Tanya Harding's absurdly tilted life

Margot Robbie does stand-out work as a figure skater battling long odds, class prejudice, and her own demons.

Most movies about athletes build toward a big contest in which the main character either triumphs or, in rare cases, learns from a crushing defeat. By such measures, I, Tonya -- the story of disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding -- might be considered an anti-sports movie. It touches on subjects as diverse as class prejudice and the abuse of women, not to mention a criminal assault committed by a collection of bumbling fools.

I, Tonya also can be unexpectedly funny because director Craig Gillespie has given the movie a near-antic spirit that derives from a keen appreciation of the rank absurdity rippling through various layers of American society.

I, Tonya, of course, revolves around the 1994 episode in which Harding was blamed for a devastating attack on Nancy Kerrigan, the figure skater who became the anti-Harding. In the movie, responsibility for a ham-handed attempt at knee-capping falls to a goofball associate (Paul Walter Hauser) of Harding's abusive husband (Sebastian Stan).

According to the movie, Hauser's Shawn concocted a scheme in which a couple of hired thugs did Shawn's bidding. One of them took a retractable baton to Harding's knee in an attempt to keep her from participating in a National Competition prior to the Lillehammer Olympics of 1994.

Harding herself knew nothing about any of this, although she was vaguely aware that Stan's Gillooly was planning to send Kerrigan threatening letters to undermine her confidence, an idea he got after Harding herself received a death threat.

Working from a screenplay by Steven Rogers, Gillespie allows several of the characters to offer versions of Harding's story in faux interviews that help to give the movie some wobbly, cockeyed spin.

But I, Tonya isn't a lower-class Rashomon and it has less interest in anyone's guilt or innocence than in Harding's place as an outlier in the world of figure skating.

Harding had obvious skills, but she had to battle (often unsuccessfully) the notion that female figure skaters should be ice princesses, uncorrupted representations of purity and innocence. It's all hooey, of course: No one becomes a champion figure skater without the kind of single-minded self-absorption and drive that justifies long hours of training and sacrifice.

Harding's sometimes garish outfits and her working-class background overshadowed her skill with judges who were looking to promote not only talent but a "worthy" vision of American "girlhood."

Robbie’s performance captures both Harding’s defiance and vulnerability, as well as her belief in her own innocence. She sees herself as a woman constantly being abused by others and who has no interest in smoothing her rough edges.

It's not difficult to see some justification in Harding's viewpoint. Her husband physically abuses her. Stan's Jeff Gillooly displays a bit of rough charm, but Harding sticks with him long past the time when their love has passed any reasonable expiration date.

The biggest obstacle to Harding’s shaky confidence is her caustic, domineering mother, rendered in furious blasts of cigarette smoke by a terrific Allison Janney.

Janney’s LaVona, a waitress by trade, pushes and goads Harding, seldom missing a chance to belittle her daughter. Janney knows how to put comic spin into her work, peppering her dialogue with blistering sarcasm, some of it bitingly funny.

Robbie did some of the movie's skating, but stunt doubles presumably filled in when it became necessary to show Harding's triple axel, a difficult maneuver that she became the first American woman ever to execute.

Julianne Nicholson plays Tonya's coach, a woman who tries to help Tonya fit into an acceptable mold, and Bobby Cannavale does duty as a TV tabloid reporter, present only to suggest that Harding's story became fodder for a media that couldn't get enough of it.

The real Harding is tougher looking and physically more compact than Robbie, who made her first big splash in Wolf of Wall Street. But Robbie nails the pugnacious spirit of a young woman who has been kicked around plenty — by the authorities in her sport, by her mother, her husband and a voracious media that turned her into the butt of many cruel jokes.

I don’t know how to sort out my feelings about the real Harding, but Robbie and Janney are working at peak form, and I'll tell you this, as well: I, Tonya made me think about all the Tonyas in our culture, the ones who’ve never even gotten close to their 15 minutes of fame, who've never had their stories told and who somehow survive life’s battering, their fury undiminished.

Scars of hatred and the American West

Christian Bale portrays an embittered soldier in Hostiles.

Sometimes, in straining to grapple with deep issues, a film can show more strain than grapple. That struck me as the case with Hostiles, a Western that wants to explore the impact of genocidal behavior -- not so much on its Native American victims -- but on the US soldiers who fought the many battles that led to the near-destruction of the indigenous populations of the West.

