David Mamet takes drama to prison

 

 David Mamet's Henry Johnson -- his first film in 18 years -- revolves around men who might be classified as either predators or prey. 

  First presented as a play in 2023, Henry Johnson relies on Mamet's ability to turn the tables on us and his characters, providing plot-twisting reveals that steadily raise the dramatic stakes. True to form, the movie delivers its bitter pill of a conclusion straight and without soothing chaser. 

    Four major scenes are given continuity by the work of Evan Jonigkeit, who portrays the title character. 

   In the early going, Henry asks his boss (Chris Bauer) to hire a newly released convict with whom Henry became acquainted during his college days. Our sympathies go to Henry, who seems intent on doing the right thing by someone who has, in his words, "paid his debt to society." 

  The unseen criminal, we learn, served time for manslaughter, having induced a miscarriage against the will of a woman he had gotten pregnant. Boss and employ bat around questions about guilt and punishment.

  If you know Mamet, you know that our initial impressions probably will be undermined. No need to say more except to note that Henry himself has laid the ground work that will turn him into a prisoner. On day one, he encounters Gene (Shia LaBeouf), a convict who spins shrewdly compelling monologues about matters of immediate and philosophical consequence. 

  LaBeouf deftly masters the flow of Mamet's dialogue, flourishing in the director's world. Jonigkeit ably creates questions about Henry's ability to survive in prison, but he's playing the movie's least interesting character, a bit of pawn in other men's power games.

   The drama concludes in the prison library, where Gene has helped Henry land a job. At this point, Gene tries to school Henry about what he sees as the manipulative intentions of the female prison psychologist. He challenge Henry to take action.

   Here, the story stretches plausibility, contriving to arm Henry and bring him into another conversation, this one with Jerry (Dominic Hoffman), a prison guard he holds captive. Near the end of his tenure, Jerry has seen everything the job has to offer. Hoffman's performance matches the others in its excellence.

   Every Mamet enthusiast knows that the once-heralded playwright, director, and screenwriter has shifted political gears. Once reliably liberal, Mamet now adamantly advances his brand of conservatism. I, too, have had difficult coming to terms with the "new" Mamet, but I still found myself caught in Henry Johnson's grip.

   My favorite Mamet movie remains Glengarry Glen Ross. Perhaps because its focus is narrower, Henry Johnson lacks Glengarry’s pathos, humor, and satirical sting. But Mamet's mastery over structure  can't be denied, and he knows how to push us to places we may not want to go.

    Maybe that's the point -- to rub our noses in the harshness the movie reveals. Whether this predatory world corresponds with the reality the rest of us perceive is open to question, but damn if Mamet doesn't compel us to at least consider the possibility.

Coppola's long-awaited opus arrives

 

  

An Elvis impersonator. A chariot race. A man who sometimes wears bright red lipstick and dresses. Hamlet's "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy. Quotes from Marcus Aurelius and Petrarch. The Statue of Liberty, and The Chrysler Building. 

  OK, take a breath.

  I've only mentioned a few of the sights and sounds found in Francis Ford Coppola's extravagant WFT opus, Megalopolis, a movie that makes its themes clear but remains jumbled in other ways.

   I begin this way because Coppola has made an amusing, risible, sometimes exhilarating mess of a movie that either can be accepted as a bold display of cinematic ambition or as a $120 million misfire. 

   Which choice you make or whether you find yourself somewhere in the middle, mostly depends on how you regard Coppola's career and Coppola himself. You never forget there's someone with a vision behind the camera.

   The director of two great American movies (The Godfather and The Godfather Part II) always gets the benefit of my doubt -- up to a point. 

   I reached that point many times during Megalopolis as I wondered what had compelled Coppola, who's now 85, to spend 40 years hoping to make this movie, ultimately financing it with his own money.

   I wish I could say that the answer becomes obvious upon seeing the movie; I'm not sure it does. 

   So what's Megalopolis about? Here's a laundry list of themes: time, creativity, power, hubris, Roman history, urban planning, the role of artists in society,  the fate of the United States, and possibly all of humanity. I'm sure I've omitted something important, but I'll note that in an interview shown before a preview screening, Coppola said that the United States is Rome.

