Love, Death & Robots: THE CREATOR

In a time of Hollywood spectacles that can conjure up incredible digital wizardry to populate all manner of fantasy worlds, it is dispiriting how often it feels like visual effects that can take us anywhere are so often used to take us to a generic nowhere. The same templates of gloopy magics and yawning vistas can be so indifferently framed and formulaically deployed that we might as well stay home and imagine for ourselves. Gareth Edwards films, however, are among the few of their blockbuster ilk suited to drop us into an invented world and almost immediately conjure a real sense of place and space. He shows us what it’s like to live there, placing his camera at a human level, letting it sweep back with a sense of proportionality with the elements in the frame. The people in his shots are dwarfed by the enormity and complexity of their lives interrupted by conflict on a fantastical scale. His scrappy indie debut Monsters and his American Godzilla alike let skyscraper-sized beings tower over his human figures to sell a sense of massive, threatening scale. Even his Star Wars spinoff Rogue One, a film of much-reported post-production compromise, has that visual element of believable dimension and size, never more than when an Imperial Walker or Death Star shakes the ground and blots out the sun. Here are movies that acknowledge the smallness of its human element as a way of not only heightening the believability and the danger of its sci-fi conceits, but to make the human spirit all the more indomitable in the face of it all.

And that’s what makes his latest, the totally involving widescreen stunner The Creator, such a fine work of speculative sci-fi action and thrill. It has ideas—a bit of pop jumble and genre play where imperious American military might is waging a war against third-world countries harboring banned Artificial Intelligence. And it has character—a wounded G.I. mourning his presumed-dead wife, holding out hope that one last mission might bring him back to her. And it has spectacle. Boy, does it have spectacle, wall-to-wall with the kind of visual effects that are so seamlessly convincing that I just completely bought into its every detail. It takes place in a future wherein artificial intelligence is embodied in humanoid robots that took the place of blue collar workers from factories to police forces. It was supposed to protect humans. For some reason that lead the machines to detonate a nuclear warhead in downtown Los Angeles. (Isn’t that always the way?) This kicks off the conflict we join in media res, with John David Washington’s grieving grunt reluctantly called into action to stop a top secret A.I. weapon from being unleashed by a rogue robotics expert who may or may not be related to his late wife (Gemma Chan). That human-sized sadness keeps the violent suspense sequences tied to something real that lets us believe the sci-fi trappings all the more.

Edwards makes propulsive proceedings in whirring and clacking military skulduggery of the hardest of hard sci-fi, a Vietnam-War-movie-inspired edge to heavily-armed squads helicoptering into humble rice paddies and Buddhist enclaves populated with robot refugees hiding from the omnipresent threat of American bombs. Into this grim quagmire drops a bundle of sentimentality—an adorable robot child who may be the one who can bring peace to this violent world. Edwards develops these ideas with a fine degree of complication, with characters torn between seeing A.I. creations as mere programming and those who say, even so, why must we be cruel? Villains Ralph Ineson and Alison Janney are perfectly nasty, brutal figures who want to kill at all costs. We see violent robots, but also ones who just want peace. Some have eerily emotive human eyes with whirring open gears behind their ears; others are blank-faced humanoid machines. Good thing they were all programmed to care. Washington’s a perfectly complicated figure, who slowly navigates the twists and turns until he settles on a feeling of moral righteousness. At every step along that way, the movie is so hard-charging and wide-eyed in detail that every walloping explosion and casually revealed tech enhances the absorbing world-design and the genuinely spectacular spectacle. And yet there’s that undertow of human soulfulness that finds these robots just might bring out the humanity in us—for worse, yes, but for better, too. This is genre filmmaking at a huge scale that for once lives up to its size and scope.

Cooking the Books: BAD EDUCATION

Bad Education is set in schools, but concerns no actual classes, and certainly not any dynamics of students and teachers. It doesn’t tell us about curriculum or class sizes or demographics or unions — but it does crow that the schools at its center, a well-funded Long Island district, have a growing reputation for sending kids on to prestigious colleges. It’s a fact that causes local real estate to steadily grow, and to attract the sort of high-earning parents looking to keep their offspring on cushioned, easy paths to privilege. That we don’t know any details about the schools’ actual contents beyond that seems to be part of the point. Director Cory Finley, whose chilled observational eye was attuned to a dead-eyed emotional violence of bored rich girls of suburbia in his accomplished debut feature, the creepy domestic drama Thoroughbreds, now turns his attention to a house of cards built out of criss-crossing pressures on school administrators. He finds there, in this based-on-a-true-crime picture, a cauldron of false appearances that brew up the opportunity for massive embezzlement. Finley keeps the film’s style cool and collected, staging unassumingly and clearly scenes that take in squirming unease as officials get suspicious, the frazzling of authorities as they’re implicated, and the icy office power plays as various administrators makes moves to preserve their own prestige and influence. He’s out to show how so much of a whole town’s educational and economic interest can be built out of not looking too closely at the details when the big picture appears rosy.

