'Dial of Destiny:' the fun wears out

 

  Archimedes, one of the most renowned mathematicians of the ancient world, doesn’t usually show up in fantasy-reliant action movies.

 He nonetheless finds his way into Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the latest story about the fabled archeological adventurer who made his first screen appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark way back in (gasp!) 1981. 

  This time, Indy packs his bags with references to the previous movies as well as a search for the fabled Dial of Destiny, a.k.a. the Antikythera mechanism.

  In the movie, the Antikythera is said to be one of Archimedes’s  inventions, a device that, in fictionalized IndyWorld, can locate fissures in time that allow for travel into the past. 

   In a way, the entire movie — with James Mangold taking over directing chores from Steven Spielberg — is like traveling into the past, an action-heavy adventure in which Mangold demonstrates journeyman competence but fails to generate enough of the ingredient that has distinguished the best Indiana Jones’ efforts: fun.

    The movie features appearances by a de-aged Harrison Ford, as well as the well-preserved Ford, who — in his 80s — is still willing to don his fedora and take on physical challenges. 

     Once again Indy battles (who else?) Nazis.

     An add-on: Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays Helena, the daughter of one of Indie’s old archeological cohorts (Toby Jones).

     Part adversary and part ally, Waller-Bridge adds a touch of naughtiness to the proceedings, but not enough to sustain a gleeful, whip-cracking romp. 

    Other names include Antonio Banderas, as a sea captain, and, more importantly, Mads Mikkelsen as Dr. Voller, a Nazi scientist who, after the war, began working in the American space program. 

   The movie kicks off with a speedy train sequence set during World War II and leaps forward to the late 1960s, the period when most of the action takes place.

    Many of the movie’s characters want to find the Dial of Destiny, the movie’s MacGuffin. Indy thinks it belongs in a museum. Voller wants to find both halves of the device and use it for his own evil purposes.

    Note: In these kinds of movies, there always seem to be missing parts that need to be recovered to activate a device’s potential. 

    In this case, Voller has a cockamamy plan to travel back in time, change the course of the war, and mastermind a German victory.

    Of course, there’s plenty of globe-hopping, taking the movie to Morocco and Sicily, among other places. 

    And, yes, there are chases galore, most executed by Mangold and company with the required skill.

     Still, it's difficult not to realize that we’re watching Mangold and his team blend the ingredients into the familiar Indiana Jones recipe, a self-conscious awareness that works against surprise.  

   Yeah, time for another chase. Yeah, time to squirm, this time thanks to a cave full of bugs.

     Ford brings a carload of trademark grumpiness to the role. He remains credible as an aging action hero — albeit one who occasionally creaks.

     The early Indian Jones movies had a celebratory quality that returned us to the days when movies could be approached with naivety and wide-eyed expectation.

     Belonging to a now-faded moment, that feeling is difficult to revive. So it's no surprise that Dial of Destiny can feel a bit stale.

      Designed as the final chapter in the Jones saga, Dial of Destiny  doesn’t generate all of the thrills we expect from a series that arguably already should have been put to rest.

      Sigh deeply and move on.

   

    

The battle to license a video game

  Alert for gamers: Tetris isn’t a movie based on a video game you’ve probably played at some point in your gaming life. Tetris deals with a different kind of game: hardball business dealings.

  Taron Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, a Dutch-Indonesian entrepreneur who was raised in the US but lives with his wife and kids in Japan. 

   Rogers discovers the game at a trade show, immediately sees its potential, and spends the rest of the movie trying to license it.

  Director Jon S. Baird surrounds Egerton with a strong cast, many of whom play characters who try to thwart Rogers’ ambition. 

   Toby Jones signs on as Robert Stein, a businessman who thought he had purchased the rights to the game.  Roger Allam (as Robert Maxwell) and Anthony Boyle (as Maxwell's son Kevin) further complicate matters as they also jockey for position. 

  Nikita Efremov plays the Russian programmer who invented the game before the fall of the USSR, an oddly marginal figure when the story begins, mostly because of how the Soviets play the licensing game.