     You can pick that apart while I try to condense a tangled plot. Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) serves as the movie's main character, an ambitious architect with megalomaniacal tendencies and a belief that his high level of intelligence entitles him to disparage others.

     In a commanding prologue, Catilina tentatively steps onto the rooftop of the Chrysler Building. A vertiginous sequence follows and we learn that Catalina has the power to stop time, a sci-fi element explained by Catalina's invention of the substance Megalon.

    No need to memorize, it won't be on the quiz.

    Cesar's ability to freeze time reflects his power as an architect and artist. Artists can stop time -- or at least to freeze it with images, stories, etc.

    Presented in the broadest of strokes, the story centers on the conflict between Catilina and Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the mayor of New Rome, an imaginary city that resembles New York.  Deeply skeptical about those who want to create utopias, Cicero speaks the language of pragmatic politics.

     Megalopolis, by the way, is the utopia Cesar wants to build within the borders of New Rome, a "futuristic" city  in which the police cars look like they came directly from 2024, print editions of tabloid newspapers can be seen, and cigarette smoking hasn't vanished.

      Among New Rome's residents, we also meet Cicero's daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). Early on, Julia seems more interested in partying than artistic vision, but she's drawn to Cesar, and they eventually fall in love. 

     Dad objects. So does Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a character who enters the movie as a well-known TV reporter and Cesar's mistress.

     A striver of the first order, Wow eventually marries Crassus (Jon Voight), perhaps the richest man in New Rome. Shia LaBeouf plays Clodio, Crassus' treacherous grandson. Late in the movie, he seals a conspiratorial pact with Wow by having sex with her. He calls her Auntie Wow, suggesting a bit of incestuous creepiness.

     A large cast weaves its way through a visual showcase that mixes dreams, special effects, and diaphanous dissolves in which one image peeks through another. If there were such a thing as visual indigestion, Megalopolis could give it to you.

     I can't single out any of the performances but will note that Driver works his way through an arc that includes Cesar's arrogance, moral collapse, and rebirth as, let's say, a true artist or, in the movie's terms, a man who finally can love.

     Plaza seems totally committed to her role, as does LaBeouf, who delivers a major helping of craziness.

     Laurence Fishburne portrays Cesar's driver, a loyalist who also provides occasional narration.

     It's difficult to discuss acting when the characters function as archetypes that represent the story's conflicting values. Crassus stands for capitalist greed, for example.

     Coppola's screenplay, by the way, draws on a real bit of history, the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC. You can look it up. But characters' names are linked to Roman history, and Coppola presumably sees parallels between the Roman Republic on the cusp decline and ... well ... I don't need to spell it out for you.

     Coppola does that with dialogue -- often presented in form of bromides, aphorisms, and quotations from philosophers. Many lines have on-the-nose clarity, and the film's ending borders on agitprop as Coppola invites the audience to engage in a conversation about what kind of future it wants, topping it off with a greeting card flourish: We owe it to the children.

     Megalopolis can be as baffling as it is engaging; it may serve as a kind of exclamation point to Coppola's long-standing commitment to cinematic daring, as well as an expression of hope for a chaotic world.

      Whatever it is, it left my head spinning.

       

Powerful acting in an uneven movie

    Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo's White God stands as one of the most riveting movies of 2014, a political allegory that made you gasp and left you wondering how its many scenes with dogs had been filmed

    A drama of shocking immediacy, Mundruczo's Pieces of a Woman marks the director's English-language debut and provides an opportunity for Vanessa Kirby to give one of the year's most emotionally naked performances.

     Familiar for having played Princess Margaret in The Crown, Kirby portrays Martha, a young woman who loses her baby during a home birth. The 23-minute scene in which Martha goes into labor was recorded by cinematographer Benjamin Loeb in a single agonizing shot. 

     Kirby's character, the baby's father (Shia LaBeouf), and a midwife (Molly Parker) are all caught up in a fraught, anxious moment. Taking place before the opening credits, the scene sets a high bar of intensity that the movie will have trouble topping. 

     Before the birth sequence, Mundruczo sketches the relationship between Martha and LaBeouf's Sean. He works in construction; she works in an office. He's a brusk jokey guy who knows that Martha's mother (Ellen Burstyn) thinks her daughter can do better.

