'Hunger Games' crosses the finish line

Jennifer Lawrence helps bring the series to a satisfactory -- and slightly melancholy -- conclusion.

Hunger Games: Mockingjay -- Part 2 probably never should have been made. Mockingjay -- Part 1 felt as though it were marking time until the grand finale. Put another way, Parts 1 and Part 2 should have been one movie.

Having offered that necessary caveat, I'm happy to report that the finale has arrived, and if it's not a masterpiece, it's good enough to keep fans happy.

Jennifer Lawrence carries Part II through its many dark moments as rebel forces stage an attack on the Capitol where the fiendish President Snow (Donald Sutherland) struggles to save his diminishing reign.

Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen continues as one of the more interesting screen heroines, a fierce fighter who's given just enough emotional shading by Lawrence to be more than a symbol. And, yes, Lawrence deserves tons of credit for holding the line on a character that easily could have gone off the rails over the course of four movies.

This helping of Hunger Games qualifies as essential viewing for those who've seen the first three movies. It's probably of no interest to those who haven't.

Say this, though: Overall, the series has been a well-handled affair that shamed no one as it toyed with some intriguing ideas about violence, media, propaganda and betrayal.

True, many of these "ideas'' were served at the kids' table, but no matter: At least, there was some meat on the Hunger Games' bones.

I won't attempt to summarize the final movie's plot because it consists mostly of embellishments added to a central concern: Overthrowing Snow, thereby putting an end to his horrible tyranny over the 13 Districts of Panem.

The rebels are led by President Coin (Julianne Moore), a woman who may not be the savior she pretends to be. She's assisted by Plutarch (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a strategist and propagandist.

That brings me to what may be the essential things to know about Mockingjay -- Part II.

-- The proceedings are laced with a surprising amount of melancholy. Instead of pushing toward a celebratory and triumphant conclusion, Mockingjay exudes a sadness that begins the first time we see the late Hoffman on the screen. His appearance has an unintended mournful quality that echoes the way the movie tries to remember those rebels who have died fighting for freedom.

-- A couple of grandly conceived action sequences -- one involving a flood of oil and another set in a tunnel -- help fend off boredom, although director Francis Lawrence doesn't always make it clear who's fighting whom.

-- The final movie (and the series) actually acknowledges both loss and consequences, a good thing in a story that's aimed mostly at teen-agers.

Let's be thankful that some of the more colorful characters haven't entirely been jettisoned from this last chapter: Elizabeth Banks' Effie Trinket makes what amounts to a cameo appearance. Woody Harrelson's Haymitch Abernathy drops by from time-to-time, as well.

So let's bid goodbye to Katniss, as well as the generally vapid men in her life: Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth).

Mostly, tough, it's Lawrence who deserves congratulations for fitting into a series she probably has outgrown and for never shortchanging either the audience or Katniss.

That's saying something. Quite a lot, really.

Three characters burdened by the past

A strong cast should have elevated Secret in Their Eyes, but the movie turns out to be a mostly drab police procedural.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts.

Tell me that those names don't spark interest. Considering the acting power on display in the new thriller, Secret in Their Eyes, you'd expect the movie to strike a mother-load of dramatic pay dirt. Instead, this drably realized and often murky police procedural yields only medium-grade helpings of suspense.

Secret revolves around a Los Angeles-based, anti-terrorism unit in which we find three of the movie's principal characters.

Julia Roberts plays Jess, a team member who suffers a terrible blow when her daughter is raped and murdered, her body unceremoniously tossed into a dumpster.

Joining Jess in what appears to be a delayed quest for justice are Ray, a former FBI agent played by Ejiofor, and Claire, an attorney portrayed by Kidman.

Director Billy Ray wrote the screenplay, which is a loose remake of the 2009 Oscar winning Argentine feature of the same name. That movie played out in the aftermath of Argentina's "Dirty War," a period when dissidents were "disappeared" by a military junta and its henchmen.

This one deals with the kind of post 9/11 jitters in which concerns about terrorism sometimes trump the pursuit of individual justice.

