A revenge saga that fails to kill

In a more reasonable world, there would be a national contest to determine whether anyone can find a way to care about the plot of The Rhythm Section, a senseless thriller about a woman who sets out to avenge the death of her family.

Blake Lively portrays Stephanie Patrick, a promising young woman who abandons her work at Oxford when she loses her parents and siblings in a plane crash. More than grief-stricken, Stephanie loses her moral bearings, sinking into a life of prostitution and heroin use.

As for Stephanie's family, they're not only killed in a plane crash, they're rendered lifeless in flashbacks that director Reed Morano uses to remind us of the familial bliss that Stephanie has lost.

Not to worry. A reporter (Keith Proctor) arrives at Stephanie's seedy digs to tell her that this was no normal plane crash, but one engineered by an Islamic terrorist.

What's a girl to do? In a sub-par movie such as Rhythm Section, she decides to take revenge, seeking out a former M16 agent (Jude Law) to help her learn the assassin's trade.

Killing is easy, Law's character says. The hard part? Living with it.

Adapted from a novel by Mark Burnell, who also wrote the screenplay, the movie plays as if it consists of little more than story beats cobbled together without much concern for either credibility or involvement.

Murky motivations substitute for intrigue when Stephanie goes to work for Marc Serra (Sterling K. Brown), an ex-CIA agent who wants her to hunt down the people involved in the bombing.

Stranded by a lifeless screenplay, Law had the good sense to hide behind a beard and look as grim as possible. Lively approaches a physical role by inserting streams of grunting realism into her many bruising fights.

Lest any base is left untouched, the movie travels to London, Tangier and Marseilles in search of excitement, including (what else?) a frenzied car chase.

Perhaps to add faux complexity, the screenplay finds Stephanie hemming and hawing about how much she wants to hone her skills. Is there any form of killing she won't try?

Efforts at nuance aside, Rhythm Section fails as either a satisfying helping of revenge or a drama about a female character kicking down the doors of a formerly male preserve. Does a franchise loom? That may have been the hope, but -- for my money -- Rhythm Section offers no reason we should want to see any of these characters again.

It’s time to consider short films

Taken individually, the short films in this year's Oscar program are all refreshingly concise; i.e., no more than 40 minutes in length. But the only way these shorts can be seen is in packages, five films in each serving. Although this kind of presentation is unavoidable, the approach can be frustrating.

Watching five films in succession leaves little time to digest what you've seen. No sooner has one film finished than you're asked to involve yourself in another. I think this hurts high-impact films, particularly those in the documentary-shorts category.

The short documentary In the Absence, for example, examines a series of inept decisions that made the Sewol ferry disaster of 2014 even worse. You'll recall that 300 people died in that Korean ferry accident. High school students on a field trip made up the bulk of the casualties. Watching Absence in the same program as the charming Walk Run Cha-Cha can make your head spin.

Even in the animated category, wild tonal shifts can be found as one film gives way to another. Memorable, director Bruno Collet's touching look at a painter suffering from Alzheimer's bumps up against Matthew A. Cherry's Hair Love, a story about an African-American father struggling to master the art of combing his daughter's hair. Hair Love, by the way, might be the most buoyant of the animated shorts, although it, too, strikes some serious notes.

Of course, there's a flip side to what I'm saying. These packages of Oscar-nominated short films provide a window into an astonishing range of approaches and interests. Shorts also constitute one of the few areas where you can be reasonably sure that filmmakers are following their interests rather than the usual commercial imperatives.

And in a moment when few features run less than two hours, shorts also remind us that brevity needn't be an obstacle to telling a meaningful story.

Animated Shorts

This year's animated shorts stuck me as less self-consciously arty than those of previous years, although they often traverse difficult emotional terrain. Siqi Song's Sister can be viewed as a companion piece of Nanfu Wang's documentary One Child Nation. Song explores the impact of China's one-child policy on a boy who imagines what his life might have been had he had a sister.

