There's no leaving this 'Room' behind

The harrowing story of a mother and son under extreme duress.

Sometimes to appreciate what a movie is, it helps to consider what it isn't.

Room, the story of a young woman who's held prisoner in a backyard shed along with her five-year-old son, could have been the sensationalized story of a deranged psychopath who kidnapped a woman when she was 17, sexually assaulted her, got her pregnant and continued to terrorize her.

But Room smartly takes us into a world where the abnormal has begun to normalize. Born in the shed, the woman's son knows no other life than the one he's experienced in this ratty space. He's seen nothing of the outside world except for the vacant sky that's visible through a skylight in the roof. Otherwise, there are no windows, and the door has been rigged so that only the psychopathic jailer has the combination that can open it.

Captured when she was 17, the boy's mother sometimes negotiates with her captor, who shows up whenever he wants to sleep with her. He's the boy's father, but he barely acknowledges the child's existence, and he obviously has no concern for the boy's welfare.

In their horrible situation, mother and son develop an unbreakable but sometimes difficult bond. Mom -- known as Ma and played with great dexterity and determination by Brie Larson -- tries to create a stable environment within an obviously perverse situation. She does her best to cope. She teaches the boy as best she can.

For his part, Jack (an amazing Jacob Tremblay) is as normal as any child could be under such circumstances. He's never had a haircut. He's made to hide in a small wardrobe when the man -- called Old Nick by Ma -- makes his nocturnal visits. He's always alone with Ma.

Jack hears Old Nick and his mother talking, but can't really understand what's being said, a condition made frightening and confusing by director Lenny Abrahamsson, who makes Jack's point of view frighteningly real, a child in a world he can't comprehend.

You're not wrong to think all of this sounds like the basis for a horror movie. But the brilliance of Abrahamson's adaptation of a novel by Emma Donoghue, who also wrote the movie's screenplay, is that Ma has made adjustments, even though she can't ignore the terrible frustrations of living in a confined space (10 feet by 10 feet) that never was meant for human habitation.

You get the impression, Ma never would have been able to survive without Jack, who has given purpose to her life. She's intent on doing her best to protect him, and also to begin telling him about the world beyond the shed. Her motherhood can be both tender and fierce.

I won't describe the plot machinations any further because, if you haven't read Donoghue's novel, it's best not to know much more.

There are other characters in the movie. Eventually, we meet Ma's mother (Joan Allen), the husband she's acquired since Ma's kidnapping (Tom McCamus) and Ma's father (Bill Macy).

Wisely, Irish-born Abrahamson, who directed the oddball movie Frank, offers only glimpses of Old Nick (Sean Bridgers). He focuses on Ma and Jack in ways that begin to illuminate both the love and claustrophobia of a mother/son bond, as well as the nature of a reality Jack is only beginning to comprehend. What he knows of the world beyond the shed comes from Ma and from the small TV left by their captor.

Old Nick, at one point, buys the boy a toy, and he's obviously left a few books and other things for Jack, but the movie never suggests that Old Nick has any capacity for empathy nor does it exploit his monstrousness for genre thrills: It stays within its mother-and-son frame.

Ultimately, Room is a story about what happens when love is put to the severest of tests.

Abrahamson credits us with enough intelligence to know that Ma has had no preparation for motherhood. Commendably, he doesn't turn Jack into a poster boy for adorableness; the kid can get on your nerves.

Unexpected and troubling, Room looks at what it takes not only to survive under horrific circumstances, but to love, as well.

Room followed me out of the theater: I couldn't entirely shake the uneasiness of the movie's first half, and I don't believe the characters ever will either. Room unbalances our world and makes it feel strange.

Yes, there's love and restoration -- but there's also lingering disquiet, the feeling that things can go so wrong that they never can be made right again. That's what haunts you about this absorbing, plain-spoken and carefully calibrated movie.

Lame drama, but food looks great

Burnt features Bradley Cooper as a narcissistic chef.

Someone needs to explain to me why I should want to spend time with an obnoxiously narcissistic chef who's trying to make a comeback in London after having undermined a skyrocketing career in Paris.

