Love in the time of paralysis

A British weepy that tries to get serious.

The title -- Me Before You -- sounds like it might be describing a self-help book for the terminally selfish.

But Me Before You has nothing to do with getting ahead in a ruthless, Trumpian world where deal-makers think of themselves as killers, and turn their adversaries into prey.

Actually, I'd like to see that movie, but Me Before You comes from a polar opposite direction. It's a bona fide weepy, so intent on wringing tears from its audience that complimentary boxes of tissues -- in a promotional wrapping, of course -- were handed out prior to a recent preview screening.

This adaptation of a popular 2012 novel by Jojo Moyes might have gotten somewhere if it hadn't starred an unbearably cute Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin, a guy who looks like a young Hugh Grant in a wheelchair. The story involves quadriplegia.

But that's just me. Clarke (Game of Thrones) and Claflin (The Hunger Games) are precisely the reason that the movie will work for those who are able to buy into it.

A glossy romance with a morbid twist, director Thea Sharrock's movie purports to deal with a few serious issues. Really, though, it's all about those tissues.

To prime the pump for a flow of tears, we're supposed to fall under the spell of the irrepressible Lou, a lower-class woman with a spiffed-up thrift store wardrobe and an unwillingness to appear in any two scenes wearing the same pair of shoes.

Lou's village also is home to a castle occupied by a wealthy family. Enter Will Traynor (Claflin), a hot shot investment guy who became a quadriplegic after being hit by a motorcycle while crossing a London Street.

Miserable that he no longer can be the dashing young man he once was, Will has sunk into a depression.

But wait ...

It's a sure bet that Lou, desperately in need of a job after losing employment at a local cafe, will try to reinvigorate Will's spirit when she's hired as his caretaker.

For his part, Will claims he'll never accept his new lot. If he can't be the man he was, he'd rather not be at all. He'll choose assisted suicide.

Will's parents -- Janet McTeer and Charles Dance -- give the movie gravitas. They're understandably concerned about their son.

McTeer and Dance also resemble drop-ins from another movie, reminders that this isn't a traditional rom-com, but a movie that wants to appeal to the same crowd that wept at The Fault in Our Stars.

Disability isn't the only obstacle to burgeoning love. Class issues intrude, as well. Will works to educate Lou, exposing her to subtitled films, books and Mozart. This isn't exactly Pygmalion, but you get the idea.

Clarke and Claflin develop some chemistry, but Clarke's Lou is bubbly to the point of overflow. She works overtime trying to persuade Will that he shouldn't travel to Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal. She's a cheerleader for Team Life.

No self-respecting romance can proceed without glamor. Me Before You pours it on when Lou and Will visit Mauritius. He wants to give her a dream vacation, and she hopes that the trip will take his mind off any end-of-life plans.

To which I say: Assisted suicide should be a lot more than a plot device. It should be fully engaged as a subject.

A final fillip of encouragement turns the story into a tale of self-actualization for Lou; her relationship with Will may be just what she needs to leave the constricted confines of her village and make her way in the larger world.

Call me callous, but the little box of promotional tissues still sits on a forsaken corner of my desk. It remains unopened.

It's possible to argue that Me Before You is well done, but well done teary-eyed schlock is still teary-eyed schlock.

'Dark Horse' is a good bet

If you're a habitual fan of the underdog (in this case a role played by a horse), you won't want to miss Dark Horse, a documentary set in an economically depressed Welsh village. The story: Some of the village's residents pooled meager resources, and bought a race horse. The participating owners chipped in about $14 a week to pay for and train the horse, which they named Dream Alliance. Director Louise Osmond interviews the backers of the colt, as well as the woman who began the journey, Jan Vokes. Vokes worked as a bartender in the town, which had fallen on hard times since the closure of its coal mine in the 1980s. Dark Horse includes some re-enactments, a technique I mostly don't like, but the story is irresistible, largely because we can't help but root for Vokes and her neighbors to add some triumph to lives that badly need bolstering. Just as important, these folks aren't in it only for the money; they love the horse. Maybe that's why the whole genial lot of them were able to become working-class heroes in the sport of kings.

Tripping on the stairway to heaven

A documentary takes an inside look at a cult and its leader.

No one asked, but here -- anyway -- a few tips for spiritual seekers: 1. Follow no one who asks you to break all ties with your family. 2. Unless you're entering a monastery, be suspicious of anyone who asks you to avoid romantic involvement. 3. Be wary of any spiritual path that lacks roots that go beyond last week.