Director Daria Kascheeva's Daughter employs stop-action animation to create a story about a woman who remembers her difficult relationship with her father while he lies on his deathbed. Kashcheeva sculpts her characters from paper mache, a technique that gives the movie a heavy, somber feeling that perfectly fits its subject.

I already mentioned Hair Love and Memorable, so I'll move to Kitbull, an entry from Rosana Sullivan who has worked for Pixar; Sullivan introduces us to a scraggly stray cat who befriends an abused pit bull, an unlikely friendship that carries obvious metaphoric weight.

I've always found it difficult to predict winners in the shorts category, so I'm not going to try, although I'll tell you that my favorite is Collet's Memorable, which depicts an artist losing touch with his two principal loves, his wife and his art.

Live-Action Shorts
As I watched Saria -- a recreation of a real-life story -- I had to remind myself that I wasn't watching a documentary. This speaks to the film's power. Director Bryan Buckley doesn't flinch from a difficult topic and the ending of his film packs a horrific wallop.

Belgium's A Sister, directed by Delphine Girard, almost instantly becomes an exercise in high tension. A woman who has been kidnapped tricks her abductor into allowing her to call her sister to check in on her daughter. Instead of phoning her sister, she reaches a police emergency operator who plays along and tries to save the woman.

Marshall Curry's The Neighbors' Window begins as if it's going to be a kinky study of voyeurism. Initially attracted to watching a couple's lovemaking, a New York husband and wife continue to observe the lives of two people occupying the apartment across the street from them. The story increasingly focuses on the prying wife -- a mother dealing with three small children -- who becomes obsessed with what she sees the couple's freedom. You may be able to guess where Curry's story is headed, but the movie succinctly makes its point. And, no, the moral of the tale has nothing to do with the wisdom of buying curtains.

Directed by Meryam Joobeur and Maria Gracia Turgeon, Brotherhood takes us to Tunisia for a story about tensions between a father and a son, a young man who left home to join fighters in Syria. The son returns with a pregnant young woman who's hidden by a niqab and who he introduces as his wife. Faced with terrible unemployment, many of Tunisia's young men left for Syria and, as is the case here, many came to regret their decision. The relationship between the returning son and his brothers proves touching as the story builds toward a tragic conclusion that left me with questions about precisely what the filmmakers were trying to say.

Yves Piat and Damien Megherbi may have made the category's prohibitive favorite, the amusing NEFTA Football Club, which also takes place in Tunisia. While playing in the desert, two brothers discover a lost donkey that's wandering about wearing a set of earphones. We'll later learn what the earphones are about, but the story reveals its first twist when the older brother realizes that the donkey is carrying bags full of drugs. Could this be a gateway to a huge windfall? Obstacles and various O. Henry-like turns make the film instructive and entertaining.

Documentary Shorts

Ever heard of Resignation Syndrome? I hadn't, but I learned about it while watching John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson's Life Overtakes Me, the moving story of eastern European children who fall into catatonic states as a way avoiding tensions resulting from constant threats of deportation from Sweden, the country to which their parents have fled.

In Laura Nix's Walk Run Cha-Cha, we meet a Vietnamese couple that arrived in the U.S. 40 years ago. Paul and Millie Cao talk about leaving Vietnam, being reunited in the US and living lives built around work and family. After raising their kids and meeting their responsibilities, Paul and Millie take up dancing. Finally, they feel a measure of true personal freedom.

As mentioned earlier, Yi Seung-Jun's In the Absence explores the tragic story of a ferry accident. I'd say that Jun's film has more emotional punch than the others in this category, which rounds out with Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan's St. Louis Superman and Carol Dysinger's Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if you're a girl).

St. Louis Superman introduces us to Bruce Franks, a father and rapper who runs for a spot in the Missouri State legislature after the shooting that roiled Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

In Learning to Skateboard, Dysinger tells the story of an Afghan program that uses skateboarding to help instill confidence in girls who also receive instruction in reading and math, sometimes against the wishes of parents who either fear for their daughters safety or have tradition-bound ideas about what girls should be doing with their time.

If you have the time, you’d do well to see all three programs. You’ll be informed and entertained, but you’ll also be helping to support a form of cinematic expression that’s a vital part of film culture. You'll also notice that unlike some of the other Oscar categories, women are well-represented.