It’s a film full of people projecting an idea of themselves into the world, desperately trying to hide the shallowness and sneakiness beneath. Yet it starts with one of the uncomplicatedly good characters: a reporter for a high school newspaper (Geraldine Viswanathan), tasked with an article about impending construction, who starts poking around in the finances of a new capital outlay project. Something doesn’t add up. Then the ne’er-do-well son of the district’s assistant superintendent (Allison Janney) gets caught using a school credit card around town. There’s scandal brewing, and the charming, hollow superintendent (Hugh Jackman) finds his unflappable local celebrity calm breaking a sweat as he tries to keep it secret, minimize the damage, and keep up appearances of success as it all threatens to fall apart. He’s a man of secrets — a closeted gay man, yes, and also carrying on an affair with a former student, and sneaking off for cosmetic procedures — who has intermingled his reputation with that of his schools. He likes looking like an important man, a big grin and slicked back hair matching his easy superficial charm. We see him quizzing himself on teacher’s names and positions so he can slide through a faculty mixer with chummy ease. He works hard to keep up the looks of a man on top of the world. Jackman plays the razzle-dazzle well, and cuts it with a hunger and a sadness. He’s a desperate man, even before scandal erupts. Maybe he really wants to help students; there’s a real note of melancholy when he admits to sometimes missing being in the classroom. But he’s consumed with keeping his secrets, and so too, in its own way, is the community. Finley’s movie is a narrow character study, tunnel-visioned into the tick-tock details of how some well-regarded community leaders lose their reputation because that was all they had. The movie is poignantly sympathetic to the damage they caused themselves with their sociopathy, and subtextually troubled by the ways that psychological problem is aided and abetted by similar surface-level impulses that can be the only thing holding a community together.

Fire and Ice: I, TONYA

Yes, I, Tonya, Craig Gillespie's rollicking whiplash darkly comic recreation of Tonya Harding's ice skating career, is a sports movie with an arc of scandal and tragedy. It would have to be, following the inevitable unlikely rise and tabloid-violence fall of an Olympic hopeful. But what the movie is about underneath these grabby trappings is digging into the psychology of a woman in an abusive relationship. She (Margot Robbie) is used to getting hit. Her prickly, chain-smoking, boozy mother (a tough, biting Allison Janney) chips away at her for years with mean-spirited jabs and frequent smacks. When she escapes, as a late teen, into the arms of her first real boyfriend (Sebastian Stan, with a shyly dangerous charisma unseen in his Marvel pictures), he hits her too. "I told myself, my mom hits me and she loves me," Harding tells us with a honey-drip affection in her voice. It's harrowing and sad, a film intermingling the glowing romance she feels with the bruised eyes and raw scrapes of a battered woman. All the while her skating career is taking off, the thrill of her graceful athleticism sitting next to her hard-scrabble poverty as she has to fight classism and snobbery at every step of the way. She sews her own costumes, which are pretty but not quite the pageant-level shine of the fussy rich girls who dominate the sport. It's not just about talent; it's about image. 

By the time Tonya’s handsome dope of an abusive beau -- now her on-again-off-again husband -- gets it in his head, with prompting from a buddy of enormous, stupidly delusional self-confidence (Paul Walter Hauser, with a convincing bovine look), to intimidate Harding's closest rival, the ensuing chaos threatens to snuff out Tonya's life-long dream. By this point Gillespie -- providing a booming jukebox score, overlapping voice over perspectives, and an active, swirling camera with insistent, pushing editing (a very David O. Russell approach for this usually more restrained journeyman) -- has made it clear the whole incident will be no less than the final parting smack of this abusive husband. Steven Rogers’ screenplay skips around between characters’ competing, overlapping versions of events, sometimes even stopping the action to have another character in the scene turn to the camera and say “I never did this.” It creates a swirling triple-axle of tone, allowing Tonya’s pain to be centered in every telling. This neither excuses her complicity, nor lays all blame at her feet. The film overemphatically pushes and prods at the real complexity under the tabloid sensationalism while using it to raucous effect.

Track Changes: THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

The Girl on the Train has all the right ingredients for a polished tawdry thriller, but it never really gets cooking. There’s a missing woman. There’s a cast of talented performers assembled to play suspects. There’s a glossy, handsomely photographed look, like its upstate New York setting is a high-end furniture catalogue with roiling undercurrents of jealousy, abuse, addiction, and intimate crime. There’s a solid, dependable director at the helm in Tate Taylor, whose previous films The Help and Get on Up also had some interest in complicated women’s roles. And there’s Emily Blunt acting her heart out in the center of the movie as a depressed, alcoholic, unreliable witness at her wits’ end, who either did or did not see something integral to the investigation. The stage is set for something interesting, but the movie is instead a total snooze. Its mysteries are haphazardly developed, its tension is erratically sustained, and its characters remain flat types.

Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson adapts Paula Hawkins’ bestseller with a scrambled chronology and shifting points of view. It’s a Three-card Monte plot, shuffling back and forth in time and perspective while withholding key information just because it can. By the time the pieces finally stop moving the picture comes up empty. Its central character’s confused mental state motivates the jumbled telling, which takes the idea of an unreliable narrator to its least helpful illogical conclusion. Blunt’s girl on the train is depressed. The dual shocks of learning she can’t have a baby and being left by her husband (Justin Theroux) for their realtor (Rebecca Ferguson) haven’t helped. Nor has incessant drinking improved her life, leaving her stumbling, slurring, blacking out, and missing time. It’s not uncommon for her to ask her roommate (Laura Prepon) what she did last night, a habit that carries over from her ex. She’s used to being out of control and not remembering. But she’s sure she saw the missing woman (Haley Bennett) on the night of the disappearance.

There is a dusting of interesting thematic work here. Blunt is playing a woman who is told stories about her life she has no choice but to believe given her condition. She, in turn, enjoys looking out the train window during her commutes, making up little stories about the people whose lives she glimpses for a few moments a day. That’s how she feels she knows the missing woman enough to try to give a statement to the detective on the case (Alison Janney) or approach the woman’s shocked husband (Luke Evans) or therapist (Edgar Ramirez) to slip some of her information or delusions into their narratives. Ah, but how to do that while seeming sane? It’d take a sharp mind and sober social skills to pull that off, and she can only fake it for so long. Besides, she’s not totally sure she didn’t have something to do with the vanishing. The movie takes us into flashbacks narrated by the missing woman describing her sad life, then back to Blunt wringing her hands over the state of things. This interest in the stories people tell to convince themselves of one thing or another is a good enough hook to make the lackluster execution all the more disappointing.

Taylor handles this material with some confidence. He trusts his close ups of Blunt’s tear-streaked face and woozy booze-soaked flashes of memory to carry across the haze through which the facts can be glimpsed. He’s also sure his oblique references to horrible things – a character’s tearful monologue about the death of her infant; a bludgeoning; a pattern of emotional abuse – are worth springing as surprises and then cutting away before the visuals get too rough. But ultimately there’s just not enough there there. The twists are artificially delayed through obfuscation, stretching out obvious developments for the sake of the story’s deliberately frustrating structure. (We can’t be sure of anything until late in the picture, by which point it’s hard to retroactively care.) And the whole ensemble of terrific performers (down to two scenes for the always great Lisa Kudrow) are stuck playing slight types whose actions are determined by the circuitous plotting and whose decisions and developments hinge only on the dictates of the surprises. Worst, there’s never any compelling question pulling it along. I was so frustrated by the film’s thin psychology and unforthcoming shiftiness I simply didn’t care where the missing woman went and whodunit. I was merely waiting out the runtime.

Mellow Yellow: MINIONS

Minions, the scene-stealing little yellow pill-shaped babblers from the Despicable Me movies, have been spun off into a feature film all their own. You could say they’ve gotten this honor because, with a distinctive look and elemental appeal, they’ve proved themselves instant members of the Cartoon Characters Hall of Fame. You could also say it’s because they’re a money-minting merchandise machine. It’s a bit of both. Minions follows the title group’s antics from before they met up with Gru, their supervillain-with-a-heart-of-gold boss in their earlier films. They’re shorn free of his story’s sentimentality, involving fighting off worse villains for the sake of his adorable adopted daughters. Instead, the Minions are careening on a fast-paced consequence-free zip through sequences of amiably silly animated slapstick. There’s not much to it, but it’s often too pleasant and amusing to resist, at least for those of us predisposed to find the Minions funny.

Screenwriter Brian Lynch and co-directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda are smart to keep the story simple, the action goofy, and the focus on the cute, unpredictable lead creatures. What is it that makes the Minions so appealing? They have visual simplicity, aural abstraction, and physical malleability. They speak near-total nonsense, and yet because they wobble their bodies and stretch their little faces, we can always figure out what they’re feeling. It’s pleasing inscrutability.  They’re ageless, genderless, and timeless, speaking language made up of gibberish and bits of every language under the sun. But they’re so strong-willed, we can watch them express elemental emotions. Minions are mischievous troublemakers, quick to laugh and quick to get angry, easily frustrated, sputtering and grumbling, or opening up their mouths in blasts of staccato laughter.