But wait, maybe the answer has something to do with the fact that said chef is the main character in a movie called Burnt, and he's played by a fashionably bestubbled Bradley Cooper.

Burnt, the plot of which I've just described, can't rise above its many problems even with Cooper portraying a culinary hotshot who thinks he's better than everyone else -- and probably would be if it weren't for the drug and alcohol problems that derailed his rise.

Turns out the best thing about this John Wells directed movie, set in the upper echelons of London's foodie culture, is the food, photographed with glossy slickness by cinematographer Adrinao Goldman.

When the camera focuses on the meals that Cooper's Adam Jones prepares, the movie has the allure of a beautifully photographed gourmet magazine, and it affords us a glimpse into the kitchens of the kind of gastronomically praised establishments that serve up minuscule portions for astronomical prices.

Is there an unwritten rule that all highly praised food must never touch the edge of any plate?

Wells supplies the kitchen scenes with the heat and bustle you'd expect, and I'd have been content if food preparation -- complete with tension, yelling and the occasional dress-down -- had completely wiped out the plot.

The screenplay by Steven Knight (Locke, Redemption) doesn't have much to offer once it convinces us that Jones' character is a jerk.

Because he's a talented jerk, others -- Sienna Miller as a saucier with a big future and Daniel Bruhl as a gay Maitre-D -- tolerate Jones and try to help him, even when they're frustrated by him.

Additional support comes from Omar Sy (The Untouchables), as a sous chef whose business in Paris was ruined by the then drunken Jones, and Matthew Rhys , as a rival restaurateur who also dislikes Jones intensely.

Subplots involving Jones' indebtedness to drug dealers and the late-picture introduction of one of his former lovers (Alicia Vikander) add little to an undernourished script.

Functioning as a kind of garnish, Emma Thompson appears as a doctor hired by Jones' employer to monitor his blood-alcohol level, and, occasionally, to offer sage advice.

Celebrity chefs Marcus Wareing and Mario Batali are credited with having served as consultants on the movie, so the kitchen environment presumably has some authenticity.

Truth be told, I'd rather watch the two of them work than be force fed another helping of Burnt.

If you're hungry for a more appetizing food movie, and haven't seen Chef, well ... there's always Netflix.

'Truth' looks at big-time TV news

Kate Blanchett and Robert Redford star in a drama about the story that took down anchorman Dan Rather.

Truth, the story of how a team of crack 60 Minutes' reporters got misled while doing a 2004 story about George W. Bush's military record, tries to mount what might be the most high-minded defense of journalistic misjudgment ever.

The real-life story resulted in resignations and firings, including the abdication of Dan Rather from the anchor throne of the CBS Evening News. Rather also had to issue an on-air apology.

In Truth, absorption with the details of researching the story ultimately gives way to a lamentation over a once honorable news business that has been swallowed by self-serving corporate concerns.

Look, I'm as happy as the next former ink stained wretch to cry in my beer over the sorry state of contemporary journalism, but Truth may not have found the right story to make the case.

For those who've forgotten, the CBS story revolved around two central contentions.

One: During the Vietnam War years, influence was used to get the privileged Bush into the Texas Air National Guard, presumably as a way to avoid combat. Two: Bush didn't fulfill a substantial portion of his Guard commitment.

That's a good story to be sure, particularly in a year when Bush was running for his second term, but significant doubt was cast on the authenticity of two documents Mapes and company relied on to prove make their argument.

Truth, which stars Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes and Robert Redford as Dan Rather, suggests that a few missteps along the way didn't necessarily undermine the story's essential veracity. That may be true, but it's not a position I'd want to argue in the court of journalistic ethics.

Redford, who starred in All the President's Men, a 1976 story about the journalistic triumphs of Watergate, again takes up the cudgels for a probing press. But even in a story of involving mistakes, Rather is made to embody a heightened form of journalistic virtue.

A pair of suspenders can't turn Redford into Rather. Still, he gives a decent enough performance as a guy who's been around the journalistic block.