    During the Cold War, the state version of Communism dictated that all licensing agreements be made with the Soviet Union, not with  individual inventors.

 That's why Hank visits Moscow, meets with  Soviet bureaucrats, encounters a corrupt Soviet KGB agent, and a translator who seems eager to help.

   For Rodgers the stakes are high; he's betting everything he has on emerging victorious. 

   Tonally, Tetris resembles a spy movie -- only one that revolves around the complex maneuvering of those who seek to work deals with big companies such as Nintendo and Atari.

   How true to life is Noah Pink's screenplay? Beats me, but an action-oriented ending including a car chase seems like a stretch, a last-minute attempt to add thriller flourishes

    Entertaining in parts, Tetris doesn't totally click as a story about a little guy who's trying to make it big, as a movie about international business, or as a depiction of the final days of the Soviet Union. Tetris seems more like a sidebar to the larger stories that form its backdrop.

    On the plus side of the ledger: Egerton's Rogers turns out to be a good-guy hustler whom we root for and animated game-style introductions to various segments help sort things out, at least until they begin to feel repetitive.

  And there’s this: Lively and never dull, Tetris could be the only movie I’ve seen recently in which the outcome hinges on the invention of a hand-held device — Nintendo’s Game Boy — that’s not designed to blow anything up. 

   

An eccentric detective at West Point

 

A great cast can't save The Pale Blue Eye, a gloomy melodramatic story about a detective (Christian Bale) who investigates the murder of a cadet who was hanged before his heart was cut from his chest. Adapting his screenplay from a novel by Louis Bayard, director Scott Cooper delivers a chilly drama that brings a historical figure -- Edgar Allan Poe -- into a plot weighted with secrets. Poe (Harry Melling) did attend West Point, but the story is pure fiction. Bale's Augustus Landor invites Poe to join him in trying to solve a crime that has the Academy on edge. In addition to Bale, the movie casts Gillian Anderson and Toby Jones as a husband and wife whose son (Harry Lawtey) also attends West Point. Their daughter (Lucy Boynton) catches Poe's eye. Charlotte Gainsbourg portrays a waitress at a local pub who carries on an affair with Bale's Augustus Landor. Yes, that's Robert Duvall as an expert on witchcraft whom Landor consults. Suggestions of the paranormal waft through the wintery depictions of West Point, where Timothy Spall takes a turn as the school's embattled superintendent. A moody depiction of 19th-century life turns Cooper's movie into a mystery that's a bore or perhaps "chore" is the better word. The gothic environment Cooper creates is credibly somber but the drama feels freeze-dried.

Too much polish, not enough nerve

  Few 2022 movies are as impeccably crafted as director Sam Mendes's Empire of Light. Set during the Thatcher years of the 1980s, the movie focuses on the Empire Theater.

 Once a proud movie palace, the aptly named Empire stands for a time when both movies and Great Britain had a more exalted profile than they did in the 1980s, not exactly a high point for either reality or fantasy.

   It should be stated at the outset that the movie offers another bravura performance from Olivia Colman. Colman excels as a mentally disturbed woman who manages The Empire, joylessly submits to the sexual advances of her sleazy boss (Colin Firth), and develops a relationship with a young black man (Michael Ward) who lands a job at the theater.

    Empire of Light wants to pay tribute to the powers of cinema  while telling telling the stories of the people who work at a place where the downtrodden masses once sought glamor and escape.

     So given all this polish and craft, why does Empire of Light fail to get where it might have gotten?

     The most obvious reason involves Mendes's issue-laden screenplay, which sketches its way through racism, the rise of right-wing street punks, as well as sexual abuse and mental illness. 

      Colman's Hilary has a troubled past that's reflected in the uneasiness of Colman's demeanor. A solitary figure who has been stabilized by lithium, Hilary develops a relationship with Ward's Stephen, who's acutely aware of the racial climate in the surrounding town. 

