Note Worthy: MARIA, BETTER MAN,A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

Musical biopics tend to work better when they’re working a thesis about the performer in question. It’s certainly preferable to a dutiful recounting of their life story that’s somehow less entertaining than finding the original concert footage and reading their Wikipedia page. In the case of Pablo Larraín’s Maria, the thesis about opera singer Maria Callas is somehow the same as the ones in his dreamy, subjective approaches to Jackie Kennedy in Jackie and Princess Diana in Spencer. The read on each figure is: look, how beautiful, how troubled, how resilient, how tragic. Fair enough. I happen to like those movies’ cramped opulence and grainy wooziness and temporal limits as acting showcases on a pedestal of swirling style. This one’s more of the same. It has Angelina Jolie lip-syncing to Callas’ diamond-cutting voice crackling with lyrical vibrato and tearful tremulousness. The film takes place largely in the singer’s final weeks as she struggles to regain her voice, seemingly wanting to sing more than live. There are also some flashbacks to a moment in her career during which she’s romanced by Aristotle Onassis. (An appearance by JFK hints at a Larraín biopic cinematic universe.) This funeral march uses Jolie’s contradictory qualities as well as any of her best non-Tomb Raider performances—Girl, Interrupted’s mental patient, By the Sea’s troubled wife, Maleficent’s wounded witch. She’s a stunning statuesque figure wielding sturdy charisma and steady fragility. The movie never quite fully activates an interesting narrative around Maria, but it consistently provides a beautiful look—Ed Lachman bringing faded cool colors in shooting a finely upholstered production design—and an enveloping mood. There are worse ways to spend a couple hours than hanging out with a movie star in lovely images that let one contemplate opera music.

An even more obvious thesis biopic is Better Man, an authorized recounting of Brit-pop’s bad boy Robbie Williams’ career so far. He came from a troubled family to join a 90’s boy band, and then go solo. It’s a typical arc from foundational childhood pain to fluke sudden success to sex, drugs, and gossip columns. What makes it atypical is the fact that he’s played here by a CG monkey in a musical that uses Williams’ songs to explain his emotional states. Who’d have thought, watching the recent motion-capture performances in the terrific recent Planet of the Apes films of the past decade, that one day the technology would be put to use for a metaphor of pop stardom? That it nearly works—sustaining its meager insight and mild visual interest for nearly the entirety of a feature length effort—is credit to director Michael Gracey. He gives it plenty of amped-up pizzazz in musical sequences with lots of extras, zippy editing, and fancy camera work. The best is a number stunningly done in a single stitched-together take that flows unblinkingly through multiple vehicles, buildings, and streets as talented dancers (and one animated monkey) hoof it with the right razzle-dazzle. Following up his fun debut feature The Greatest Showman, Gracey’s becoming the go-to guy for fantastical musicals that are more “inspired by” than factual accountings of a real person’s life. This one, though oddly more true, is not as good, because it’s bogged down in so many of the usual rise-fall-rise cliches and dreary dramatic scenes where dialogue expresses what the dancing could do and had done. Gracey’s strength, however, remains his emotional shorthand, which hits all the harder for flying so quickly it outraces its obviousness. It’s just more unevenly deployed here. And there’s only so much novelty to the monkey metaphor before it all feels overfamiliar again. It remains so purely metaphorical, with his simian appearance never acknowledged as real by anyone on screen, that it stretches its insight—he feels like a wild animal, or a trained zoo act—quite thinly. But Robbie Williams made some catchy pop songs, and there’s real earnest wildness here that keeps it from being entirely tiresome. If nothing else, looking at this monkey in all these standard biopic scenes certainly makes the sex part of sex and drugs weirder to contemplate.

