It's one 'Mother!' of a movie

Director Darren Aronofsky's wild-ass horror movie aims big -- maybe too big..

Take the exclamation point in the movie's title seriously. Watching director Darren Aronofsky's Mother! is like reading a book in which every word has been italicized for effect: the silences are oh so ominous, the creak of a shoe on a wooden floor can be jarring and when a furnace fires up, it's like a bomb has exploded. The aural atmosphere of Mother! has been amped up to take what starts as a chamber-piece helping of horror and inflate it to the point of explosion -- maybe beyond that.

In his efforts to harness as much on-screen venom as possible, Aronofsky has enlisted an A-list cast led by Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem. Bardem plays a poet; Lawrence plays his devoted wife. The couple has just moved into an isolated country home.

Irritable to the point of hostility, Bardem's character ignores Lawrence's character. She plasters walls and works on turning the house into a little piece of paradise. You probably have a pretty good idea where all attempts at creating paradise wind up.

Buried in an increasingly chaotic plot, you'll find a mordant comedy about the burden of uninvited guests. The first of these is a man who identifies himself as an orthopedic surgeon (Ed Harris). The surgeon excuses his intrusion by saying he thought he had arrived at a bed and breakfast inn.

Harris' character smokes when asked not to, and claims to be a devoted fan of Bardem's work. He also says he's dying. It doesn't take long for the surgeon's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) to show up. She's so rude, she makes Harris's character look considerate. She leaves a mess wherever she goes and pushes Lawrence's character into all manner of unwanted conversations.

To augment this bizarre scenario, the couple's two grown sons (Brian Gleeson and Domhnall Gleeson) show up and immediately engage in a Cain-and-Abel style fight over their father's will.

The credits identify Lawrence's character only as Mother; Bardem is referred to as Him. This tells us that we're watching a film that wants to mine a metaphorical motherland. As is often the case, Aronofsky aims big.

Aronofsky toys with every horror trope he can find: eerie basements, spurts of blood and a steady stream of unexplained noises.

All the while, Aronofsky frames Lawrence's face in booming close-ups; Lawrence expresses perpetual consternation over the fact that her husband insists that these uninvited guests stay; his desire amounts to a betrayal.

Generally, Lawrence's character behaves in ways that make little sense, a problem that afflicts much of the rest of the movie, but Aronofsky seems intent on making us ride a wave that swells with bizarre shocks.

With a movie such as Mother!, much hinges on whether Aronofsky can tie things together. Watching Mother! is like listening to a very long (and not entirely interesting joke) hoping that the punchline makes the time we're investing worthwhile.

Now if you want to excavate some meaning from all the stylistic bric-a-brac, try this. Bardem's character is a self-absorbed artist who pays very little attention to his wife. He allows his guests to insult and berate her, every now and again offering his apologies. The fact that Harris's character is a fan suggests that Bardem's character will put up with anything -- so long as it's accompanied by massive adulation.

Aronofsky carries this notion to wild extremes in the movie's final act, which I won't describe here because Aronofsky's images do have a surprising quality that should be discovered in a theater.

Aronofsky (Noah, Black Swan, The Wrestler and The Fountain) certainly knows how to create vivid images but when he finally wraps up his movie, I had the sense that I had just watched a perversely overproduced and willfully malicious episode of The Twilight Zone. It's as if Aronofsky has channeled impulses from filmmakers such as Roman Polanski (Rosemary's Baby) and Michael Haneke (Funny Games) and given them an even more twisted spin.

Mostly I felt sorry for Lawrence, a gifted actress playing a character who takes a psychological and physical beating as the film progresses. Aronofsky may be trying to describe a particularly loathsome form of male behavior, especially among artistic men, but to make his point Lawrence must become the movie's sacrificial lamb.

Whatever the case, it's worth noting that in enlarging the characters played by Bardem and Lawrence to float his allegorical balloons, Aronofsky mostly ignores their humanity. I took the movie's preoccupation with close-ups as significant, a way of locking its characters in the prison of a tormenting vision.

With Mother!, Aronofsky huffs, puffs and damn well tries to blow the house down. But this time out, I found myself wondering whether there was anything more to the movie than the ominous howl of all that huffing and puffing.

He's very tough but who really cares?

Mitch Rapp, the hero of American Assassin, battles bad guys and a muddled script.

Loads of people are familiar with author Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp, a disaffected loner recruited into the CIA after a terrorist murders his girlfriend on a beach right after the two have become engaged. It may take every fan of Flynn’s 16-book series to turn American Assassin — the first Mitch Rapp movie — into a hit.

