importance, but -- then again -- what doesn't? I watched. I shrugged.

A ride too long for this Lone Ranger

Director Gore Verbinski's latest has its moments -- but his story about an American icon tries to do too much while dragging on for nearly two-and-a-half hours.

I've long regarded director Gore Verbinski as one of the few filmmakers working today who understands visual comedy, somewhat in the same way that the masters of silent film understood it. It takes nearly all of the intermittently exhausting 149 minutes of The Lone Ranger for Verbinski (of Pirates of the Caribbean fame) to put his best talents on display in an action set piece that, though not quite as fleet or nimble as expected, begins to deliver the summer-movie goods.

Until that point, Verbinski -- who in 2011 won critical and audience approval for the animated Rango -- seems caught in a suffocating trap. He is at once presenting a revisionist view of The Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer) that makes Tonto (Johnny Depp) into a dominating presence. He's also making winking fun of westerns, paying homage to native Americans and throwing in splashes of block-buster level action.

Does it work? Only in fits and starts. The Lone Ranger becomes a mixed bag of ploys that's evidently supposed to be elevated by Depp's head-liner performance. Depp, of course, is caught in a trap himself. He can't give an over-the-top Jack Sparrow-like performance without trashing Tonto nor can he play the role completely straight.

To steer the movie away from condescension, Depp portrays Tonto as an equal (or perhaps even superior) partner to Hammer's character.

No stranger to oddball costumes, Depp this time coats his face with white paint -- evidently cracked from years of baking in the Western sun. He also wears a dead crow head dress. He's the antithesis of Jay Silverheels, the well-groomed Canadian Mohawk who played Tonto on TV and who talked in clipped, cliched sentences.

In the 2013 edition of The Lone Ranger, Tonto seems like one more weird-ass Depp creation, and, yes, I think it's time that Depp made a real movie, something that didn't have to be released between May and August.

Working with a team of Pirates writers, Verbinski employs a mostly distracting framing device to tell an origins story about America's favorite masked man. During the 1930s, a boy -- dressed in a Lone Ranger costume -- visits an Old West diorama at a carnival.

Before you can say, "Kimosabe," an aged Indian from the diorama ("The Noble Savage in His Native Habitat") comes to life, evidently to tell the real story of the white man who, by the 1930s, already had attained mythic status as The Lone Ranger. The Indian, of course, is Tonto.

The plot is an uninspired amalgam of Western tropes that pits a tenderfoot (Hammer's John Reid, the man who becomes The Lone Ranger) against the ruthless Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner), an outlaw who has fallen under the sway of a greedy railroad tycoon (Tom Wilkinson).

John Reid, a devotee of the law who refuses to carry a gun, becomes inspired to capture Cavendish after John's lawman brother (James Badge Dale) falls victim to Cavendish's brutality. Not content with mere murder, Cavendish rips the man's heart out of his chest and eats it. Now, it's true that my memory isn't what it used to be, but I don't think the old TV show featured many instances of cannibalism.

In this outing, Cavendish's foul ways turn Dan's wife (Ruth Wilson) into the widowed mother of a young son.

At times, The Lone Ranger -- shot with plenty of big-vista style by cinematographer Bojan Bazelli -- feels like a serious revival of a classic Western. At other times, the movie plays like a goof on those same westerns. At still other times, it's a surprisingly mournful look at the exploitation of Native Americans.

Hammer makes a decent Lone Ranger, a good foil and straight man for Depp's Tonto, but no actor could have unified the movie's wildly disparate parts, which drag their collective way to the action set piece that provides the movie with its near-rousing finale.

You will learn why The Lone Ranger wears a mask. You'll discover how Tonto came to be estranged from his tribal roots. You'll see how the Lone Ranger acquired Silver, a horse that seems to have magical powers.

Will you care about any of this? Not so much, to borrow an anachronistic phrase Tonto overworks. The Lone Ranger tends to be increasingly enervating right up until the time that Verbinski breaks out an amped-up version of the Ranger's signature tune, the famed William Tell Overture.
Verbinski tries to return us to (and debunk) what the original radio show and, then, the TV version called "the thrilling days of yesteryear," but in this version too much of the thrill is gone.

"Hi ho, Silver!," the cry that defined the character played by Clayton Moore on TV, could just as well have been "Oh no, Silver!"

The Lone Ranger probably should have remained a relic, a bit of cherished radio and TV nostalgia -- and not much else.*

*For the record: The Lone Ranger is better than 1981's The Legend of the Lone Ranger, but then so is almost everything -- and that includes most street busking.