Rather may be the big name in the story, but Truth focuses most of its attention on Mary Mapes, the gifted producer who led the team of reporters who researched the story before the heavy interviewing artillery -- i.e., Rather -- arrived.

Blanchett's certainly good at showing how the satisfactions of a job well done are undermined once Mapes learns that the story she thought was meticulously researched began to fall apart.

Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace and Elisabeth Moss hold their own as members of the reporting team. Bruce Greenwood, David Lyons and Rachel Blake add flavor as CBS news division execs.

Obviously, the reporting team worked hard on the story, and Rather had ample reason to have confidence in Mapes, who won acclaim and, later, a Peabody, for her work on the infamous Abu Ghraib story. (The movie, in an obvious irony, points out that Mapes won her Peabody after she'd been fired by CBS.)

So what we ultimately get feels a bit addled, a movie that mourns the demise of hard-nosed journalism, but focuses on a case in which the reporters very well may have been suckered.

Vanderbilt concludes with outraged flourishes over they way a major corporation treated reporters with a fighting spirit and a willingness to keep asking tough questions.

Sure CBS was concerned about revenue, its image and possible government retaliation. Maybe the network put its interests above a pursuit of the truth, but that doesn't mean the story that set off this firestorm wasn't flawed.

It's hardly surprising that things ultimately got ugly at CBS. When a network has to fall on its sword, you can bet that blood will be shed, and -- in the case of the Bush story -- some of it belonged to journalists who sincerely thought they had uncovered something big.

Perhaps they did, but the country since has moved on from a story whose greatest impact was felt by those who reported it.

Never mind the war, let's sing

Despite a few chuckles, Rock the Kasbah pretty much seems pointless.

The new Bill Murray comedy, Rock the Kasbah, makes room for a worthwhile story of courage: A brave Pashtun woman risks her life to defy cultural norms so that she can sing on Afghanistan's version of American Idol.

In the case of the movie's Salima, the risk goes beyond being laughed off the stage. Salima's life is threatened by the men in her village, most of whom see her behavior as a cause for shame.

Salima's a fictional character, but the story has roots in reality. In 2008, singer Setara Hussainzada appeared on Afghan Star, the Afghan version of American Idol. Another woman, Lima Sahar, also competed on the show.

Hussainzada has been the subject of two HBO documentaries, 2010's Afghan Star and a 2011 follow-up, Silencing the Song: An Afghan Fallen Star.

Unfortunately, director Barry Levinson, working from a screenplay by Mitch Glazer, trivializes the story of his fictional singer by focusing on Richie Lanz (Murray) a bottom-feeding American who organizes tours for rock groups.

Remember? I told you this was a Bill Murray comedy.

When the movie opens Richie -- who lives in a dumpy apartment in Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles -- is so down on his luck, he accepts a job taking a no-name singer (Zooey Deschanel) on a USO tour to Afghanistan.

Once in Kabul, Deschanel's character quickly realizes that she's in danger, and arranges to leave the country. She takes Richie's money, and his passport, stranding him in a two-star hotel in Kabul.

To make matters worse, a tattooed mercenary (Bruce Willis) claims Richie owes him $1,000 for helping to get Deschanel's character out of the country. He gives Richie 24 hours to pay up.

A couple of shady gun runners (Scott Caan and Danny McBride) offer Richie a way out. They'll pay him to deliver ammunition to a group of local villagers who are trying to defend their homes.

After an encounter with an IED, Richie and Willis' character reach the village, and Richie discovers Salima.

In the middle of all this and for no apparent reason, Kate Hudson appears as a hooker with (yes) a heart of gold, a woman who's trying to use the war to gather a nest egg that will launch her in the real estate business once she returns to the states.

Doing his best to convey Richie's perpetual cynicism and all-around crumminess, Murray ambles though Kabul (the film was shot in Morocco), a war-torn city where there are no rules, and where foreigners gather at a club where they drink and indulge in other pleasures.

Despite its ravaged location, the movie can't escape the bright glare of Hollywood cliche. A seedy, no-account guy must find a way to redeem himself. Richie discovers his route to salvation by standing up for Salima.

It's roughly the same pattern Murray established in last year's St. Vincent: the apparently irredeemable guy who's not as bad as he initially seems.

