‘Bones and All’ difficult to digest

    If you simply described the premise of Bones and All, a story about two cannibalistic teenagers trying to find their place in society, it might sound like an ordinary horror film with lots of coagulated blood and amped up tension. 

   In the hands of director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) the movie turns into something different, an indie-spirited accumulation of strange scenes that suggests deeper meanings, “suggest” being the operative word. 

   But suggesting and saying aren’t the same thing, and for most of it two-hour and 10-minute running time, I kept waiting for Bones and All to find something. I'm no sure what. Not some on-the-nose declaration of purpose but perhaps a door that swings open, inviting us to drop beneath the surface.

   Instead, Guadagnino suspends his movie in a low-rent limbo where nearly everything seems drab, unappealing and only potentially meaningful.

  Those looking for color will find it mostly in the blood that stains the faces of the movie’s young cannibals after they chow down.

   Without making too big a fuss about it, Guadagnino lets us know that the film, based on a YA novel by Camille DeAngelis,  is taking place during the ‘80s. Working phone booths. A TV repairman’s truck. (Yes, kids, people once had their TVs repaired). Music on the soundtrack. It's all from the '80s.

  In the film’s best performance, Taylor Russell portrays Maren, an 18-year-old cannibal kid who’s abandoned by her father (Andre Holland), a caring man no longer able to cope with his daughter’s proclivities. Every time she bites, they must uproot.

  Once dad is gone, Maren sets out on her own. Early in her journey, she encounters Sully, played by Mark Rylance with a vaguely southern accent, a long braid, and skin-crawling creepiness. Sully wants to teach Maren how to live as an “eater,” which is how those driven by irresistible flesh-eating urges refer to themselves. He also craves company.

  After wisely splitting from Sully, Maren meets Lee (Call Me By Your Name star, Timothee Chalamet), another “eater. 

   Unable to find niches in the “normal” world, the two travel around the country in Lee’s pick-up truck. During one encounter, they meet a couple of good-ole boys, also eaters (an unrecognizable Michael Stuhlbarg and David Gordon Green). 

  Stuhlbarg’s character explains the title. Ominously, he tells Maren and Lee that they won’t be full-fledged eaters until they consume a body “bones and all.”  

   There’s before bones & all and after, he says, signaling what I took to mean full and gleeful submission to one’s cannibal self. 

   Unlike the movie’s two main characters, these two are barbaric eaters. Or maybe they just don’t like leftovers.

  In another encounter, Maren meets her institutionalized mother (Chloe Sevigny), who presumably passed the macabre genetic heritage of “eating” to her daughter. Mom, by the way, had herself locked up so that she wouldn’t victimize anyone else. 

  The supporting cast fully embraces these whacky roles. Chalamet charts his own weird course.

  The movie attempts to redeem itself by showing that Maren and Lee don’t really want to be “eaters,” although they take different approaches to their unexplained  “affliction.” 

  Maren adopts a moral stance: She’d rather not kill. Lee says he has no choice. It’s not clear, though, whether Maren can choose to be a more acceptable kind of carnivore.

  Guadagnino doesn’t cop out on gore and those who are squeamish about such things should probably find another movie about two outsiders roaming a lonely, creepy world. 

   If you’re wondering whether Maren and Lee eat regular food, they do — at least until the need to feed on human flesh overcomes them. I guess the movie wants us to see them as a couple of kids desperately in need of connection. 

  The movie's saving grace, such as it is,  lies in Guadagnino’s understanding of the sadness of outcasts.

   And, yes, it takes talent to draw us into this bizarre world and accept (or at least adjust to) its terms, so much so that we forget to step outside and consider what we’re watching. 

   Should we do that, we might see Maren and Lee as needy kids who also happen to be killers who can’t control themselves. 

   When these kids get hungry someone dies. Just sayin’.

Two reporters dig for an important story

   

 She Said, the story of how two The New York Times reporters exposed the abusive conduct of Harvey Weinstein, effectively dramatizes the ins and outs of reporting a big story in which sources are reluctant to talk and the target of the investigation wields significant power. 