Alternating between the present and 2002, the movie's skittering structure adds unnecessary murkiness to an already complicated plot.

Equally problematic, the characters don't seem richly enough observed for the movie's trio of headliners.

Kidman plays a tightly wound Harvard Law School graduate who eventually becomes Los Angeles DA.

Sans make-up, sporting bangs and a ghastly parlor, a deglamorized Roberts plays Jess, a grief stricken woman who still manages to soldier on with her police duties.

Thirteen years after the murder of Jess' daughter, Ejiofor's Ray -- now out of the FBI -- returns to LA believing that he has located the murderer, a felon who recently has been released from prison. Ray wants to reopen the case.

Most of the movie focuses on Ejiofor's angry, regretful character, a man who nurses a long-standing (and mostly undeveloped) crush on Kidman's Claire. Again and again, other characters tell him, she's out of his league. She's Harvard; he's community college.

We get a glimpse of what Kidman might have delivered in a scene in which she conducts an interrogation. As a grieving mother, Roberts too often is pushed to the film's periphery.

The supporting cast has little room to maneuver, but the always terrific Alfred Molina registers strongly as a DA with an agenda.

If you like surprise twists, you may be satisfied by this downbeat thriller, but taken as a whole, Secret qualifies as a disappointing use of prime acting talent.

A beautifully acted 'Brooklyn'

Saoirse Ronan plays a young woman who learns to claim her destiny.

Eilis Lacey spends a good deal of Brooklyn, the movie derived from a 2009 novel by Colm Toibin, in a disoriented state. A girl from Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Eilis travels to the U.S. in 1951 after her older sister Rose arranges for her to leave Ireland.

Eilis makes the trip, but it is not yet her journey. And that's the basis of a coming-of-age movie that embraces an old-fashioned style that files the roughest edges off its story, but allows its central performance to carry us along with it.

Brooklyn focuses on young Eilis, beautifully played by Saoirse Ronan, familiar to moviegoers from movies such Atonement, The Lovely Bones and Hanna.

Ronan inhabits her character so thoroughly, it seems as if we're watching a flower break ground, stretch to meet the sun's warmth and eventually bloom. Without affectation or undue showiness, Ronan manages to carry a movie that spans the distance between two very different worlds.

When Eilis arrives in the U.S., she takes up residence in a boarding house run by Mrs. Keough (Julie Walters), a good-hearted woman who also happens to have a dictatorial streak when it comes to the women who live in her home.

Gradually, Eilis begins to encounter the new life into which she has been thrust. She's helped by a local priest who cares about her welfare and who is portrayed by Jim Broadbent without a trace of cynicism.

Eventually, Eilis lands a job as a clerk at a department store and begins studying accounting. She also meets Tony, (Emory Cohen) a young Italian man who works as a plumber, but who -- along with his bothers -- hopes to start a construction business that will relocate his family to Long Island.

As the story develops, Ronan begins to taste the freedom and sense of possibility that her sister (Fiona Glascott) so ardently wishes for her. She even learns to hold her own at the table with other women who board with Mrs. Keough.

Eventually, Eilis learns that Rose has passed away. Before Eilis returns to Ireland to comfort her grieving mother, Tony insists that they marry. He wants to make sure that she'll come back to him.

Eilis agrees, but we don't know exactly how committed she is to this marriage; she's still living her sister's dream, not her own.

Back in Ireland, Eilis begins to see a side of life she never experienced while growing up.

Instead of the world narrowing, it suddenly seems to be opening. Not knowing that Eilis is married, one of the town's bachelors (Domhnall Gleeson) begins to pursue her. She lands a part-time job, and comforts a mother who has known her share of grief.

Obviously, Eilis eventually must make up her mind about whether to remain in Ireland or return to the U.S. and resume the life that seemed to offer her so much.

Director John Crowley must have sensed that Ronan could keep the movie on track, so he supports her with nostalgic period design and allows the story to unfold without undue fuss. Nick Hornby's script is both economical and respectful of its characters.

Well-cast and nicely appointed, Brooklyn might be one of the least cynical movies of the year, an engagingly wide-eyed look at a world in which a young woman learns that she has something to say about the way her life will unfold.