From the outset, director Scott Cooper makes his position clear. He begins with a chilling DH Lawrence quote that serves a tone-setter for what's to follow: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted," Lawrence wrote.

In the world Hostiles imagines, whites hate Native Americans and Native Americans return the favor, each group seeing the other as murderous savages. Of course, if victory has anything to do with savagery, the whites are the greater offenders.

Christian Bale plays Captain Joseph Blocker. A grizzled veteran of the so-called Indian wars, Blocker hates the Native Americans who have taken the scalps of many of his comrades in arms. Perhaps in an attempt to balance the scales, a visiting Eastern writer accuses Blocker of having taken more scalps than Sitting Bull.

But -- or so the argument goes -- for Blocker, killing is the job that he's sworn to do.

Blocker faces a challenge when he's ordered to escort a dying Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) and his family from New Mexico to Montana. On orders from the president Benjamin Harrison, the Army must make it possible for the imprisoned Yellow Hawk to die on land that he calls home.

A staunch believer that Native American savagery knows few bounds, Blocker makes little attempt to conceal his disdain for Studi’s Yellow Hawk, a man who has killed his share of white men. Both men fought at Wounded Knee.

Not long after the journey begins, a woman whose family is massacred by Comanche warriors (Rosamund Pike) in the movie's brutal prologue, joins the group. Pike's Rosalie is stunned and bereft and Blocker treats her with a tenderness that suggests that he may not be quite as hard-hearted as we've been led to believe.

The movie’s major question becomes obvious from the start: Will Blocker come to some sort of appreciation for the fact that Yellow Hawk and his family are human beings, no less wounded and embittered than he? Both men are deeply scarred, but Yellow Hawk seems to have done a better job of carrying his burden.

Ben Foster turns up as a soldier whose wanton disregard for life makes him one of the movie’s only true savages. Blocker shows him no mercy, although Foster's character insists that, as soldiers, they are kindred spirits.

Cooper tries to add some complexity, distinguishing between various tribes. At one point, Yellow Hawk helps the soldiers fight off a group of vicious Comanches that he likens to rattlesnakes, vipers who will destroy whites and Native Americans alike.

I’m not sure Cooper knows how to resolve the gaping contradiction that occurs when racism and humanity begin to clash in the same characters. In addition, those who argue that the movie represents another attempt to use indigenous people to redeem a white character shouldn’t entirely be dismissed.

It’s difficult to shake the feeling that Cooper isn’t so much telling a story as he’s applying contemporary sensitivities to the nagging problem of how whites can resolve the undigested shame that results from the way the US has treated Native Americans. He turns the film into a kind of social laboratory that often strands its actors in self-conscious silences.

The characters in Hostiles are laconic and, to cite Lawrence, hard and isolate, but when it comes to articulating the movie's points, they also seem to speak in ways that hit too many points squarely on the nose. Whatever the case, Hostiles doesn’t quite find its way through the rough thematic course it sets for itself.

She has powers she can't control

There are few new stories, only new ways to tell them. That may be important to remember as you watch Norwegian director Joachim Trier's Thelma, a coming-of-age tale in which Thelma, a first-year college student played by Eili Harboe, learns about the power of sexual desire. Thelma's separation from her parents (Henrik Rafaelsen and Ellen Dorrit Petersen) creates the situation in which her emerging sexuality bumps against the walls of repression established by her religious mother and father. Trier's chilly style fills the screen with images that rattle Thelma and us along with her. Some of these images occur during the seizures Thelma begins to have. Doctors can't pinpoint any cause for Thelma's distress, which seems to be exacerbated by her burgeoning friendship and sexual attraction to another coed (Kaya Wilkins). Eerie and full of disturbing sights, Trier's movie proves engaging enough to squelch criticisms that might arise from a plot that many have compared, with some justification, to that of Carrie. Whatever you make of Thelma, it's difficult to ignore Trier's ability to unsettle an audience. Besides, Harboe ably suggests a woman on the precipice of terrifying discoveries. Together, Trier and Harboe create a state of sustained unease that penetrates nearly every frame of the movie, and Thelma becomes a movie that's not so much about telling a story as about creating a world that matches Thelma's interior life. Thelma grapples with a mysterious force that she hardly comprehends but must learn to accommodate. Is this force a psychological response to religious repression? Is it something real or something imagined? Can Thelma really make things happen in the world external to herself? Trier wisely leaves us looking for answers, giving Thelma a feeling of tantalizing ambiguity.