Cast lifts familiar British gangster movie

Director Guy Ritchie may not be breaking new ground in The Gentlemen, but his actors provide the movie with some juice.

If the year were 1999 instead of 2020, director Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen might have seemed more inventive. Ritchie, you'll recall, made his cinematic bones with 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a fresh-feeling foray into a netherworld occupied by British gangsters.

In this outing, Ritchie again goes gangster but the verve that once defined Ritchie's style now feels a little proforma, something on the order of the difference between an arranged marriage and a spontaneous love affair.

After striking out with King Arthur (2017), it’s not surprising that Ritchie sought comfortable ground — and, to be fair, The Gentlemen derives a fair measure of entertainment from a spot-on cast.

Notable among a large ensemble is Hugh Grant, playing a sleazy, gay private detective with traces of cockney in his accent. Colin Farrell adds more color as Coach, a character who trains boxers and occasionally dips into the dark arts required to settle matters in the criminal world.

Add an unflappable Charlie Hunnam to the mix. Hunnam rides shotgun to Matthew McConaughey, who plays Mickey, a pot czar who pays off fading aristocrats for the privilege of building vast underground grow houses on their property.

Now another American (Jeremy Strong) wants to buy Mickey's vast empire so that he can reap illegal gains and be ready to capitalize when marijuana goes legit. Tired of life in the fast lane, Mickey may be willing to sell.

A Chinese gangster named Dry Eye (Henry Golding) also would like to purchase Mickey’s business, an ambition that sets off fireworks, notably a raid on one of Mickey’s mammoth facilities.

To add structural pizazz, Ritchie frames the story by having Grant’s character try to extort money from Hunnam’s character, using a screenplay to convince Ray to pay up. The screenplay gambit proves a bit much, even in a movie that's not afraid to display its cinematic self-consciousness.

True to its title, The Gentlemen is mostly an all-guys affair, although the dashing Mickey has a greyhound sleek wife (Michelle Dockery) who runs a garage staffed by many female mechanics. Mickey, we're told, relies on her judgment.

It takes time to get all the characters straight and to fully appreciate The Gentlemen, you need a taste for a narrative that hopscotches through the proceedings, sometimes creating confusion. You also may find yourself wondering whether any of these characters possibly could exist outside a Guy Ritchie movie.

Still, there’s pleasure in watching actors sink into juicy roles as we wait to see who among these felons will emerge as the king of the gangster jungle. In January, that may as good as we get.

Cage uncaged in weirdly amusing thriller

Color Out of Space pits an isolated family against a force from outer space.

Director Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space might have been another mediocre horror film and, I suppose, parts of it still deserve that description. In adapting a story by H.P. Lovecraft, Stanley introduces us to a family living in rural isolation.

But Stanley smartly uses Lovecraft’s story as a launching pad for another memorable Nicolas Cage performance and as an opportunity to serve up a heaping helping of weirdness. Now the undisputed champion of over-the-top crescendos, Cage appears at his terrifying, comic best.

Cage plays Nathan Gardner, the father of a family which includes a teenage son (Brendan Meyer) and a younger son (Julian Hilliard).

The rural life doesn't seem to be doing any of the Gardners much good. Daughter Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) dabbles in witchcraft. As she recovers from cancer surgery, Mom (Joely Richardson) battles the balky Internet connection that threatens to sink her investment-advisory business.

The already skewed family life of the Gardners is further upset when a mysterious flaming object lands in their yard. The object emits an eerie glow that may be a threatening alien life form. Plants begin to turn colors and various misfortunes befall the members of Nathan’s family. Deviations from the norm further compound: An insect the size of a football appears. The youngest son starts having conversations with characters no one else sees.

Stanley works with juxtapositions that border on the absurd: Lavinia’s witchy aspirations, dad’s preoccupation with the alpacas that he’s purchased as a possible source of revenue and the arrival of a very sincere hydrologist (Elliot Knight) who’s surveying the area.

