No dramatic bounty in 'Promised Land'

Credit Matt Damon, who co-wrote the new movie Promised Land with actor John Krasinski, for tackling a difficult subject. Too bad, Damon and Krasinksi didn't come up with a stronger, more credible script for their movie about issues facing a small rural town when a natural gas company starts dangling major money for fracking rights.

Granted, it's difficult to make a dramatic feature about a subject as controversial and complicated as fracking, but the details in Promised Land don't always compute and a less-than-credible late-picture plot twist limits the movie's power.

Promised Land reunites Damon with director Gus Van Sant, who directed Good Will Hunting (1997), a movie that won screenwriting Oscars for Damon and his then partner Ben Affleck. Van Sant also directed Gerry (2002), a movie that Damon wrote with Casey Affleck and Van Sant.

This time, Damon -- who has appeared in all the movies he's written -- plays Steve Butler, a representative for a natural gas company. His assignment: buying drilling rights from economically stressed farmers. On the verge of a major promotion, Steve is one of the company's best closers, a guy known for achieving success while offering farmers rock-bottom prices. Needless to say, Steve doesn't say much about dangers posed by fracking.

Steve's success stems from his ability to relate to farmers. He grew up on an Iowa farm, and understands that most small farmers are struggling to make ends meet. He views his company's offers as a kind of salvation for farmers -- and, to the movie's credit -- there's some truth in Steve's pitch. Why should farmers sacrifice the future of their families for some romanticized, and in Steve's view, misplaced loyalty to the land?

Steve plies his trade with a down-to-earth partner (an underutilized Frances McDormand), a good-humored, no-nonsense woman for whom the work is just that -- a job, a way to support her son and earn a living. An eye-on-the-ball gal, McDormand's Sue doesn't waste time entangling herself in moral issues.

All seems to be going well for these representatives of Global Gas in their latest assignment until a town meeting at which a high-school science teacher (Hal Holbrook) raises questions about dangers associated with fracking. Holbrook's Frank Yates also wonders whether the promised rewards aren't being exaggerated.

Damon, Krasinksi and Van Sant have a feel for small-town life in an agricultural community and for how reps for a natural gas company might operate. When Steve and Sue arrive in town, they stop at a local store to buy clothing that they hope will make them look more like the town's residents.

But the movie falters when it comes to other details and perhaps even in the way Damon's character develops. First off, I found it difficult to believe that a born-and-bred Iowa farm boy such as Steve wouldn't know how to strive a stick-shift car; the movie uses Steve's difficulty with stick shifting as a running joke.

And when an environmentalist (Krasinski) shows up to warn the townspeople that fracking can result in dead live stock and poisoned land, the movie starts to feel contrived.

Obviously, the script builds toward a crisis of conscience for Steve, but that, too, stuck me as a stretch. This isn't Steve's first rodeo. You'd think he already would have worked out any moral issues stemming from the work he does. He seems a little too naive.

Are we supposed to believe that Steve begins to see new light because he meets an appealing woman in town (Rosemarie DeWitt)? Or is he thunderstruck when he receives revealing new information about the mammoth company that employs him? Maybe he never entirely abandoned his farm-boy roots.

You get the picture. Good intentions don't always make for a good movie, and although Promised Land captures some of the informalities of small-town life and, commendably, tries to find a bit of balance, it falls short both as a character study of a conflicted oil rep and as an expression of agitated social conscience.

'Django Unchained,' also unhinged

A different setting, but it's the same old Tarantino.

Having taken vengeance for the horrors Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino shifts his attention to blacks in Django Unchained, a wild assault on the antebellum South: land of plantations, slavery, sexual perversity, leering sadism and bloody violence.

If you're wondering -- as I am -- why Tarantino has assumed so many vengeful burdens, I'll wonder along with you. I leave it you to decide whether Jews and blacks should be grateful, offended or indifferent to revisionist fantasies conducted on their behalf.