Poker for big names and fat wallets

Aaron Sorkin makes his directorial debut with Molly's Game, a movie that features some winning hands from a somewhat limited subject.

When I was browsing the internet looking for information on the real Molly Bloom, I came across a review of Bloom's book, which serves as the basis for writer Aaron Sorkin's eagerly awaited directorial debut.

A website devoted to books about poker featured a headline that suggested that the book struggled to find both an audience and a point.

I'm not sure that Sorkin's adaptation of Bloom's book, Molly's Game, will have trouble finding an audience, but it does have a bit of difficulty finding a larger point. Bloom's journey took her from an Olympic caliber skier to a woman who made a ton of money running high-stakes poker games before running afoul of the law.

In real life, Bloom's LA-based game attracted players such as Ben Affleck and Tobey Maguire. She evidently operated legally until she began taking a cut of the biggest pots. Such "raking" is illegal and evidently changes friendly games (even when played for ridiculously large stakes) into crimes.

Don't get me wrong. Molly's Game can be entertaining, and it features an energized performance from Jessica Chastain as Bloom, a woman whose brother Jeremy Bloom became both an Olympian and an NFL player.

Molly Bloom was on a similar Olympic track until a freak accident derailed her career. At loose ends, she headed to LA where she eventually moved from a gofer at high-stakes card games to an impresario of such big-money affairs.

Perhaps taking a cue from Bloom's book, Sorkin has Molly narrate the movie, a dialogue-heavy plunge into her point of view that, at times, makes it feel as if Molly's reading us the movie.

As much as any writer, Sorkin has a way of making it seem as if he's in the know about whatever subject he tackles. He floods the screen with poker jargon and makes sure that every actor speaks with the kind of rapidity that marked the great screwball comedies of yesteryear. The result can be dizzying, skilled actors engaging in tricky verbal workouts.

Idris Elba adds weight as Molly's attorney. Watching Elba and Chastain bat words over the metaphorical net that separates their characters creates a pleasure all its own.

Bloom's story moves from Los Angeles to New York City, unfolding in episodic fashion, almost as if Sorkin drops little short stories into the larger mix. This approach highlights the work of a strong supporting cast.

Jeremy Strong portrays Molly's first LA boss, a character who makes no attempt to be anything less than obnoxious. Michael Cera does good work as an arrogant player with skills; Bill Camp does a terrific job as a skilled player who swan-dives into a terrible losing streak, and Chris O'Dowd impresses as a dim-witted drunk who works off a gambling debt by bringing some troubling folks into one of Molly's New York games, figures from the Russian mob.

Kevin Costner has one of the movie's best small roles. He plays Molly's authoritarian father, a philandering psychology professor who presides over a flock of high-achieving offspring.

Up to a point, Sorkin benefits from the lavish surroundings that Molly created for those who gambled at her table: drinks, fine food, fancy hotel rooms and beautiful women to wait on both winners and losers.

Earlier, I mentioned that the movie might have difficulty making a point. By the end, it seems as if Sorkin wants to hold Molly out as an example of female achievement. She used her wits to create a small empire and honorably refuses to supply the FBI with the names of those who sat at her table. Public exposure might have ruined lives and destroyed families.

Pretty noble for someone who knows she made a small fortune serving the gambling addictions and fantasies of men who were willing to throw money at her in the form of out-sized tips.

I was entertained by much of Molly's Game, which -- at 140 minutes in length -- probably runs 20 minutes longer than necessary: Sorkin turns cards over with enough flair and snap to keep his movie watchable, but, in its entirety, the movie doesn't make the case for why Bloom's story is more than a sketch in a bigger picture that remains unpainted.

My 10 best movies of 2017

In the year of #MeToo, the biggest movie news took place off screen, and, as most of the world knows, involved accusations of odious sexual behavior on the part of big-name actors and others. (See Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and the rest of what has become a distressingly long list). On screen, 2017 proved a fairly strong year for movies of the "good" but not "great" variety. I offer my 10-best list with pleasure but little by way of staunch passion. And I note, as the great Samuel Johnson aptly said, "the natural flight of the mind is not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope." Let's look forward to 2018 with hope. Some of those hopes, we know, will be dashed, but other movies will emerge to remind us why we still love going to the movies -- or watching them on DVD or streaming them or ... waiting until they show up on cable or ... oh, well ... you get the idea.