We open on a montage of their failed attempts to find a boss, the more despicable the better, from prehistoric times on. The Minions (all voiced by Coffin), wander through the ages inadvertently leading a variety of employers (a dinosaur, a caveman, a vampire, Napoleon) to their doom. These early moments play on pre-verbal visual jokes and cartoony energy, while a booming narrator (Geoffrey Rush) speaks over-emphatically about whatever silliness we observe – a T. Rex trying to balance on a boulder, a caveman using a flyswatter on a bear, an army of Minions in Napoleonic uniforms wobbling through the snow. Eventually, the creatures flee an angry mob into the wilderness where they hide in a cave for many decades, luckily avoiding work for Hitler or the KKK while they’re at it.

By 1968 they’ve grown bored of their exile. Three Minions, a tall one named Kevin and two shorter ones named Stuart and Bob (I could rarely tell them apart) leave in search of a new home where they can serve a villain. After a long trek through the wilderness, a rowboat across the ocean (complete with the old reliable seeing-others-as-giant-fruit hunger pains), and a stop in New York City, the trio finds their way to Orlando for a Villain Convention. They hitchhiked, picked up by a deceptively sunny couple (Allison Janney and Michael Keaton) and their kids, whose family secret is too funny to reveal. At the convention, they win the affection of the terrifically named villain Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock, teetering smoothly between sweet and mean), who invites them back to her place in London and demands they help her execute a heist.

That’s the long and short of the plot, with a series of manic antics and rubbery cartoon violence twisting and turning its way to a slaphappy conclusion. The Minions almost can’t quite hold down a full, interesting story on their own. But every stop on their trip is bright, colorful, and manic, full of characters and designs appealingly clever and round. Retro-cool supervillain gadgetry, wardrobe, and architecture fit right in with a Swinging Sixties London. The likes of The Beatles, The Who, and The Kinks jump on the soundtrack as the Minions are stuck in a vintage Bond meets Rube Goldberg meets Thunderbirds aesthetic. There are lots of visual gags from slapstick violence, cultural iconography, and teasing naughtiness – characters flailing every which way in loose hectic zaniness. In the center of it all, Kevin, Bob, and Stewart are Looney Tunes crossed with Three Stooges, pliable indestructible absurdities driven to get a job done, but too incompetent to do it right.

They bumble into conflict with a Tower Guard (Steve Coogan), a lanky inventor/torture chamber enthusiast (Jon Hamm), and the Queen (Jennifer Saunders), before Overkill herself turns on them. It's good for conflict. But the people and all their funny chattering and flailing can’t match the little yellow guys for appeal. The Minions have no emotional arc or great lessons to learn. Not even Gru could be so purely powered by id. They want their buddies. They want fun. They want bananas. They’ll do anything to get back to a comfortable status quo serving Saturday morning cartoon villainy. There are car chases, hypnosis, disguises, trap doors, elaborate weapons (a lava lamp gun was my favorite), and mad science gone wrong, but the stakes never feel all that high. (Look what happens to a time traveling scientist for an example of matters straight-faced horrifying this movie’s bouncy tone covers up.) It’s a simple jaunt through rubbery ridiculousness. Minions’ only interest is in tickling you into distraction.

Live and Let SPY

A big, broad action comedy, Spy works by using evergreen genre elements – in this case, secret agent thriller tropes – and taking them seriously. There’s a missing nuke floating around the black market and the CIA wants to stop its sale. The process involves evil arms dealers, slimy smugglers, fancy women, and clever gadgets. At every turn we find bruising hand-to-hand combat, bloody shootouts, and fast chases involving several modes of transportation. There are surprise reversals, unexpected reveals, and double, triple, quadruple crosses from agents in too deep. It plays like a rip-roaring globetrotting adventure. That it just so happens to be hilarious is even better. It’s the rare action comedy that holds up both ends of its bargain.

By treating genre elements so plainly – squint a little and it looks like a Bond movie – writer-director Paul Feig gets comedy out of writing scenes slightly askew from the norm. This isn’t a spoof or parody of the spy picture. No Austin Powers here. This is a full-on embrace of the spy picture. Its title sure isn’t lying to you. Spy is what it is, simply and funnily. In the center is Melissa McCarthy, working with Feig for the third time after Bridesmaids and The Heat. They’re having a productive collaboration turning the expected beats of a chosen comic subgenre slightly on its head through force of offbeat screen presences and his ability to get not just laughs, but genuine, affecting performances. Here Feig writes her a starring role in a take on an oft sexist genre and uses it to refute sexist assumptions. In scene after scene, a woman male colleagues dismiss gets the job done. Anything a Bond can do, she can do.