I wasn't a total fan of Inglourious Basterds, but I'd rank it above Django Unchained, another Tarantino exercise in genre eclecticism that twists the past into something as lurid as an exploitation movie -- only one in which the comic elements have ceased being inadvertent and clearly were intended.

Django Unchained borrows from Spaghetti Westerns (notably 1966's Django by Sergio Corbucci), rap music (I'm not kidding), Blaxploitation movies of the '70s and even other Tarantino movies. In assembling the movie's several acts, Tarantino creates a work that's wanton in its excessiveness -- and that includes its two-hour and 46-minute length.

That's an awfully long time to tell a relatively simple story about Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave who's freed by a bounty hunter and who develops into a kind of laconic cowboy hero with whom no one would want to mess.

Those who know Tarantino's movies (and who doesn't?) won't be surprised to learn that Django Unchained lets the N-word flow freely, includes a surfeit of vividly mounted violence and splashes its way through the kind of old-fashioned southern racism that looks indistinguishable from sadism.

Tarantino fans probably won't mind any of this, and those who don't count themselves among the director's devotees may be consoled by performances that include tasty turns from the incomparable Christoph Waltz (as the bounty hunter who frees Django from slavery and makes him a partner) and Leonardo DiCaprio (as a genteel southern slave owner and monstrous example of humanity).

In many ways, Django is a tonal free-for-all, even boasting a scene that may remind you of Mel Brooks. Tarantino depicts a gathering of Klansman as a convocation of dimwits who complain about not being able to see through the eye holes in masks that have been crudely and ineptly made by the wife of a Klansman.

Other scenes seem to transpose familiar Tarantino tropes (exchanges of dialog that play like gunfights) into new settings.

The story seems nothing more than an outline onto which Tarantino grafts numerous riffs. Waltz's Dr. King Schultz, a former dentist turned bounty hunter, liberates Django in the early going. Schultz's motives aren't entirely altruistic; he knows Django can identify a couple of hoodlums he's been hunting. He wants to collect the reward money.

Django and Dr. Schultz work together before heading to Mississippi to rescue Django's wife (Kerry Washington), who was sold to another slaver after the couple was caught trying to run away. Washington's Broomhilde even speaks a little German, a skill that the screenplay makes use of later.

During this phase of the movie, Foxx pretty much holds himself in reserve, saving Django's blossoming fury for a finale in which it emerges with explosive force.

But Foxx carries a big -- and perhaps impossible -- burden here: He's not only playing a character, he's illustrating ideas about the ways in which blacks have been portrayed on screen with a view, one supposes, toward ultimately subverting such stereotypical images.

To rescue Broomhilda, Django and Dr. Schultz must invade the preposterously named Candieland, a massive planation owned by DiCaprio's Calvin Candie, a plutocrat who enjoys watching dogs tear apart runaway slaves, has a black mistress and forces strapping black men to fight to the death for his personal amusement.

Schultz and Django concoct a ruse that gains them entry into Candieland. They pretend to want to buy a fighter of their own. They hope that Candie will include Broomhilda as an add-on, someone with whom the German-born Schultz can enjoy chatting in his native tongue.

Once in Candieland, Django and Schultz also encounter Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a house slave whose speech and inflections recall Jules, the character Jackson played in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Stephen, who has served the Candie family for years, isn't outwardly subservient, but he knows where his Big House bread is buttered. He remains loyal to his master.

Tarantino builds tension, and some of the scenes in Django Unchained are beautifully executed, DiCaprio, Waltz, Foxx and others at a tense formal dinner in Candieland, for example.

Enjoyable in bits and pieces Django Unchained is another off-the-hook helping of Tarantino. If you want to take the movie seriously, you can argue that Tarantino is playing around with film iconography from several generations of "B" and mainstream movies, although that may make Django Unchained a tough talking entertainment for cinema geeks. You also can look at it as a full-blown exercise in absurdity or as a simple revenge saga.