Although there are some chuckles (credit Murray), this dragged-out, shambles of a comedy doesn't amount to much of anything.

Maybe that wouldn't have mattered had Rock the Kasbah been funny enough to make us overlook its shortcomings or serious enough to excuse a very sporadic supply of laughs.

An experiment creates controversy

Experimenter takes a creative look at the work of a psychologist.

At least two experimenters are involved in Experimenter, a movie whose principal events unfold during the 1960s.

Experimenter 1: Psychologist Stanley Milgram, the movie's real-life subject.

In the early 1960s, Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) conducted a series of controversial experiments at Yale. Dubbed the "obedience experiments," Milgram's work was inspired by his interest in Nazi behavior during World War II.

Milgram designed an experiment that was supposed to determine whether ordinary people could -- through suggestion and rules -- behave sadistically. Would otherwise decent people administer punishment to others -- in the form of electric shocks -- simply because they were told it was part of an apparently legitimate experiment?

Experimenter 2: Director Michael Almereyda

Known to American art-house audiences for directing Ethan Hawke in a modern-day adaptation of Hamlet (2000), Almereyda creates a purposefully abstract environment in which to study Milgram, his experiments and their ethical consequences.

Unafraid to take risks, Almereyda, uses black and white photos as backdrops, obviously artificial sets and other tricky conceits to tip us off to the fact that he's interested in both Milgram and in the human capacity to accept illusion, even when little attempt is made to conceal it.

At a couple of points -- perhaps to make clear that he's blurring the line between the real and imaginary -- Almereyda shows Milgram being followed by an elephant as we walks down a corridor, discussing his experiments.

We speculate about that obvious elephant in the room? Could it be an unacknowledged question: Is Milgram himself acting sadistically?

Milgram, a young Jewish researcher whose parents emigrated from Hungary in advance of the Nazi onslaught, governs himself with dispassion. He observes people under duress, and he's played by Sarsgaard with quiet commitment and a belief in his objective rigor.

Almereyda opens the movie by introducing us to Milgram's signature experiment, one in which no electric shocks actually were given, something the subjects administering the shocks didn't know.

The movie goes on to raise questions that it's never going definitively to answer; i.e., "Is Milgram violating academic ethics by putting subjects under too much stress? And does this artificially created situation really have any equivalency with what happened in Nazi death camps?

Almereyda gives Milgram ample opportunity -- in whispered comments from his diary or in remarks delivered directly to the camera -- to make his conclusions clear: Hideous behavior is situationally determined. Given the right circumstances, most people will submit to an authority that encourages them to behave badly or even sadistically.

Almereyda includes biographical details: We meet Milgram's wife Sasha (Winona Ryder) and follow the course of an academic career that saw Milgram move from Yale to Harvard, where he was denied tenure. He then was hired by City College of New York, where he was awarded a full professorship.

Intellectually challenging and tricky, Experimenter operates on low dramatic voltage. It's a subdued provocation that's designed to throw us off balance by raising fundamental questions about choice: Those made by Milgram, those made by his subjects, and, presumably, those made by us, as well.

A lawyer discovers Holocaust horrors

Labyrinth of Lies shows us a post-war Germany that's steeped in denial.

There may be few more explosive topics than how post-war Germany came to grips (or didn't) with the country's Nazi past, particularly as it involved the Holocaust.

The German movie Labyrinth of Lies qualifies as a mostly prosaic attempt to show how the country began to overcome a serious case of Holocaust denial.

In the decade following the war, many Germans adopted a rationalization based on what they deemed a "practical" necessity: Talking about past horrors would only demoralize a new generation that was trying to help its country rise from the rubble.

Besides, Germany's web of former Nazis was far more extensive than many suspected, and many of those in West Germany's leadership circles had no desire to discuss past party affiliations -- theirs or anyone else's.

Labyrinth of Lies centers on events leading to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which began in 1963 and which focused on SS personnel who had served in Auschwitz.

A year after Adolf Eichmann was executed in Israel, Germany began its own series of trials, proceedings that contributed to the growing record of Nazi atrocities.