The movie's modesty and Ronan's lovely performance make it a pleasure to watch.

She collected art -- and men

Complicated, sexually adventurous and deeply devoted to the art she collected, Peggy Guggenheim managed to assemble one of the world's most important collections of 20th century paintings and sculpture. A devotee of Jackson Pollack, Picasso, Max Ernst (whom she later married) and Marcel Duchamp, Guggenheim's collection today is valued in the billions. She spent about $40,000 acquiring much of it during World War II. Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland builds her documentary -- Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict -- around recently discovered audio tapes in which Guggenheim was interviewed by biographer Jacqueline Bograd Weld. Vreeland tells us about Guggenheim's family (her father died on the Titanic), and takes us with Guggenheim to Paris in 1921. There, Guggenheim managed to become part of the art world. She was one of those people who knew everyone worth knowing. She also spent time in London, where she ran the Guggenheim Jeune Gallery. When the war broke out, Guggenheim returned to New York and eventually opened a gallery called Art of This Century, a fabled spot for viewing work by the shining stars of modernism. In 1947, Guggenheim moved to Venice, where her collection is housed in the palazzo she restored. She died in 1979 at the age of 81. Interviews include curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and art dealer Larry Gagosian. I wouldn't call Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict a great documentary, but the life and times of this brash, frank and influential woman stave off any trace of boredom.

Wishing 'Trumbo' had been better

Bryan Cranston commands the screen in a bio-pic that's regrettably wooden.

During the Black List period of the late 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood shamed itself, joining a national witch-hunt designed to root out Communists from cultural institutions that presumably were being subverted.

One of the people caught in this maelstrom of chest-thumping, patriotic excess was Dalton Trumbo, the Colorado-bred screenwriter who had written movies such as A Man to Remember (1938), Kitty Foyle (1940) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944). Trumbo also wrote Johnny Got His Gun, an acclaimed 1939 antiwar novel which won a National Book Award and which shook me to the core when I read it in high school.

In 1947, Trumbo was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He was found in contempt of Congress for telling the Committee his political beliefs were none of its business. As a result of his defiance, Trumbo served nearly a year in prison, and was blacklisted by Hollywood studios for the next 13 years.

Desperate to support his family, Trumbo -- part of a group dubbed The Hollywood Ten -- turned out scripts for the King Brothers, schlockmeisters who didn't give a damn about politics.

Trumbo also persuaded other writers to pose as the authors of scripts he wrote. Trumbo's screenplay for Roman Holiday won an Academy Award. Screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter fronted for Trumbo, and received the Oscar.

It wasn't until Spartacus (1960) that Trumbo's name again appeared on a movie screen, thanks mostly to the courageous insistence of Kirk Douglas, the movie's star.

OK, that's the background.

In the bio-pic Trumbo, Bryan Cranston, an actor of considerable command, plays the title role. Cranston captures the writer's wit, commitment and contradictions. Trumbo was a leftist who liked the trappings of wealth, and made no bones about hungering for recognition.

In a sometimes wooden and prosaic movie, Cranston does the kind of stand-out work that may earn him a best-actor nomination, even if -- at times -- it feels as if he's doing a one-man show on Broadway. In some ways, Trumbo is a one-man show rather than a richly developed movie, but it has its merits.

As the viperous Hedda Hopper, Helen Mirren gives the movie's second best performance. Hopper was a flag-waving right winger, as well as a power hungry gossip peddler who could make or break careers and didn't let those she wrote about forget it.

Director Jay Roach faced a difficult problem in making Trumbo. He's dealing with Hollywood personalities, some of whom are so well known they resist being played by other actors.

Michael Stuhlbarg comes close to capturing Edward G. Robinson, an actor who supported those who were being demonized by HUAC, but who ultimately named names. David James Elliott has the thankless job of portraying John Wayne; he finds the intonations in Wayne's voice, but we've all seen John Wayne and ... well ... you know how the rest of the quote goes.

Dean O'Gorman portrays Kirk Douglas, one of the story's heroes.