McCarthy plays a mild-mannered desk-bound agency employee, used to compiling dossiers and feeding field agents recon through their earpieces. Over the course of the movie, she’s forced into the field and there, after initial fish-out-of-water floundering, her talents bloom. Putting her in the place of the usual strong silent spy, dry quips become filthy barrages of exasperation and determination. She, an unassuming, underestimated agent, is called into an undercover mission because a baddie (Rose Byrne) is in possession of a list identifying all known agents. An unknown is needed to track Byrne down and take her out, especially since she’s also the one selling the loose nuke and has already removed one suave agent (Jude Law) from the equation. Scenes of espionage take on fresh interest as McCarthy gets an opportunity to be every persona in her range. She’s playing a sweet professional who’s out to prove her doubters wrong, slipping effortlessly into disguises: sad cat ladies, confident whirlwinds of profanity, and glamorous international women of mystery.

Between exposition, one-liners, and dirty insults, Spy is a rush of physical comedy and exciting action. Feig finds a balance between slapstick and violence, moving from tense to jokey, exciting to funny, gory to gross-out gags. It’s a tricky dance of tone pulled off with aplomb. The characters are appealing, the plotting is crisp and clear, and the stakes are silly and high. It’s the breeziest spy picture in ages, delighting in how light it is. It works because the writing is consistently clever, the performances are terrifically calibrated to straddle the demands of serious thriller mechanics and goofy comedy while still feeling consistent in character. The entire ensemble has great fun tweaking their images, playing familiar parts in eccentric directions.

Byrne is a delightful icy villain, while Law has a good time taking the suave superspy to a goofy place of dangerous unflappability. There’s a goofy assistant back at the base (Miranda Hart, in a role calling on eager happiness incongruous to the dire stakes), a no-nonsense superior (Allison Janney), and a greasy Big Bad (Bobby Cannavale, pickling his charm). Best is dependable man-of-action Jason Statham as a macho master spy frustrated after being sidelined by McCarthy. He blusters about her inadequacies while bumbling his way through the story, making things worse for everyone. Showcasing a welcome sense of humor, he pokes fun at his usual roles. At one point he rattles off a list of exaggerated near-death experiences from prior missions – “I once drove a car off a freeway on top of a train while I was on fire” – that’s both amusingly hyperbolic and could easily be actual scenes from his filmography.

And yet McCarthy’s the clear star here. Her arc is treated respectfully without losing sight of her comic gifts. Even when she tumbles out of a scooter or vomits over a corpse, the joke's with her, not at her expense. She's in command of every scene. It’s one of her finest, funniest performances, terrific sight gags and muttered asides keeping the laughs flowing while building up real affection and sympathy for her character. She moves between slippery false identities, slowly increasing a core of self-esteem while becoming a very good spy. She shows her character’s progression filtering through layers of disguises in action. It helps that Feig is a more confident visual stylist with each film he makes. Spy looks, sounds, and moves not like a comedy, but like any big studio thriller, glossy and expensive. The surface sheen makes it all the funnier as it moves so fleetly through its exciting silliness. I was more thrilled and amused by McCarthy's espionage than many non-comic movie spies'.

Road to Somewhere: TAMMY

Melissa McCarthy is a movie star and that makes me very happy. It’s not just that she’s incredibly likable, intensely sympathetic, and awfully funny in everything I’ve seen her in. She’s also a woman who is over forty and isn’t a supermodel. Even when she is in a bad movie, she’s wonderful. That her talent and charm is recognized on a level that makes her an Oscar nominee and a bona fide box office draw is good enough. That she has chosen to cash in on this recognition by writing herself a starring role in a big studio movie, then made room for a generous ensemble of beloved actresses of all ages, shapes, and sizes is even better. Tammy, which she co-wrote with her husband Ben Falcone, who also directs and appears in a brief role, is an unkempt road trip comedy that pokes around Midwestern towns, celebrating underdogs wherever it may find them. It’s a little scattershot, a little uneven, and the direction creaks with the slips of a safe first-time filmmaker shooting blandly, putting the camera in a spot to capture the comedy and little more. But when jokes land it’s gut-bustingly hilarious, and when they miss, at least the film is still so warm and generous.

That generosity of spirit stands out in stark contrast to the rest of the Hollywood comedy machine. So often R-rated comedies (and many PG-13, and some of the PG) are purposelessly crass, uncomfortable, and mean-spirited, usually omnidirectionally, but mostly punching down to those least worth laughing at. Look at how smug a Grown Ups or Horrible Bosses or Bad Teacher can be, asking us to sympathize with obliviously privileged upper-middle-class (almost exclusively white) people being cruel to each other and laughing at those who would stand in their way, or worse, dare to exist outside their group. The quiet revolution of Tammy is the way it finds compassion for characters of all types. At its center is a working-class woman whose blundering rudeness is a cover for her insecurity. She comes by her sloppiness honestly. She’s ground down by the world and the  movie decides to help her pick herself back up. She has a good heart underneath her surface slob – tangled hair, greasy T-shirts, baggy shorts, clutter and litter – and the movie is kind enough to see that.