Ignoring some of these rules, director Will Allen spent 22 years following a self-proclaimed guru who attracted some 150 adherents to a group called The Buddhafield.

Known as Michel, this supposedly enlightened being walked among his followers wearing a Speedo. Sun glasses covered what we later learn is the glassy-eyed stare of someone who claims to be able to transmit spiritual experiences to others.

In an exercise called "The Knowing," Michel introduces "select" members of the Buddhafield to a direct experience of the divine -- or something like that.

Consisting of footage Allen shot while in the cult -- he was in charge of the group's videography -- Holy Hell also presents testimony from many of Michel's now-disillusioned followers. The big source of their disillusionment: betrayed trust.

During so-called "therapy" sessions, Michel sexually abused some of his male devotees. Turns out that Michel was a second-rate actor who apparently found his calling among the susceptible.

According to the film, Michel still works his "magic" in Hawaii, where he has accumulated new followers.

Allen doesn't penetrate deeply enough into Michel's psyche to explain him, and from the outside, it's sometimes difficult to understand how so many apparently intelligent people fell under his sway.

The major gains for members of the Buddhafield seem to involve a sense of belonging and, perhaps, the notion that devotees are on a special road. And, yes, some are genuine seekers.

Holy Hell plays best as a cautionary tale. Beware of anyone who promises to show you the way to higher spiritual ground. There's a danger that the path will lead only to the leader's self-aggrandizement -- and possibly worse.

Taking matters into her own hands

A woman's protest against an insurance company..

At one time or another, just about everyone has had something bad to say about an insurance company. In the Mexican thriller A Monster With a Thousand Heads, a distraught woman (Jana Raluy) decides that there's only one way to obtain a drug for her husband, a man in the last stages of his battle with cancer.

Accompanied by her teen-age son (Sebastian Aguirre Boeda), Raluy's Sonia heads to the home of the doctor who denied her husband a pain-relieving drug that wasn't covered by her insurance company's formulary. Knowing that she'll likely meet with resistance, she has armed herself with a pistol.

Director Rodrigo Pla relies on our distrust of insurance companies and bureaucracy to create sympathy for Sonia, a woman who's acting out of desperation and perhaps denial about her husband's inevitable fate. < Sonia's first target is Dr. Villalba (Hugo Albores), the physician charged with coordinating her husband's care. He manages to avoid her until she's at the front door of his home.

The story then follows Sonia and the captive Villalba as they seek out various executives of the insurance company to obtain the necessary signatures for Sonia to be granted an exception that will allow her to buy the drug.

The outcome of Sonia's criminal foray is partially revealed because as the movie unfolds, we hear snippets from the court proceeding that follows Sonia's impromptu protest.

Although presented in an entirely realistic manner, A Monster With a Thousand Heads can be viewed as a fantasy of the downtrodden and frustrated, those who -- in seeking help -- are faced with stony indifference of people who act as if they are too important to be bothered with the pain and suffering of those they supposedly serve.

Love, hate and the tango

I have friends who have devoted time, energy and money to mastering the tango, which -- as much as anything -- tells me that there's something alluring and obsessive about a dance that can be viewed both as an erotic expression of romance and a battle of the sexes. If tango fascinates you, you probably won't want to miss Our Last Tango, a quasi-documentary about Juan Carlos Copes and Maria Nieves Rego, a famous Argentine tango-dancing couple who have been both lovers and antagonists. I call Our Last Tango, a quasi-documentary because it includes reconstructed scenes of Copes and Rego as young dancers. Although richly realized, these re-stagings of dance numbers from various points in the Copes/Rego relationship struck me as frosting on an already satisfying cake. The main attraction here is Rego, who isn't the least bit shy about discussing her feelings about Copes, whom she met when she was still a kid. He's not reticent in discussing his feelings about her, either. Now in their 80s, these former partners aren't the best of friends, although they spent roughly half a century dancing together. Our Last Tango was written and directed by German Kral, who imbues the movie with feature-quality cinematography from Jo Heim and Felix Monti. I'd say the movie is a bit over-produced, but Rego is a character you won't soon forget. Age doesn't seem to have dimmed either her piercing candor or her irrepressible ardor.

Not the best of 'X-Men' movies

Fear Apocalypse? Not with the X-men around.

For some reason, X-Men: Apocalypse was screened for critics a couple of weeks back. Normally, early screenings are welcome, but with a movie as diffuse as this one, the details already have begun to blur into a miasmic haze of mutants and overblown action.

As for those mutants, their powers can be kept straight only by devotees with an addiction to Marvel Comics or those willing to keep a scorecard.

