His tragedy: He no longer can ride

An authentic look at the post-rodeo life of a bronc rider.

These days, we tend to think of head injuries as a byproduct of ferocious hits that occur during football games, particularly at the professional level. The Rider, a film that mixes documentary and fiction footage, alerts us to the dangers of another -- if less publicized sport -- rodeo bronc riding. But that's not all that's on the movie's mind. It's also about the ways in which a man's deepest identity can be challenged.

Brady Jandreau, a South Dakota bronc rider who suffered a terrible head injury, grew up on the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Reservation. In The Rider, Jandreau plays a character much like himself.

After a terrible rodeo accident, Jandreau’s Brady Blackburn, a Lakota cowboy, has been warned off riding by physicians. Brady trains horses that are too challenging for other wranglers, but he misses the rodeo life, which is tied to his long-held view of how he should live in the world.

Brady grew up with an ethos that’s as much a part of his being as his skin. Abandoning rodeo challenges his view that when you fall off a horse, you get back on. You don't whine. You don't feel sorry for yourself. You "cowboy up,'' as the saying goes.

Brady lives with his sister (Lilly Jandreau) and his father (Tim Jandreau), real members of Jandreau’s family. As is the case with Brady Jandreau, these non-actors give the film a feeling of authenticity that would otherwise have been impossible to obtain.

Brady must deal with a variety of blows to his ego: He goes from being a hotshot on the rodeo circuit to working check-out at the local supermarket. He still hangs out with his pals who seem to have hybrid identities: They’re cowboys with what looks like classical western values and they're Native Americans.

Beijing-born director Chloe Zhao doesn't do much by way of exploring any tensions between the cowboy and Native American psyche. Maybe that's the right approach. The characters in The Rider don't seem at odds with themselves. They're not the kind of men who much care about what others think.

If you were looking to cast a cowboy simply for looks, you could do no better than Jandreau. He's entirely believable as a bronc rider and horseman, probably because that’s what he has been. Handsome and stoic, the only physical mark of Brady's disability involves an ugly wound on the side of his head; his cowboy hat covers the staples. His right hand sometimes freezes in paralysis.

The most moving part of the movie involves Brady’s visits to another former rodeo roughneck (Lane Scott) whose injuries were even worse than Brady's. Now hospitalized, Lane can’t speak and he's partially paralyzed. Brady quietly and tenderly helps Lane with his rehab exercises, scenes that are touching and unimpeded by any displays of self-pity.

Zhao doesn’t try to fit her characters into stereotypical cookie-cutter molds to advance the movie’s drama or stir up false promises of romanticism. The relationship between Brady and his dad can be rocky, his concern for his mentally challenged sister is sweet and unforced, and he seldom complains.

Zhao gives us a character study and slice of life that’s memorably void of cant. She presents her characters as men who belong entirely to their own worlds.

Fair to say, though, that Zhao has made a movie about how one man copes with the pain that accompanies loss. Brady certainly knows how to "cowboy up," but we know his pain is real -- and so does he.

A colonial official suffers major indignities

The Argentine movie Zama takes us on a strange, often brutal journey.

One of the frustrations of reviewing involves the number of movies (too many) opening in any given week. The problem with this perpetual flood of movies is that it's possible for good (and even important movies) to drown in the ever-surging multiplex tide. It would be a shame if that fate awaited Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel's Zama, the story of an 18th Century Spanish official whose life reaches ascending stages of ruin as he serves in South America.

Zama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), the official in question, wants nothing more than to leave his post and return to the wife and children he left in Spain. But circumstance and cruel bureaucrats have consigned him to a life in which he's destined to waste away in colonial obscurity.

Patience is required to make it through the movie's opening scenes, which can feel as torpid as the humid air that Zama breathes. Martel uses the film's opening act casually to delineate the power equations that govern life in this little colony. It's not pretty.

Sometimes subtly, sometimes directly, Martel shows the cruelty and hypocrisy that fuels nearly every encounter between the Spanish interlopers and the colony's indigenous residents.

Not that Zama enjoys anything about this dominance: At nearly every turn, his ambitions are punished. A woman he regards as an intimate companion sleeps with someone else and a supposed subordinate receives a posting Zama wanted for himself.