Labyrinth of Lies tells the story of a dedicated, young prosecutor (Alexander Fehling), a fictional character who fights to overcome official resistance to exposing former Nazis and bringing them to justice.

A journalist (Andre Szymanski) becomes an ally in the prosecutor's fight. As it turns out, Szymanski's character knows an Auschwitz survivor, an artist who serves as the voice of the movie's victims, who mostly are ignored in favor of examining German complicity and guilt.

Radmann works for Fritz Bauer (Gert Voss), an attorney general who supports the young man's efforts. Most of Radmann's colleagues oppose any inquiries into the immediate German past.

To add to the drama, Radmann is an unseasoned prosecutor who has spent nearly all his time on inconsequential traffic cases. Naturally, there's resentment when Bauer puts the young man in charge of an investigation with the potential to jar the country's already fragile psyche.

Radmann also falls in love with a seamstress (Friederike Becht) who aspires to be a fashion designer. Becht's Marlene begins to benefit economically when Radmann is courted by some of Frankfurt's bigwigs, many of whom are former Nazis. They hope to lure the young man from his task.

During the course of his investigations, Radmann even discovers that his own father was a member of the party.

Aside from a detour with a major law firm, Radmann persists in his newfound cause, eventually developing an obsessive commitment to capturing and trying Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor whose sadistic "experiments" on human beings have been well-chronicled elsewhere.

Considering the volatility of his subject, director Giulio Ricciarelli's style feels regrettably wooden and familiar. Ricciarelli misses an opportunity urgently to dramatize an important subject: societal responsibility in the face of terrible injustice and legally sanctioned murder.

There's informational value in Labyrinth of Lies to be sure, but the movie's hampered by a bit of formula thinking at its core: Lone man fights forces of suppression.

Besides, if the drama were going to focus on a solitary figure, it probably should have been State Attorney General Bauer, a determined but worldly character who seems far more interesting than his callow young charge.

Hanks, Spielberg reunite for thriller

Well-made Bridge of Spies takes us back to the '50s for a story of espionage and intrigue.

The opening sequences of Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies deal with the arrest of a Russian spy, an incident that allows Spielberg masterfully to establish time (the 1950s) and place (Brooklyn, N.Y.), as well as to infuse a situation we don't yet understand with gloomy tension.

Suspenseful, atmospheric and brilliantly underplayed, the film's early going reminds us just how good a director Spielberg can be.

Based on a true story, Bridge of Spies allows Spielberg to reunite with Tom Hanks for the fourth time.* The movie also provides Spielberg with a canvas on which he can sketch a complicated story about a period when U.S./Soviet tensions were at their peak.

Hanks plays James B. Donovan, a New York insurance lawyer who's drawn into international intrigue when he's asked to defend Rudolph Abel (Mark Rylance), the Soviet spy who's caught by the FBI in the movie's opening.

The legal fraternity feels homage must be paid to the notion of a fair trail, but just about everyone believes that Abel should be convicted without much fuss.

In full decency mode, the instantly likable Hanks paints a portrait of a man trying his best under difficult circumstances. Abel is convicted, but Donavan saves him from the death penalty with a pragmatic argument: Someday the U.S. may need a spy to trade for an American prisoner who has been accused by the Soviets of espionage.

Defending Abel proves costly for Donovan who becomes a bit of a pariah. A brick thrown is thrown through the window of his family's home, and many think he's betraying his country.

But Donovan isn't willing to temporize for the sake of appearances. He's a decent man.

Not only is Donovan a good guy, but -- as it turns out -- he's also prophetic.

Working from a screenplay by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen, Spielberg also introduces the story of Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), the U-2 spy pilot whose plane was shot down over Russia in 1960. Donovan is asked to travel to Berlin to broker the trade he foresaw.

These chilly Berlin scenes heighten the spy drama as Donovan travels back and forth between West and East Berlin. To further complicate matters, an American student (Will Rogers) also is captured by the East Germans.

Donovan wants both Rogers' character and Powers to be swapped for Abel. The Russians are more interested in a one-for-one deal. So is the CIA, which regards the student as a negligible part of any negotiation.