    Clearly psyched about becoming a father, Sean's bustling energies and his sympathetic behavior during the protracted labor sequence keep us from dismissing him as entirely "boorish," a term he later uses sardonically in describing himself to Martha's mother.

     Martha, however, turns out to be the movie's driving force. Sean spins like a helpless wheel around Martha's increasingly distant behavior. At one point, he forces himself on her sexually, another scene that has generated much discussion.

    On one level, Pieces of a Woman deals with relationships, family, and grief. On another level, it's about acting, the way actors navigate heavy emotional waters, leaving themselves exposed as they deep dive into what feels like unprotected waters.

     But that doesn't mean that Pieces of a Woman succeeds as a drama. An uncompleted bridge becomes one of Mundruczo's several visual symbols, along with apple seeds. Whatever Mundruczo intended to convey with these visual metaphors feel labored. The movie's at its best when it's being literal and physical rather than symbolic.

    Another current animates the story. Burstyn's character wants her daughter to press charges against the midwife. Martha resists, opening the door for Burstyn to deliver a short monologue about having been a Holocaust baby. She follows by making an offer to Sean, which I didn't buy -- not on either side of the transaction.

         Anyone who ever has experienced or knows someone who has experienced the death of an infant during childbirth probably should think twice before seeing a movie that may strike them as too realistic, too evocative of a terribly painful experience.

    Those who approach the movie on a more neutral footing will find  a performance in which Kirby establishes herself as a master of mood and self-containment. It's as if she's in one movie and everyone else in another, which makes sense because Martha travels through the story in a state of extreme alienation. She's separated from everyone by an experience that can't be rationalized or even explained.

    Pieces of a Woman stands as a collection of scenes -- some quite powerful -- that demand a lot from its cast without ever totally cohering for us.

     

'Tax Collector' fires familiar bullets

     Shia LaBeouf channels his inner psycho-killer in The Tax Collector, director David Ayer's immersive plunge into a part of the Los Angeles drug world populated by the city's Latinos. Playing a character known as the Creeper, LaBeouf puts on a scary face.  
     Creeper earns his living as the strong arm for the title character, a "tax collector" (Bobby Soto) who works for a  cartel. Soto’s David collects a share of all drug dealings in South Central. David lives by a code that's as unoriginal as the rest of the movie, something about love, family, loyalty, and honor. 
     You get the idea. It's possible to view The Tax Collector as a movie with a screenplay based almost entirely on tattoos.
      To create the movie’s gangsters-are-people-too ethos, David lives with his wife (Cinthya Carmona) and takes a strictly business approach to his work.  When he's not overseeing beatings or putting on his tough-guy pose, he lives like a normal person. 
     Things go smoothly for the movie's criminals until an aspiring new crime czar arrives in Los Angeles. Conejo (Jose Martin) wants to put David and Creeper under his thumb, which, of course, leads to major trouble, which means lots of bullets will fly and many bodies will hit the ground.
     Perhaps in a bow to equal opportunity, Ayers makes Conejo's major hit person a woman (Cheyenne Rae Hernandez).
     Ayer, who wrote the screenplay for Training Day and who directed Suicide Squad, knows his way around gangster jargon and his movie -- all gangsters all the time -- paints a portrait of South Central as a world unto itself. Too bad it feels more like a B-movie world than one  that might be found in real life.
     Among a group of guys who are up to no good, David stands out as a man who sometimes allows his decent impulses emerge. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that David is a little guy among some big-time bad guys. He works for his uncle Louis (George Lopez). A mostly unseen mobster named Wizard presides over all of his. 
     Despite some religious references, Tax Collector makes its bones with action, violence and attitude.  Strong on performance and atmosphere, The Tax Collector takes us down a familiar blood-soaked road.
    Drugs. Money. Night clubs. Shoot-outs. Tragedy. Gang rivalries. Just another day at the movies.

'Honey Boy' packs an emotional punch

Shia LaBeouf takes a semi-autobiographical look at his troubled youth.

I couldn’t tell whether Shia LaBeouf's Honey Boy should be taken as an act of revenge by an aggrieved son against an abusive father, a confessional about LaBeouf's struggles with alcohol or an exercise in deeply immersive acting. Maybe it’s all three.