       At one point, Hilary shows Stephen the upper stories of the Empire building, which once housed a ballroom but has become a refuge for pigeons. It's as if she's sharing a forbidden secret with him: It cements their connection.

      Hillary will invest more in the relationship than Stephen, but he's kind and genuinely concerned about a woman who's much older than he is.

      Nicely calibrated performances, including from Hannah Onslow as one of the theater's employees, Tom Brooke, as junior manager, and Toby Jones, as the movie's projectionist, have a strange consequence. They add to a feeling that Empire has been over-groomed, notably by cinematographer Roger Deakins' wondrous images and production designer Mark Tidesley carefully appointed sets. (A real theater in the seaside town of Margate was used for filming.)

      It would be unfair to say that any sense of urgency suffocates under the weight of production design, but only Colman shatters the movie's often decorous surfaces, most notably in a scene in which Hilary (sans lithium) crashes a gala opening of Chariots of Fire, a premiere that Firth's character regards as pivotal in the re-establishment of the theater's cultural and social primacy. 

        Hilary becomes an uninvited intruder on the stage, where she recites Auden and generally makes a large crowd feel ill at ease. Something real and disturbing overtakes the palace of fantasy and, in the case of Chariots of Fire, any feeling of reassurance that picture might have offered.

       It may be inadvertent, but Empire of Light works less as a  tribute to the transporting power of cinema, an old-hat subject anyway, than as testimony to the power of an actor to unleash something volcanic, nervy and difficult to categorize.

     Even in a movie that can't leap over the high bar it sets, Colman continues to amaze.

        

       

An unlikely pair of business partners

First Cow takes some patience but its rewards are worth it.

Cookie and King Lu are as unlikely a pair of felons as you'll find in movies.

Frontiersmen in the Oregon Territory during the 19th Century, Cookie and King Lu team up to bake biscuits which they sell to locals. Their business runs smoothly and the biscuits — Cookie’s recipe — are great. There’s a catch, though. To make the biscuits, Cookie and King Lu rely on the milk they steal nightly from the area’s only cow.

Working in a style defined by a leisurely, restrained naturalism, director Kelly Reichardt (Meek's Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy) establishes an environment in which bathing is infrequent and life can be brutal. I don't mean to deter anyone from seeing Reichardt's First Cow, but she creates a mud-caked world in which you practically can smell the characters.

When we meet Cookie, he's working as a cook for a group of trappers who berate him for not finding anything more than mushrooms to eat. On one of his food searches, Cookie encounters King Lu, who's hiding naked in the woods. Cookie helps King Lu, who says he's fleeing a vengeful group of Russians. King Lu later returns the favor, inviting Cookie to share his ramshackle cabin.

By the time, Cookie and King Lu start sharing digs, Reichardt has deposited them at Fort Tillicum, a settlement populated by Native Americans and grizzled-looking white men. The local boss (Toby Jones) owns the cow that tempts Cookie and King Lu into their life of crime.

Reichardt doesn't see this odd-ball duo as criminals and neither will audiences. Cookie and King Lu are budding entrepreneurs. Lacking capital, they must be extra-enterprising about how to begin collecting their share of the great American profit stream.

The movie deals with prejudice and class differences without italicizing a point of view. As a Chinese immigrant, King Lu (Orion Lee) isn’t exactly greeted with open arms. He dreams of owning a farm. Cookie (John Magaro) has his own cockeyed ambition: He’d like to own a hotel with an adjoining bakery.

In a land where fistfights are as common as handshakes, Cookie and King Lu form an alliance that blossoms into a genuine friendship. They make a good team. With Cookie handling the baking and King Lu, the marketing, a thriving business develops even as the threat of exposure looms. We already know from the movie’s opening — set in the present — that Cookie and King Lu are fated to run into some bad luck as the tale unfolds in one lengthy flashback.

The conversations between Cookie and King Lu aren’t exactly memorable, but they have their own amusing rhythm.

First Cow requires a taste for cinema that’s in no hurry. It’s as if Reichardt wants us to feel the earth under Cookie’s boots and to understand that these men inhabit a historical moment when the passing of time felt different than it does today.