It starts with the woman of the title late for work at a KFC knockoff. Her car’s busted after she hit a deer or, as she puts it, a deer hit her. It’s the last straw, so her boss fires her. After throwing a comical fit through the cheap restaurant – “That’s not chicken!” she hollers at the patrons – she storms home and finds her husband (Nat Faxon) cheating on her with a neighbor (Toni Collette). Then, tearfully trying to maintain composure, her suitcase breaks open, spilling belongings every which way as she leaves. Tammy can’t take it. She storms over to see her mother (Allison Janney) and demands the car keys, vowing to leave their stupid small town once and for all. Her grandmother (Susan Sarandon) thinks that sounds good, packs her booze, and runs away with her. Together they set off for Niagara Falls, but one thing after another (a jet ski accident, drunken disorderly behavior, and more) puts roadblocks in their path. They’re loud, wild, and difficult, quick to bristle at any slights real or perceived. They’re quite a pair. 

The loose, episodic plotting takes them to campgrounds, roadside diners, a BBQ, liquor stores, fast food joints, jail, and a lakeside mansion owned by a distant relative (Kathy Bates at her most lovable). From time to time, it even threatens to tip over into a small-time caper. There’s a pair of robbery scenes that had me laughing hysterically through McCarthy’s fumbling bravado, clumsy mannerisms, and others’ reactions to her. Through it all Tammy struggles with finding a new, more productive path for her life and her randy grandma struggles with alcohol. There are moments of real drama between them, as drunken sniping hurts and diabetes is deadly serious. But mostly it’s a lark that regards their plight with sympathy. It’s a road movie without much of a sense of direction and once in a while spins it wheels, but that seems to match the lead duo’s lives pretty well.

As setbacks, both accidental and self-inflicted, weigh her down, Tammy just keeps charging forward. There’s this small gesture that never fails to make me snicker. She moves forward with total slapstick confidence until she pauses for a brief flicker of doubt – am I behaving strangely? – before doubling down on her commitment to whatever physical gag she’s in the middle of. McCarthy is as dexterous with slapstick as she is with banter and petulant outbursts of profanity. Here she’s a star who lets others share center stage, as generous as the movie she wrote. Everyone, from Sarandon and Bates, to small roles for Gary Cole, Mark Duplass, Sandra Oh, and Sarah Baker (of the terrific monologue that was the high-point of the most recent season of Louie), do fine, charming work. It’s the rare comedy that likes just about everyone, except for the few who deserve a smidge of scorn. But even that goes soft by the end, for the most part.

This sweet, charming, warm-hearted movie is a fun, shaggy, hangout with loveable misfits on a likable self-improvement journey, even if they didn’t realize it at the time. It’s worth the trip. By the end, it’s been a noncondescending Fourth-of-July Midwest tour celebrating the drunk, the sloppy, the unlucky, and the striving, while recognizing their need to make changes for the better. It’s a loving movie full of all manner of average folk: mothers, daughters, and granddaughters; lesbians; fast food workers; bluegrass bands; police officers; farmers; low-level criminals. And they’re all okay in Tammy’s eyes. It ends up being a holiday-weekend tribute to America, land of rough edges and kind hearts, where a woman with a mess of a life can head out into the heartland and figure herself out.

A Dog and His Boy: MR. PEABODY & SHERMAN

Mr. Peabody (Ty Burrell) is far and away the smartest dog in the world. I’m not just talking smart like Snoopy, or even smart like Stan the talking, blogging dog of Dog with a Blog. Mr. Peabody is a genius. He’s an inventor, a scholar, a scientist, and the founder and C.E.O. of Peabody Industries. For his contributions to the pursuit of knowledge, he’s been awarded a Nobel Prize. That’s some dog. But perhaps his most notable achievement is his win in the historic court case for his right to adopt a human child. The judge decided that someone as accomplished as Mr. Peabody could surely be trusted with such a task and so the bespectacled beagle is awarded custody of Sherman (Max Charles), a red-haired, big-eyed infant orphan eager to learn and grow. They make a good pair and have for many years. Seeing as Mr. Peabody & Sherman opens with the boy as a seven-year-old, this intelligent canine has clearly discovered the secret to expanding dog lives. I wouldn’t put it past him.

These cartoon characters have been around since the late 1950s when they debuted on TV with Ted Key's Peabody’s Improbable History, part of Jay Ward’s Rocky and Bullwinkle. Their new feature length reboot comes courtesy of DreamWorks Animation, director Rob Minkoff (The Lion King, Stuart Little) outfitting them with a bright primary color world full of soft and shiny CGI of appealing rubberiness. Now, as then, their story hinges on Mr. Peabody’s most amazing invention, one he keeps secret out of necessity. It’s a time machine. He uses it to teach Sherman about history by letting him observe it in action. They call it the WABAC Machine (say it out loud if you don’t get it). Since the rules of time travel movies dictate that time must be put in disarray, the better to send our protagonists lost in time desperate to fix mistakes, you know the first time you see the spinning red vehicle bleeping its way through wormholes that something will go wrong soon.