1. The Florida Project

Director Sean Baker revivifies the cinema of marginal lives with a beautifully filmed story about a girl (the amazing Brooklynn Prince) trying to get by with her loving but irresponsible mother (Bria Vinaite) in a rundown Florida motel near Disney World. Baker conveys both the joy of childhood and the perils of lives lived on society's economic fringe. The movie also includes a wonderfully sympathetic performance from Willem Dafoe as a motel manager who tries to maintain order without denying the humanity of his renters. In all, a sonorous and moving work.

2. Get Out

Jordan Peele accomplished an amazing feat. He wrote and directed a trenchant satirical movie about race that also did a ton of business at the box office. Peele mixes horror and comedy in a story that skillfully takes on the notion that we've arrived at a post-racial moment in American life. In telling the story of a young African American man who spends a weekend meeting his white girlfriend's family, Peele gives his directorial debut bite even as it makes us laugh.

3. Graduation

Few directors combine storytelling and social criticism with the skill and insight of Romanian director Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days). In the multi-layered Graduation, Mungiu focuses on a father who's desperately trying to get his daughter into a British college so that she can escape the Romanian morass of corruption and cronyism. Mungiu gives us a movie in which nearly every scene reveals new wrinkles of character, and equally important, of the society in which these characters are struggling to find their footing.

4. A Ghost Story

Director David Lowery tells a very unusual ghost story that put Casey Affleck under a sheet, turning him into a bizarre version of Casper the Friendly Ghost. As goofy as that sounds, Lowery delivers a serious movie about the majestic sadness that accompanies the passage of time. Perhaps more than any other movie this year, A Ghost Story lingered in my mind as a statement about our tenuous place in an ever changing landscape. A little movie that dares to think big -- and pulls it off.

5. The Big Sick

Co-writer and star Kumail Nanjiani presents a comic version of his real-life relationship with his wife, co-writer Emily Gordon. This fine romanic comedy also deals with questions of assimilation, the power of family ties, and includes an engaging performance from Zoe Kazan, as well as fine supporting work from Holly Hunter and Ray Romano. Michael Showalter directs with sensitivity and a flair for dealing with difficult issues in a way that's both funny and insightful.

6. Lady Bird

Although Greta Gerwig's directorial debut has been a bit overrated, I put it on my list because it's an enjoyable coming-of-age movie that's both smart and nuanced and because it helps establish Saoirse Ronan as one of our best young actresses.

7. Dunkirk

Dunkirk has its flaws -- most of them involving a structure that can be confusing -- but director Christopher Nolan's World War II epic revolves around a notion too often neglected in war movies. War, at least for those who fight it, is about little more than fear. Dunkirk tells an interesting story about how civilian boaters help evacuate British troops from the beaches of Dunkirk where they awaited annihilation by a fast-approaching German army. The movie reminds us that, as its lived, history neither is certain nor inevitable. Nolan makes it clear that once the bullets start flying, the desire to survive can trump any devotion to cause and the lines between heroism and necessity quickly blur.

8. Call Me By Your Name

Director Luca Guadagnino tells the story of a teenager (a terrific Timothee Chalamet) who falls in love with an older man (an equally terrific Armie Hammer) who has traveled to Italy to serve as an assistant to Chalamet's character's professor father (Michale Stuhlbarg). What distinguishes Guadagnino's movie from other such stories is its delicacy and, equally important, the director's ability to convey the warmth and casual feel of a northern Italian summer -- not to mention its re-interpretation of T.S. Eliot's famous line, "Do I dare to eat a peach?"

9. A Quiet Passion and Lady Macbeth

I know, it's cheating to put two films on the same line, but why have rules if they can't be bent.

Director Terence Davies' A Quiet Passion features an amazing performance from Cynthia Nixon as poet Emily Dickinson and is steeped in the stark silences of 19th century life. In Lady Macbeth, director William Oldroyd tells the story of a British woman living in rural England in 1865. Florence Pugh plays Katherine, a woman stuck in a loveless marriage. A bone-chilling movie that cut deep.

10.Mudbound

Director Dee Rees follows two familes -- one white, one black -- in the days before, during and just after World War II. Mudbound may feel like an old-fashioned movie, but it doesn't flinch from taking a comprehensive look at race relations in the South. Rees obtains fine performances from Jason Clarke, Garrett Hedlund, Mary J. Blige, Carey Mulligan and Jason Mitchell. This one showed on Netflix, but had a rich look that deserved theatrical exposure, which the movie did receive in select markets.