But whatever it aspires to be, Django Unchained felt a little old hat to me, Tarantino strutting his stuff in another genre playground. And by now, Tarantino movies have acquired an almost clubby aura in which cinematic in-jokes, outré slices of violence and ample helpings of the "MF" word act as signifiers of a brand of movie "cool" that forgives every indulgence and all manner of cruelty, so long as the tables eventually are turned.

But the trouble with revisionist revenge sagas is that they don't really loosen the grip of the past; they take aim at images and play with situations we know from other movies, often standing them on their heads. The whole business is a bit like shooting at ghosts. You make a lot of noise, but, in the end, you have to wonder whether you've actually hit anything.

A dark, melodramatic 'Les Miz'

You may find imperfections, but the big-screen version of Les Miserables ultimately proves stirring.

The voices sometimes seem to be straining. An abundance of extreme close-ups tends to give the movie a feeling of cramped intimacy. Although filmed mostly on sets, the movie steeps itself in gritty 19th century realism. It's a musical with dirt under its fingernails.

I'm talking about Les Miserables, the big-screen adaptation of the much-revered musical that made its debut in Paris in 1980 and seems to have been in production somewhere ever since.

Melodramatic, operatic and seen through cinematographer Danny Cohen's dark lens, Les Miserables bypasses its imperfections, ultimately getting where it needs to go. It's less a story well-told than a production massively mounted, but that may be precisely what the material needs.

Based on an 1862 Victor Hugo novel, Les Miserables thunders its way through nearly three hours of suffering, death and melodrama, frequently miring its cast in mud, muck and -- as the title promises -- the kind of bone-deep misery that might have roused envy even in Dickens, himself no slouch when it came to injustice and suffering.

As directed by Tom Hooper (The King's Speech), Les Miserables is top heavy with marquee names, including Anne Hathaway, who tackles the role of the tormented Fantine in a performance in which emotion seems to spill from her every pore.

I'm not going to provide background for every character in Les Miz, but Fantine, you may recall, is a single mother, a status that caused her to be scorned and persecuted for profligacy in France of the 1800s. And, yes, it might be advisable to bone up on Hugo's story before you go because plot points breeze by as if propelled by wind machines.

The story centers on poor Jean Val Jean (Hugh Jackman), the ex-convict who violates his parole and spends a lifetime fleeing Javert (Russell Crowe), a lawman who applies justice like a lash. Amanda Seyfried turns up as Fantine's daughter, Cosette, a woman who eventually is sheltered by Jean Val Jean.

All of this takes place against a post-revolutionary historical backdrop in which the monarchy has been restored in France, and the people are suffering under the weight of too much regal indifference.

The movie's third act deals with the revolt of 1832, introducing us to Marius (Eddie Redmayne), a revolutionary who's smitten by Cosette. Be assured barricades will be stormed. The spirit of the people will be aroused. You will be stirred.

To heighten the feeling of emotional urgency, Hooper had his actors sing their numbers as the cameras rolled rather than relying on lip-synching. The technique is employed to mixed result.

Jackman, who has a history in musical theater, carries it off convincingly, as does Hathaway. Crowe, who has a background singing with rock bands, is only moderately successful. Trussed up in the costume of a 19th century lawman, Crowe moves around as if encased in plaster. Javert's a rigid guy, but Crowe never seems entirely comfortable playing him.

Hooper doesn't quite suffocate the production, but I wish he had let it breathe some, and I got tired of watching close-ups of the singers. Hooper must have wanted his camera to bring us close to the performances, but the face of a singer -- particularly when grappling with heavy emotion -- isn't always a thing of beauty.

The major numbers in Les Miserables -- At the End of the Day, I Dreamed a Dream and One Day More -- are effectively performed, and there's even a bit of comic relief. Sacha Baron Cohen makes an appropriately despicable and conniving Thénardier, an inn-keeper who for a time takes charge of Cosette. Baron Cohen receives an able assist from Helena Bonham Carter -- now a specialist in playing grotesque-looking women -- as Madame Thénardier. Samantha Barks makes a bit of splash as their daughter, Éponine.