A thesis about Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is that he’s ultimately unknowable, which could be a cheap trick to wiggle out of telling us anything about the man, but in practice makes his trickster inscrutability itself too vivid to ignore. All the best Dylan movies—Todd Haynes’ kaleidoscopic re-castings in I’m Not There, the self-contradictory interviews of classic verité doc Don’t Look Back—realize this. He’s both completely earnest and totally joking, a brilliant, purposeful writer and a persuasive crafter of public persona. Somehow he’s simultaneously earnestly artful and an impish improviser. He’s deliberately cultivating a mystique, and sometimes just a jerk. Either way he’s a poet and a genius and this movie is more about how people react to him than anything else. And then it pushes back with his own confusion about who others want him to be. That’s nice tension finely dramatized. The sturdy meat-and-potatoes Hollywood craft of this new film quite effectively communicates why people responded so strongly to his work, and why some would feel a sense of betrayal when he went electric. The movie ends with that divisive moment in his career, but begins with his arrival in the New York City folk music scene of the early 1960s, and follows his rise to fame before concluding with him trading his acoustic guitar for that electric one. Mangold, who also co-wrote with frequent Scorsese co-writer Jay Cocks, brings a fine sense of pacing and placing to the events, and fills the picture with loving recreations of the sights and sounds of the time, including tons of satisfying musical performances. It helps us understand how Dylan hit big, and returns to these old classics some of the shock of the new. We see him through the eyes of: folksy singer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who takes him under his wing; sweet college activist Sylvie (Elle Fanning), who falls in love with him; sharp, ambitious Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who’s as much a collaborator and competitor as love interest; and various other music industry types who try to pin him down from managers and programmers to Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). (That means Mangold, whose Cash picture Walk the Line was two decades ago, also has a biopic universe at play.) Dylan himself is played by Timothée Chalamet in a proficient impersonation that also always seems like Chalamet putting on an act. Maybe that’s the point. So is Bob.

Almighty Then: ETERNALS

The first thing we see in Eternals, before the first sequence and even before the Marvel Studios logo, are the words “In the beginning…” Lifting from the Bible for an opening info dump sure sets a tone. You can tell right away this is a superhero movie of unusual hubris. Here we find the creators of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, high off the smash culmination of their first multi-franchise finale, 2019’s absurdly popular Avengers Endgame, starting to mistake their comic book lore for actual mythology and take it as seriously as the ancients did.

The result is a centuries-spanning story following immortal beings sent to Earth to guide humankind’s development by protecting people from carnivorous computer-generated critters until such time that enormous intergalactic celestial masters send for their return. They’ve mostly done that job, and are in their 500th year of waiting for the next assignment, when the Eternals must confront an apocalyptic threat of which only they are aware, since the seeds of this destruction have been incubating since prehistoric times. So, although the main thrust of the movie is the far-flung members of the mostly-disbanded team wandering around collecting their compatriots one at a time to confront this crisis, the movie begins with the dawn of the Bronze Age and contains numerous flashbacks to a number of ancient cultures and modern historical moments. The mix of real myth and history with Marvel’s filigrees is sometimes fun—I liked how the Eternals are an explanation for gods and heroes of yore (Athena, Gilgamesh, and so on)—but just as often it is slathered with a phony religiosity that amplifies the sometimes chintzy visual thinking and cliched writing on display. It’s a cosmic leap with an anvil tied to its feet.

Inspired by characters from Jack Kirby, the movie lacks his spark of divine madness in dashing out incomprehensible intergalactic gods and monsters. But it does have ambition I want to admire. It stretches across time and space, concerns itself with the birth and death of the universe and the alien midwives of solar systems. That’s potentially profound nonsense. The movie is at its best when it deals casually with the intersection of the mortal and immortal. Some of their kind seems to float above it all—Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek dimming their bright star-power to intone exposition and disappear into muddy colors. But others are in direct collision between their ageless powers and human fragility. Leader Sersi (Gemma Chan) tentatively romances a mortal teacher (Kit Harington). Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) has enjoyed being every member of a Bollywood dynasty, hiding his finger-gun powers for a song-and-dance screen heroism. A perpetually-preteen Sprite (Lia McHugh) has some pathos derived from never growing older. (There are also some odd questions about her the movie just barely skirts around.) Technologically inclined Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) laments what humans have done with his gifts to them, while the mind-controlling Druig (Barry Keoghan) wishes he could just zap the minds of the masses and quell all conflict. (Worth a shot, right?) The movie gazes at their conflicts from an inhuman remove, but the camera hovers close to their whispered melodrama and angst. We can see why they haven’t done more to help stop humanity’s problems—they’re too busy moping around about it. They love us from afar, distant gods shaking their heads and wandering away for awhile.

The movie perches this massive idea on the usual Marvel mechanics—super-beings on a MacGuffin quest in route to a final effects reel—and writing. The gears turn. The simple story is told complicatedly to preserve meager surprises. The balance is all out of whack, cosmological woo-woo cut with a soupçon of deflating quips. As the team assembles for the climactic showdown, they banter and quip and feel sorry for the state of humanity and themselves. The apocalypse is well on its way, and the only way to stop it is for them to take drastic action on the margins of our awareness. Somehow the movie gathers both real portent and dopey interpersonal japes. There are some lovely or amusing character beats bubbling up in what’s otherwise drowned in the po-faced pseudo-spirituality draped over the sunlit hero shots and awestruck sentimentality. The film comes to us from writer-director Chloe Zhao, who has so often been good at that exact balance, a neo-Malickian flair for star personas set against quotidian beauty of her cultural tourism. But here it lacks the poetic gleam that animated her indie character studies against the backdrop of the American West, like The Rider or her Oscar-winning Nomadland. It does film most of its big sequences outdoors, which does lend the images a different texture than the usual Marvel green-screen, parking-lot blandness.