Muddled by a scattered screenplay and hampered by Dylan O’Brien’s notably unremarkable performance as Rapp, American Assassin does a fair share of globe hopping but manages to go nowhere.

After his fiancee’s death, Rapp trains himself to become a killing machine, staging a one-man Libyan mission to kill the leader of the terrorist group responsible for his fiancee's death. When American troops disrupt his work, Rapp finds himself in the hands of the CIA, where the head of counter-intelligence (Sanaa Lathan) turns him over to Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton), a former Navy SEAL who trains his charges to be merciless killers.

At first, it seems as if swarthy complexions constitute the movie's only requirement for villainy, but we soon learn that a disaffected American (Taylor Kitsch) is trying to arrange a plutonium deal in Poland. Kitsch's character plans to sell Russian plutonium to Iranians — or some such.

That’s only the beginning of global hopscotching that takes Rapp to Turkey, Italy and other places, moving too quickly even to offer travelogue diversions.

In my view, only three reasons justify seeing American Assassin: a reasonably imaginative virtual reality training sequence, Keaton's crazed handling of a wince-inducing scene in which Stan is tortured and a late-picture explosion that can’t be described without giving away the movie’s climax.

Most of the time, American Assassin -- which was directed by Michael Cuesta (Kill the Messenger) -- fails to distinguish itself, looking like a low-rent version of the Jason Bourne movies with a little Jack Ryan thrown in.

For all its fights and action, American Assassin fails to generate the excitement we associate with the discovery of a new hero. The movie pauses for occasional chunks of listless exposition before leaping ahead to the next scene or country.

The net effect: Watching American Assassin made me feel as I if were skimming a second-rate novel, leafing from one chapter to the next, vainly hoping to stumble on something good.

Dancing her way toward freedom

A classically trained Russian ballerina wonders how much self-expression she must sacrifice in preparing for her audition for the Bolshoi Ballet. Anastasia Shevtsova, a real dancer, portrays Polina, the movie's title character as a young woman. Based on a graphic novel by Bastien Vives and directed by Valarie Muller and choreographer Angelin Preljocaj , Polina follows Polina from childhood into her 20something years. Initially, Polina studies with Bojinski (Aleksey Guskov), no-nonsense teacher who doles out compliments parsimoniously. When Polina travels to Moscow to try out for the Bolshoi, she falls for a French dancer (Niels Schneider) and decides to return to France with him, much to the dismay of her father. Miglen Mirtchev plays Polina's Dad, a man who has fallen into difficulties with the Russian mob but who always wanted to see his daughter become a prima ballerina. In France, Polina joins a company run by Lira Elsaj (Juliette Binoche), a character whose style is freer and more modern than anything to which Polina has been exposed. Trouble looms: An ankle injury hampers Polina's career and her romance falls apart, leaving her to travel to Antwerp, where she works as a bar tender. There, she meets Karl (Jeremie Beligard); you won't be surprised to learn that Polina and Carl wind up dancing together. Hardly groundbreaking, Polina nonetheless features two fine performances from the actresses who play Polina (Veronica Zhovnytska as the young Polina and Shevitsova as the more mature dancer). Polina isn't the deepest drama but the dancing elevates a story that sometimes feels predictable. Credit Shevtsova with creating a character who's trying to use her training and develop her own style. Polina doesn't necessarily want to throw away the past; she hopes to carry it into a more liberated future.

Outrage after a police shooting

Directors Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis deliver a strong, clear message in Whose Streets?, a documentary about what happened in August of 2014 after Michael Brown was killed by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo. The message: The Civil Rights movement as we once knew it is dead, but that doesn't mean protest has ended. Whatever you think about Brown's killing, Whose Streets? proves informative because it focuses on the people who took to the streets in the wake of Brown’s death; i.e., it can be seen as a portrait of a deeply aggrieved community. The U.S. Justice Department eventually found that the police in Ferguson consistently had violated the rights of African Americans, so it's hardly surprising that Whose Streets? captures the outrage and frustration felt by Ferguson residents who view the post-Brown response as an armed invasion of their community. No disputing the conclusion; we all saw the armored vehicles roll in. Some of the footage comes from cell-phone images captured by protestors, which gives Whose Streets? an appropriately shaky and chaotic feel. Disturbing, if a bit repetitive and digressive, Whose Streets? reflects the mood and concerns of a much-abused population, the residents of Ferguson who weren't shot but who too long have lived with a police force that seems to have done little to serve and protect them -- and, as the movie makes clear, that treatment didn't start with Michael Brown's death.