Louis C.K. creates a portrait of deep-seated depression as Black Listed writer Arlen Hird, a composite character who never quite understands Trumbo's preoccupations with success. Put another way, Trumbo wasn't exactly a purist when it came to politics.

As the crassly entrepreneurial but fiercely loyal Frank King, John Goodman steals every scene he's in. Diane Lane plays Trumbo's wife, Cleo. Elle Fanning has a nice scene as Niki, Trumbo's oldest daughter, a firebrand in her own right.

Roach's previous efforts include Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, not exactly the best preparation for this kind of material.

Trumbo doesn't fully engage the ideological battle the Hollywood Ten fought or, perhaps, more accurately, the war that was fought against them.

But even this CliffsNotes version has some emotional clout, a testament to the inherent power of the story, to Cranston's charisma and to the fact that Trumbo's suffering was, by any measure, entirely unnecessary.

Another marriage on the rocks

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie Pitt in a slog of a movie.

By the time, By the Sea -- a numbingly arty movie written and directed by Angelina Jolie Pitt -- begins its second hour, you may find yourself wishing that Jolie Pitt, who appears in the movie with real-life husband Brad Pitt, would descend from what appears to be an Olympus where the gods do nothing but suffer. Remote, aloof and in possession of some astonishing hats, Jolie Pitt's Vanessa is emotionally walled off from husband Roland (Pitt), a writer who -- as is usually the case in this sort of movie -- is blocked. Roland and Vanessa arrive at a French seaside resort to get away from it all, but wind up doing what characters inevitably do in overly arty movies: They bathe in their pain. Vanessa specializes in meaningful stares. Roland drinks heavily. Eventually, Vanessa and Roland wind up observing the sexual play of the honeymooners (Melanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) next door. Thanks to a hole in their hotel room wall, Roland and Vanessa become peeping Toms. The story hinges on a dark secret that Vanessa harbors and which you probably will guess within minutes. By the Sea has the exasperating feel of a movie that's trying so damn hard to be profound, it forgets to have something say.

Trying to escape the bonds of tradition.

Jolie Pitt may have overreached in By the Sea, but she deserves credit for executive producing Zeresenay Mehari's Difret, the story of Hirut (Tizita Hagere), a 14-year-old Ethiopian girl who's kidnapped and raped so that she can be forced into a marriage with her abductor. Hirut, who shoots her captor during an escape attempt, faces a murder charge in a male-dominated culture. Based on a true story, Defrit focuses on the efforts of a persistent attorney (Meron Getnet) to save young Hirut from the death penalty. The filmmaking is rudimentary, but Hirut's story stands as a powerful cry against deeply rooted traditions in which women too long have been subjugated.

The Catholic Church meets the press

A compelling look at how the Boston Globe uncovered a scandal..

As the nation lumbers toward another major election, you can be sure that some of the candidates will be taking aim at the media. Many already have.

Tiresome as they may be, these inevitable anti-media rants make Spotlight -- a terrific movie about how the Boston Globe's investigative team uncovered sexual abuses by priests in Boston's archdiocese -- a must-see reminder that journalists can (and often do) make important contributions to the betterment of their communities.

Director Tom McCarthy builds his story around the Globe's Spotlight team, a quartet of reporters who were given time to develop and report stories that required deep digging.

Michael Keaton, who played a newspaper editor in Ron Howard's sometimes overlooked The Paper, returns to the ranks of ink-stained wretches as Walter "Robby" Robinson, the head of the Spotlight team.

The story of pedophile priests didn't really take hold until the Globe got a new editor in 2001. Marty Baron -- played in a masterfully collected performance by Liev Schreiber -- was a Jewish newcomer to Boston. Baron, who's now editor of the Washington Post, thought that the Globe had a responsibility to look at the failings of one of the city's most revered institutions.

McCarthy (Win Win, The Visitor, and The Station Agent) keeps a complicated story on track in ways that sustain interest even though we already know the outcome of this unseemly tale.

In a way that works for the story, Spotlight doesn't really have a main character. It's about individual commitment within a context of team work, a much-needed tribute to role players. There are no star turns in Spotlight; the movie that celebrates journeyman work on every level.