The film concludes with a mysterious journey in which Zama leads a ragged band that's sent to capture a bandit whose murderous activities long have taunted the colonists.

He leaves the safety of the colony and begins to encounter people and situations for which he has no ready response. Zama already has been defeated before he encounters the primal forces that await him and that will bring him to his cruel, punishing destiny. The poor man can't even die.

There's much going on in Zama, which can be viewed as a movie of satirical impulses and brutal jests.

No matter what you make of this strangely enthralling movie, Zama will take you on a trip in which Martel serves as a remorseless, insightful guide, a director attuned to the small notes that let us know that we're in a world where we have no moorings -- and where many of the film's characters have no business being.

The pain of 'Love After Love'

Andie MacDowell finds a rich role in this story of a grieving family.

Love After Love has been hailed for providing Andie MacDowell with an opportunity to show that she really can act. If so, MacDowell owes a debt of gratitude to director Russell Harbaugh who cast her as Suzanne, a recently widowed woman and the mother of two grown sons (Chris O'Dowd and James Adomian) who look as if they might be MacDowell's contemporaries. (For the record, MacDowell just turned 60; O'Dowd is 38; Adomian, also 38.)

Maybe what appear to be blurry lines of age and relationship are part of Harbaugh's point: Almost no one in Love After Love seems to have matured into a clearly defined adult.

Harbaugh presents the story of a grieving family in dramatic shards, eliding the passage of time in ways that occasionally make it difficult to keep track of the characters. He leaves it to us to piece the movie together. Nothing wrong with that, but I wish the pieces of Harbaugh’s domestic jigsaw fit more elegantly together. Sometimes, it seems as if he’s tripping into scenes the way a person might stumble into a darkened room before turning on the light.

Early on, the movie makes Suzanne a widow. Harbaugh depicts the death of the family patriarch (Gareth Williams) in brief, unsparing strokes: a loss of voice and mobility and finally an exit from his home, courtesy of a couple of undertakers.

Gradually, we get to know the various characters whose lives revolve around Suzanne, luminous in appearance and bristling with feelings she may not always understand.

O’Dowd’s Nicholas works as a book editor whose marriage to one of his publishing-company colleagues (Juliet Rylance) is falling apart. It doesn’t take long for Nicholas to find a new victim for his love. Soon after his divorce, Emilie (Dree Hemingway) marries Nicholas, a union we presume is doomed from the start.

Harbaugh and his co-writer Eric Mendelsohn present a series of family dinners that range from unpleasant to excruciating. At one of them, Nicholas’ brother Chris (Adomian) gets so drunk he winds up urinating in the foyer of the home in which he's a guest -- not the best way to say thanks for dinner.

O’Dowd dominates another dinner scene in which Nicholas expresses crushing cruelty toward a man with whom Suzanne has begun a relationship.

Mired in unexpressed (and perhaps unfelt) grief, Love After Love can be read as a protracted essay on self-absorption so deep even the death of a loved one can’t dislodge it.

Make up your own mind about David Shire’s jangled jazz score; I found it as obtrusive as was illuminating.

An all-in cast doesn't shrink from the painful nature of material steeped in dissonances and disturbance.

At one point, Chris — a failed comedy writer — takes a turn at stand-up comedy. He delivers a riff on the ways in which Jesus simply couldn't measure up to the achievements of his father. However irreverent and amusing Chris may be, he appears to be talking more to himself than to his audience, something Love After Love sometimes seems to be doing, as well.

A look at a genial musical genius

If you thought musical genius, by definition, would be intimidating, the documentary Itzhak should go a long way toward changing your mind. In her look at the life of Itzhak Perlman, director Alison Chernick shows us an artist who can't resist indulging a silly sense of humor, who loves baseball and who has been in the public eye since he made his television debut on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1958. Now 72, Perlman seems to be one of those rare people who take their art more seriously than they take themselves. It will come as no surprise to those who have enjoyed Perlman's musical adventures that Perlman has built a philosophy around the indefinable passion that goes into the music he plays. We see the Israeli-born Perlman meeting with violin restorers and hear him discuss the popularity of the theme from the movie Schindler's List, his most requested piece. Perlman also talks about growing up with polio that now has him moving about in a motorized wheelchair, but no one will feel sorry for this genial genius who seems to spread warmth wherever he goes. My favorite moment: Perlman waiting for a concert and requesting a TV so that he can watch baseball. He'll practice during commercials. That's probably not a great idea for young musicians, but when you're a master, you set your own rules. You've earned the privilege.