    As the co-founder and the public face of Miramax, Weinstein was a major player in the world of movies, a producer of influence that he evidently used to help those whom he favored and thwart those he didn't.

    For some women, the side of the equation on which they landed depended on how they responded to Weinstein's sexual advances, some made in startlingly crude and even criminal fashion.

    Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) revealed that Weinstein, now serving a 23-year prison sentence for rape and sexual assault, had been settling sexual abuse cases with women for years, silencing them with restrictive non-disclosure agreements.

       Mulligan's Twohey seems the more aggressive of the two, more seasoned in pitfalls of pre-#MeToo harassment. Early on, we learn that Twohey wrote stories about women who had things to say about Donald Trump’s behavior. She was dejected when the stories appeared to change nothing.

       Kazan's Kantor gives the movie a steady beat. Despite discouragement, Kantor persists and she shows that reporters can respect the sensibilities of those with whom they deal. Better yet, her concern never seems like an ingratiating journalistic ploy.

      Brief references are made to the home life of each of the women. Husbands aren't upset that their wives are working feverishly, as often happens in such movies. Both women deal with the demands of motherhood. But the movie’s focus remains on the work required to nail the story.

      Of the supporting performances, the always interesting Patricia Clarkson proves an unsurprising standout as a Times editor. Samantha Morton makes a strong impression as Zelda Perkins, a woman who once served as a personal assistant to Weinstein. Ashley Judd plays herself, a prominent show business figure who ultimately went public about Weinstein.  Jennifer Ehle has a nice turn as Laura Madden, a woman who was battling breast cancer when she told her Weinstein story.

     Andre Braugher is convincing as Times editor Dean Baquet, particularly in a couple of scenes depicting terse conversations with Weinstein who tried to derail the story.

     Dramatizing the grunt work of journalism isn't easy. At times, it almost looks as if Schrader has made a movie about cell phone calls -- calls that awaken the women from sound sleeps, calls while walking in parks, calls while walking with husbands, calls that disrupt meetings, and on and on.

      I'm not sure how the problem could have been resolved; besides, the story and its detail have more to do with the movie's success than cinematic flair. 

     We only see Weinstein (an actor) from the back in one scene near the end of the movie but we're made to understand the power that he used to impose himself on women, many of them young and naive.  Schrader includes a real phone call between Weinstein and Ambra Gutierrez, an Italian model, but she wisely creates no scenes in which we see Weinstein committing his crimes.

     That doesn't mean that Weinstein's presence isn't felt throughout. With help from enablers, he abused his position and got away with it -- until some of the women he harmed and two determined reporters helped bring his misdeeds to light.

‘The Menu’: a tasty satire about foodies

     The Menu takes aim at restaurant obsessives, folks who'll pay a fortune to be served fashionably minuscule portions.

   Price tags, however, are anything but small. The well-heeled or wannabes willingly open their wallets. In return, they're rewarded with super creative dishes prepared under the guidance of executive chefs who have attained celebrity status.

      In The Menu, director Mark Mylod employs a strong cast -- led by Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy -- for a darkly hued comedy with an amply stocked side dish of horror. Food snobs beware, Mylod's coming for you. 

     For most of its one-hour and 46-minute run-time, The Menu serves its observations with a sharp satirical edge.

       The movie owes much of its success to Fiennes, who plays Chef Julian Slowik, the culinary genius who presides over a restaurant so exclusive it's located on an island where all the food that's served is locally harvested. Diners arrive by boat.

     When he introduces a new course to the assembled diners, Slowik claps his hands loudly and the kitchen staff -- visible to the diners -- snaps to attention.  Slowik has turned his staff into a paramilitary food force. 

      The only response to any question Slowik might ask: "Yes, chef."

       The diners are a select group. John Leguizamo appears as an actor whose career has hit the downside. He arrives with his assistant (Aimee Carrero), a young woman who's ready to seek greener employment pastures.

        Judith Light and Reed Birney play a couple celebrating their anniversary, although they don't seem especially happy about it. 

        Taylor-Joy appears as the date of a young man (Nicholas Hoult) who thinks he knows a great deal about food. Hoult portrays the diner who hopes to impress the chef with his vast food acumen. He's eager to genuflect at Slowik's culinary altar.