Best as I can recall, X-Men: Apocalypse boils down to this: Another bad-ass villain -- this one more than 5,000 years old -- must be fought by a bunch of X-men with idiosyncratic powers.

Of course, both the bad guy and X-Men are crammed into a high-stakes battle of one sort or another. You already know the drill; a digressive plot is punctuated with lots of wanton destruction.

Call this a medium-grade helping of X-men, another Marvel Comics movie that's glutted with mayhem and characters from Marvel's over-populated universe.

In this case, the story centers on Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), a character who was entombed in ancient Egypt. A terrific actor, Isaac is buried under lots of make-up. He's recognizable, but I half wondered whether it mattered who was playing this powerful villain.

Once revived from millenniums of slumber, Apocalypse assembles a posse consisting of rogues. These are (wait for it), the proverbial Four Horseman, and they're led by Pole Magneto (Michael Fassbender). Magneto, we learn, has been living a quiet life after his family was destroyed in Auschwitz.

The Holocaust as a comic-book plot device? Best not to think about it.

Years after World War II, Magneto experiences new injustices. He's then reborn as an angry mutant with an abiding grudge against humanity.

Olivia Munn plays Psylocke, a woman with telepathic powers, a chip on her shoulder and a costume that enables her to moonlight at an S&M festival.

Meanwhile, Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) schools fledgling mutants in the art of putting their powers to good use rather than destroying civilization. He's assisted by Hank McCoy/Beast (Nicholas Hoult).

Additional mutants include Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan), a mutant whose brother Alex/Havoc (Lucas Till) already understands his powers. And you'll find a bunch of other mutants including Quicksilver and Nightcrawler, characters I mention only because I like the names.

By the way, the ability of some of these mutants to shoot destructive rays from their fingertips or eyeballs created waves of low-rent nostalgia for me, echoes of the old Flash Gordon serials.

This time, X-Men keep appearing in what seem to be droves, including Jennifer Lawrence's Raven.

Despite the man X-Men, director Bryan Singer, can't quite elevate this one into the superhero stratosphere. Too bad, he's done better X-Men work before, notably in 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past.

I can't say that I hated watching Apocalypse. It unreeled with the usual fury, but its playbook evolves over two-and-a-half hours without finding much that's inspired.

And really, after Hunger Games and other X-Men movies, can't Jennifer Lawrence find something better to do with her time and talent? Et tu Michael Fassbender.

A dense, unsatisfying 'Alice'

Another wild, crazy and scattered trip to an alternate reality.

Alice Through the Looking Glass arrives in theaters as an effects-laden, visually dense extravaganza that feels more like a wild-and-crazy theme park ride than a trip to Wonderland.

Director James Bobin (Muppets Most Wanted) takes over from Tim Burton, who made his version of Alice in Wonderland six years ago. Simply put: Burton's movie -- though no masterpiece -- was better.

Familiar characters emerge from Bobin's galaxy of imaginative sets, bizarre costumes and dizzying action. But this time, the appearance of old favorites generates little by way of fond recall.

When we first meet her, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is a skilled sea captain who loses her father's ship to a greedy fleet owner. An unhappy Alice then walks through the famous Looking Glass.

Once she enters this alternate reality, Alice learns that she must travel through time in order to help save The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp). The Hatter, poor fellow, has fallen into a near-terminal funk as the result of having lost his family.

Alice also meets Time (Sacha Baron Cohen), a character who controls something called a Chronosphere, a spinning globe into which Alice climbs so that she's able to go back in time, perhaps to repair past wrongs. Mostly, it's an excuse for a screenful of summer-time action.

The movie holds two queens in its hand -- the White Queen (a pasty-looking Anne Hathaway) and the Red Queen (an arch Helena Bonham Carter). Enmity between the queens traces back to their childhoods, in case you've been longing to know why they never seem to be able to get along.

If someone told you that Bonham Carter, under the customary ton of makeup, was really a very large toy, you might believe it. More than others who suffer the same fate, Bonham Carter has an air of China-doll unreality about her.

As for Depp, his silly ramblings as the Hatter made me again wish that he'd once and for all leave childhood films behind.

I could say more, but all I'll tell you is that the amusements are skimpy, the sights overwhelming and the whole business seems to have lost the heady, mind-warping spin of Lewis G. Carroll.

In short: Big production, small yield. In 3D, of course.