Reichardt’s approach allows for brief detours, odd moments that help make the movie memorable. Through an open window, for example, a captivated Cookie sees a Native American doing what looks like a North Woods form of Tai Chi.

At other times, the movie discovers absurd contrasts, notably Jones’s character and one of his guests chatting about what’s happening in Paris. Their discussion includes references to the colors currently dominating the Parisian fashion scene.

For Cookie and King Lu, such talk has about as much significance as a weather forecast for Mars. They do, however, know enough to realize that in this harsh world, some are faring better than others. Cookie and King Lu take a bit of getting used to, but they make for a memorable duo.

The dinos return, but where's the fear?

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom falls short as big helping of entertainment.

If there's any emotional heft in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, it stems from the fate of the movie's genetically engineered dinosaurs. At this point in their big screen lives, these innocent creatures have come to represent a natural state that greedy humans have altered and abused. Some will get behind the wrath of the dinos, which is directed mostly at bad folks who want to profit from their revived existence (Gasp!) even turn them into the world's most deadly weapons. Had the picture been better, I might have joined them.

Director J.A. Bayona, known for his 2007 horror opus The Orphanage, limits his achievement by adhering to the required action formula. Here's a clue: The movie's dialogue relies heavily on the word "run." The fact that people need to tell one another to flee as massive thundering creatures approach at full speed stands as a greater indictment of human intelligence than anything else in this protracted stompfest.

Fallen Kingdom leans heavily on action while shortchanging build up, but I took the multiple instances in which Chris Pratt -- reprising his role as a kind of dino whisperer -- was slimed by various creatures as a welcome helping of self-mockery on the part of Bayona and his CGI crew. The movie could have used more such flippancy.

In the last Jurassic World film, Pratt teamed with Bryce Dallas Howard . The two reunite for an adventure in which a wealthy benefactor (James Cromwell) tries to save dinosaurs from imminent extinction by taking them off an island on which an active volcano is about to erupt.

Howard's Claire recruits a Pratt's Owen, who -- of course -- initially plays hard to get. He's busy building a cabin in the isolated woods and has had enough of dinosaurs. Still, he answers Claire's call.

Additions to the series include a nervous computer expert (Justice Smith) who provides some of the movie's many screams and a young woman (Daniella Pineda) who seems to function as a kind of punk veterinarian.

Of course, an evil military type also must crop up. Enter Ted Levine as Ken Wheatley, the brutally duplicitous organizer of the rescue mission. Keep your eye an assistant (Rafe Spall) to Cromwell's character, a guy who immediately becomes suspect by being too damn nice for his own good.

The movie divides its time between the island and the estate created by Cromwell's Benjamin Lockwood. Thanks to manipulations of plot that needn't be spelled out here, the dinos wind up on the estate, where they eventually race around, somewhat unexpectedly, indoors.

Lockwood's granddaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon) joins in an effort to save the dinos from profiteers who eventually bring in an auctioneer (Toby Jones) to conduct the world's most malign rare species sale.

The dinosaurs have human allies, but the movie's heart belongs to Blue, a human-friendly velociraptor that was trained by Owen in the last movie. Unlike any of the human characters, Blue shows a degree of inner conflict: She must decide which humans to protect and which to turn into lunch.

The movie also includes a prologue and epilogue in which Jeff Goldblum, as a scientist testifying before a Senate Committee, condemns the hubris that was required to create these genetic marvels in the first place. He advises against rescuing the dinosaurs; for him, the pending volcanic eruption represents an opportunity for a reset.

Bayona can't entirely escape the trap of open-mouthed acting that often results from an extensive reliance on CGI: This involves asking actors to gawk at the special effects or scream with fear as the digitally created dinos bear their predatory teeth.

Braced by familiarity with this franchise, I seldom -- if ever -- shared the fear. We know the genre too well (and so does Bayona) to get beyond the rote deliverance of one action set piece after another as the movie stomps its way toward the ending that inevitably (and finally eerily) opens the door for the next chapter. I'm betting we'll see a lot more running, chomping and wholesale swallowing of those who trample ethical considerations in their relentless quest for profit.

