For the record ...

 

  Every week, the number of movies released threatens to become more unmanageable. Some films creep into the market where I work without opportunity for advance viewing. That makes the critics' job difficult. And given the onslaught of releases, particularly as the year draws to a close, playing catch-up can be daunting.

 So where am I going with this?

 I've been looking for a way to call attention to movies I believe deserve consideration, although I may not offer full reviews. I hate to see movies of interest fall through the cracks. 

  So, here are two movies I found worth my time and may well be worth yours.

  Let's begin with Nouvelle Vague, director Richard Linklater's movie about the making of Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard's groundbreaking 1960 movie. By 1960, the French New Wave had already broken on the shores of world cinema. Godard was late to chime in, but he made his presence felt.

  Beautifully filmed in black-and-white, Nouvelle Vague features Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, who was 29 when Breathless hit world screens, a little old to be a cinema enfant terrible, but still young enough to begin a career that lasted 70 years.

  Aubry Dullin portrays Breathless star Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Zoey Deutch appears as Jean Seberg, his co-star. 

  Nouvelle Vague reminds us of a time when audiences were discovering movies that felt fresh, invigorating, and full of promise. The future seemed open and expansive, as if something vital was happening -- not just in one movie but across the cinema board.

   And that's the key. We don't necessarily yearn for  something "new" at the movies. We yearn for something "fresh," movies that reignite our excitement by making cinema feel alive and putting us in touch with aesthetic sensibilities that awaken the senses, and -- in rare cases --point us toward truth.

Christy tells the story of Christy Martin, nee Christine Salters, a woman who boxed professionally from 1989 to 2012. A West Virginia native, Christy became known as "The Coal Miner's Daughter," which, in her case, was literally true. Her dad was a miner.

   Sydney Sweeney, who reportedly gained 30 pounds to play Christy, looks fiercely credible in the ring as a hard-punching boxer driven by fury and ambition.

  Christy's sexuality -- she's a lesbian -- gives the movie another focus, shedding light on her relationship with her trainer, Jim Martin (Ben Foster). Martin coerced Christy into marriage and took charge of her career, convincing her that no one else could help her advance.

   The movie charts Christy's rise in conventional ways, but  her relationship with her husband makes for an increasingly wrenching domestic drama, made all the more painful by the Svengali-like control Martin exerts over Christy and which culminates with a shocking display of violence.

   Sweeney and Foster are in fine form. Additionally, Merritt Wever gives a scalding performance as Christy's censorious mother, a woman more worried about public perception than her daughter's well-being. Similar kudos for Chad L. Coleman, who plays boxing promoter Don King, a man who could charm but who always lets those around him know who’s in charge.

'Not Okay' turns out to be okay

   

   Not Okay takes aim at the ravenous need some young people have for on-line fame. It's not exactly fresh territory. We already know that hollow on-line ambition inspires shameless searches for notoriety. Besides, the selfie joke pile pretty much had been exhausted.

    But director Quinn Shepherd, with help from a cast headlined by Zoey Deutsch, gets something out of an obvious premise by flooding the screen with upbeat style and maximizing her lead actress's ability to balance glibness with hints of genuine emotion.

   Deutch’s Danni is an aspiring writer who works for a Manhattan-based website named Depravity.  Using rudimentary computer skills, Danni fakes a trip to Paris so that she can claim to have attended a prestigious writers' workshop. She wants to impress her boss (Negin Farsad) and maybe become a full-time writer.

   Danni's timing turns out to be rotten. She posts a fake picture of herself in front of the Eiffel Tower shortly before a terrorist bombing rocks Paris. Danni now has a problem. She either must confess to never having left New York or concoct a story about the difficulties of dealing with a traumatic brush with death. 

   She chooses the latter course and becomes an on-line celebrity as well as leader of a movement that encourage people to admit that they've been ravaged by trauma.

   Enter Rowan (Mia Isaac), a young woman who lost her sister in a school shooting and who since has become a highly recognizable  anti-gun voice. Rowan and Danni meet at a support group.

   Recently seen in Don’t Make Me Go, Isaac again proves a standout. As a character who's personable but burdened by badly frayed nerves and grief, Isaac rescues the movie from its own clever striving. 

    Of course, Danni's bubble must burst and when it does, Shepherd  tempers the movie's playful tone. 

    As a movie about shallow people, Not Okay sometimes seems shallow itself. I could have done without chapter headings and other self-consciously playful ploys. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I wondered whether a comedy involving deadly terrorism might not be at odds the movie's mostly bouncy beat.

   By the end, though, Shepherd leaves us with a slightly sour taste. She's right to do so. Danni's fraudulent ways teach her a lesson but, to the movie's credit, her shallow appetites are not without consequence. 

A deja vous helping of zombie comedy

Zombieland: Double Tap breaks little new ground and that may be just what the movie's fans want.