The Spotlight team is ably represented by Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian D'Arcy.

Ruffalo portrays Michael Rezendes, an avid, monkish reporter who eventually won the confidence of Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), a lawyer who represented victims of church abuse. Initially mistrustful of the Globe, Garabedian had spent years trying to interest the paper in what he saw as wide-scale criminality within the church.

McAdams plays Sacha Pfeiffer; she's committed to the story but understands that it will shatter the church-centered world in which her grandmother -- like many Catholic Bostonians -- lives. Catholics made up 53 percent of the Globe's readership.

D'Arcy portrays James Matt Carroll. While working on the story, Carroll discovers that his own home isn't located far from a house where pedophile priests were hidden so that they could be "rehabilitated."

Billy Crudup portrays a lawyer who knows how to keep the lid on things by making settlements with victims; and Jamey Sheridan has a nice turn as a church attorney who wants to avoid scandal for what he deems a greater good: maintaining the order of things.

Len Cariou portrays Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, the church official who eventually was accused of covering up sexual abuses of priests in his archdiocese.

I don't normally like reviews that turn into lists of actors, but it's impossible not to acknowledge all of those who contributed to a fine ensemble cast, including John Slattery, who plays Ben Bradlee Jr., the editor who functions as Robinson's boss.

Spotlight's reach extends beyond the way journalists handle a complicated story, although it certainly shows the required grunt work. It's also about the way a community constructs a protective veneer around its valued institutions and how easy it is for lifelong members of that community to accept such facades as necessary and immutable.

McCarthy doesn't neglect the toll that the investigation takes on the journalists who are conducting it. Keaton, better and much less showy than he was in Birdman, wrestles with the conflicts generated by his varying identities and loyalties: journalist, Catholic and Bostonian.

We meet victims of priests who are conflicted about telling their story, sometimes because they've tried before and were met with indifference. We meet Boston bigwigs; and see what happens when a Cardinal tries to charm a newspaper editor who's not impressed by charm.

Spotlight bravely keeps its eye on truths that don't always make the Globe look good: The paper, we learn, had enough information to have begun reporting the story 20 years before it actually turned to the task.

Credit Spotlight for not imbuing its hardworking journalists with phony nobility, for not sensationalizing a tawdry story and for reminding us that journalists do more than, as some would have you believe, employ cheap tricks to play "gotcha" with politicians.

Bond is back, but where's the fun?

Daniel Craig is serious as a clenched fist, but at 148 minutes, Spectre is a Bond too long -- and a bit boring, as well.

Remember when Bond movies were fun?

With a wink at the world and a playful attitude toward 007's legendary sexual prowess, Bond movie etched themselves into pop-cultural immortality -- which in this instance means 53 years of entertainment.

Now comes Spectre, the 24th film in the series that will not die. No expense has been spared to fill Spectre with action, exotic locations and IMAX-worthy scale.

But this time, a dizzying pre-credit sequence -- set during the Day of the Dead in Mexico City -- proves the most exciting part of the movie.

Amassing a crowd of extras reported to number about 1,500, director Sam Mendes guides Daniel Craig's Bond through an escapade that finds 007 scampering over roofs and elbowing his way through crowds of revelers in skeleton costumes. He finally hops onto a helicopter for a white-knuckle battle with an ugly villain.

The movie's opening gives you the feeling that this edition of Bond is going to blow the roof off the theater, thanks in part to spectacularly good design: Mexican rhythms, the traditional Bond theme and an amazingly fluid camera blend in ways that let you know that some very talented people are at the controls.

It's an opening that's tough to match -- and director Mendes, who directed the far better Skyfall -- never tops it.

Mendes seems to have approached Spectre with the same dutiful seriousness that infects Craig in his fourth outing as Britain's most legendary spy.

Many critics applauded the dark hues that Craig brought to the Bond series when he took over the job in 2006's Casino Royale. Craig made Bond credible in a post 9/11 world -- or so the argument went. Glowering menace seemed preferable to nonchalant ease.

Is it possible that this approach has worn out its welcome?