What exactly these miscreants will do with all their money in a world they seem eager to destroy remains a mystery.

A mournful World War I story

A young officer mixes with hardened vets in Journey's End.

As time passes, World War I seems to have lost its grip on the popular imagination. The ill-named "War to End All Wars" shouldn't be forgotten, which is one of the reasons Journey’s End -- a World War I drama based on a 1928 play by R.C. Sherriff -- makes a welcome contribution to cinema’s inexhaustible canon of films about the horrors of war.

Director Saul Dibb puts us in the midst of the trench warfare that defined World War I. Claustrophobic as life in the trenches and sometimes constricted by its theatrical origins, Journey’s End nonetheless arrives as a mournful depiction of loss, particularly among young soldiers who had little idea what the war would do to them.

The movie centers on Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), a young officer who arrives at the front asking to be assigned to the company of a former school chum Capt. Stanhope (Sam Claflin). A man he views as a mentor, Stanhope also is engaged to Raleigh's sister.

By the time Raleigh arrives in the trenches, Stanhope has left the reality of the home-front far behind. He has been shocked into cynicism about the nature of warfare. Naive and eager, Raleigh doesn’t receive the hoped-for welcome from a man who can’t seem to drink enough alcohol to quiet his sense of fear, anxiety, and hopelessness.

The year: 1918 and the British soldiers are playing a waiting game as the Germans prepare to launch a major spring offensive.

Stanhope wants little to do with the wide-eyed Raleigh, who’s taken under wing by Lieutenant Osborne (a terrific Paul Bettany), a former school teacher who doesn't seem to have been crushed by the mud, boredom, and apprehension of a war that required harrowing night patrols and in which men could be gunned down even before they could even leave their trenches. The other soldiers refer to Bettany's character as "Uncle."

Journey’s End won’t unseat Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory as one of the great World War I films, but the performances are strong and, the movie proves sorrowful and moving, a reminder that many of the men who fight are destined to become bodies strewn across ravaged landscapes that hardly seem worth the trouble.

Living with that knowledge takes its toll on men of Company C and — as it should — on us.

Sheriff's play, by the way, was adapted for the screen in 1930 by director James Whale (Frankenstein), but the story is worth repeating and Dibbs does it well.

One big unhappy family

Michael Haneke's Happy End lacks the director's usual edge.

In movies such as Amour, The White Ribbon, Funny Games, Cache and The Piano Teacher, Austrian director Michael Haneke has established himself as one of the cinematic voices most committed to observing the brutal nature of nearly all human interaction. Haneke's movies can have so much edge, one often feels cut by them.

In Happy End, Haneke files down the edge a bit, but still clings to his less-than-optimistic views about society and its despicable perils.

This time, Haneke focuses on the Laurents, a wealthy French family living in the port city of Calais. Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), the family's patriarch, has fallen into physical and mental decline. His daughter Anne (Isabelle Huppert) has taken charge of the family’s construction company and is about to announce her engagement to a British businessman (Toby Jones) who's helping arrange a company-saving loan.

Anne’s son Pierre (Franz Rogowski) drinks too much, imbibing hostility along with his wine. Anne’s philandering brother, Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz), works as a surgeon; Thomas’ daughter from a previous marriage, Eve (Fantine Harduin), has just moved in with her father. Eve's Mom became incapacitated from a drug overdose, a situation that creates discomfort because we know from early images that Eve has an interest in poisons.

Not surprisingly, the characters live behind curtains of self-absorption with Haneke introducing computer conversations and cell phone photography in an attempt to add one more element of alienation, as well to give the story some contemporary spin.

Unafraid to present his images in lengthy takes that defy contemporary pacing, Haneke again immerses us in a world in which the so-called civilized folks are vicious and the rest of society (notably a group of immigrants seen at the end) are innocent pawns. Same goes for poor Rachid (Hassam Ghancy) the family servant who lives in a house next to the large mansion where all of the Laurents reside.