Whatever its objectives, LaBeouf's Honey Boy, which he wrote and stars in and which has been directed by Alma Ha’rel, is one of those aggressively emotional movies that almost dares you to look away from the screen. And props to LaBeouf for not trying to direct: playing his own father and writing the screenplay must have been job enough.

LaBeouf's semi-autobiographical foray explores how the travails of a child actor carry over into young adulthood, linking Honey Boy to a list of movies that operate in a world of amped-up emotional realism. Think Florida Project.

LaBeouf's James lives with his son Otis in a rundown Los Angeles motel, which is frequented by drifters and prostitutes. Otis (a terrific Noah Jupe) supports his penniless father with his acting. Aside from a brief phone call, his mother is absent from view.

As a former convict, James has no visible means of support; he rides his son mercilessly, but it also becomes clear that he loves Otis — even if he can’t manage his volatile emotions. In truth, James has no idea about how to be a father. He either tries to be Otis' friend or plays the role of tough-love mentor.

Like a fighter who relies on jabs, James takes verbal shots at Otis. He may believe he's toughening the boy but James' non-stop cruelty becomes increasingly difficult to take. When it comes to needling, James is a champ.

With his hairline pulled into recessionary retreat, LaBeouf gives a totally committed performance as a man who's part trickster, part self-aware failure and part rodeo clown, a job that James once held.

All of this unfolds against the background of Otis’ show-business life, which includes appearances on TV sitcoms and roles in action movies. LaBeouf, of course, became a star in several Transformer movies.

The story's timeline shifts between two periods in Otis' life. Lucas Hedges plays the adult Otis. It’s not always Jupe and Hedges look quite different, but Hedges establishes the necessary emotional connection with the character of young Otis and the shift from one actor to the other proves only minimally distracting.

The frame for the story involves Otis’ stint in rehab after an arrest for drunk driving. Otis meets with a therapist (Laura San Giacomo) and makes friends with a veteran of rehab (Byron Bowers). Reluctantly, he accepts the fact that he needs help. He also begins writing, presumably the script for the movie we're watching.

In scenes at the motel, young Otis forms a tender bond with a teenage hooker (FKA Twigs). He also experiences the humiliation of watching his father brutalize a well-intentioned man (Clifton Collins Jr.) who has connected with Otis though the Big Brother program.

It’s tough to emerge from Honey Boy without feeling a bit battered, and not everyone will feel a need to share in this experience, but you hope for LaBeouf's sake that Honey Boy was cathartic enough to allow him to move on.

Buddies on the road -- and on the water

A country boy and a young man with Down syndrome team for a fairy tale of an adventure in The Peanut Butter Falcon.

We've all seen enough bromances to last several lifetimes. But that doesn't mean anyone plans to retire a genre that continues to connect with audiences.

The Peanut Butter Falcon arrives in theaters as a buddy movie -- but one with a difference. It teams Shia LaBeouf, as a red-neck renegade, with a young man with Down syndrome, played by Zack Gottsagen, an actor who really does have Down syndrome and for whom the movie was written.

LaBeouf's Tyler and Gottsagen's Zak make a typically unlikely duo. Tyler's on the run from a couple of guys (John Hawkes and Yelawolf) who want to kill him for messing up their crab-fishing business. He's also troubled by the death of his older brother (Jon Bernthal).

To hit the road, Zak must escape from the nursing home where he's being housed, no other placement being available. Zak's roommate (Bruce Dern) helps the young man engineer the breakout that leads to his hook-up with Tyler.

A nursing home volunteer (Dakota Johnson) follows. She's supposed to return Zak to the home. She also adds feminine energy to the generally masculine proceedings, which are heightened by Zak's burning ambition. He wants to be a professional wrestler and dreams of visiting a training school run by his idol, a wrestler who goes by the name of Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church).

Eventually, Johnson's Eleanor joins Tyler and Zak's brotherhood of two. Reluctantly, she agrees to help Zak pursue his dream.

Shot in the Florida Panhandle, the movie -- a passion project from first-time directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz -- relies heavily on the chemistry generated by a fully committed LaBeouf and by Gottsagen, a natural charmer with a robust sense of humor.

They're playing two characters who are thrown together for an adventure that includes a raft trip and an encounter with a backwoods preacher (Wayne DeHart) -- all spaced over sufficient time to allow LaBeouf and Gottsagen to develop a conspiratorial bond, two against the world.

