A fine movie from Italy and two lesser movies as a disappointing summer draws to a close

For the most part, this has been a summer of discontents, to borrow (badly, I suppose) from Shakespeare.

The pleasures we have found at the movies have been mostly on the fringes, so it's probably entirely appropriate that Labor Day weekend, regarded as the conclusion of summer ever since the days when politicians put their white shoes back in the closet for another year, follows suit.

A DIRECTOR GRAPPLES WITH CRISIS ON AND OFF SET

In Mia Madre, Italian actress Margherita Buy plays a woman with plenty on her plate. Her character -- also named Margherita -- is directing a movie, dealing with her aging mother's decline, trying to be a good mother to her teen-age daughter, and seeking a break from her relationship with a needy lover. She's also trying to coax a performance out of an egotistical American actor (a funny John Turturro) who shows up to play the part of a beleaguered factory owner in a movie about labor/management conflict. Director Nanni Moretti appears in the movie as Margherita's brother, a reassuring man who holds together even when others are falling apart. Moretti (Dear Diary, We Have a Pope and The Son) follows Margherita as she rushes between her movie set and the hospital where her once highly competent mother (Giulia Lazzarini) is slipping ever deeper into the fog of dementia. As if all this weren't enough for a single movie, Moretti includes flashbacks, fantasies, and, in what seems to be a case of piling on, a flood that forces Margherita out of her apartment. Perhaps directing a movie and trying to balance an emotionally taxing personal life aren't entirely different enterprises. Both require the ability to function in the midst of apparent chaos and both require belief in the illusion that circumstances can be controlled.

A STRESSED OUT SOLDIER FINDS A CHALLENGING NEW JOB

Director Alice Winocour (Augustine) succeeds mostly in frustrating us with Disorder, a portentous thriller about a traumatized French soldier (Matthias Schoenaerts) who lands a temporary job guarding the family of a Lebanese businessman (Percy Kemp). When the ostentatiously wealthy tycoon leaves on business trip, Schoenaerts' Vincent is left to fight a series of invaders who are connected to a murky, arms-related plot in which the businessman's wife (Diane Kruger) and her young son (Zaid Errougui-Demonsant) are targeted. Sensible behavior (leaving the gated mansion that's under attack, for example) too often gives way to atmospherics as Schoenaerts and Kruger struggle with the screenplay's insistent vagueness. To me, their efforts went for naught. Winocour teases us into involvement without giving Disorder a satisfying enough payoff.

IS HE ACCIDENT PRONE OR IS SOMETHING ELSE AFOOT?

The 9th Life of Louis Drax begins as if it's going to be a seriously intriguing drama about a nine-year-old boy who spends much of the movie in a coma after he falls off a cliff. Rather than an examination of how people cope with tragedy, The 9th Life begins raising doubts about whether Louis (Aiden Longworth) is accident prone or the victim of sustained abuse. As director Alexandre Aja moves through a variety of flashbacks, we meet Louis' angry stepfather (Aaron Paul), a neurologist (Jamie Dornan) who wants to help the boy, and the boy's mother (Sarah Gadon). Dornan's character believes that it's possible to carry on mind-melding communication with people in deep comas. Additional complications arise when Dornan's character, who's married, begins to fall for Gadon's character. Rather than building on its strong premise, Max Minghella's screenplay -- based on a 2004 novel by Liz Jensen -- devolves into a strained and unsatisfying thriller that's intent on leading us down one more muddled path.

Summer isn't a total loss. A look at a diverse week of movies: reviews of 'Florence-Foster Jenkins,' 'Hell or High Water' and 'Indignation

The movies always have been a kind of crazy quilt of ambition, accomplishment, disappointment and joy, a collection of individual offerings that have little in common other than a desire to encourage audiences to purchase tickets. As an example, consider this week, a movie moment in which offerings range from the bawdy humor of Sausage Party, an animated feature for adults, to the supposedly instructive bromides dispensed by Pete's Dragon, a movie with a dragon that looks like a cuddly stuffed animal. Said dragon saves the life of a boy who's left to his own devices in a forest after his parents die in an automobile accident, the abandoned child syndrome being a Disney common denominator dating back to Bambi.

It's also the week in which Meryl Streep plays the late Florence Foster Jenkins, a New York socialite whose passion for music and performance were indulged by those in the rarified social circles in which she circulated. The only problem: Jenkins had a hideously bad voice.

Jenkins' solicitous and morally frayed husband (Hugh Grant) protected his wife's delusions. Maintaining Jenkin's image of herself became his occupation.

Because Jenkins raised money for a variety of New York musical endeavors, no one had the courage to tell her that her private recitals were so painful, they could have induced the most saintly of innocents to confess to the most heinous of crimes.

Florence Foster Jenkins is the latest film from director Steven Frears, who began his cinematic journey with what now seem like films from some fading Pleistocene age: The Hit (1984), My Beautiful Launderette (1985); Prick Up Your Ears (1987) and Sammie and Rosie Get Laid (also 1987). Those movies -- practically a British New Wave in themselves -- seem like ancient eruptions from a director who hasn't exactly mellowed, but who, in this outing, focuses attention on a woman whose self-created grandeur is beautifully captured by Streep.