No James Bond, Donovan struggles through his time in Berlin with a terrible cold that's made worse when several East German thugs mug him and steal his overcoat.

Hanks again gives the movie a reliable center, and a subtly entertaining Rylance makes his mark as a wry but resigned fellow who answers every question about why he's not more panicky with another question: "Would it help?"

Spielberg overworks the line, and can't resist a few Spielbergian touches that go against the movie's dark grain. I won't describe them here, but if you know Spielberg, you'll have no trouble picking them out.

In sum, Bridge of Spies stands as a mature and involving entertainment that recalls a time when our only concern seemed to be with the Soviet Union, and a sense of Cold War menace cast a chill over everything it touched.

*Hanks/Spielberg collaborations include The Terminal (2004); Catch Me If You Can (2002); and Saving Private Ryan (1998).

Backstage with Steve Jobs

Jobs launches three new products and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin tries to explore human themes in a high-tech world. .

Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network and whose new movie Steve Jobs now goes into wide release, capitalizes on our bottomless interest in the founder of Apple. At the same, time -- and perhaps in contradictory fashion -- Sorkin asks us to accept that he's not trying to give us a factual portrayal of Jobs' life.

Of course, artists are entitled to take license with the facts as they search for larger truths, but -- let's be honest -- had Sorkin focused his movie on a tremendously successful but often callous executive named Barney McBride -- his project might never have been greenlit.

I say all this by way of telling you that I can't totally buy into Sorkin's approach (expressed in a Charlie Rose interview) that he's not replicating real people, but creating characters -- within limits, of course. Sorkin's screenplay draws on Walter Isaacson's much-lauded 2011 biography, Steve Jobs.

Whether Steve Jobs reflects the reality of the real person in full or only in part can be assessed business historians, but Sorkin's screenplay -- brought to the movies by director Danny Boyle -- charts a lively, if not entirely satisfying, course during three clearly demarcated acts.

Those three acts are constructed around backstage events preceding the launch of three products: the Macintosh computer in 1984; the NeXT cube in 1988 and the iMac in 1998.

Sorkin script spends a lot of time on the fraught relationship between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and his daughter Lisa.

It's not that Jobs' relationship with Lisa (he initially denied paternity) is irrelevant to understanding the man (or the character in the movie), it's more that Sorkin may be off base in thinking that this father/daughter tug-of-war is the most telling thing about Jobs. It's a telling thing.

We also get a little too much of Jobs' irritation at being asked for money by Lisa's mother (Katherine Waterston).

Sorkin's great strength is dialogue, so Steve Jobs includes lots of conversations that take place with the rapid fire insistence of a mouse click as we meet the characters who most interest Sorkin:

These include John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the Pepsi executive who took over Apple and who fired Jobs in a dispute over the company's direction. (Twelve years after leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs made a triumphant return to the foundering company. He's credited with turning Apple into one of the most profitable businesses in the world.)

There's also Joanna Hoffman, Apple's marketing genius, who's portrayed by Kate Winslet. Hoffman seems to be the one character who's able to speak truth to Jobs' power.

If the corporate aspects of the movie have a moral center, it belongs to Steve Wozniak, played with patience and determination by Seth Rogen, a nice piece of casting. Woz, as he's called, constantly asks Jobs to do the right thing by acknowledging the team that created the Apple II, the computer that kept the company profitable for a long time.

Fassbender approaches Jobs as a control freak who must juggle 50 different balls at one time, all in the high-stakes atmosphere of a product launch. To this end, Fassbender ably conveys Jobs' focus, intensity and intelligence.

The movie's product-launch backdrop may be the most telling thing about it. Sorkin and Boyle (Slum Dog Millionaire) make it clear that Jobs understood theatrics.

He launched new products in large auditoriums. In front of eager audiences, he shared the spotlight with new Apple products. He gave his user-friendly devices a near celebrity aura, creating a sense of specialness that somehow was supposed to transfer to the consumers of Apple products. (And, yes, I'm one of them.)

I suppose that's part of the point: Jobs could humanize high-tech products, but not himself.