Unlike some of Haneke’s work, Happy End can’t entirely escape dullness, even as its defiant characters work their cruel ways. Happy End is like a snake bite without enough venom as if the snake has become so desensitized by a cruel society that it wants nothing more than to be put out of its own misery.

Charlize Theron, kicker of butts

Atomic Blonde has style to spare, but wears itself out.

What's the most damning thing you can say about a movie? That its actors don't behave credibly. That it has been miscast? That its plot wobbles? That its dialogue sounds lame and wooden? That it displays too little visual imagination?

All of those are unfortunate missteps, but only one of them (the one about a story made overly complex by a needlessly fragmented narrative) applies to Atomic Blonde, Charlize Theron's plunge into the world of movies based on graphic novels.

The damning sum total of the movie's plot intricacies and icy stylizations, at least for me, is that I didn't much care about the outcome of a story set in Berlin in 1989, a time when the wall separating East and West Germany is about to topple and spies on both sides are beginning to wonder about their role in a post-Cold War world.

This sounds like John Le Carre territory, but Atomic Blonde, which springs from a graphic novel by Antony Johnston and has been directed by David Leitch, wallows in attitude and style in ways that create little by way of emotional involvement.

For all its hyper activity, the movie often feels exhausted, perhaps because it taps into an already mined thematic vein in which old antagonisms are evaporating like morning mist exposed to new sun.

Theron's performance as the self-possessed Lorraine Broughton embodies nearly everything you need to know about Atomic Blonde. A cooly efficient MI-6 agent, Lorraine arrives in Berlin to obtain a list of western spies a wannabe Stasi defector (Eddie Marsan) has offered to sell before it reaches Soviet hands.

Ably demonstrating her mastery of martial arts choreography (think Hong Kong movies of a couple of decades back), Theron plays a spy so cool she takes ice baths. Lorraine's blonde hair frames the countenance of a character who has been trained to turn her face into a mask. It's possible that Lorraine has worn her spy mask so long, it has become real.

Lorraine is bruised and bloodied by fights, but the bruises feel like physical post-it notes, self-conscious attempts to add realism to an overall atmosphere rich in faux trappings. Watch out for Lorraine's high heels.

Lorraine is asked to work with another British agent, James McAvoy's Percival. Percival, who has plied his trade in Berlin for some time, claims to know everything about this increasingly corrupted environment.

With his hair cut short, McAvoy offers plenty of scenery-chewing mania, but a framing device adds to the feeling of a mishmash unified only by style and attitude. Intermittent breaks in the action arrive when Lorraine is debriefed by an MI-6 desk jockey (a dyspeptic-looking Toby Jones) and a CIA operative (a bearded John Goodman).

Sofia Boutella portrays a French spy who has a sexual encounter with Theron's character. Does it mean anything? Or is it just a way for the filmmakers to add an LGBT twist to a story that wants to be hip, which -- in this case -- requires a bit of prurient seasoning?

Protracted and built around the grunting exhaustion of the protagonist and her enemies, a late-picture fight scene packs some wallop, as does a car chase in which the crunch of colliding metal smashes against your ear drums. Moreover, the movie's opening scenes are cool enough to feel like exercising without breaking a sweat.

But for all Theron's punches, kicks and icy stares, the movie's flirtation with ideas remains unconsummated. Besides, how many stylistic trump cards can one movie play before you start wondering whether it has anything else in its deck? For me, so many that I eventually stopped caring what Atomic Blonde might deal next.

Are all geniuses created equal?

The Man Who Knew Infinity tells the story of an Indian math whiz who encounters the British establishment.

The less familiar you are with the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the more likely you are enjoy The Man Who Knew Infinity, the story of an Indian mathematical genius who was forced -- because of deeply embedded British racism -- to beat his head against the wall of Great Britain's academic establishment.