The only other person living on Nathanial’s property is a squatter (Tommy Chong), an aging hippie who plays the role of deranged profit.

Cage — who’s playing a character who defies definition from the start -- eventually made me wonder if he weren’t using his performance to comment on the sheer insanity of what we’re watching. I decided he wasn't.

Most times, if you have questions about what an actor might be doing, you feel frustrated and deflated. In Cage's case, this uncertainty is precisely where he lives. He doesn't try to get laughs with a line reading; he just says the line and it comes out funny. In this case, he's playing a character who tries to normalize the most bizarre of occurrences, but with barely concealed undercurrents of madness that could, at any moment, tilt toward violence.

Stanely has fun with the movie's images, notably color settling over rural landscapes like a fog, some version of pink, I think. And, yes, blood and gore are given their due.

You can attach larger meanings to all of this if you want, an assault on the naive values of self-sufficiency and middle-class escapism, perhaps. But I chose to take Color Out of Space as a bizarre entertainment that gave me the creeps and made me laugh.

Stanley, by the way, hasn’t made a film since 1996’s Island of Dr. Moreau, a film on which he was replaced by John Frankenheimer. Stanley’s story is documented in a 2014 documentary called Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau. I haven’t seen it but plan to seek it out.

Stanley’s career aside, Color Out of Space makes for one of those irresistibly strange movies that leave your head buzzing. When you exit the theater, the world may look a little weirder than when you arrived. That's a form of success.

Kids and cops clash in a Parisian suburb

Les Miserables focuses the pressure cooker of immigrant life..

All aspiring artists hear it, the injunction that urges them to begin with what they know.

Like most advice, there’s nothing sacrosanct about it, but in the case of French director Ladj Ly, familiarity with his subject (the hard life in the commune of Montfermeil outside Paris) gives his version of Les Miserables plenty of gritty authenticity.

The movie begins in jubilation. A kid from the neighborhood (Issa Perica) wraps himself in a Tricolor cape and gathers his pals for a trip into the heart of Paris. It’s the day in 2018 when the French win the World Cup and Ly’s camera captures the pure exaltation of fans celebrating a longed-for victory. At that point, the kids are French through and through.

But as children of African immigrants that status won’t survive. Set during a single day, Les Miserables revolves around tense interactions between three cops (Alexis Manenti, Djibril Zonga, and Damien Bonnard), the kids we saw in the opening scenes and other figures in the neighborhood. These include the district’s mayor (Steve Tientcheu), a man who keeps order, as well as various members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that tries to guide the kids toward the local mosque.

The cops approach their work with distinctly different attitudes. The worst of them is Manenti’s Chris, a police officer who happily accepts the name he’s been given by residents of the neighborhood he patrols: The call him “The Pink Pig.” Often arbitrary and cruel, Chris justifies his behavior by blaming it on the mean streets he patrols. He sees his cruelty as a necessity, not a choice. Zonga’s Gwada isn’t as narrow-minded as Chris, but he goes along with the program.

Bonnard plays a newcomer on his first day on the job. Chris demeans him with the nickname Greaser and does his best to exert his authority over the newbie. It quickly becomes apparent that Bonnard’s Stephane will act as the movie’s conscience, as well as the audience’s entry point into a rough-and-tumble world where the police are viewed as a clear enemy and where the neighborhood has its own rules, most of them ignored by the kids.

A kid with big eyeglasses (Al-Hassan Ly) serves as a witness to the various episodes that make up the movie: He shoots video of the neighborhood with a drone that captures the incident that will bring the movie to a violent boiling point.

More turmoil results when Issa steals a lion cub from a circus run by gypsies. The cops of the anti-crime squad try to find the lion to stave off a war between the gypsies and the gangs of Montfermeil.

As I said at the outset, Ly knows this terrain. He grew up in the Montfermeil area and drew on his experiences to make his movie, and we often feel his anger at the way these immigrants have been marginalized. The pressures squeezing a hot-house neighborhood — a creation of prejudice on the part of the larger society — becomes the movie’s real subject.