'It' sends in the clown -- and he's a killer

Latest Stephen King adaptation likely to score with audiences. To me? A yawn.

The working-class adults in It, an adaptation of a 1,000-plus page 1986 Stephen King novel, are abusive, cruel and, in some cases, detestable. Whether this arises from economic pressures or stands as some sort of class bias isn't entirely clear. Maybe it doesn't matter because the adults aren't the obvious focal point of director Andy Muschietti's adaptation; it's their kids.

To explore the fears of adolescent life, It follows -- if distantly -- a 1990 TV adaptation in which Tim Curry distinguished himself as Pennywise, the clown who terrorizes the children of Derry, Maine.

Muschietti and a trio of writers (Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman) shift the time frame of King's novel from the 1950s to the 1980s and deal only with the first half of King's opus. A sequel is set to follow in which the teens of this edition return as adults.

Arriving more than 30 years after the novel's publication, this big screen version suffers from inevitable comparisons with a rash of other horror movies in which teens are terrorized by evil forces and by memories of another King-inspired movie, Stand By Me (1986).

By now, gory horror (icky streams of blood, razor-sharp teeth and other foul manifestations of malignant forces) make it seem as if we've seen It before and deprive the movie of some of the resonance that King must have intended.

Full of familiar King tropes, It tries to follow King's lead, allowing evil figures to provoke familiar fears of childhood. Who, at one time or another, hasn't trembled at the thought of entering a dank basement? That sort of thing.

In what can be viewed as thematic piling on, the teens of Derry not only must confront the buck-toothed Pennywise but are also taunted by the town bully (Nicholas Hamilton). Anyone who remembers his or her teen years may find Hamilton's character a good deal more frightening than any of the movie's booming effects, delivered with considerable verve and polish but too easily left behind in the theater, along with kernels of spilled popcorn.

The teens in the movie have named themselves the Losers Club. Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) leads the group. Bill's younger brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) is taken by Pennywise in the movie's swiftly stated prologue.

The rest of the club members mostly are distinguished by single traits. One kid (Wyatt Oleff) is Jewish; another kid (Chosen Jacobs) is black; still another (Jeremy Ray Taylor) is overweight.

Every group of screen kids needs a wise-ass. In this case, the job falls to Finn Wolfhard. Jack Dylan Grazer portrays a kid dominated by his mother.

As the story develops, a girl (Sophia Lillis) joins the pack. Lillis' Beverly has a sexually abusive father and, unfairly, has been branded as "a slut" by her classmates.

Among the movie's problems: Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), the scary clown whose makeup and goofy affect conceal his true nature, hovers near cliche, even with his ability to transform from a clown into his horrific real self.

Having pretty much found It to be a yawn, I should hasten to say that the movie likely will add some spin to the multiplex turnstiles after a lackluster couple of late-summer weeks.

Before a preview screening of It, King appeared in a short clip addressed to the audience. He said he was happy with the adaptation and praised the movie's young cast, all of whom do fine work as they spout profanities, shriek and behave as credibly as the story allows; they also discover that their hometown is targeted by waves of violence that appear in 27-year intervals.

Sometimes, it feels as if It lumbers from one set piece to another, giving each of the teens a scene that plays to his or her major fear. Each eruption of shock creates the aura of a super-charged fun house -- vivid but depthless. And at 135 minutes, the film begins to feel as lengthy as the book.

The movie teaches the members of the Losers Club a lesson that might have been culled from Hillary Clinton's campaign slogan: "Stronger together." The monster can't win if the kids unite to overcome their fears.

Although It takes full advantage of current technology in producing its many effects, the movie nonetheless feels trapped by the well-worn demands of a genre in which nearly every move feels too ingrained to break the bounds of the screen and take up residence deep inside our worst nightmares.

When Alice, 40, meets Harry, 27

Reese Witherspoon can't save a rom-com in which the romance isn't great -- and neither is the comedy.

Viewed through the most positive possible lens, the new romantic comedy Home Again has one element that might be regarded as fresh. A 40-year-old woman (Reese Witherspoon) disregards age differences and has an affair with a 27-year-old man (Pico Alexander).

Fair enough, but Home Again breaks little new ground with a mostly desexualized affair that stems less from desire than from confusions caused by a dissolving marriage. Besides, the whole age thing would have been more daring had Alice been written as a 50-year-old woman.