Director Matt Brown opts for prestige, hallowed-halls packaging with a cast that features Dev Patel, as Ramanujan, and Jeremy Irons, as G.H. Hardy, an established mathematician who insists that Ramanujan provide proofs of his discoveries.

The movie's most interesting thematic wrinkle centers on the difference between two approaches to mathematics -- Ramanujan's intuitive grasp of mind-bending theories -- and Hardy's more dogged, academically respectable plodding. Hardy isn't entirely dismissive of intuition, but he also believes in dotting every "i" and crossing every "t."

As played by Dev Patel, Ramanujan claims to be channeling information about the universe from God. Hardy seems to view Ramanujan's approach as a form of unacceptable romanticism.

Gradually, Hardy comes to respect Ramanujan and lobbies for his admittance to the inner circle of recognized mathematicians who have done significant work at Trinity College.

Mostly set in the early 1900s, the movie emphatically underscores the bigotry that once pervaded British academic circles. Few of Trinity's dons believe that an otherwise uneducated Indian from Madras could develop ground-breaking proofs on his own.

When we first meet Ramanujan, he's a 25-year-old shipping clerk with a wife (Devika Bhise) who he must leave behind when he travels to England. The difficulties of this long-distance relationship are exacerbated by Ramanujan's overly possessive mother. She hides the letters her son lovingly writes to his bride.

Irons makes Hardy's insistence on playing by well-established academic rules credible, but Patel has difficulty getting beyond the trademark avidity he has been bringing to the screen since he appeared in Slumdog Millionaire.

The movie derives added tension from a social and personal question: Can Ramanujan retain his confidence while he's constantly being berated by one or another of Cambridge's elite? He arrives in Britain expecting to function as an equal to the school's academicians. He views them as colleagues, but quickly is pushed into subordinate roles.

Hardy's friend and fellow mathematician Edensor Littlewood (Toby Jones) supports Ramanujan. Jeremy Northam fills a small role as Bertrand Russell, the famed playwright and mathematician who warns Hardy against restraining Ramanujan.

There aren't many surprises in the arc of Brown's story, whose major accomplishment involves introducing Ramanujan's name to uninformed audiences -- albeit in a decorous fashion that never quite stirs the imagination.

Fairy tales with adult spin

Tale of Tales takes director Matteo Garrone, best known to American audiences for his Naples-based mob drama Gomorrah, in a new direction.

Lavish in its design and lush in its sensuality, Tale of Tales presents three fairy tales from Giambattista Basile, a Neapolitan courtier who wrote in the 1600s.

Garrone tries, with varying degrees of success, to make three tales cohere, but the movie contains too many amazing sights to ignore, and each of the tales offers stern cautionary elements to balance a visual abundance that borders on decadence.

In the first of these tales, Selma Hayek plays a childless queen who's promised by a hooded sorcerer that she'll conceive if her husband (John C. Reilly) slays a sea monster and carves out its heart for later boiling by (what else?) a certified virgin.

For his efforts, the king is mortally wounded, but the sorcerer's promise comes true -- only with a catch. The virgin who boils the monster's heart also becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a carbon copy of the queen's son, a white-haired kid who introduces a Prince and The Pauper dimension to the story.

In the second tale, another king (Toby Jones in an unlikely bit of casting) takes a flea as a beloved pet. By nourishing the flea with an ample supply of blood, the insect grows to an ungodly size and then expires.

The king then decides that he'll marry off his daughter (Bebe Cave) to any suitor who can identify the skin of the recently departed creature, which he has stretched for display in the throne room.

As bad luck would have it, the winner is a hideous looking ogre who carts the princess off to his bone-littered mountain lair.

In the third tale, yet another king (Vincent Cassel) lives a live of unashamed debauchery, bedding as many women as possible.

One day, the king hears the siren call of a beautiful voice coming from a peasant cottage. The king assumes that the voice only can belong to an irresistibly beautiful woman.

The twist: The woman (Hayley Carmichael) is an elderly crone, who lives with her sister. The crone concocts a scheme to sleep with the king. I suppose I needn't tell you that things don't work out as well as she or anyone else might have hoped.