By the movie's final act, Jobs has donned the jeans and black turtle necks that became something of a trademark. He has refashioned himself as a kind of god who brings products down from the digital mountaintop and reveals them to the masses.

Steve Jobs is worth seeing because Sorkin is a clever writer, because the performances are sharp enough to match the brisk pace that Boyle sets, and because much of the byplay is entertaining.

I love the fact that Sorkin takes a shot at Jobs' vaunted design sense when, in the final going, Lisa -- now a Harvard student played by Peria Haney-Jardine -- compares the first iMac to a child's Easy-Bake oven.

Apple users may get more excitement out of a real Apple product launch than they do from a movie that follows on the heels of a documentary about Jobs (The Man in the Machine) and a 2013 bio-pic that cast Ashton Kutcher as Jobs.

Ultimately (and perhaps unfortunately) Sorkin underscores the movie's message: In a climactic scene, he has Woz tell Jobs that it's possible to be both a genius and a compassionate person at the same time. "It's not binary,''says Woz.

Those words needn't have been spoken. They're like an exclamation point on a conclusion that Sorkin should have let us draw for ourselves, and they made me wonder whether the movie shouldn't have been given a subtitle: Steve Jobs, The Nagging of a Genius.

A house in need of repairs

Director Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak borders on the ludicrous.

I was hoping that Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak would rival the alluring weirdness of the director's 2006 Pan's Labyrinth, but this lavish Gothic romance/ghost story wastes a ton of production design and a capable cast on a story that (at its most dramatic points) had members of a preview audience chuckling.

As best as I can tell, chuckles aren't what del Toro had in mind for a movie that's striving to be eerie and chilling.

To make matters worse, Crimson Peak brims with the kinds of behavior found only in second-rate horror movies.

Consider: A young bride (Mia Wasikowska) arrives with her dashing husband (Tom Hiddleston) at his family estate in England. A staggeringly gloomy home looks as if it was lifted from an over-priced theme park.

Leaves and later snow drift through a large hole in the roof, but Wasikowska's Edith doesn't bother to ask whether Hiddleston's Sir Thomas Sharp has any repair plans in mind.

Did I mention that Edith, who aspires to be a novelist, is warned never to go below the house's first floor? Well, of course, she is.

To add color and perhaps symbolism, the Sharp home is built atop blood-red clay that seeps through some of the walls of Sharp's Allerdale estate.

Edith's arrival at the Sharp manse isn't exactly joyous. Jessica Chastain plays Lucille, Sharpe's sourpuss sister, a woman with an unnaturally possessive attitude toward her sibling. Lucille doesn't take kindly to her brother's new wife.

All of this takes place after Edith loses her father, who's ruthlessly murdered in the bathroom of his Buffalo, N.Y, club. The movie opens in the U.S. before moving to Sharp's isolated British wreck of a mansion.

Del Toro's depiction of Buffalo society in 1901 seems to have some potential. At minimum, it demonstrates what a movie looks like when some considerable part of the costumer's budget appears to have been spent on women's hats.

Edith's father (Jim Beaver) immediately mistrusts the aristocratic Sharp, who's trying to persuade him to invest in a machine that mines clay. A self-made industrialist, Beaver's Carter Cushing prides himself on being a good judge of character.

These early scenes -- sort of an extended prologue -- also introduce us to a doctor (Charlie Hunnam), an earnest fellow who cares about Edith, and who quite predictably will figure into the movie's over-the-top finale.

Del Toro lays on the funhouse effects (skeletal-looking creatures emerge from floors or soak in bathtubs), but the story evolves in ways that seldom surprise.

Perhaps del Toro was betting that audiences would delight in seeing these musty horror tropes exhumed and presented with unashamed blatancy, but -- in the clinches -- the resultant movie proves as silly as it is somber.

If Crimson Peak had been intended as a comedy, it might have worked, but del Toro seems to take the movie's swooning melodrama seriously.

Beyond all that, Crimson Peak's ghosts seem less like expressions of supernatural unrest than effects that seep into a movie like wandering strangers with no place else to go.