I'm not a particular fan of musicals, and Les Miz involves wall-to-wall singing with almost no spoken dialogue. I can't exactly say that Les Miserables left me humming any of its tunes. But whatever problems the big-screen version has, I mostly enjoyed it and even felt a slight tingling of the spine during its finale. Put another way, Les Miserables has genuine theatrical power.

A bland, predictable 'Parental Guidance'

Billy Crystal and Bette Midler in a comedy that's silly, sentimental and not very funny.

During Parental Guidance, a distressingly juvenile comedy starring Billy Crystal, a Little Leaguer uses his bat to slam Crystal's character in the -- why put it politely? -- testicles. It's intended as a funny moment, but like much of the comedy in Parental Guidance it's pretty painful -- and if not painful, predictably bland. The story finds old-school grandpa and grandma (Crystal and Bette Midler) taking care of their three grandkids so that their parents (Marisa Tomei and Tom Everett Scott) can take a trip. The parents worry because grandma and grandpa haven't seen the kids for a while and are not versed in contemporary methods of child rearing, the kind in which gratuitous indulgence has replaced sensible discipline. At times, it seems as if Crystal may be improvising, but neither he nor Midler can bring this mixture of obvious humor and rancid sentiment to a boil. Despite a host of problems, grandma and grandpa ultimately help the kids deal with their issues. The screenplay offers condescending jokes about the ways in which grandpa and grandma are technically illiterate. Other jokes involve constipation, urination and regurgitation. That's not to say that this PG family-oriented comedy is overly crude -- only to tell you that it's way short of wit, insight and, even worse, laughs.

A look at the year's best

Time for a top-10 list. Sorry, Abe, you may have been our greatest president, but the movie Lincoln didn't make my cut. Sure Daniel Day-Lewis is on target for an Oscar nomination for giving the 16th president a folksy veneer that masked his toughness. But overall, I found it easier to appreciate Steven Spielberg's beautifully detailed movie than to become involved in it.

My number one pick, The Master, confounded many. I get that. But I also thought director Paul Thomas Anderson's latest work was haunting and strange, an encompassing view of post-war America that, at least in my opinion, should be taken as commentary rather than as a reflection of reality.

Among the documentaries I admired in 2012 were The Gatekeeper, The Imposter, Searching for Sugar Man and The Central Park Five. The Central Park Five and The Gatekeeper are still opening around the country. If you miss any of these docs ... well ... that's what Netflix is for.

Among other observations: It seems 2012 was the year in which Matthew McConaughey proved that he's a better supporting actor than a leading man with impressive performances in Magic Mike and Bernie. Beasts of the Southern Wild , which will find its way onto many 10-best lists, probably deserved its status of the year's best-reviewed indie. The movie also earned praise for non-actor Quvenzhané Wallis, who played a six-year-old girl learning how to survive in a Louisiana backwater. Moonrise Kingdom strengthened director Wes Anderson s position with his loyal fans.

It also should be mentioned that the theatrical experience took on a new dimension in Aurora, Co., where shooting no longer was confined to the screen. After Aurora, I noticed no decline in the number of weapons that found their way onto the big screen. Sept. 11 didn't put an end to explosive violence, and I'm betting that we're not likely to see any gun control on the big-screen in the wake of 2012's Aurora carnage or the recent school shooting in Connecticut.

I hope Hollywood proves me wrong.

My 10-best list follows:

1. The Master

Director Paul Thomas Anderson's movie focused on a strange rivalry between two men (Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman). Terrifically acted and almost mesmerizing, The Master boasts some of the year's most exciting filmmaking. Like other of Anderson's movies, The Master may require multiple viewings to appreciate and fully absorb its thoroughly disquieting tone. Phoenix plays a wayward, alcoholic war veteran who falls under the sway of a cultish leader (Hoffman).