I wouldn't say that each tale is profound, but in sum, the movie dishes out its visual pleasures in such unstintingly large portions that it's almost impossible not to feel sated.

'Tinker, Tailor' has mood to spare

It may not always be crystal clear, but Tinker, Tailor has plenty to recommend it.

I admit it. I sometimes became confused watching Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a big-screen adaptation of John Le Carre’s 1974 novel. Frustrating? Yes, but there also were times when I found the movie so atmospherically right I didn’t care whether I could dot every “i” or cross every “t” in Le Carre’s labyrinthine plot.

A bit of background. Dense with character and incident, Le Carre’s novel does not naturally lend itself to adaptation. In 1979, it took the BBC seven episodes to translate Le Carre’s novel into a comprehensible drama. The great Alec Guinness starred as George Smiley, the world’s least emotive spy.

Those familiar either with the novel or the BBC series immediately will know that screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan faced a monumental task. Fair to say, they haven’t entirely succeeded in taming Le Carre’s novel.

But in the case of Tinker, Tailor, mood and background may be as important as a plot that, in its overall arc, is easy enough to follow.

Here’s the gist: We’re nearing the end of the Cold War. The British intelligence agency – known to its employees as The Circus – is in the midst of a power shift. A group of rebellious spies is trying to unseat the agency head, known as Control (John Hurt). They succeed in ousting Control, and his most reliable operative, George Smiley (Gary Oldman). Control subsequently dies.

All of this turmoil begins when Control initiates a search for a mole who has penetrated the highest levels of British intelligence.

In keeping with the feeling of institutional decline, Tomas Alfredson -- who directed the terrific Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In – gives the proceedings a bracingly severe tone. From the start, it’s clear that Alfredson has total command of the movie’s look.

Following the story isn’t made easier by the fact that the screenplay employs a flashback structure that can be disorienting. And the screenplay’s refusal to explain any of its spy jargon doesn’t help either.

But I doubt whether you’ll find a better supporting cast in any movie this year. Populating the spy ranks are intelligence bureaucrats played by Colin Firth, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones and David Hencik, all of whom are superb.

And in Hurt, Alfredson has found an actor whose weathered face does as much to suggest institutional collapse as any plot developments could. Hurt crops up at the beginning and in some flashback scenes, and he gives the movie a cynical weight that's indispensable.

Then there’s Oldman, whose restrained performance as Smiley has been praised in the British press and elsewhere. To play Smiley, Oldman slows his delivery and explores the lower octaves in his vocal range.

He can be brilliant. A scene in which a drunken Smiley reenacts a long-ago interrogation of a top and much-feared Soviet agent delivers the goods, and is punctuated by Oldman’s slight wobble when Smiley finishes his story and attempts to stand up.

But there are also times when Oldman’s restraint seems to lack resonance. Smiley has been through a lot. His wife Ann (never seen in full view) has left him. He has endured the endless sordid battles of Cold War spying. He’s been pushed aside by the agency that has dominated his life. He's hardly the kind to vent: Still, I found myself wishing that Oldman had taken us a little past Smiley’s purposefully blank expressions.

Maybe Oldman, who functions as the story’s principal investigator, didn’t want to take anything away from his fellow actors. In a scene in which George meets with Connie Sachs (Kathy Burke), a former intelligence emplyee, Oldman watches while Burke creates a telling portrait of a woman whose romantic impulses were channeled into admiration for her co-workers. It's a great small piece of work.

Although it falls short of perfection, and although, as I’ve said, Tinker, Tailor can be confusing, it always feels intelligent, partly because of Alfredson’s skillful direction and partly because there’s not an actor on screen who doesn't seem smart in some way.

Tinker, Tailor includes sexual betrayals, references to torture and fierce intra-agency battling, but instead of going for cheap thrills, the movie immerses us in a world-weariness that fits its historical moment. Alfredson may not fret about whether viewers sink or swim with the plot: But surely he wants us to swim in the same murky waters in which the characters bob, looking for something to grab hold of.