In Streep's hands, Jenkins pretensions are delivered with the piercing exactitude of a soprano's high C.

Jenkins' singing becomes both amusing and painful, particularly as she prepares for a 1944 concert at Carnegie Hall. Jenkins readies herself for the big evening with help from her tutor Cosme McMoon, a deliciously bemused Simon Helberg.

Because Jenkins had contracted syphilis from her first husband, her marriage to Grant's St. Clair Bayfield was chaste. To compensate, Bayfield carried on an affair with his mistress (Rebecca Ferguson).

Grant finally has found a perfect role as he ages out of the British prince charming phase that mostly has served him until now. He's playing an honorable cad.

There's little I can say to prepare you for Streep's attempts at operatic singing. Let's just say that she makes Susan Alexander Kane, the woeful opera singer in Citizen Kane, seem like Joan Sutherland. If screeching were an art form, Jenkins would have been its foremost practitioner.

Thankfully, Frears hasn't totally yielded to the temptation to make a feel-good comedy. He charts Jenkins's inevitable march toward disaster -- albeit not without making note of her pluck and fortitude in the face of a monstrous lack of talent.

I suppose one is obligated to say that Florence Foster Jenkins is a small movie enlarged by big talents.
But two other small movies (both enlarged by big concerns) also open this week.

HOW THE WEST WAS LOST

Hell or High Water belongs in a genre that might be dubbed the neo-western. Set in West Texas, the movie spreads bank robbery, sibling loyalty and violence across a Texas landscape that grows its own form of justice, rolling it out like wind-blown tumbleweeds.

Director David Mackenzie, working from a screenplay by the gifted Taylor Sheridan (Sicario), introduces us to Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster), brothers who rob small banks in forgotten towns that seem to shriveling in the Texas heat.

At first, the brothers seem to be another pair of mismatched hoodlums. Toby has a steady hand; Tanner quickly establishes himself as the movie's wild one, an uncontrollable weed sprung from parched Texas soil.

Still most familiar as Captain Kirk in the reborn Star Trek series, Pine gives what might be his best performance yet. As Toby, he must hold things back. Divorced and crippled by a past in which much has gone wrong, Toby is trying to right a very specific wrong.

Looking at iMDB, I was surprised to see that Foster already has 51 movies and TV appearances to his credit. You may remember him from The Messenger, a mournful 2009 story about an Army sergeant assigned to deliver the ultimate bad news to spouses and parents of fallen soldiers.

You have to reach the end of Tanner's trail to realize what's driving this irredeemable bad boy, but Foster is one of those rare actors who can scare you just by showing up. He can put a look in his eyes that turns them into bullets just waiting for something to trigger their release.

Jeff Bridges, whose voice has taken on the roughness of weathered leather, plays Marcus, a Texas Ranger who's on the verge of retirement. Marcus hunts the brothers with his Comanche partner, Alberto (Gil Birmingham), a Native American who has learned to live with Marcus' racist taunts.

It's not easy to tell whether Marcus is a racist or just a guy who tries to needle his way under the skin of anyone with whom he feels close.

The story takes us in unexpected directions and gradually builds to a confrontation that's as much about character as it is about violence.

The Scottish-born Mackenzie, who directed the searing prison drama Starred Up, proves that he can handle drama with drawl and something on its mind.

Birmingham's Alberto sounds the chord that plays behind the solos that the rest of the characters deliver. The whites came and took the land from the Indians, and now, in what can be interpreted as a form of karmic retribution, the banks are taking the land from whites.

Mackenzie leads us to a conclusion that feels wise in a way that's far more complex than a movie like this has any right to be.

Like the juice from a wad of sour chewing tobacco, you may to savor the movie's bitterness before you think about spitting it out.

TO BE YOUNG, JEWISH AND BAFFLED BY A SHIKSA
The violence in Hell or High Water doesn't happen without motivation, but there's another kind of violence, the violence of cruelty that's embedded in observation of characters who are pinned to a writer's unforgiving wall. No matter how much they struggle, they'll never be free.

That brings me to Indignation, an adaptation of a small (and some would say "minor") 2008 novel by Philip Roth.

Indignation marks the directorial debut of James Schamus, who has written screenplays for director Ang Lee (Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Brokeback Mountain) and who, as an executive, helped create movies such as Lost in Translation and Milk.

Though presented in straightforward style, Indignation requires contemporary audiences to take an imaginative leap back to 1951, a time when a young woman who'd perform oral sex on a man might be labeled a slut by young men who still kicked around questions about whether they'd marry a woman who wasn't a virgin.

In adopting Roth, Schamus pits the Newark, N.J., of Roth's imagination against life in at small Ohio school called Winesburg College. If you're familiar with Roth, you'll immediately know that part of the story's tension centers on moving from a mostly Jewish world into a less-welcoming WASP society.