American audiences familiar with gritty street-level drama may find the movie a bit familiar, but there’s no escaping Ly’s conclusion: Those relegated to France’s banlieues are living in pressure cookers. We all know how the metaphor works. When pressure cookers overheat, they tend to explode.

A quirky story about young outcasts

Set in 1977, Troop Zero tries (boy does it ever) to uphold the rights of young outcasts to claim their place in the world, maybe even in the entire universe. Directors Bert & Bertie, a British directing team, build their story around Christmas Flint (Mckenna Grace), a girl who’s an outsider in the small town of Wiggly, Georgia. Christmas's widowed dad (Jim Gaffigan) plies his trade as an attorney, losing most of his cases and seldom being paid for his efforts. Gaffigan’s Ramsey Flint expects his assistant (Viola Davis) to look after his daughter, a task she approaches responsibly but not happily. The plot begins when Christmas makes friends with a girl who formerly bullied her (Milan Ray). She then assembles a group of girls to join the Birdies, scouts who are vying to see which of them will win a chance to record a message that NASA will send into space. The local Scout Master (Allison Janney) reluctantly accepts Christmas's crew as Birdies, labeling them Troop Zero. Lest boys feel left out, Birdie Troop Zero includes Christmas's best friend, Joseph (Charlie Shotwell). Of course, a group of by-the-book Birdies demeans the outcasts. The young actors do well enough and Davis’s portrayal suggests unexpected complexities for a movie that seems to want to be quirky and endearing at the same time. Christmas’s individuality takes a strange form: She’s a bed wetter, which the movie tries (weirdly, I think) to turn into a gesture of assertive defiance set to the tune of David Bowie's Space Oddity. A real emotional issue (grief over a lost mother) rises to the surface at the end, but an over-commitment to quirkiness can make Troop Zero feel like a song played out of tune.

Older but still bad boys at heart

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence deliver for viewers who like these kinds of formula jobs.

Bad Boys for Life includes a late-picture plot twist so preposterous and far-fetched that it practically wraps itself in immunity from criticism. It's as if the filmmakers are saying, "Hey, you've come this far, might as well go along with the rest."

With this third in the Bad Boy series, which began in 1995 and continued with a sequel in 2003, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence attempt to reclaim box-office potency and prove that buddy movies, even in re-treaded form, are as much big-screen staple as corn is to American agriculture.

Director Michael Bay, at the helm for the first two movies, cedes directing chores to Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, a duo that lives in Belgium. They approach the challenge with something approaching cheerful brio.

Now, it needs to be said at the outset that any movie that looks for its juice from Mexican drug cartels, which Bad Boys for Life does, already feels a trifle old hat. But Arbi and Fallah don’t seem to care. For them, it's pedal to the metal and full speed ahead.

The directors must have known that they’ve been charged with ensuring, as many critics previously have noted, that thair movie includes ample amounts of bullets and banter, both of which they ladle out in over-sized helpings.

On the way out of a preview screening, an audience member described the movie as “fun.” That's what movies such as Bad Boys for Life are supposed to provide — fun with bloodshed or maybe it's the reverse, bloodshed with fun.

To be fair, Bad Boys for Life does provide some fun. The banter between Will Smith’s Mike and Martin Lawrence’s Marcus ranges from funny to routine. Smith, of course, plays the serious cop; Lawrence provides the comic relief as a Miami detective who wants to retire, particularly after a mysterious assassin riddles Mike with bullets in the movie’s early going.

Though badly wounded, Mike makes a miraculous recovery. He then decides that he must find the motorcycle-riding murderer who gunned him down in the street. Of course, he wants Marcus to join him.

No, says Marcus, who insists on hanging up his badge so that he can watch his infant grandson grow up. Besides, when Mike was hovering near death in the hospital, Marcus promised God that he wouldn’t commit any more violent acts if Mike pulled through.

Will Marcus finally relent? What do you think?

A wary police captain (Joe Pantoliano) half-heartedly tells Mike not to investigate his own case, but even he knows that Mike won't listen. In movies such as this, no one gets in the way of the formula.