Austen, manners and much amusement

Director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Damsels in Distress) has taken Jane Austen's early, epistolary novel Lady Susan and turned it into an amusing trifle. I don't use the word "trifle" to demean Stillman's efforts, but to describe its level of amusement in a fair and, I hope, appealing way. Kate Beckinsale plays Lady Susan, a flirtatious widow with a reputation that challenges English notions of propriety. Among other things, Lady Susan preoccupies herself with finding a husband for her daughter (Morfydd Clark), a young woman who has been dismissed from a private school that Lady Susan can't afford. Lady Susan pushes her daughter toward a doltish, giggling fool of a man, Sir James Martin (a very amusing Tom Bennett). Smart and attractive, Lady Susan proves alluring to the men she encounters, notably young Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel) and older Lord Manwaring (Lochlainn O'Mearain), who happens to be married. The American Alicia Johnson (Chloe Sevigny) is Lady Susan's best friend. Stephen Fry has a tasty turn as Alicia's aging husband. Stillman is particularly good at allowing some of his characters to reveal their fatuousness. An example: When the giddy Sir James confronts a plate of peas for the first time, he can't resist describing them as "tiny green balls." Beckinsale's feisty, razor sharp turn holds everything together, and gives the movie its sting. Well-appointed and true to its period, the movie is nonetheless bouncy and amusing. Besides, what are Eighteenth Century drawing rooms for -- if not characters such as these.

When the absurd becomes normal

The Lobster takes us to a strange hotel where the guests search for mates.

If you're looking for the kind of movie that dutifully works its way toward a conclusion you can see coming from several multiplexes away, you may want to skip The Lobster, a film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. Lanthimos marches -- or in the case of The Lobster -- crawls to a different drummer, immersing us in worlds that slowly reveal their secrets.

The movie takes place in what looks like the near future. Newly divorced David (Colin Farrell) has taken his dog to a hotel that imposes strange rules on its guests. The main rule allots each guest 45 days to find a mate or be turned into an animal -- of his or her choosing, of course.

The pressure on hotel guests can be felt from the start because in this society, being single has been classified as a crime.

As near, as we can tell, the transformations from human to animal aren't meant to be taken on a strictly metaphorical level. At various times, we see animals wandering the hotel grounds. We, of course, realize that we're looking at former guests who didn't make the cut.

Somewhere near the hotel, there's a city, which Lanthimos later will visit. Life there proceeds in reasonably normal fashion, but only married people are allowed to live in the city.

At the hotel, David meets two additional male guests, equally miserable fellows played by Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly.

When not thinking about finding a mate, the guests hunt with tranquilizer guns. Their prey: loners who live in the woods beyond the hotel, people who -- if shot -- give the successful hunter an important extra day to continue searching for a spouse. And, oh yes, mates must share at least one common trait, like being short-sighted, for example.

It may occur to you that The Lobster wants to be a weird commentary on mating and dating, which transpires in near-mechanistic fashion at the hotel; everything feels depersonalized.

There's more to the plot, but I won't reveal it here, except to say that at one point, David joins the loners who are led by a woman of severe temperament (Lea Seydoux). She tells them that loners may masturbate at will, but aren't allowed to touch one another. With awful punishments looming, no one wants to get crosswise with the leader.

Among the loners, short-sighted David meets a short-sighted woman played by Rachel Weisz; a romance begins to take shape.

Now, it may not sound like it, but deadpan humor runs through the movie; Lanthimos wrings emotion out of human interaction in ways that are both bizarre and funny.

When Reilly's character is caught masturbating, he's punished by being forced to insert his hand into a toaster. It's so weird that we chuckle, even as we wince. People actually submit to this?

Farrell does a fine job as David, going soft around the middle and maintaining an even -- if morose -- keel. If David doesn't find a mate and must be turned into an animal, he selects a lobster. He says they live long and remain fertile throughout their existence. Thus, the movie's title.

If you check the credits, you'll see that some of the characters have been named for their defining characteristics, as in Reilly's Lisping Man and Whishaw's Limping Man. Angelika Papouila raises the movie's fright level as one of the hotel's most successful hunters, a woman with no feelings. Her name: The Heartless One.

Olivia Colman shows up as the hotel's manager, a host whose crisp efficiencies suggest a cross between a school principal and a prison warden.

It's impossible to predict whether you'll enjoy The Lobster or be driven crazy by it. Lanthimos (Dogtooth) may not care into which group you fall.

The movie's insistent strangeness throws human relationships into a Kafaesque stew and stirs, letting us know what happens when humans (both the hotel guests and the rebel loners) are jammed into a world governed by absurd rules.

Comparisons to known realities probably are encouraged.