        Diners also include a powerful career-making food critic (Janet McTeer) and the editor (Paul Adlestein) who publishes her work. 

       A table of young tech execs (Rob Yang, Arturo Castro, and Mark St. Cyr)  tosses around credit cards with the kind of abandon that lets everyone know they believe in their own sense of entitlement.

      A memorably scary Hong Chau portrays the stern maitre d of the restaurant Hawthorne. She greets guests, gives them a quick tour of the island, and otherwise informs them of the rules by which they must abide if they're to get the most out of their dining experience.

      The meals are amusing. A lone scallop served on a rock drawn from the sea, for example. Or how about a bread course distinguished by the absence of bread? The guests (only 12 are allowed) pay $1250 per person for the evening.

      Aside from Taylor-Joy's outspoken character, most of the guests are pretentious jerks. The screenplay by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy leads these exemplars of privilege to their well-deserved, often violent comeuppances.

       Fiennes makes an imposing dictatorial chef, who regards himself as an artist. Slowik instructs patrons that they must taste, not eat. People aren't eating meals, they’re sampling food conceptions, many mimicking the ambitions of “molecular”  gastronomy.

       A study in austere modernism, restaurant Hawthorne isn't just a place to eat, it's the physical embodiment of rarified consumer aspiration, which is pretty much what the movie’s about — not exactly a theme on which to feast but sufficient for some tasty grazing. 

                

A trip through one man's troubled psyche

       

   Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths unspools a series of remarkable images designed to lead us deep into one man's psychic condition.

     Yes, that sounds pretentious, but Inarritu's reach for significance doesn't stop there. A deliberate invitation to head scratching, Bardo's subtitle suggests a movie that marries a game-like approach to feelings of free-fall fuzziness.

     What saves Bardo from its own grandiosity -- at least some of the time -- is the playfulness that Inarritu brings to what otherwise might be seen as a gargantuan display of overreach. 

       Put another way, not all of Bardo needs be taken seriously, even though the movie deals with weighty matters.

      A disaffected journalist and documentary filmmaker played by Daniel Gimenez Cacho gives Bardo its wobbly center.  Unlike other troubled men, Cacho's Silverio seems comfortable or at least resigned to his disaffection. Maybe he's even a little bored with himself.

     Broadly framed and episodic, Bardo introduces us to Silverio on the eve of his receiving an award in Los Angeles. Silverio returns to Mexico, a country in which he has not lived for 20 years. In Mexico, Silverio begins a lengthy encounter with his life: his career, his marriage, his role as a father, and, most importantly, his mortality.

      Shades of Fellini’s 8 1/2 haunt Bardo, as do other movies but Inarritu's imagery — the movie’s undeniable strong point —achieves singularity with help from cinematographer Darius Khondji.  Khondji and Inarritu concoct a vision that could have found an alternative life on a painter’s easel.  

      Late in the movie, Silverio climbs a pyramid composed of dead bodies as part of an effort to show that the original inhabitants of Mexico were brutalized and murdered. At the summit of this bizarre Aztec hill, Silverio converses with Hernan Cortes, the 16th Century Spanish conqueror, a figure who becomes an emblem of a still-unresolved part of the Mexican past. 

       A ghost? A hallucination? You decide.

       This impressive heap of flesh isn't sufficient for Inarritu, who shatters the illusion by showing us how the mountain was built and filmed. It's as if Inarritu can't resist deconstructing his own brilliance.

      A scene at a dance in Mexico City held to honor Silverio includes a dazzling shot of Silverio dancing to David Bowie’s Let’s Dance. The giddy rush of the party put me in mind of the ecstatic frenzy Italian director Paolo Sorentino sometimes found in The Great Beauty.

      Strange and compelling stuff, and I haven’t even mentioned the baby that refuses to be born and is pushed back into his mother’s womb. Why? Because the world is too fucked up, Silverio explains. 

       At times, the movie seems like a lamentation for this lost son -- and also an excuse for a bit of shock comedy. During one inopportune moment with his wife, Silverio must push the baby back into the womb himself.