But you might not expect to see a film that takes the father/son relationship seriously, especially taking into consideration the canine factor. Sherman gets into a fight with a snooty girl at school (Ariel Winter) and, in a moment of frustration, bites her. In storms a towering social worker (Allison Janney), glaring at Mr. Peabody and sniffing that such behavior is to be expected letting a dog raise a child. It’s a fine stand-in for knee-jerk condemnation of unconventional family structures. Even better is the film’s insistence that getting to know people melts away prejudices. Why, that super-smart dog is not so different from us after all! Peabody invites the bitten girl and her parents (Stephen Colbert and Leslie Mann) over for a dinner party in the hopes of smoothing the conflict and preventing the social worker from deciding to take Sherman away. 

But, even before the first course, the kids end up sneaking into the WABAC and rocketing into the past. Told you that time machine would cause some trouble. What follows is a mashup of famous times and faces as the kids bounce into Ancient Egypt, running into King Tut (Zach Callison) before dashing away, desperate for Peabody’s help. So it’s two kids and a dog racing through time, interrupting an Egyptian wedding ceremony, Leonardo Da Vinci (Stanley Tucci) in the middle of painting Mona Lisa (Lake Bell), and Agamemnon (Patrick Warburton) and his army huddled in a giant wooden horse. The movie moves at a fast, but never frantic, pace as it finds pleasantly elastic history. A mix of brisk caricature and actual interest in facts, the script by Craig Wright (with additional dialogue by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon) finds amusing little details and gigglingly over-the-top accents at each stop. There’s an Egyptian who is way too excited about the mummification process. Mona Lisa is too tired from sitting around all day to smile. And I especially liked the portrayal of Odysseus as not exactly the sharpest guy around. I mean, it’ll take him long enough to get home, right?

In its brisk, colorful cartooniness, Mr. Peabody & Sherman is often funny. It leans heavily on gags and puns – when a mummy loses an arm, the dog quips, “That’s disarming” – with a welcome emphasis on clever silliness. And yet there is rubbery rigor in the time travel mechanics, enough to tickle my inner timeline nerdiness without leaping beyond the understanding of its target audience. It’s entertaining, but never taxing. Part of what makes it so comfortable are the warm and appealing voice performances, especially Burrell’s Peabody, quaint and inviting with a pinched ivory tower voice sparkling with a love of learning and of wordplay. He was never adopted as a puppy because he was too sarcastic. Aw. It’s fun to fly through history with him as a guide.

As with so many modern animated family films, through all the bouncy movement, sly references, and quick slapstick, everything hinges on the emotional state of the family. It is as if adults who go to these with children need reassurance that they’re doing okay. In this film, the father/son relationship is movingly developed, from an early montage of backstory set to John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” to the key climactic moment that’s nothing more than a show of familial solidarity, the dénouement an exchange of fatherly “I love you.” It may be just a silly time travel comedy about a dog and his boy, but a father’s love for his son (and son for father) outlasting all the tribulations of all time is a lovely thought.

Everybody Hurts: MARGARET

Margaret’s two-and-a-half hour run time is a jumble of themes and scenes, adding up to a deeply affecting, bogglingly complex picture of human emotion and moral quandaries. It’s a film that feels sifted, chopped, and cajoled into being. It's a powerful, sweeping yet intimate collection of moments that build towards a powerful, unexpected climax: a thorough evocation of its difficult characters living lives in a recognizable world. It’s rich and thought provoking.

The film is a quintessential sophomore effort, bigger in ambition, weightier in scope, risking a mess. Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, after the 2000 release of his terrific, small-scale debut You Can Count on Me, filmed this in the fall of 2005. Since then, the film has been wrangled around in post-production under a cloud of unhelpful lawsuits and countersuits between the studio and financiers, conflict between the director and the editors, and even the deaths of two of the producers. Getting the film finished at all with so much strife puts Lonergan on a short list with Terry Gilliam of directors who work with a potent mix of genius, patience, and bad luck. The final product proves the struggle was worth it. 

Margaret is about Lisa, a teenage girl (Anna Paquin) who is startlingly, frustratingly real. Her moods swing wildly. She can be pleasant and flirty or a snapping vindictive twerp. She’s just a kid, one capable of great precociousness and blind to the overwhelming extent of her own naïveté. Living in relative privilege with her stage actress mother (J. Smith-Cameron) and her little brother (Cyrus Hernstadt) in New York City, she has little practical reason to involve herself in anything but the constructed conflict that arises out of the typical teen problems. 