If you've seen the first Zombieland, you've pretty much seen the second.

Zombieland: Double Tap arrives 10 years after the release of the first movie with the original zombie- fighting crew offering the same brand of humor that made the first movie a hit. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

If you've been hankering to see Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin reprise their roles as destroyers of zombies, Double Tap delivers.

Of course, a few new faces have been added, notably a funny Zoey Deutch as the most cheerfully clueless blonde to hit the screen in a long time.

Those who care should know that the quartet of remaining humans from the first movie is still threatened by hordes of zombies, brain-eating creatures that began spreading after the world was struck by some sort of virus.

Early on, Eisenberg's Columbus, Harrelson's Tallahassee, Stone's Wichita, and Breslin's Little Rock take refuge in a devastated White House. After a bit of plot maneuvering, Little Rock hits the road with a guitar-playing hippie who appropriates Dylan songs. Little Rock evidently is headed for Graceland, the equally devastated home of the late Elvis Presley.

The trio of survivors (along with Deutch's Madison) follows, maybe for no other reason than to give the movie somewhere to go. The journey provides an opportunity for Rosario Dawson to enter the fray. Dawson's Nevada presides over the Hound Dog hotel, home of Elvis memorabilia and facsimiles of Graceland's garish rooms. At this point, Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch show up to play odd replicas of the characters portrayed by Harrelson and Eisenberg.

It's as if Columbus and Tallahassee meet themselves and, thus, are confronted by their own ridiculousness -- or something like that.

Ruben Fleischer, who also directed the first installment, keeps the proceedings zipping along, moving fast enough to fly over the bits that don't work.

Those who find the movie superfluous won't be wrong, but there are enough laughs to combat resistance, perhaps even among those who've already seen enough zombie-apocalypses to last a lifetime.

Besides, Double Tap passes in an acceptable 99 minutes, leaving many smashed zombie heads and a whole lot of silliness in its wake.

A college party movie set in Texas

Director Richard Linklater transitions from Boyhood to college in a movie about partying student athletes.

Director Richard Linklater will be 56 in July. Although he's drifting past middle age, the Austin-based director still seems intrigued by youth, perhaps because it's a period when characters are able to test life's waters and try on different styles.

Linklater spent 12 years working on the masterful Boyhood. Now, he's taking aim at adolescence -- albeit of a particular kind, that of college baseball players at a small Texas school during the early 1980s.

Everybody Wants Some!! takes place during the several days before classes begin; the movie's ballplayers drink, look for sexual adventures and jockey for position in the ramshackle house where they've taken up residence.

It's possible that if anyone but Linklater had made the loosey/goosey Everybody Wants Some!!, it would have been greeted with shrugs, a patchy attempt to chart what happens when an 18-year-old jock (Blake Jenner of Glee fame) arrives at fictional Southeastern Texas State for what he hopes will be a great career as a pitcher.

Equipped with a winning smile, Jenner's Jake easily finds a place among his teammates, crude and raucous ballplayers who might be '80s extensions of the frat boys from Animal House.

A bit more sensitive than his teammates, Jake eventually establishes a relationship with a theater major (Zoey Deutch).

But Jake also joins his new pals as they try various party modes -- from disco to punk, all set to a strong and nostalgic soundtrack that includes work by The Knack, Patti Smith, Jermain Jackson, Dire Straits, Devo and The Cars.

Standouts in the baseball playing group include Finn (Glen Powell), a pipe smoking student with a relaxed, know-it all manner, and Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), a stoner who proudly sets the record for the school's longest and deepest bong hit.

Willoughby occasionally philosophizes in the manner of the Linklater characters who populated his hang-out movie, Dazed and Confused, which was set during the 70s.

To the movie's credit, Linklater's characters don't exactly qualify as stock figures.

Tyler Hoechlin portrays McReynolds, the cockiest athlete, a power hitter who disdains pitchers and treats them as a lower order of being.

J. Quinton Johnson appears as the team's only black player, a second baseman.

There's also a good-ole country boy (Will Brittain), a young man who looks like he might have skills, but who could evolve into the kind of player who dribbles the juice from chewing tobacco down the front of his jersey.

I've still got enough adolescent in me to have chuckled as Linklater works his way through his plotless helping of dudes in search of a movie but having too good a time to care if they actually find one.

A couple of Linklater's observations are worth noting -- the way these young men turn nearly anything into a competition, for example.

But for the most part, Everybody Wants Some!! is a shambling, rambling look at young people who have yet to become interesting. Judging by the movie, they may never actually achieve that status.

Pointedly, the movie -- which shows very little baseball -- concludes on the first day of classes with Blake and another teammate (Temple Baker) falling asleep moments after the professor arrives. It's meant as a comment, I suppose, but it's not exactly one that shakes off the movie's party-hardy cobwebs.