       Story strands appear and vanish in dreamlike fashion, touching past and present and sometimes taking the form of a domestic drama. On such occasions, Inarritu provides glimpses of Silverio’s relationship with his wife (Griselda Siciliani) and his two children (Iker Sanchez Solano and Ximena Lamadrid).

       I wish that Silverio had been a less familiar character, the middle-aged artist riddled by doubt and splayed across the chasm of a wide cultural divide. Throughout the movie, various characters accuse Silverio of betraying his Mexican roots to garner favor with the US journalistic and film establishments.

       At least once, Silverio strikes back, but he usually joins the chorus of criticism. He questions his achievements, wondering if he isn’t a fraud and turning into the kind of character we've seen too often, like the pal who's always harping on the same dejected note.

      And, yes, Inarritu does carry on. The movie feels long, even after Inarritu cut 22 minutes from the film’s original 174-minute running time. 

    So what about the elephant in the room? Should Bardo be seen as a quasi-autobiographical confession from a director who has climbed the ladder of success. Inarritu has won Academy Awards for best direction (Birdman and The Revenant) and has received additional Oscar nominations. 

     Bardo is the first movie he’s made in Mexico since 2001’s Amores Perros. Like Silverio, he has returned to the land of his birth.

       It's tempting to regard Bardo as Inarritu’s exercise in self-exploration, which is way of saying that the movie can be viewed as the eruption of a bountiful ego: mesmerizing, chaotic, beautiful, amusing, and even a little goofy. 

       Some will find all of this off-putting and bloated; at times, I found myself in that camp but then I'd be snapped back by a bravura image. For me, watching the movie was like riding a seesaw of conflicting responses. 

     Perhaps that's what Inarritu had in mind. Bardo opens with a shot of a vast desert expanse. We see the shadow of a man who seems to be running across parched terrain. Occasionally, the shadow lifts and heads skyward, only to vanish before returning to earth. 

     The man is never seen. Only the shadow.

     That summarizes Inarritu's flickering phantom of a movie as well as anything. Engage. Detach. Liftoff. Come back down to Earth. Wonder where you’ve been.

     Bardo is that kind of movie. 

Bardo has had a theatrical release in some markets; it will be released in more on Dec. 11, and will be available on Netflix on Dec. 16.

      

           

A mostly satisfying 'Black Panther' sequel

 

  Black Panther: Wakanda Forever makes  a mostly worthy addition to a series forced to compensate for the death of its star, Chadwick Boseman. After Boseman’s death in 2020, the filmmakers faced a monumental problem: How to keep the series going without T'Challa, its main character?

   Viewers will no doubt argue about how well director Ryan Coogler solves the problem, but Coolger —who directed the first installment —lays the groundwork for more Black Panther movies by giving this sequel a strong cast of women while maintaining a respectful tone for what has been lost. 

     Is Boseman missed? Of course.

     Wakanda Forever sometimes feels like a movie stocked with supporting players and no clear lead. As the Queen Mother, Angela Bassett receives a good deal of attention, as does Letitia Wright, who plays Shuri, T'Challa's  tech-savvy sister.

     Both Wright and Bassett embody the movie's major theme: coping with loss. At one point, Shuri asks how a threatened Wakanda will survive without Black Panther to protect it? Much of the story involves attempts by various characters to answer that question, a process that sometimes feels labored.

    Familiar faces help. When series' regulars turn up, we're happy to see them. Among them: Danai Gurira as the stern general Okoye. Lupita Nyong'o reprises her role as Anika, entering the picture about midway through.

       So what happens in this Marvel extravaganza? 

       Outside forces threaten Wakanda’s tranquility. The nations of the world want to obtain vibranium, the substance that has allowed powerful Wakanda to develop into a tech paradise.

      The CIA acquires a machine invented by an MIT student (Dominique Thorne) that can detect vibranium. The agency has begun using this scanner to survey oceans for vibranium, a manifestation of the imperialist greed that Wakanda loathes.

     But wait, there's more.

     The underwater kingdom of Talokan (yes, a whole other empire) thwarts the CIA efforts. Talokan also has a supply of vibranium, which helps its residents survive in the sea.