Peanut Butter Falcon, which avoids gooey sentiment, takes its fanciful title from the name Zak chooses for his wrestling alter ego. The title proves suggestive; this is a movie that isn't afraid of its sometimes goofy appeal.

To fully enjoy Peanut Butter Falcon, it's probably best to set aside demands for total plausibility and accept the movie as a fairy tale about what it means to be young and feel free.

And -- at least to my knowledge -- The Peanut Butter Falcon is the only film in the long history of cinema that includes a scene in which the characters cook a fish, smear it with peanut butter and eat it. That moment, I should point out, marks the only time I felt sorry for anyone in the movie.

Stuck in the mud of war

Brad Pitt leads a tank crew in a movie full of harrowing war imagery.

By April of 1945, U.S. troops had advanced deep into German territory. For Germany, the war already was lost. Humiliation and surrender loomed.

Despite being set on the eve of the impending Allied triumph, the mood of director David Ayer's Fury remains forbidding and dark. Seldom has victory looked quite this grim.

If there's freshness in Ayer's approach, it's found just here: It doesn't really matter whether soldiers are fighting on the first or last day of a war: Many will die. Brutality doesn't stop just because the end is near.

The opening image of Ayer's movie has a haunting, nearly surreal quality. A German soldier rides a white horse onto an open field. We don't know where the soldier's headed or why he's on horse back.

Seconds later, a lone figure springs from a U.S. tank. Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) leaps on the German officer, pulls him off his horse and stabs him to death.

In one image, Ayer vanquishes any thoughts we might have had about the romance of war.

Fury offers lots more unsettling imagery, sights presumably intended to make us see the war with fresh eyes, to absorb its intensity and fear in ways that we haven't yet experienced. To say Fury has a kind of bleak power may sound like a turn-off, but that's precisely what we're supposed to feel with a movie such as this.

Pitt's performance as an Army sergeant in charge of a war-weary tank crew inevitably will remind audiences of the character he played in Inglourious Basterds, but Pitt's Collier is more complex than Lt. Aldo Raine.

A hardened veteran, Collier parcels out his human impulses sparingly, almost as if he's afraid of tapping out an already depleted supply.

The rest of Collier's crew consists of Boyd "Bible" Swan (Shia LaBeouf), Trini "Gordo" Garcia (Michael Pena) and Grady "Coon Ass" Travis (John Bernthal). Scott Eastwood portrays Sergeant Miles, another member of the crew.

The plot -- hardly a groundbreaker -- begins when a newbie (Logan Lerman) joins Collier's tank crew in what seems a desperate or possibly haphazard move by the Army.

Lerman's Norman Ellison has spent most of the war as a clerk typist. He has no tank training, and makes a reluctant warrior, someone whose unwillingness to kill is seen as a threat by his comrades in arms.

Much of the story involves the ways in which Lerman's character is toughened -- at first against his will and later with vengeful relish.

In Ayer's world, the members of the tank crew are bonded, but they're not always admirable. Bernthal's Travis can seem like a borderline sadist. So does Collier, at times.

The point, of course, is that the savagery of war tends to turn men into brutes regardless of what uniform they happen to be wearing.

The actors all mold their performances to fit the dreary, mud-soaked landscapes that become another character in the hands of cinematographer Roman Vasyanov.

The movie offers up equal amounts of combat and desperation, although there's an interlude in which Collier and Ellison enter the apartment of a couple of German women (Anamaria Marinca and Alicia von Rittberg). The soldiers are in a town that just has been taken. Some of them are looking for sex and spoils.

At first, the scene humanizes Collier, but there's a terrible, growing tension when the rest of the tank crew shows up, wondering why they've been excluded from what appears to be a moment's pleasure and respite.

Ayer made his cinematic bones with viscerally charged movies such as End of Watch, which focused on cops in South Central Los Angeles. He makes full use of his talent for violent immediacy here, bringing it to scene-after-scene.

Fury also reminds us that shocking sights can become routine if seen in abundance: Dead bodies are flatted by tank treads, and the ugliness of war unfolds under dark, apprehensive skies.