She fights with her family. She’s attracted to two of her peers (John Gallagher Jr. and Kieran Culkin) and can’t quite sort out her feelings. One of her teachers (Matt Damon) has caught her cheating on her geometry tests. Another, her English teacher (Matthew Broderick), strikes her as dorky, yet his readings of poetic language are sometimes moving in a way she can’t find words to express. These are all common enough adolescent problems, sources of angst that fade with maturity and age. She’s still in the midst of sorting out competing impulses and emotions. Then, one day while wandering the streets of the city in search of a cowboy hat to buy, she catches the eye of a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) as he pulls away from the curb. He’s wearing a cowboy hat. She tries to run after the bus, hoping to get the chance to ask him where he bought his hat. In this brief moment of distraction, the bus hits a pedestrian (Allison Janney).

Lisa feels responsible for the accident and lies to the police to protect the driver. But then, the memory of the incident eats away at her. She’s deeply affected, rattled, disturbed and distressed. And yet the world moves on. Her mother finds a new boyfriend (Jean Reno). Her teachers keep teaching. Her friends (Olivia Thirlby and Sarah Steele) keep chattering. The boys are still interested in her. The world keeps spinning. And yet how can it keep spinning when she has been in the middle of such a traumatic incident, an out-of-the-blue moment of violence for which her sense of culpability is eating her alive, is churning her emotions, won’t let her rest easy? So she lashes out. (Several scenes in the film draw out a post-9/11 parallel with some potency.) She snaps at her mother. She cancels a trip to visit her father. She takes steps to contact the family of the woman hit by the bus and finds a strange sense of comfort in connecting with a woman (Jeannie Berlin) who was a friend of the victim. Lisa selfishly convinces her to sue, to keep the pain of the moment alive in the courts and hanging over the driver’s head. 

Though the plot is driven to a certain extent by the actions and emotions of Paquin, the film doesn’t rely for its impact on her alone. The supporting characters are so fully, tenderly realized with nuanced performances that weave into the frazzled fabric that they feel to be as startlingly, frustratingly real as the teenage girl they all come into contact with. Gallagher’s lovesick teen, Damon’s caring teacher, Ruffalo’s casually troubled bus driver, Culkin’s lothario, Janney’s dying woman and Berlin’s mourning friend all are so beautifully acted and wonderfully played that they add up to an ensemble of depth and interest. Each character feels fully realized, whether in a plot-line that feels edited down to evocative wisps or in a relationship – as in the sharply observed mother-daughter conflict — that slowly takes center stage. 

What’s most powerful about the film, what makes it such an emotional workout, is the way it manages to bottle a whiplash self-important precociousness of adolescence where grappling with deep and powerful philosophical and emotional topics still unknowingly creates an incredibly self-centered point of view. This is a film about a girl who slowly begins to realize that others are not merely supporting characters in the opera of her life.

Out of the cast, J. Smith-Cameron stands out. As the mother, she exudes thwarted warmth, a caring compassion that is ineffective and unreceived by the adolescent angst to which it is directed. She makes her living embodying emotions of characters, yet she finds herself frustrated by the difficulties of “playing” the mother. In a terrific scene, she argues with her daughter, devolving into a great mimic of her behavior. She plays the part, but she has no reference for her own identity. She'll be there for her daughter whenever her daughter rediscovers the need for maternal comfort. This is an example of the film’s beneficial looseness and choppiness. A character of great depth and thematic importance seems to float in and out of focus, ultimately useful, but not always clear. 

In total, the film is an expertly written, breathtakingly acted, experience, an interior epic that reconciles its lack of cohesion and conventional narrative within an emotional framework that makes intuitive sense. Sitting near the front of the theater with the towering screen revealing all the more strikingly the film’s visual powers – a scene from a low angle seeing a taxi cab suddenly, subtly surrounded by a canyon of buses felt nearly overwhelming, echoing the girl’s towering confusion. How often can you sit and feel a crowd wrestling with a film so emotionally and thematically dense and articulate, so deeply felt and so smartly filmed? The brilliance of Lonergan’s film is the way it invites us into the life of a character and is unafraid to explore, to allow plot points to exist and breathe like life events, to grow and develop, to wither or fade at their own paces. It’s truly some masterpiece.

Lonergan features a prominent allusion to a quote from George Bernard Shaw, tossed off and referenced casually, illuminating themes with which the film is playing. The full quote, from the 1903 play Man and Superman, is one character’s condemnation of another’s “regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in, [which] occasionally leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people’s necessities.” This is a film about just that. Growing up is hard to do. Learning how to interact with others is complicated. Margaret is a sprawling evocation of this hard, complicated mess.