2. Zero Dark Thirty

Director Kathryn Bigelow follows The Hurt Locker with another tough-minded topical thriller, this one about the quest to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. As she did in The Hurt Locker, Bigelow avoids taking a position about what we're watching -- in this case numerous scenes in which CIA operatives torture a captured al Qaeda terrorist in hopes of obtaining valuable information about bin Laden's whereabouts. Bigelow's straightforward approach to a complex story allows us to reach our own conclusions about what we're seeing. An outstanding Jessica Chastain portrays a dedicated CIA agent whose persistence leads the CIA to bin Laden. Sure we know how the story ends, but in this case, it's how the movie gets there that counts.

3. Amour

A French couple in their 80s (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) are the centerpiece of a touching story about what happens when a perfectly contented husband and wife face a sudden decline. Director Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon) softens his usual hard edge, but still delivers an unblinkingly honest look at love, grief and adjustment to the inevitable. Wonderfully seasoned actors, Trintignant and Riva are excellent, but it's Trintignant who eventually carries the full burden of the movie's considerable weight.

4. Silver Linings Playbook

Not perfect, but a lovable rom-com that challenges formula without surrendering its humanity. A mentally disturbed former teacher (Bradley Cooper) meets his match in the person of a widow (Jennifer Lawrence) with a personality that's ... well ... Philly strong. Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver provide able support as the parents of Cooper's Pat. A little loopy and a lot of fun, this one is augmented by genuine emotion and (of all things) a whacko dance contest.

5. Life of Pi

I was braced for the worst, but director Ang Lee manages a lovely big-screen adaptation of Yann Martel's wildly popular novel. The CGI effects are nothing short of miraculous, and the story contains enough ambiguity to keep even confirmed cynics from rolling their eyes. As young Pi, newcomer Suraj Sharma gives an extraordinary performance. Lee's fable about a boy shipwrecked with a full-grown Bengal tiger transports us to a richly imagined and ultimately rewarding world.


6. Argo

Aside from a small misstep at the very end, Ben Affleck's thriller generates both humor and tension in telling the story of CIA-concocted ruse to save a team of American diplomats who had taken refuge in the Canadian embassy during the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran. Alan Arkin and John Goodman are terrific as the Hollywood guys who help Affleck's Tony Mendez carry out a plan in which Mendez poses as the director of a fake film crew that enters Iran under the guise of scouting locations for a sci-fi movie.

7. Footnote

Israeli director Joseph Cedar puts his characters into a vice and squeezes until it hurts. A father and son -- both Talmudic scholars -- find themselves in a testy, competitive relationship in this acutely intelligent look at what happens when a son enters the family business (in this case, academia) and surpasses the father. Lior Ashkenazi plays Uriel, an honored scholar who takes an intuitive approach to his work. His father (Shlomo Bar-Aba) prefers meticulous fact-oriented research. Footnote turns into a work of biting wit and smart observation.

8. The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan wraps up his Dark Night trilogy in gripping fashion. The release of Dark Knight Rises was tainted by the Aurora shooting that took the lives of 12 people on the film's opening night. If that shooting put you off Dark Knight, you may want to get the DVD and give it a try. Credit Nolan, Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt with bringing the series to an intelligent conclusion. If Dark Knight Rises offered a forbidding vision of a world in which no one can feel totally safe ... well ... connect the dots for yourself.


9. Farewell My Queen

Filmmakers aspiring to make period pieces owe it themselves to take a look at Benoît Jacquot's pulsating drama about the last days of Marie Antoinette (Diane Kruger). The story centers on a servant (Léa Seydoux) who lands the job of reading to the queen. Jacquot breathes urgency into every frame of a movie that concludes with a twist that's both horrific and chastening. In the bargain, he takes us into a world in which denial has replaced hope.