The movie's finale involves a terrible battle in which Collier's crew (unbelievably, I think) decides to face an entire SS battalion, a decision that's tantamount to a death sentence. Is it courage or a death wish from soldiers who know they'll never again adjust to normal life? Will anyone survive?

When stripped of all its grim atmospherics, Fury may not seem radically different from lots of other war movies that follow small groups of men into the teeth of war.

But story arc may not be the point here: Ayer seems to be trying to give us a more vividly disturbing picture than the one sometimes associated with the so-called Greatest Generation.

With hindsight, idealism may be possible. On the battlefield, it's a forgotten luxury.

Lars Von Trier's sexual odyssey

Part I of a two-part film prompts a mixed reaction.

An older man discovers a woman lying in an alley. She's been badly beaten. He takes her home, puts her in his bed and begins nursing her back to some semblance of health and stability. She, in turn, tells him her story.

The set-up is nothing if not conventional, but when you know that I'm describing the opening of director Lars Van Trier's Nymphomaniac: Volume I, you'll understand that the movie has no intention of following a familiar arc.

As best as can be gleaned from Volume I -- reviewers have not yet had access to Volume II -- Von Trier has decided to explore female sexuality by pushing one woman's story to nymphomaniacal extremes.

We soon learn that Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the bruised woman from the alley, has taken an aggressively pro-active approach to sex, taking up with what seems a never-ending stream of men. Joe's relationships are brought to us in a variety of flashbacks in which Stacy Martin plays Joe as a young woman.

This being Volume I, we're left to surmise what might have brought Joe to her moment of degradation in that damp back alley.

The screenplay makes Joe her harshest critic; her rescuer (Stellan Skarsgard) seems a man of infinite patience. He steadfastly refuses to judge Joe. Instead, he gives her quasi-philosophical pep talks as they sit around his monkishly spare apartment.

Skarsgard's Seligman rambles on about fishing and other matters. He loves Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler, and tries to connect fly fishing to Joe's story.

This gives Von Trier an opportunity to create some beautiful fishing and stream imagery, which adds a sense of mystery, but doesn't exactly prove revelatory in terms of our understanding.

Principal among Joe's relationships is her intermittent connection with Jerome (Shia LaBeouf). As a girl, Joe asks Jerome to take her virginity. He obliges. She then runs into him at various times during the story.

Some of the movie has a near-comical tone. At one point, Joe and a girlfriend take a train ride. They compete over who can score the most conquests on the train.

Given her rampant sexual activities, it's hardly surprising that Joe becomes something of an expert on penises. Perhaps that's why Von Trier includes a series of shots of penises of varying types and description.

Is he suggesting that, for Joe, men have been reduced to this essential bit of equipment? Is he mocking male genitalia by calling attention to their strangeness when abstracted from the rest of the body?

We also learn about Joe's upbringing as the movie progresses. She tells us her mother was emotionally frigid. Her father (Christian Slater) seems to have been an understanding fellow who introduced his daughter to the wonders of nature. Von Trier punishes his apparent decency with a cruel death scene.

Von Trier also makes room for an appearance by Uma Thurman, who plays the wife of a misguided husband who believes that Joe's in love with him. Thurman's character arrives at Joe's apartment moments after her fleeing husband, who thinks he's about to move in.

To make matters even more bizarre, Thurman's character -- named in the credits as Mrs. H -- brings her two sons on her journey of revenge. How else to complete the humiliation of this poor sap, a man who apparently has misread everything about Joe?

Did Volume I leave me as eager for Volume II as I was for the next episode of Breaking Bad? Hardly. I'll certainly watch Part II, but I can't say I'd feel deprived if I didn't.

The movie's provocative title, its occasional obtuseness and its artful visual gestures may well create a mixed reaction for those who aren't entirely put off by the excessive nudity, sex and blunt language.

For me, though, the most shocking thing about Nymphomaniac, Volume I is that I didn't have a stronger reaction to it. Perhaps Volume II will light a stronger fire.