That doesn't mean the filmmakers can't accessorize. The screenplay surrounds Mike and Marcus with a kind of tech-savvy IM Force led by Miami cop played by Paola Nunez. She and Mike once had a thing.

As it turns out, the plot against Mike has been authored by the vicious widow (Kate del Castillo) of a drug lord who Mike helped bring down. The widow insists that her equally brutal and maniacally focused son (Jacob Scipio) make Mike suffer before killing him.

If you have no taste for this kind of mayhem, Bad Boys for Life gives you no reason to expand your window of tolerance.

If, on the other hand, you're up for a well-oiled big-screen machine that gives Smith a chance to mix dead-pan seriousness with a bit of charm and eventually makes room for Lawrence to find his way to some real laughs, you could do worse.

Bad Boys for Life provides the expected jokes about aging, but a teaser that runs during the film’s end credits suggests that we take the title seriously. Smith and Lawrence may be in it for the duration.

Sisters separated by treachery and deceit

The Brazilian film Invisible Life tells its story in bold, emotional strokes.

Although it occasionally surrenders to melodrama, Invisible Life remains solidly grounded in the reality of daily life in Rio de Janeiro. Setting his story in the 1950s, director Karim Ainouz follows the lives of two sisters, each suffering because of a tyrannical father.

Though united in spirit, the sisters are tragically separated when Guida (Julia Stockler), the wild-child sister, runs off with a Greek sailor, a choice that sends her life into decline. The more sedate Euridice (Carol Duarte) wants to study classical piano in Austria and has little interest in unleashing her sexuality.

The fates of both sisters are determined by their father (Antonio Fonesca), a baker who disowns Guida when she returns to Rio pregnant. He refuses to accept a daughter who will bring him a "bastard grandchild."

Fonesca's Manoel also pushes Euridice into a loveless conventional marriage.

Ainouz takes his time developing the story but makes a point of allowing bursts of energy to break the movie's surface, Euridice wildly dancing at her wedding, for example. A less-than-erotic encounter between the bride and groom follows the celebration.

Even though Guida returns to Rio, her father never tells Euridice that her sister has come back to Brazil. He also lies to Guida, telling her that Euridice lives in Europe where she's pursuing a career as a pianist.

Although they're living in the same city, the sisters never meet; they almost encounter each other at a restaurant at one point, but they remain apart -- each assuming the other is living the life she dreamt of as a young woman.

Euridice plods unhappily through married life. For her part, Guida finds a home in one of Brazil's lower-class neighborhoods. She cares for her son and creates a kind of impromptu family with some of the residents.

The movie eventually deals with the lie that has separated the sisters. No fair saying more, but you probably can guess that the story will not resolve happily. In all, Invisible Life makes for a moving look at a bond that endures despite out-dated rules and a father's uncompromising rigidity.

In her last film, Agnes Varda reviews her art

I'm guessing that when Agnes Varda, who died last March at the age of 90, began assembling Varda by Varda, she might have sensed that she was writing her own obituary. The result: a biography of a creative life.

That's not to say that there's anything morbid, self-congratulatory or nostalgic about Varda's movie. Varda by Varda turns out to be a catalog of an artist's process of invention -- not in any self-serving way, but in a manner that underscores Varda's commitment to an idea: Creation should be shared. Her final movie can be taken as an act of generosity. She had things to tell us.

At times, Varda can be seen talking to audiences as if to underscore that she's not interested in solitary reflection. As always, Varda insists on engagement.

Varda uses clips from many of her films, analyzing them and explaining how they developed. Among the features she discusses: Cleo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond.

We learn that Varda's later documentary work tended to rely on streamlined, simplified production methods, sometimes only the director and a small video camera that she operated. Varda followed her eye where it took her, often capitalizing on serendipitous moments that found her camera.

In her last decade, Varda branched out from filmmaking to become what she calls a "visual artist." Her installations can be whimsical or sharp -- or both. They make you understand that only death could have halted Varda’s voracious interest in the world around her, in things that can be seen or touched and, above all, captured with a camera. Even in old age, Varda's eyes remained open to new possibilities.

As an artist, she never stopped growing.