10. Bernie.

The always versatile Richard Linklater directed the year's best comedy, which is saying quite a bit when you realize that he was telling the story of a real-life murder in which a former undertaker (Jack Black) bumped off a despotic widow (Shirley MacLaine) whose bullying ways made her the least popular person in the tiny town of Carthage, Texas. Black and MacLaine couldn't be better. Same goes for Matthew McConaughey, who plays the DA who prosecutes Bernie. A real-life tale bolstered by the participation of some real Texans.

This is 40 -- and it's pretty funny

Judd Apatow puts a toe into mature waters, but doesn't forget to bring along the laughs.

It takes a long time to get to her, but when the new Judd Apatow comedy, This is 40, arrives at a scene that's stolen by Melissa McCarthy, the humor suddenly becomes incendiary, foul-mouthed and very funny. Building on the crudeness she established in Bridesmaids, McCarthy scores big -- so big, in fact, that writer/director Apatow had the good sense to include one of her character's rants in an outtake.

But I digress, even before I begin.

In this mostly enjoyable outing, Apatow casts Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann (Apatow's real-life wife) as a husband and wife who also happen to be the self-absorbed parents of two daughters (Apatow's real daughters, Maude and Iris). Rudd's Pete runs a Los Angeles-based record company devoted to indulging his passion for '70s rock. Mann's Debbie owns an upscale boutique. And, yes, This is 40 represents a reunion for Rudd and Mann, both of whom appeared in Apatow's 2007 comedy, Knocked Up.

Of course, Pete and Debbie are way past knocked up. They're deeply ensconced in the grind of family life. Over the years, their relationship has lost a good deal of its romantic luster. Not surprisingly, Pete and Debbie have issues -- not the least of which revolves around the financial help Pete gives to his father (Albert Brooks), a likable freeloader who has started a new family.

A sharply funny Brooks -- who immediately raises the movie's comic ante -- plays an older man married to a younger woman and now grappling with three young children. Long on gall, Dad views any resistance by Pete as evidence of his son's selfishness. Never mind that Pete has financial troubles of his own.

Perhaps to balance things, Debbie's father (John Lithgow) enters the picture, as well. He's also married to a younger woman, and has been estranged from his daughter for years.

As the movie progresses, Lithgow's character sheds the bonds of caricature and becomes a real, flesh-and-blood father. Credit Apatow with mixing some expectedly crude humor (not all of it funny) with a few well-played scenes in which the writer/director makes a welcome journey into adult territory. Hey, at least he's putting a toe in deeper waters.

Unlike a comedy such as The Guilt Trip, This is 40 is no anemic two-hander. Apatow not only makes room for Brooks and Lithgow, but for Jason Siegel (as an overly confident physical trainer), Graham Parker (as a musician who can't sell any of his new recordings), Chris O'Dowd (as one of Pete's employees) and Megan Fox (as a woman who works in Debbie's boutique).

That's a decent amount of support for a comedy that aspires to be attuned to the debilitations of middle-age, many of them shockingly trivial. Pete is a little too fond of cupcakes. Debbie likes to sneak cigarettes. In this sun-splashed and mostly prosperous LA world, what could be more sinful than overeating or doing something that poses a direct threat to robust good health?

At 134 minutes, This is 40 probably overstays its welcome, and no one's likely to confuse it with Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, which Apatow reportedly watched before making his movie. OK, so Apatow isn't making great art, but, then again, Bergman didn't get many laughs, either.

Another loner, another show

Tom Cruise fights his way to justice as Jack Reacher.

Somewhere along the line, it became mandatory for a certain kind of male hero to display as little emotion as possible, to become an icon of don't-mess-with-me toughness. As played by Tom Cruise, former soldier Jack Reacher -- the main character in a series of popular books by British novelist Lee Child and the title character in Cruise's new movie -- is one such man: decisive, physically fit, brutal when necessary and unencumbered by possessions. Reacher has only one shirt to his name, travels by bus and always seems to keep moving.