Indigestible chaos in Romania

In Charlie Countryman, first-time Swedish director Fredrik Bond tosses off some interesting images, even when he's trying to keep things looking seedy. Fair to say that Bond and his director of cinematography, Roman Vasyanov, prove they have eyes for unusual shots. Storytelling? That's another matter. Chaotic to the point of confusion, the movie casts Shia LaBeouf as a young man adrift after his mother's death: Bond can't find a groove that makes sense of the journey LaBeouf's character takes: from Chicago to Bucharest. Why Bucharest? Charlie's recently departed mom (Melissa Leo) appears to her son in a vision and instructs him to head for Romania. On his flight to Bucharest, Charlie meets Victor (Ion Carmitru), a warm-hearted Cubs fan who dies before the plane lands. Once in Bucharest, Charlie looks up the daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) Victor told him about before his unfortunate demise. It shouldn't surprise anyone that Charlie falls in love or that his romantic pursuit is not problem free. Charlie's interest in Wood's Gabi upsets Nigel (Mads Mikkelsen), a handsome but vicious thug who was once Gabi's lover. As he wanders around Bucharest, Charlie also meets Darko (Til Schweiger), a gangster who -- like Nigel -- is looking for a videocassette that seems to have some importance in advancing what little story can be found. Adopting a Ratso Rizzo-like shuffle and a haggard look, LaBeouf becomes the naive tourist in a city inhabited by bizarre, sometimes dangerous characters. He also meets a couple of companions at a youth hostel (James Buckley and Rupert Grint). Working with a less-than-convincing accent, Wood doesn't seem quite tantalizing enough to justify Charlie's willingness to die for love, and Charlie Countryman (originally titled The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman) emerges as little more than a pop pastiche that travels an awfully long way to go nowhere.

Tale of bootleggers has genre kick

Lawless has the look of a great movie, but its rewards have more to do with its hard-core attitudes..

Set in the early 1930s, Lawless tells the story of a clan of bootlegging brothers who rose to prominence in Franklin County, Va. Working from a novel by Matt Bondurant, director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave try for the bracingly bitter tone of a Depression-era story that sometimes feels as if it's out to recycle a variety of familiar western and gangster ploys.

In this case, three moonshining brothers face off against a corrupt lawman. Bondurant's novel, by the way, derives from his family history, and the movie begins with a title card telling us that it's inspired by a true story.

In Lawless, Hillcoat (The Road ) focuses on Jake Bondurant (Shia LaBeouf), the youngest of three Bondurant brothers and the tale's narrator. The Bondurants are hard-core moonshiners led by Forrest Bondurant (Tom Hardy). Brother Howard Bondurant (Jason Clarke) brings muscle to the proceedings. Jack is considered "the runt" of the Bondurant litter, a young man not naturally given to violence.

In this case, the bootleggers aren't the bad guys. That job falls squarely on the shoulders of Guy Pearce, who pushes the limits of stereotype as Charlie Rakes, a citified sadist of a lawman who travels to Virginia from Chicago. Rakes has been hired to enforce a system of payoffs to local officials.

Fiercely committed to controlling his own affairs, Forrest refuses to play ball with the local pols, and the building blocks fall into place for a story that turns white-lightning outlaws into advocates for untrammeled independence.

Lawless boasts an impressive supporting cast. Gary Oldman has a small role as Floyd Banner, a Tommy-gun toting gangster. Jessica Chastain shows up as a red-headed refugee from Chicago, a woman with a checkered past who hopes find a little peace in a small town. Chastain's Maggie has an eye for Forrest, who -- as played by the stoically impressive Hardy -- seems as immovable as a tree stump.

When Forrest thinks or speaks, he tends to start with a murmured growl that sounds as if it's somewhere between a sigh and grunt. He's the brutal brains and backbone of the Bondurant brothers' thriving booze business. Hardy, who gave one of the bravura performances of cinema in the British movie Bronson, remains an impressive actor whose very presence can seem like a threat. When he really wants to make a point, Forrest uses a set of brass knuckles.

Working with cinematographer Benoît Delhomme, Hillcoat gives his images a romanticized burnish, but when the screenplay calls for brutality, the director presents it with full force. The action builds toward a showdown between the Bondurants and Rakes at a covered bridge.

LaBeouf doesn't always seem perfectly cast as a young man who has an eye for a preacher's daughter (Mia Wasikowska), but he has his moments. LaBeouf's Jack lacks the killer instinct of his tougher brothers, a deficiency that sets up one of the movie's big (and all-too-obvious) questions. Will Jake be able to pull the trigger when the chips are down?