'The Endless,' a tricky little movie

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead join forces to direct and star in The Endless, a film that takes enough unexpected turns to provoke interest. Justin and Aaron — characters obviously named after their creators -- are brothers who fled a California commune a decade before the movie begins. Justin saw the commune as a cult — and a death cult at that. After the brothers learn that the members of the commune are still alive, younger brother Aaron begins to have fond recollections of the place. The food was good. People had fun. As Aaron remembers it, life on the commune seems better than the crummy lives the brothers now lead, scuffling for money in low-level jobs. Justin doesn’t buy it. He says appropriately named Arcadia was "culty," that all the adult males underwent castration and that no one living at the commune really was free. Nonetheless, a persistent Aaron insists that the brothers pay a one-day visit to their former home to gain closure. As the movie progresses, the strangeness grows ever stranger. Although the cult members seem friendly and reasonable, the sky above Arcadia sometimes glows with double moons -- and that's far from the weirdest development. No fair telling you where all this is headed, but Benson and Moorhead create an eerie little movie that effectively plays with time and mortality — and with our heads.

'Avengers' long march toward the finish

A lengthy Avengers bobs and weaves its way through a penultimate chapter that sometimes falters but does offer some rewards.

It's intended to knock your socks off and, in the end, it finally attains a stirring, if slightly morose, grandeur. We're talking about Avengers: Infinity War, the penultimate chapter in a series that thus far has spawned 18 movies, Infinity being the 19th.

This edition gathers all the Avengers -- from Thor to Spiderman to Iron Man to Black Panther to the Hulk and more -- into a single movie. It also expands the geographical scope of its concerns, taking us to New York, to Scotland, to the far reaches of the cosmos and to Wakanda.

And, yes, I'm omitting some of the movie's superheroes and super-places, but a two hour and 40-minute extravaganza creates far too many bases to touch for all but the most obsessive reviewers.

At the same time as the movie has enlarged, it also seems to have shrunk. Black Panther transcended the Marvel Universe with its irresistibly mythic celebration of Afro-centric culture. Infinity War marks a return to the Marvel universe.

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo (Captain America, Winter Soldier and Captain America, Civil War) seem to have decided that more is more as they pit dozens of superheroes against Thanos (Josh Brolin), a massive, rock-jawed warrior committed to gathering the Infinity Gems, six stones that will give him power over the entire universe and which also will result in massive amounts of death.

Thanos, a CGI motion capture warrior capable of pathos, believes his cause is just. He wants to rid an overpopulated universe of some of its inhabitants in order to save the rest. Brolin infuses the evil Thanos with genuine character, sometimes even approaching doubt about the choices he must make in order to fulfill his malign destiny.

In their quest to stop Thanos, various superheroes turn up on various planets and have various adventures as the movie punctuates its longueurs with the obligatory spasms of action. I'd be lying if I told you I cared about the outcome of all this battling, but when it comes to Marvel movies, we know precisely where our rooting interests are meant to lodge.

As expected, touches of humor (much of it paying homage to popular culture) also can found as the Russos navigate the choppy waters in which characters and storylines bob and weaver toward a finale.

Did I get lost? Not really.

The Russos manage to keep the characters distinct (no small feat), but I wish that instead of title cards announcing on which planet the movie had arrived, Disney had substituted title cards telling us which of the various characters we were watching. Who exactly is Vision, the character played with welcome elegance by Paul Bettany? And it took me a while to recall exactly what superpower Elizabeth Olsen's Scarlet Witch wields.

Honestly, I leave all that to the fanboys or those willing to revisit the 18 previous Avenger movies.

Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr. Strange) and Robert Downey Jr. (Ironman), by the way, carry on a reasonably entertaining intramural rivalry, and although Disney warned critics against revealing spoilers, I will tell you that some of the characters display touching affection for one another and that the Guardians of the Galaxy characters reprise their comic antics to mixed results.