Jack Reacher, a new movie adapted from Child's 2005 novel, One Shot, takes place in in Pittsburgh and kicks off with a harrowing shooting. Positioned in a parking garage, a sniper picks off five people in what appear to be random acts of senseless murder.

The sniper (Joseph Sikora) is quickly arrested. Evidence against him seems overwhelming and irrefutable. Of course, in movies, a scenario such as this only can mean one thing: The guy didn't do it. It doesn't take long for the shooter's attorney (Rosamund Pike) to become embroiled in an attempt to discover why Sikora's character has been made into a patsy.

She has help. Just before slipping into a coma, Sikora's character scrawled one sentence on a legal pad, "Get Jack Reacher."

Pike's Helen hires Reacher, who turns up in Pittsburgh for reasons of his own, to help figure things out, a task for which he's well-suited because he's a former military policeman known for his brilliant investigatory powers. You know the drill: Reacher's the kind of guy who can visit a crime scene and notice things that the police always seem to overlook.

The cast of characters drawn together by the murders includes the Pittsburgh District Attorney (Richard Jenkins), who happens to be Helen's father, a man with whom she has long-standing but ill-defined tensions. David Oyelowo plays the lead detective on the case. Neither the DA nor the cop can understand why Helen insists on wasting time on such an unambiguous situation.

Looking a little gaunt in the face, Cruise does his version of the tough, mysterious loner, and the rest of the actors do little to compete with him. How tough is Reacher? He can take out five guys in a fight outside a bar.

The villains in Jack Reacher offer the only hints of personality. They're led by Werner Herzog, a director who spends most of his time behind the camera. Herzog brings just the right amount of sadistic intensity to the proceedings. He's not playing a villain, but Robert Duvall -- in a late-picture appearance as the owner of a shooting range -- adds life to a story that's not without a few dull spots.

The mystery at the heart of writer/director Christopher McQuarrie's screenplay isn't especially compelling, and Jack Reacher builds toward a shoot-out at a construction site that doesn't exactly represent a high point in the history of imaginatively presented action.

McQuarrie, who wrote the screenplay for Cruise's Valkyrie, receives a major assist from cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who gives Pittsburgh an appropriately noirish sheen, and who has fun with a woozy car chase, the movie's best action set piece.

But there's something tired and lame at the core of Jack Reacher, which doesn't exactly break fresh cinematic ground.

I know there's nothing new under the sun, so there's no shame in telling a story about another tough guy who'll let nothing stop him from exercising his own brand of justice. But unlike the best of Cruise's Mission Impossible movies, Jack Reacher isn't enough fun to make you overlook its flaws. And you can't take it all that seriously, either.

Love that lands like a punch

Rust and Bone pulsates with life, romance and bare-knuckle boxing.

Director Jacques Audiard directs Rust and Bone, a romance between two people with bruised hearts, with refreshing boldness. Although some of the ingredients of Audiard's tale may sound familiar, they're given new life, thanks in part to the director's brash style and to a couple of vivid performances by actors playing two unlikely lovers.

Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) trains orca whales at Marineland, a seaside attraction in the town of Antibes on the Côte d'Azur. Alain (Mathias Schoenaerts), known as Ali, is a bare-knuckle fighter who meets Stephanie when he's working as a bouncer at The Annex, a rough Antibes nightclub.

Ali has a five-year-old son (Armand Verdure), but has no idea how to take care of the boy; he relies on his sister (Corinne Masiero) to tend to the child. It's clear that Ali is not trying to win any father-of-the-year awards. He plows from one situation to the next: head down, seldom looking too far into the future.

Into this already turbulent brew, Audiard adds a major shock: Stephanie loses both her legs when a whale jumps out of a pool during a performance. We begin to wonder whether Rust and Bone isn't going to settle into the rhythms of formula: Damaged beauty learns to live with her disability, perhaps with help of a back-street brawler.