Witherspoon's Alice Kinney has arrived in Los Angeles with her two daughters (Eden Grace Redfield and Lola Flannery) to occupy the house of her late father, a well-respected director who also was known for his womanizing.

While partying at a bar with girlfriends on the occasion of her 40th birthday, Alice meets Harry (Alexander), an aspiring filmmaker.

Harry has arrived in LA with two filmmaking buddies (Nat Wolff and Jon Rudnitsky). The trio hopes to sell a screenplay writing based on a short that gained some recognition of the festival circuit.

After a drunken attempt at romance between Alice and Harry misfires, the three young men wind up living in Alice's guest house where they engage in annoyingly positive interactions with Alice's daughters and prove to be ideal tenants. Why not? They're not paying rent.

It's nice to see Candice Bergen in a brief role as Alice's mother, the woman who suggests that Alice shelter these apparently talented young men. Too bad, the screenplay gives Bergen so little to do.

Alice and Harry eventually begin a romance. The other two guys also have their eyes on Alice, but behave like gentlemen who become ridiculously (if not amusingly) protective of her when her estranged husband (Michael Sheen) arrives with hopes of patching up the marriage.

Director Hallie Meyers-Shyer -- the daughter of filmmakers Nancy Meyers (The Intern) and Charles Shyer (Baby Boom) -- has made the kind of romantic comedy that seems to exist behind the walls of a gated community where suffering is limited and all consequences easily are attenuated.

In starting her own business, Alice meets the duplicitous Zoey (Lake Bell), who hires Alice to decorate a child's bedroom. Zoey takes advantage of Alice, treating her like a nanny. Oh, the indignity.

OK, so rom-coms often rely on easy to swallow situations and posh surroundings, environments that soothe, offering palliative care for reality-weary audiences. But it's definitely disappointing to see Witherspoon, who created a real character in HBO's Big Little Lies, step backward into a world in which the most adventurous thing anyone might do is forgo the luxury of a personal shopper.

Murder and mystery in Victorian England

There aren't many actors I can say this about, but I'd watch just about any film that features work from Bill Nighy. In The Limehouse Golem, a melodramatic period piece set in Victorian London, Nighy sheds the customary twinkle in his eye (and, yes, it's always a wry twinkle) to play Inspector Kildare, a detective whose colleagues scorn him because of rumors that he might prefer men to women. As played by Nighy, Kildare doesn't seem particularly interested in having sex with anyone; Nighy brings a spirit of existential weariness to his portrayal of a man desperately in need of one last battle to fight. Kildare finds it when he's assigned the unenviable task of solving murders committed by a fiend who refers to himself as The Limehouse Golem. Olivia Cooke portrays Lizzie, a music hall star who becomes the wife of wannabe playwright John Cree (Sam Reid). When Cree, whose career failed to launch, is found dead, Lizzie is accused of having poisoned him. Kildare believes in Lizzie's innocence and thinks that he can exonerate her by solving the Limehouse murders, which are conducted in particularly brutal fashion. Adapted from a novel by Peter Aykroyd, The Lime House Golem includes a string of real-life characters, among them Karl Marx (Henry Goodman), novelist George Gissing (Morgan Watkins) and music hall performer Dan Leno, rendered in a terrific performance by Douglas Booth. Many of the characters become suspects as the movie hops from one red herring to the next before reaching its somewhat strained conclusion. Director Juan Carlos Medina (Insensibles) delivers a richly appointed evocation of 19th Century London in a movie that makes use of twists that are revealed in flashback and speculative scenes about the Golem's true identity. Well acted and richly atmospheric, The Limehouse Golem doesn't quite terrify, even though its talented cast and abundantly colorful artifice sustain interest. Eddie Marsan has an unnervingly creepy turn as Uncle, a music hall master of ceremonies who harbors secret perversities.

An ode to the once ubiquitous typewriter

For these enthusiasts, the typewriter is a hallowed instrument

There are good reasons why the computer has replaced the typewriter as the best way to write almost anything. Word processing has proven far better than pounding the keys of a typewriter; computers are faster and make it easier to correct mistakes. Besides, as someone raised on typewriters -- even throughout a good part of my newspaper career -- I can attest to the fact that typing wore you out, although the manual carriage return created a motion that probably cut down on carpal tunnel syndrome, providing a built in motion that required taking at least one hand off the keyboard.

Don't tell any of this to the people in Doug Nichol's documentary, California Typewriter. These typewriter collectors and steadfast users of a now defunct technology believe that nothing surpasses the typewriter for composing written material.