As you probably already know, not all of the characters make it out of Infinity alive. I'm obviously not going to tell you who progresses to the final movie, but the fact that Infinity dispenses with favorite characters stands as a bold move when it comes to a long-running series. (Note: Many believe that the shocking impact of the deaths in Infinity will be undone in the next installment. In comic-book universes death often lacks finality.)

The best thing about Infinity War? I'd say the ending -- not just because this extended conclusion signals that we can move on to other pursuits (not to mention the nearest bathroom) but because the finale brims with large-scale spectacle, some of them overwhelming in the right ways.

A final note: I wish to express my gratitude to Disney for insisting that critics avoid spoilers; compliance with the request not only allows audiences to discover the movie's surprises on their own but allows for brevity in writing about a movie that can't count conciseness among its virtues.

Maybe story-telling economy would have been impossible with a roster full of actors -- all with fans -- playing so many superheroes. I’m looking forward to the next and purportedly final installment. I’m ready to bid the Avengers farewell before it's time for Iron Man to shed his high-tech armor for a walker -- or at least a cane.

She feels pretty but Is she funny?

Amy Schumer's latest misses the mark.

Amy Schumer's I Feel Pretty springs from a potentially fertile comic premise. A young woman who thinks that she’s hopelessly unattractive hits her head and suddenly believes that she has become beautiful.

Filled with newfound confidence, this woman -- Schumer’s Renee -- begins behaving as she always imagined a beautiful woman would. In Schumer's hands, Renee’s behavior as a newly anointed beauty brims with comic exaggeration and border-line obnoxiousness.

Still, Renee begins to take control of her life. She aggressively flirts with a man at the dry cleaners. She goes after a less obscure job in the cosmetics company that employees her. She's having the time of her life.

So is Renee a little crazy? Not exactly. When she looks in the mirror, she sees herself as gorgeous. Everyone else, of course, sees the same old Renee.

In case you haven't already guessed, the moral is that women should be happy to be themselves. More, they should be proud to be themselves.

And in case you missed the message -- obvious from the start -- the movie provides Renee with an end-of-picture speech in which she hits it directly on the nose.

To reach its foregone conclusion, the story follows the blossoming Renee as she becomes the highly-visible receptionist for her company. Predictably, Renee also offers the company CEO (Michelle Williams) advice about how to market a new “diffusion” line of products, which is supposed to help the company reach shoppers in the economy’s less affluent realms.

For me, Williams provides I Feel Pretty’s only real surprise: She's funny as an executive who can't reconcile her girlish voice with her corporate status.

The movie's formula requires that Renee also find love; it arrives in the form of an ordinary guy played by Rory Scovel. Scovel’s character acts as if he’s impressed by Renee’s unabashed boldness, displayed when she enters a bikini contest at Coney Island, adapting her street clothes for the occasion.

Renee also has gal pals (Busy Philipps and Aidy Bryant), women she treats badly once she believes that she’s acquired the looks of a model.

Not only does I Feel Pretty score low on credibility, but the writing/directing team of Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein lobs a softball; I Feel Pretty has little or no bite when it comes to criticizing the cosmetics industry, media-generated standards of beauty or much else for that matter.

A man lives a nightmare

Director Lynne Ramsay obtains a frightening performance from Joaquin Phoenix in You Were Never Really Here.

Director Lynne Ramsay never has been one to comprise the brutality and dark vision of the films she makes. It’s almost as if Ramsay (Ratcacher, Morvern Callar and We Need to Talk About Kevin) dreams her films, and Ramsay’s dreams tend to be nightmarish.

Adapted from a 2013 novella by Jonathan Ames, Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here hangs a series of unnerving sequences on a conventional spine: A hit man accepts a mission in which he must save a teenage girl from a life of child prostitution. As is sometimes the case with dark fables, You Were Never Really Here shows no great interest either in by-the-book expressions of plot or character development.

Instead, Ramsay takes the viewer on a visual journey in which standard elements are more suggested than spelled out. Early on, we see an image of a man with a plastic bag over his head. Are we watching a murder? A suicide? Some weird act of erotic asphyxiation?

The answer: None of the above. Later, we learn that we've witnessed the re-enactment of a bizarre childhood ritual on the part of Joe, the movie’s strange and scary main character, rendered with brute physicality by Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix seems to have enlarged himself to a point where we half wonder whether he has borrowed Gerard Depardieu’s body to play a bulky hitman who specializes in beating his prey with ball-peen hammers.