     Trouble looms. The soft-spoken leader of Talokan (Tenoch Huerta) wants to join forces with Wakanda to stop the devious plans of the "surface people," as he calls the nations who lust after vibranium. 

    Hoping to avoid global conflagration, Bassett’s Queen Romonda,  a character of pinpoint ferocity, declines, thus lighting the fuse of conflict. Talokan and Wakanda square off in the movie's climactic scene, a nifty sea battle featuring a giant ship and flying warriors.

     A two-hour and 41-minute running time proves excessive, and not everything soars. A less-than-thrilling tangent involves  Martin Freeman and Julia Louise Dreyfus  as CIA agents.

     What I missed most about this edition of Black Panther was the elevating aura of Afro-centric nobility and discovery that permeated the first installment. The sense of ennobling fantasy dwindles as Wakanda Forever spins through its various plot threads and expositional chores.

      The first Black Panther felt like an entertaining superhero movie and a cultural game changer. This one feels more like a step in the Marvel franchise staircase. But considering the heavy burden that Coogler carried, the movie qualifies as a success -- even if we grumble a little.

       Wakanda Forever wraps things up with an appropriate expression of sadness for the loss of Boseman and T'Challa, and perhaps, most importantly, with a clear commitment not to cheapen the experience that captivated so many the first time around.

       That counts for a lot.

A father and daughter wrapped in memory

      Dad is divorced. It's not clear how often he sees his daughter but we suspect that his visits are infrequent. Perhaps to make up for it, Dad has taken 11-year-old Sophie on vacation to a resort in Turkey. 

      In his early 30s, Dad finds himself in an ambiguous position: He's both friend and parent to Sophie and it's clear that he hasn't entirely worked struck the right balance.

      It's also clear that Dad is troubled. There are signs. While his daughter sleeps, Dad, who has a cast on his right arm, stands on the balcony of their hotel room swaying as he tries to light a cigarette. He's like someone trying to work out kinks, and we suspect the kinks are more than physical. 

      In her first movie, Scottish director Charlotte Wells pulls off a neat trick. She keeps things specific: A father and daughter play pool, doze in the sun or take boat rides. 

    At the same time, Wells wraps the movie's emotional life in a cloak of tantalizing vagueness. 

    Bifurcated and unsettling, Wells' approach allows for a challenging range of interpretive possibilities.

      Mostly, the daughter's point of view dominates. We'll eventually learn that Sophie is recalling this summer interlude as an adult with a baby and a wife. She's looking at old camcorder footage Dad took on that long ago trip, which Wells, thankfully, uses sparingly.

     Sophie tries to understand who her father might have been when she was at an age when she couldn't really take the measure of his life.

      Stroboscopic flashes of Sophie dancing with her father in a club disrupt the flow of calm imagery. Moments of frenzy that shatter the movie's placid surface.

      By now it should be clear that Wells' plotless, hazy approach places a heavy burden on the actors. 

       As the father, Paul Mescal creates a loving parent who seems to be harboring secrets. Mescal's Calum isn't about to allow Sophie to peer into areas he may not wish to examine himself.

        It's a tricky performance. The boyish-looking Mescal conveys a lot by simply allowing himself to live in the movie's accumulation of small moments. 

        Frankie Corio gives a great performance as Sophie, one of those amazingly natural turns that makes it seem as if no acting is happening.

        Corio's Sophie is still a kid. She can get caught up in an arcade motorcycle game with a boy who's about her age. But she's also anticipating change. She's fascinated by teenagers who invite her to share a few moments. Sophie watches with curiosity as the older kids begin to express their sexuality, an awakening that she has yet to experience.

         Wells has created a portrait of two people who share moments of amazing intimacy without really knowing each another, which perhaps stands as a metaphor for many human interactions. Wells allows us to feel the warmth of afternoon suns and the dissolution of tension that happens in the moments before one falls asleep at poolside. She lulls us into relaxation while simultaneously allowing unsettling undercurrents to ripple through nearly every scene.

          Of course, it's all a bit fuzzy. We're mostly looking at events as remembered by the adult Sophie. Maybe 'remembering' isn't quite the right word. She's dreaming the past with all its love, angers, and unrecoverable loss.