Honorable mentions: Columbus, The Shape of Water, Logan, Wonder Woman, Okja, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), and City of Ghosts.

Tiny people produce small payoff

After a clever start, the pleasures of Downsizing begin to shrink.

Let's get the movie's premise out of the way. Downsizing, director Alexander Payne's latest semi-satirical effort, imagines a world in which it's possible to shrink people to a height of five inches. Why would anyone submit to such diminishment? Because those who shrink can buy their way into the good life with very little money. Small people help society, too. They can consume all they want without devouring obscene amounts of the world's dwindling resources.

The first hour of director Alexander Payne's Downsizing has been made with cleverness and nicely executed effects, but what starts as an imaginative and amusing look at the ways in which a scientific "advance" can be commercialized eventually degenerates into a morality lesson for the main character who must be schooled in the ways of life and love.

Payne begins in bravura fashion when we meet Dr. Jorgen Asbjornsen (Rolf Lassgard), the inventor of downsizing. I won't spoil the reveals of these early scenes, but they give Payne an opportunity to play with scale in ways that surprise and amuse. Lassgard's Asbjornsen is a true believer: He thinks downsizing can solve the world's ecological problems.

The story then shifts its focus, introducing us to Matt Damon's Paul, a disaffected occupational therapist whose ambitions have been thwarted. Paul's wife Audrey (Kristin Wiig) wants to move into a better house, but Paul can't afford to pay for Audrey's dreams. As a result, Paul and Audrey are stuck living the drab life in the Omaha house Paul inherited from his late mother.

The idea of "downsizing" begins to take on more appeal for Paul and Audrey when they meet a downsized couple (Jason Sudeikis and Maribeth Monroe) at a school reunion. Sudeikis' Dave sings the praises of Leisureland. The residents of Leisureland may be small but their happiness is expansive, in part because they've left all their financial worries behind.

Once Paul and Audrey decide to downsize, the movie hints at a conflict that threatens to lift the story out of the thematically limited sphere of middle-class self-satisfaction that Payne so easily skewers.

At a bar after their pre-downsizing party, a drunk sneers at Paul and Audrey. Why should small people receive the same social benefits as large people? After all, small people contribute so much less to the economy. Aren't they ciphers?

Despite the tongue lashing, Paul and Audrey proceed to the downsizing station: Scenes at the reduction center are well executed and funny in a dry way: Payne treats this amazing process in a matter-of-fact fashion.

But Payne, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jim Taylor, has more in mind than a looming clash between resentful big folks and happy little people. He enlarges the movie by raising the stakes to say something even bigger and, in so doing, allows the movie to deflate.

The movie takes a turn away from itself with the introduction of some new characters: Christoph Waltz) portrays Dusan, an escapee from Eastern Europe, who seems savvy about life in Leisureland. Waltz's Dusan and his pal Joris (Udo Kier) are party animals who devote themselves to sensual pleasure and shady entrepreneurial efforts. Dusan's credo: Tomorrow be damned. Party on.

After one of Dusan's epic parties -- at which Paul samples his first hallucinatory drugs -- Paul meets one of the Vietnamese women (Hong Chau) who arrives with a crew to clean up the previous evening's mess.

Hong's Ngoc Lan Tran was transported from Vietnam to Leisureland against her will, something to do with her role as a staunch dissident. A shabby prosthetic device has replaced the leg Lan Tran lost during her ordeal. For a hot minute, Lan Tran was a political celebrity in Leisureland. Now, she runs a cleaning crew.

It's just here that the movie loses steam. Lan Tran introduces Paul (and us) to the Third World aspects of Leisureland, impoverished people who are even further removed from life's luxuries than Paul. Leisureland, we learn, has slums and some of its residents die for a lack of medical care.

Much is made of Paul's last name. He's Paul Safranek. No one seems to be able to say Safranek without mangling it, a running bit that suggests Paul's inability to establish himself in the world. Paul ultimately affirms his identity through exposure to those less fortunate than himself, folks who seem to be either Latino or Asian.

Speaking in a clipped style, Hong Chau becomes a jarring voice in the midst of Leisureland's soothing prosperity. Hong's expressiveness and determination in the face of her character's limited language skills can't quite overcome the stereotypical nature of the character she's playing.