It's just here that Audiard finds surprising success. He seems to understand that he's working with ingredients that could have inspired two separate movies, one about a woman's rehabilitation and another about a boxer finding his way back to his son. Instead of papering over differences, Audiard revels in the resultant collisions, allowing them to give the movie a sense of pulsating urgency.

Cotillard, whose legs were eliminated with skillful CGI work, creates a character who doesn't always react in expected ways. When she sees Ali fight for the first time, she smiles. She's a little thrilled by the violence -- and eventually, she takes over as Ali's manager, a role she assumes with confidence and pride.

The "romance" between Stephanie and Ali hardly has a hearts-and-flowers beginning. Ali, who never seems put off by his legless pal, sleeps with Stephanie after she tells him that she wonders if she still can have a sexual experience. He thinks she deserves a sex life, and offers his body in what appears to be part favor, part experiment.

Just because Ali sleeps with Stephanie doesn't mean that he's ready to curtail the rest of his sex life, which consists mostly of one-night stands that he conducts with near-aerobic zest.

Cotillard's acting prowess already is familiar to American audiences for her Oscar winning turn as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose or more recently for her work in The Black Knight Rises. Here, she makes a bitter beauty, a woman who's too strong to surrender control of her life.

Schoenaerts, who appeared in the hard-boiled Belgian movie Bullhead, is not nearly as well known to U.S. audiences, but he's perfectly cast. He tells Stephanie he fights for fun -- and he seems to mean it. His Ali is one of those characters who seems to operate totally in the present tense.

Best known for his landmark movie Prophet, Audiard allows the elements of his new movie to rub against one another in ways that can feel exciting. In a way, Rust and Bone is as much about bare-knuckle love as it is about bare-knuckle fighting.

Others have pointed out that, at heart, Rust and Bone is an old-fashioned movie. That's true, but it's to Audiard's credit that it seldom feels anything less than fresh.

When hysteria trumps innocence

A documentary chronicles the injustices suffered by The Central Park Five

In the wake of the Connecticut school shooting, it may be time to redefine what we mean when we call a crime "horrific." Back in the more "innocent" days of 1989, few crimes seemed as horrible as the brutal beating and gang rape of a female jogger in New York's Central Park.

Whipped into a frenzy, New York's tabloid press indulged its hyperventilated blood drool. And when the police announced that the crime had been committed by five black teen-agers, emotions went through the roof.

Suddenly, people couldn't stop talking about teen rampages called "wildings." Politicians expressed the expected outrage and horror, and pundits wondered if, this time, civilization really wasn't coming to its oft-predicted end.

Clearly, this was not a good climate in which to be a defendant in a high-profile case, particularly one in which several of the accused had confessed. Who -- reasonable people rightly asked -- would confess to such a heinous crime if they hadn't actually committed it?
The Central Park Five, a new documentary from director Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns* and her husband, David McMahon, answers that question, and takes us on a journey that resulted in five innocent youngsters serving more than a decade behind bars. The kids were part of a larger group of teen-agers who may have been up to no good in the park on that awful night, but whatever they did, they did not rape and brutalize a 28-year-old jogger who was making her evening run.

A belated jailhouse confession from the real perpetrator coupled with DNA evidence eventually cleared The Central Park Five. Their sentences were vacated in 2002.

For Ken Burns, The Central Park Five represents a bit of a departure in style. The movie, which consists of news footage, current interviews with the men who were convicted (sans one who declined to talk) and with relevant authorities is a sobering account of how and why justice was so badly miscarried. It's impossible to watch The Central Park Five without wondering whether we're looking at an aberration or something far more common.

If all this sounds interesting, you probably want to watch out for West of Memphis, another documentary in which false confessions play a key role. Totally different milieu. Different horrifying crime. But West of Memphis raises many of the same disturbing questions about the efficacy of the criminal justice system.

*Sarah Burns also wrote a book about the case, The Central Park Five: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City's Most Infamous Crimes, Knopf, 2011.