          Now and again, Wells shows us images of hang-gliders floating through the blue Turkish sky. These images, almost trivial from a vacation standpoint, might represent a way to think about memory --untethered drifts through time.

          Aftersun offers the pleasure of discovering a movie made by someone who knows how to speak the language of cinema. Wells isn't telling a story; she's sharing an experience, leaving us immersed in the emotions her film unleashes.

A vet returns from combat with scars

Since her breakthrough in Winter's Bone (2010), Jennifer Lawrence has become a major star and it's difficult to look at her new movie, Causeway, without being aware that she's committed herself to a narrowly focused project that's unburdened by anything resembling Hollywood glare. Lawrence plays a combat veteran whose brain was damaged when an IED exploded during her service in Afghanistan. Lawrence's Linsey returns to New Orleans where it becomes clear that her mother (Linda Edmond) hadn't been the most attentive of parents. She also has a brother whose life was ravaged by drugs. Director Lila Neugebauer's modest debut film revolves around a relationship that the emotionally scarred Lynsey forms with an auto mechanic (Brian Tyree Henry), who's carrying plenty of his own emotional baggage, including ample amounts of guilt and regret. As a gay woman, Lynsey responds to Henry's openness without having to commit to a romantic relationship which -- at least for the moment -- would be beyond her anyway. Both Lawrence and Henry are quite good with Henry creating a character who's juggling his emotions while trying to understand Lynsey, who doesn't always make it easy for him. Neugebauer utilizes New Orleans locations we don't normally see in movies. Lynsey takes a job cleaning swimming pools, which opens Neugebauer's camera to some wonderfully secluded backyards that have a nearly secretive vibe.  Hardly a knockout story but Lawrence and Henry create characters of great vulnerability and emerging need.

A sixth grader learns a difficult lesson

 

   Inspired by his own New York upbringing, director James Gray returns to the 1980s to explore the trials of Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta), a sixth grader at PS 173 in Queens, New York. 

    Gray goes to great lengths to achieve period authenticity as he tries to deal with a big subject while telling a small story. 

     The big subject: White privilege. Paul bypasses trouble with the police, something a Black friend (Jaylin Webb) can’t do. The small story: Almost everything else in the movie.

    The movie works best when Gray keeps things episodic and loose. Early on, he establishes the environment at PS 173. Paul's teacher (Andrew Polk) conducts his class in an authoritarian fashion that none of his pupils seems to take seriously, including Paul who draws a caricature of him.

   Paul is drawn to Johnny, a Black kid who's repeating the sixth grade. Johnny intuitively understands that the system doesn't favor him. He makes no attempt to conceal his contempt for it. He wants to work for NASA but finds no encouragement for his dream.

    Gray creates a working-class Jewish milieu that isn't often seen in popular entertainment. Paul's home is a scene of fractious exchanges, overheard conversations, empty bromides, worry, and casually expressed racism.

    Anne Hathaway has a nice turn as Paul's mother, who also happens to be the head of the PTA. A tightly wound Jeremy Strong plays Paul's dad, a plumber with a bad temper and little interest in his son's lofty ambitions: The kid wants to be an artist. 

    Paul's older brother (Ryan Sell) tries to torment his younger sibling. 

    The movie delivers a message of encouragement through Paul's grandfather (Anthony Hopkins), who provides the movie's moral and emotional center. One must be a mensch, which in this case means speaking out against injustice. 

     Grandpa understands Paul in a way his parents can't. He gives him a toy rocket, which the two fly together He also  provides the boy with a set of oil paints, thus endorsing Paul's arty ambitions.

    Gray unspools the rest of the family dynamics throughout. Paul's grandmother (Tovah Feldshuh) fled Ukraine, met grandpa in England, and traveled with him to the US, escaping the pogroms and antisemitism that plagued much of Eastern European Jewry.

   The big shift in Paul's young life happens when he and Johnny are caught smoking a joint in the school bathroom. Paul's outraged parents decide to enroll him in the same private school his brother attends. Paul is forbidden to see Johnny again. Grandpa picks up the tab for the new school. 