Let's look at some of the elements:

-- Lea Seydoux (Blue is the Warmest Color) comes across as a more life-sized Bond girl than some, but Bond movies tend to be at their best when nothing about them seems life-sized or attainable.

-- Monica Bellucci plays an intriguingly sexy widow, but she's not around long enough to spice things up.

-- And the Bond villain? Christoph Waltz picks up the bad-guy cudgel as the head of Spectre, the organization that's threatening the world.

Poor Waltz. He'll never top the terrifyingly polite SS guy he played in Inglorious Bastards. Here, he again opts for understatement, which may have been his only choice, but he's neither frightening nor arch enough to fill the bill.

-- Ralph Fiennes brings near-actuarial sternness to the role of M.

-- Ben Whishsaw holds his own as the inventive Q, the character in charge of the movie's gadgetry.

-- Naomi Harris, who plays Moneypenny, might be the closest the movie gets to finding a good, old-fashioned Bond beauty. She takes care of Bond business with no-nonsense efficiency and welcome traces of worldly wit.

Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema leans toward a sepia-tinged palette that reinforces the movie's more-or-less serious tone, a tone which -- by the way -- a cluttered plot can't really support.

As for Craig: He's brusque, sometimes raw in his expression of emotion. He gives Bond the force of a blunt blow to the head.

There also are suggestions that Bond is an assassin who never really has thought much about what he does, an interesting attempt to give the character some existential lift, but is this really what we want from Bond?

Look, many of the important elements can be found in Spectre: action, killer clothes, romantic dinners on speeding trains, globe-hopping and one ogre-like villain (Dave Bautista's Hinx) who rises to the occasion, something accomplished only intermittently by this overly long helping of Bond.

When British women fought for the vote

A slice of history that shouldn't be forgotten.

Currently, two women (one in each major party) are trying to become president of the United States.

Britain already has had a woman prime minister, and many other countries -- Germany, of course -- have elevated women to their top power positions.

This is not to say that every vestige of gender inequality has been wrung from a still-patriarchal world, but to point out that it wasn't so long ago that the political arena belonged exclusively to men.

Suffragette, a straightforward period piece about the struggle by British women to gain the vote, returns us to a time when women were denied one of the most basic of democratic rights.

Suffragette focuses on one woman's political awakening. She's 24-year-old Maud Watts, played with nuanced intensity by Carey Mulligan.

As the movie develops, Maude must risk everything -- her husband (Ben Whishaw) and her young son (Adam Michael Dodd) -- to push for a cause she deems essential if women are to have a voice in how British society evolves.

Whishaw's character loves his wife, but acquiesces in the way that women are abused at the laundry where Maud works, also his place of employment.

Watts' involvement in an increasingly militant movement begins when she joins a co-worker (Anne-Marie Duff) at a meeting. Pharmacist Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter) serves as the main organizer, a woman who's eventually driven to extremes to accomplish her goal.

Before Suffragette concludes, some of its women will have resorted to violence: Not surprisingly members of the movement engage in a familiar-sounding debate about how far they are justified in going to advance their cause.

Director Sarah Gavron, working from a screenplay by Abi Morgan, does her best work in scenes that show how the movie's women are subjugated. They are sexually harassed and demeaned in the workplace. And they find little support from male co-workers.

The film takes place in 1912, some 16 years before British women were granted full voting rights.

When we meet the movie's women, the battle for the vote had been going on for some time, led by figures such as Emmeline Pankhurst, portrayed in a cameo by Meryl Streep.

Streep's brief appearance comes off as an attempt at prestige grabbling. It's a way of nodding at history rather than exploring it.

It falls to a character named Steed (Brendan Gleeson) to represent the male opposition. A Scotland Yard detective, Steed tries to convince women they'd be better off if they simply went home and tended to their domestic lives. He also arrests them, and clearly stands as a staunch defender of the current order.

Suffragette attempts to turn itself into a clarion call for activism in a battle that remains unfinished, but the movie's real value has to do with the urgency of many of its performances and with the way in which it reminds us that some of the things we take for granted only resulted from hard-fought and costly battles.