Hidden behind a thick beard, Phoenix turns the near silent Joe into the movie’s essential mystery. Using quickly inserted images, Ramsay lets us know that Joe was an abused child and a traumatized former Marine. Neither of those facts -- if that's what they can be called -- explains much about Joe, a character we’re presumably meant to accept as an existential expression of the ways in which brutality and a sense of righteousness can turn an individual psyche into a war zone.

Joe's profile hovers halfway between that of a serial killer and a fierce defender of abused girls.

Everything about Joe speaks of brooding obscurity. He lives with his aging mother (Judith Roberts) in a ratty apartment. He has no friends. He tries to smash the demons that feed on him, assaultive images that explode inside his head with the force of detonated grenades.

If you're looking for a social dimension, I suppose it’s possible to take Joe as a manifestation of the worst of a corrupted society, almost a socially induced mutation.

In that regard, Joe evokes memories of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, and the movie’s story, like Scorsese's dark masterwork, also dips into the political life of New York City. A New York state senator (Alex Manette) who wants to run for governor hires Joe to rescue his 13-year-old daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov) from a ring of sex traffickers.

The movie’s conflation of politics and seamy degeneracy isn’t fully explored and the plot unfolds in somewhat muddled fashion. One presumes that little about You Were Never Really Here should be taken literally. Put another way, if you examine the developments in You Were Never Really Here, they don't always make sense. But Ramsay’s visual style sustains an atmosphere of suggested terror, punctuated by vivid imagery from cinematographer Tom Townsend.

An example: At one point, we see Joe underwater in the midst of a suicide attempt, floating silently toward oblivion.

There are also moments that challenge — perhaps too self-consciously — expectation and are meant to add splashes of weird humor. After a violent episode, Joe lies on the floor with one of his dying victims. They sing along to I’ve Never Been to Me, which happens to be playing on the radio.

In one of the movie’s most gripping sequences, security cameras record Joe going about his awful business, hammering away at anyone who has had the misfortune of seeing him at work.

Watching You Were Never Really Here, I couldn’t help marveling at the combination of daring and commitment it must have taken to make a film such as this, one that has little interest in reassuring an audience. If You Were Never Really Here is a nightmare, it’s one from which Ramsey doesn’t seem to want us to awaken.

She's greatly aided in her efforts by a score from Jonny Greenwood, perhaps the most innovate movie composer working today.

A nagging question, of course, arises: Why are we watching this? What edification can be drawn from this gleaming, alienated work? Ramsey, you should know, does not employ her considerable skills in the pursuit of visual pleasure; her aesthetics derive from trying to live inside the emotional worlds of her characters.

Let's say the jury is out on what all of this means. Maybe Ramsey has delivered a movie that’s more sketch than fully developed canvas, that she’s wandering in this territory without a map. I guess you could say that’s both courageous and crazy. And that description pretty much describes You Were Never Really Here for me -- at least until I see it again.

A softer movie for Isabelle Huppert

Isabelle Huppert never quite allows us to penetrate the enigmatic challenge she presents with almost every character she plays. Huppert never ingratiates herself or her characters with audiences. Her expressions suggest mystery, something about an indistinct but important past. Generally, Huppert's mixture of self-possession and depth work to create signature performances, but they don't quite fit Huppert's new movie, Souvenir, a trifle of a romance that teams Huppert with French star Kevin Azais. Huppert plays Liliane, a woman living a dreary life in which she goes to work each day at a pate factory. Antiseptic and lifeless, the factory looks as if it could have been lifted from a satirical riff about food that has lost its power to nourish. Routine dominates Liliane's life: Go to work. Take the bus home. Watch quiz shows. Change arrives when Huppert's character meets a new employee at work. An aspiring young boxer, Azais's Jean recognizes Liliane as a former contestant who sang on popular television talent show that attracted national attention. Jean draws a reluctant Liliane back into the show-business fray. Director Bavo Defurne does little to turn the movie into anything more than a pleasant diversion -- the kind of movie in which not much comes as a surprise but we hardly care. When Liliane tells the much younger Jean that their relationship could never possibly work out, you can bet that, after a few beats, a committed embrace will follow.