As the movie progresses, Payne tries to deal with environmental catastrophe and the kind of love that's expressed by caring for others, turning the self-serving delusions of Leisureland on their head.

I guess that Payne wanted to transcend satire and find something human, but in the attempt, the movie loses touch with its resourcefulness. It becomes ... well ... downsized.

A summer romance in Italy

Elio falls for Oliver in a story set in 1983, but Call Me By Your Name seems as much about the seductions of summer as the seductions of sex.

Call Me By Your Name -- the much-acclaimed movie from director Luca Guadagnino -- stands as a love story between a 24-year-old man and a 17-year-old young man who's just discovering his sexuality. The age difference has put some folks off, but if you see Call Me By Your Name, you'll understand that Guadagnino's work has little to do with sexual exploitation.

The movie has more to do with what happens between two characters during the languid and irresistibly pleasant summer of 1983. Set in the northern Italian town of Crema and the surrounding countryside, Call Me By Your Name is a movie marinated in sensual pleasures, not all of them having to do with sex.

When young Elio Perlman (Timothee Chalamet in a career-making performance) speaks of going swimming, he's talking about a plunge into summer and you almost feel the gentle embrace of the pond where Elio and his friends swim.

The movie's context adds interest, as well. Chalamet's Elio isn't some sad, isolated figure; he lives with his mother and his father (Amira Casar and Michael Stuhlbarg). Stuhlbarg's Professor Perlman studies classical sculpture, particularly Greek renditions of the idealized male body. Each summer, Professor Perlman invites a promising grad student to work with him, helping to catalog his research.

In the summer of 1983, Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives to work with Perlman.

It's clear from the outset that Elio is taken with Oliver, something in the way that a young man might be taken with an older, more worldly and much more confident man. Perhaps sensing Elio's interest, Oliver reacts cautiously -- but he does react.

Working from a screenplay adapted by James Ivory from a novel by Andre Aciman, Guadagnino creates sensual scenes between Elio and Oliver and also makes it clear that Elio's hormones are raging. He has sex with a girl from town and satisfies himself with a juicy peach, a strange take on the TS Eliot line from the The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: "Do I Dare to Eat A Peach."

Oliver and Elio spend their summer together, but it's also clear (at least to us) that Oliver will move on. He'll finish his internship, resume his life in the US and press the summer of 1983 into his book of distant memories.

Call Me By Your Name brims with warm-weather leisure: Elio plays classical piano, reads and sometimes hangs out with the local teen crowd. He also explains that his Jewish family believes in a kind of discreetly expressed Jewish identity. If the Perlman family belongs to any tribe, it's the tribe of international intellectuals.

The sex scenes between Elio and Oliver have been filmed as much to express sensitivity as desire, and it's Chalamet's performance as Elio that sets the tone.

Less well-defined, Oliver is a visitor in Elio's life and, in some ways, in the movie. You can see that as a flaw, but I assume that Guadagnino chose to present Oliver in this fashion. Despite being plenty smart, only Elio could have seen the relationship extending beyond the summer or maybe he had no real vision for it at all.

Although it doesn't occur until the end, a conversation between Professor Perlman and his son puts the story in context. Perlman's speech interprets the summer for Oliver from the perspective of an older and impressively tolerant man who understands that pleasure and pain exist on a continuum and that experiencing one means not shutting out the possibility of the other.

You may wish to think of Call Me By Your Name as life on vacation -- and that means that the movie is as lost in summer idyl as its characters. I suppose that qualifies as a weakness, but this self-contained world functions like a cocoon that protects all those in it.

Does that make Call Me By Your Name a fantasy? Maybe, but in Guadagnino's hands, it's an artfully constructed one.

'Hangman' chokes on bad dialogue

I don't make 10-worst lists anymore, mostly because I'd rather devote my end-of-the-year writing to movies that earned praise and did something to advance what I think of (perhaps naively) as cinema culture. If I did want to point to some of the year's worst movies, I'd have difficulty keeping Hangman off the list. A thriller that allows an exhausted looking Al Pacino to dredge out a southern accent, Hangman involves its entire cast (also included are Brittany Snow and Karl Urban) to founder. Another police procedural about cops trying to catch a serial killer, Hangman serves up reams of unimaginative dialogue and dull plot twists. Snow plays a New York Times reporter who returns to her southern hometown to do a story about what it's like to be a detective. She joins Urban's character as the stumbles through an investigation. The screenplay contrives to bring Pacino's Archer, a retired detective with a fondness for crossword puzzles, into the fray. Director Johnny Martin gets nothing out of his cast as this preposterous thriller lumbers toward obscurity. The title, by the way, derives form the killer, a fiend who uses the Hangman game in his crimes, adding a letter to each blank as he commits a new and grisly murder. If someone were to autopsy this dud, only three letters would be possible: DOA.