   As it turns out, the school is a favored institution of Fred Trump (John Diehl), father of … well … you know who. Trump's daughter Maryanne (Jessica Chastain), a US judge, speaks to a school assembly, serving up an easy irony: A person raised rich tells kids what it takes to succeed.

   Fed up with his home life, Paul convinces Johnny to help steal a computer from his new school so that the two can sell it and flee to Florida, a pipe dream that brings both boys into contact with the police, something that probably will ruin Johnny's already threatened future.

    Paul learns that it’s possible to encounter bigotry for being Jewish while also benefiting from societal assumptions about being white. Johnny gets no such benefit of the doubt and presumably never will.

    In one of the movie's softer exchanges, Dad explains how he got his son off the hook with the cops. He acknowledges that Johnny will be treated unfairly. Life is unfair. That’s it. Move on with your life.

    We don't know how Paul will internalize this message and what it will mean for his life going forward. Perhaps Gray wants us to speculate but a few hints might have been helpful.

    Gray overreaches by trying to tie Paul's woes to a major shift in the country, which is about to enter the Regan years, a rightward triumph that helps push the door open for today’s roiled climate. 

    Those familiar with Gray's work (Ad Astra, The Lost City of Z, Two Lovers, We Own the Night, and The Immigrant) won't be surprised to learn that the director avoids nostalgic indulgence, opting instead to allow rough edges to show.

    Gray bravely tackles the inadequacies and limitations of his characters but the resultant film also feels somewhat limited, a narrow gauged personal tale. Rough edges don't always add up to a larger truth.

      Oddly, I found myself more interested in Paul’s emotionally stunted father than in either of his sons. Strong’s character seemed a more intriguing embodiment of the painful contradictions Gray lays out than anything we learn about one more kid who aspires to be an artist. 

      And Johnny's story? That could be a whole other film. 

       

Two documentaries: 'Goodnight Oppy' and 'The Return of Tanya Tucker'

 Goodnight Oppy 

In 2003, NASA sent two rovers to Mars. They were supposed to function for 90 days. Amazingly, Spirt, one of the rovers, remained operational for six years. Oppy (short for opportunity) sent back data and explored the planet for nearly 15 years. The documentary Goodnight Oppy explains how all this happened while highlighting the cooperative effort required to execute a complex space mission. Oppy eventually helped establish an important fact:  There once had been water on Mars, which meant that the planet could have supported microbiological life. Angela Bassett narrates a movie that, like the people involved in this mission, humanizes the rovers, regarding them as part of an extended technological family. Anthropomorphism was difficult to resist: The rovers were built at 5'2" in height so that they would reflect the eye level of the average human. At the risk of dooming the movie, I’ll say that it would make great viewing for kids. Goodnight Oppy makes it clear that engineering and science (sometimes in conflict here) can open doorways to interesting careers. Secondly, the movie shows what can be achieved when when specialists join forces to work toward a common goal. Director Ryan White seems a bit prone to corniness.  But, hey, Goodnight Oppy is inspiring nonetheless.

The  Return of Tanya Tucker -- Featuring Brandi Carlile 

I'm not a country music buff, but that didn't stop me from enjoying The Return of Tanya Tucker -- Featuring Brandi Carlile, a documentary about a once-hot star who makes a comeback. Tucker's return was engineered by another country star, Brandi Carlile, a lifelong Tucker fan who patiently teases out Tanya's best work for a new album. The movie also functions as an abridged biography of Tucker, charting her life from teenage success to encounters with Hollywood, her relationship with Glenn Campbell, as well as her fade from glory. But it's present-tense spark that energizes the movie. Director Kathlyn Horan captures the byplay between Carlile and Tucker who, without even trying, shatter stereotypes about country music. Carlile's gay and the 64-year-old Tucker sports a pink dye job. Rambunctious and candid, Tucker's live-wire style sometimes clashes with her insecurities about trying to revive her career. The film ends in triumph with Tucker winning a Grammy. Watching the creative process unfold can be boring, but hanging out with Tucker and Carlile makes for its own brand of entertainment.