Tom Hanks, for example, talks about his collection of typewriters and tells us how much more he appreciates a typewritten thank-you note than one delivered by email. I don't know why Hanks doesn't handwrite such notes, taking up an even older and more personal technology, the pen. But that's another story.

Much of California Typewriter centers on a Berkeley, Calif., typewriter repair shop owned by Herbert Permillion III, who opened his business in 1981 after spending years working on IBM Selectrics.

Ace repairman, Ken Alexander, who works in Permillion's shop, emerges as one of the documentary's singular voices. Alexander expresses his love for typewriters and talks about the increasing difficulties of repairing them. Replacement parts are vanishing.

We also hear the late Sam Shepard talking about his Swiss-made Hermes 3000 and the hallowed rituals made necessary by using a typewriter, inserting new sheets of paper, for example.

Younger viewers will recognize singer/songwriter John Mayer, another typewriter convert.

Not all typewriter fans are equally respected by purists. Take Jeremy Mayer, who collects typewriters and uses their parts in his sculptures. Desecration, some say, although Mayer also has a trove of spare parts that sometimes helps Alexander in his work.

How serious are typewriter collectors? As committed as the collectors of anything, including someone who paid $210,000 for the Olivetti on which Cormac McCarthy wrote most of his novels.

The history of the typewriter proves fascinating, and the movie thrives on the obsessive charms of its human subjects, qualities that prove infectious even if you're not tempted to start browsing the Internet in search of a machine of your own. The Internet, by the way, plays an instrumental role in helping to save Permillion's business from extinction, an irony that's not lost on anyone.

When it comes to obsession, I, too, am not immune. I found myself browsing various Web sites to see what it would cost to obtain a Smith Corona Clipper or, better yet, one of the Hermes 3000s about which Shepard waxed poetic. Personally, I never much like the IBM Selectric or any other electric typewriters. And, yes, I suppose I could drum up some nostalgia for the days when newsrooms were full of bulky Underwoods and you always seemed to get one that had been so abused that at least one key no longer worked or had the inconsiderate habit of sticking to the paper.

Ah, the good old days.

The Nile Hilton Incident and The Oath

THICK WEBS OF CORRUPTION IN EGYPT

Great quantities of tobacco and a few joints, as well, are smoked in The Nile Hilton Incident, an Egyptian film noir based on a true story. Swedish/Lebanese actor, Fares Fares, plays a detective who tries to solve a murder, even as he takes payoffs as routinely as he lights his ever-present cigarettes. Fares Fares's Noredin may be corrupt, but he's part of a culture in which bribery has been routinized. Still, Noredin gets hold of one case he really wants to solve, the hotel murder of a beautiful young woman. A rich and powerful man is implicated. As it turns out, a hotel maid (Mari Malek) saw the murderer leaving the scene of the crime. For American audiences, a decaying Cairo becomes as much of a character as any of the story's humans. Director Tarik Saleh conducts a rambling, sometimes disjointed tour of an entirely compromised city in the days just prior to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Seedy and alluring, The Nile Hilton Incident may not be the greatest detective story you've ever seen, but its setting and the looming protests that soon would fill Tahrir Square and lead to the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak give the movie a serious tone that points to the conditions that, at least in part, led so many Egyptians to demand change.

A DOCTOR TRIES TO SAVE HIS WAYWARD DAUGHTER

Anyone who makes a thriller that's able to capitalize on the lonely frozen vistas of Iceland begins with a leg up. Baltasar Kormakur, the Icelandic writer, director and star of The Oath makes sure that we see these landscapes in ways that intensify and add depth to this story about an obsessive heart surgeon (Kormakur) who wants to save his wayward daughter (Hera Hilmar) from a drug-dealer with whom she has fallen in love. Kormakur portrays Finnur, a man who also has a young daughter with his second wife (Margret Bjarnadottir). But it's Finnur's 18-year-old daughter, Anna, who occupies his attention. Although Finnur pays his daughter's rent, she spends most of her time with the irresponsible Ottar (Gisli Orn Garoarsson). The movie twists itself into a thriller in which Finnur and Ottar square off, each threatening the other. Psychological edge becomes subordinate to a prevailing question: How far will Finnur go to protect a daughter who doesn't want his help. Finnur eventually gets the upper hand on Ottar, but not without terrible consequences. A serious tone and stabs at nuance can't disguise what at core begins to feel too much a prisoner of a familiar genre.