In the end, Lawless comes across as an artfully made genre piece that seems to have been aiming for quite a bit more: It's not in a class with Hillcoat and Cave's previous collaboration, The Proposition, an astringent western set in the Australian outback.

You also may find yourself wondering about the moral calculus that turns the brutal Bondurant boys into heroes. Still, there's a wistful air of longing about this violent movie, an attempt to hold onto a robust moment of Bondurant family history, even if that moment doesn't quite rise to the level of legend.

Robots and rubble: 'Transformers' is back

Shia LaBeouf returns to lead director Michael Bay's latest marathon of destruction.

Right after Sept. 11, 2001, knowledgeable people were talking about the ways in which movies might be impacted. Surely, audiences would be turned off by the sight of skyscrapers falling in the heart of major cities. Reality finally would silence Hollywood’s worst impulses, forcing it to examine the ways in which it doled out cinematic pleasure – or so the argument went.

Almost a full decade after that fateful day, we can see just how naïve such initial reactions were. If you don’t believe me, watch the booming last act of director Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which (I’m embarrassed to say) is also the best part of the movie, a knock-down, drag-out rampage that makes surprisingly effective use of 3-D as most of downtown Chicago is reduced to rubble.

Everything about Dark of the Moon leads Bay and his cast toward this climactic battle in which the Decepticons (evil robots) square off against the Autobots (robots dedicated to helping mankind). And when Decepticons and Autobots get it on, they tend to smash everything in sight.

Grudging respect must be paid to Bay for offering a smorgasbord of ingredients that probably will animate the summer box-office. If the movie had a motto, it might be: "Ignore collateral damage, pile on the destruction."

Dark of the Moon adds a few new twists to its 154-minute running time, even making room for a cameo appearance by Bill O’Reilly. Yes, that Bill O’Reilly.

Among other additions: Appearances by John Malkovich (as a silver-haired tycoon); Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (as LaBeouf’s love interest); and Frances McDormand (as a U.S. intelligence officer). Leonard Nimoy -- no stranger to portentous sci-fi -- lends his voice to the character of Sentinel Prime, a sagacious Autobot that's brought back into action several decades after having crashed on the moon.

Megan Fox? She’s not present, but don't fret. A rear view of Huntington-Whiteley elicited happy adolescent hoots at a preview screening, which ought to give you some idea about her function in the movie.

Ah yes, the moon. For years, conspiracy theorists and cranks have argued that the U.S. never landed on the moon. Dark of the Moon advances another theory: It seems that the U.S. went to the moon to check out an alien craft that had smashed onto the lunar surface.

To make his case more persuasive, Bay mixes newsreel footage with historical re-creations that include Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, and the late Walter Cronkite. I'm guessing, of course, but I can't help but think that the venerable CBS anchor would have been surprised to find himself adding traces of credibility to a loopy summer blockbuster.

After this "historical" introduction, the movie leaps into the present where LaBeouf’s Sam is jobless and living with his girlfriend (Huntington-Whiteley). Sam’s a little jealous of his girlfriend’s boss (Patrick Dempsey), a rich guy with a killer car collection.

Eventually, we learn that the Decepticons are trying to take over Earth so that they can save their dying civilization -- or something like that. The Autobots join with humans to stop the brutal Decpticons and to provide summer’s heaviest helping of metal-crunching chaos.

No offense to the robots, but they all tend to look alike, which may help explain why the movie never really develops a strong rooting interest, aside from encouraging us to wish that LaBeouf would tone down his over-amped performance.

I’ve read that the final battle sequence lasts for 50 minutes. I don’t know if that’s true, but it certainly felt like it. Bay goes for the action jugular with 3-D images of men plunging from skyscrapers and giant robots chipping away at Chicago’s skyline. A menacing, snake-like creation called Shockwave bores its way through concrete like an intergalactic jackhammer.

In case it's not yet clear, character development, story and emotional involvement all give way to Bay's spectacularly created marathon of destruction. If that’s what you’re after Dark of the Moon won’t shortchange you.

In fairness, it should be noted that Dark of the Moon represents a marked improvement over the last installment (Transformers; Revenge of the Fallen), but there’s a difference between a three-ring circus of mayhem and a story that aims to do more than give 'em a lot of what they came for -- and then add more on top of that.