The super-rich also can be cheap

In All the Money in the World, director Ridley Scott tells a 1973 story in which the grandson of J. Paul Getty was kidnapped -- and grandpa refused to pay the ransom.

All the Money in the World stands as a triumph of sorts. With his film already shot, director Ridley Scott decided to replace Kevin Spacey in a principal role. Scott's 11th-hour decision qualifies as an act of cinematic bravado designed, I suppose, to stave off any focus on Spacey, the recent subject of much-publicized sexual abuse allegations.

So the first question: Do the seams show? The answer: Not really.

Although it's difficult not to be aware that Christopher Plummer was a last-minute addition to the production, Scott's skill and Plummer's canny performance as J. Paul Getty help create a spry thriller with plenty of pulse.

In 1973, J. Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer, no relation to Christopher) was snatched off the streets of Rome, where he was wandering aimlessly, a long-haired hippie without much personal direction. Paul's billionaire grandfather, the world's wealthiest man at the time, refused to pay the $17-million ransom the kidnappers demanded.

It falls to Paul's mother, Gail Harris (Michelle Williams), to try to free the boy, no easy task. Divorced from her wayward husband, J. Paul Getty II (Andrew Buchan), Harris has no money of her own and doesn't really want the help of an ex-CIA operative (Mark Wahlberg) dispatched by the elder Getty to help with any negotiations to free his grandson.

We get the sense that Getty wants Wahlberg's character to clean up a mess; perhaps Getty see the kidnapping as a nuisance that interferes with his obsessive fondling of ticker tape from the markets; Getty enjoys watching his already staggering wealth increase.

Plummer, who played Scrooge in this year's The Man Who Invented Christmas, expands on his performance as a classic miser; Plummer creates a man of great wealth whose sole devotion is to things. Unlike people, things remain unchanged by any winds of betrayal. Getty collects art on a major scale but otherwise establishes himself as a world-class cheapskate. He believes that anyone can become rich, but only a select few can "be" rich.

Plummer doesn't look particularly convincing as a younger version of Getty in a few awkwardly inserted flashbacks, but those are among the few distractions in Plummer's rendition of one of history's major skinflints, a self-absorbed tycoon. In this telling, Getty values his name more than anyone who inherited it from him. He keeps a payphone in his London estate for anyone wishing to make a call. If necessary, the butler will supply change.

Young Getty's kidnapping gives Scott a premise that plays to his strengths, propelling the movie forward and creating tension.

The kidnappers eventually "sell" Getty No. III to Calabrian mobsters who hope to succeed where the first crew faltered. More ruthless than their predecessors, these second-wave kidnappers eventually cut off one of the boy's ears and send it to an Italian newspaper, affording Scott an opportunity to create a wincingly painful scene.

One of the kidnappers -- Romain Duris' Cinquanta -- develops a relationship with young Getty. Cinquanta eventually tries to help the young man who had been summoned back to Rome by his mother after spending time with his father, who -- at the time -- was immersed in drug-fueled Moroccan escapades.

Williams leads Scott's strong cast as a self-assured woman. Her Gail Harris refuses to be intimidated by Getty. A single attribute gives her leverage: She doesn't want any Getty money. Harris' crisp manner suggests that she's not the warmest person: She may not have money, but you'd never know it from her behavior.

Fine performances and the sense that the story lifts the veil on a lifestyle few of us ever will encounter help Scott sell All the Money right up until the end.

During the film's closing scenes, Scott suggests that Getty dies just as his grandson's story reaches its conclusion. Getty actually died several years later, but Scott shows Getty as a man staggering through his cavernous mansion with only his cherished possessions, a dying titan capable of seeing the beauty in a painting of the baby Jesus but unable to find any in his own children or grandchildren.

The moment feels contrived, an all-too-pat restatement of what's already been said. All the Money may not reach as powerful a crescendo as Scott probably wished, but that doesn't mean his thriller isn't involving. In a crowded holiday field, All the Money holds its own.