Logan Lerman plays Marcus, a young man who wants to break from the stultifications of Newark life, which means living at home and occasionally working in his father's kosher butcher shop.

Marcus is the '50s definition of a good Jewish boy; i.e., he's a straight A student. Academic achievement might be the only thing Marcus fully understands. Once grades no longer serve as a standard, he'll likely be lost.

At the college, Marcus meets Olivia (Sarah Gadon), a troubled young woman who introduces him to hand jobs and fellatio, neither of which Marcus is fully prepared to accept.

The movie's best scene involves an extended confrontation between Marcus and Dean Caudwell. During the course of 18 minutes Lerman and Tracy Letts (as Caudwell) play verbal tennis. In essence, Caudwell attempts to persuade Marcus to aspire to WASPishness. Marcus isn't strong enough to resist for the right reasons; he's indignant, but unformed.

As Marcus' complicated but demanding mother Linda Edmond makes the most of her time on screen. During a visit to Winesburg, she warns Marcus off his emotionally distressed shiksa, who once tried to commit suicide. She's certain no good can come of such a relationship.

To raise the stakes, Marcus' coming-of-age drama plays out against a contrivance, a backdrop in which a false move might expose him to the draft and land him in Korea, an unsafe place for young men in the '50s.

The question with all Roth adaptations involve Roth himself. How do directors compensate for Roth's missing voice? Indignation has finely wrought moments, good performances and demonstrable intelligence, and yet, it doesn't always spring fully to life. It's Roth under glass with Marcus ripe for being quashed like a bug.

There is no transition that can take me from Philip Roth to Pete's Dragon, where I began all of this.

That movie seems aimed at young children, so I'll say only this. When a movie wants to make room for magic, it should feel more magical than Pete's Dragon. Kids probably will respond to this good-natured story about a wild child's circuitous route back to civilization, but it also could appeal to adults who want to compare it to the 1977 original or who've been hankering to see Robert Redford play a character who tells stories to kids, presuming there any adults in either of those two categories.

Young, indepednent and biracial

Belle gives Austen-like treatment to a historically important story.

If you've ever wondered how Jane Austen's novels might have looked like had the author paid more attention to race, you no longer need to use your imagination.

Loosely based on a true story, Belle spins an Austen-like yarn about Dido Elizabeth Belle, a woman who was raised by British aristocrats and who also happened to be the daughter of a British Naval officer and a black woman.

After her father leaves for sea -- where he eventually perishes -- Dido is taken in by her father's uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson). She's raised on the Mansfield estate during the 1800s, prior to the abolition of slavery.

Belle follows Austen's lead when it comes to finding a man for Dido. Dido's ultimate soul mate must be a fellow whose values are more important than his position in society, presuming that he doesn't fall too low on the British totem. Virtue trumps status.

Full of inspiring speeches about justice and well-acted by an exceptionally talented cast, Belle stands as a respectable period piece that approaches its subject in straightforward fashion.

Though portrayed as mostly happy, Dido's upbringing wasn't without problems. She and her white cousin Elizabeth became fond playmates, but when guests were present, Dido had to dine apart from the family lest visitors be offended by her presence.

This is but one of the movie's many attempts to portray the mixture of gentility (which it does well) and savagery (which it does less well) that defined British society at a moment when the formal social order had begun to change -- at least a little.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw leads the way as Dido, giving us a woman whose independent spirit and intelligence is clear from the outset. As the movie progresses, Dido gains in both assurance and conviction.

Dido's realizations take two forms: Having lived among the upper classes, she knows she's their equal. Increasingly, though, she also understands that her color connects her to those who are being viciously exploited because of their race. Dido's political consciousness grows.

Wilkinson (joined by a fine Emily Watson as Lady Mansfield) delivers a wonderful performance as a conflicted man. As Britain's Lord Chief Justice, Mansfield is about to rule on an important case involving the slave trade.

Lord Mansfield believes in maintaining the social order through law, but understands that he has a moral obligation to do the right thing. He loves Dido, but fears for her future.

As directed by Amma Asante -- from a screenplay by Misan Sagay -- Belle eventually conflates legal matters and romance. With Justice Mansfield's decision looming, Dido's personal life becomes increasingly complex.

Dido is courted by the socially well-positioned Oliver Ashford (James Norton), a man who's willing to "overlook" her mixed-race background, perhaps because he's eager to gain access to the income Dido inherited from her seafaring father.

You don't need to be a master prognosticator to know that Dido ultimately will give her heart to an abolitionist firebrand (Sam Reid) who happens to be the son of a lowly vicar.

Miranda Richardson appears as the manipulative Lady Ashford -- mother of Oliver Ashford. Lady Ashford's older son James (Tom Felton) portrays the movie's staunchest racist.

Sarah Gadon nicely handles the role of Elizabeth, Dido's less-than-astute cousin who comes to envy Dido for the marriage proposal she receives.

Belle uses Dido's story as the basis for a portrait of British society in the days prior to abolition. It's not a subtle film, but the movie -- to no small effect -- is bolstered by a cast that knows precisely how to bring Asante's plan to life.