Small pleasures in an enormous, occasionally confused bore is par for the course with this mega-franchise lately, but this one wrestles over it more than most. The issue sits in the unbalanced approach, spinning wildly, if cheaply, to humanize characters who are themselves entirely apart from us. The usual Marvel cutting-down-to-size works with heroes who deal with real human emotion. Here, though, we’re in the realm of myth, and the lightness sometimes clangs. So, too, the attempts to stare up at these deities, which is the more interesting cosmic philosophical tussling—faint echoes of Snyder’s DC approach. (Interestingly Superman and Batman are referenced as often as Iron Man and Captain America in this movie.) It literalizes the latent authoritarianism that sits uncomfortably beneath the MCU’s worst impulses of the sort that assure us the powerful have our best interests at heart and we should just let them take unilateral action on our behalf. (It still chafes that Civil War made this argument flat out.) Eternals wrestles with the idea, with a calamity that truly only these heroes could address, and makes the villain ultimately think bringing about the end of the world will benefit him personally. (He must vote Republican.) But it also goes easy on its Eternals, with obvious decisions to make amid jokes and juggling tones that cheapens the film’s fleeting ideas. The machinery doesn’t let the movie express its philosophy visually, dumping it into the cast’s poses and monologues before making them just another set of action figures to move around the board. It ends as they all do, with last-minute rescues, slam-back fisticuffs, swirling pixels, and a chain of teases for future MCU projects. So it goes.

The Lady Grieve: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD

It’s a total fluke of Hollywood’s pandemic scheduling that brings to streaming this weekend two mid-budget studio thrillers with movie star turns for middle-aged actresses. That they both center on women drawn into strangers’ high-stakes dramas while suffering from their own near-debilitating flashbacks to past trauma is just another coincidence, I suppose. If only they were both terrific. Alas, Netflix got the short end of the stick there, having picked up The Woman in the Window as damaged goods when it was sold off to the highest bidder. (20th Century Fox made the adaptation of the bestselling mystery novel back in 2018 — we don’t even need to go into the even wilder story of how the author was later exposed as a habitual con artist and fraudster in a lengthy New Yorker piece — before getting acquired by Disney, which forced reshoots that delayed the release, at which point the theaters were closed and, well, here we are.) Even if you didn’t know it was a troubled picture, it’d be clear right away it’s a muddled one. Director Joe Wright (Atonement) and screenwriter Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) have been given a pretty junky piece of source material, a transparent Rear Window rip-off in which an agoraphobic child psychologist (Amy Adams) spies some suspicious behavior from her new neighbors. The filmmakers treat the set-up as an excuse to swoop through a creaky townhouse, peer out windows, and glide across dark rooms as reality gets slippery. Eventually we get a host of marquee actors (Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Anthony Mackie, Wyatt Russell, Brian Tyree Henry) cycling through Adams’ home as she gets increasingly confused about what, exactly, is going on across the street.

With hysterical accusations, devious deceptions, potential psychosis and psychopathy, and convoluted conflicts, every scene could, and maybe should, be an excuse to chow down on ham, but the film somehow never delivers on that potential. The actors stand around waiting for the main course that never arrives. The whole thing is routine as can be, with dark and stormy nights, and gaslighting suspects, and circular arguments, pile-ups of red herrings, and boy, I wonder if Hitchcock himself could’ve made Google searches a compelling source of thrills. The picture looks as dim and muddy as its plotting. Wright doesn’t even bring his usual stylish flourishes with any consistency, which makes for a curiously restrained and sleepy spelunking into bloated paperback surprises. At best it’ll throw a clip from a Hitchcock movie on our lead’s TV, which might be a cute tip-of-the hat if it wasn’t merely a reminder of how far craft has fallen in a case like this. Even the big twists just meekly peek out and slide off, one more shrug before you go. At least Adams, much better served here than by the dismal Hillbilly Elegy, for whatever that’s worth, gets to put the entire lousy picture on her shoulders and nearly carry it solo to the finish line. She inhabits every loose nerve ending and boozy pill-popping distraction as her character’s unraveling unconvincingly brings her closer to actually leaving the house.

Much better is the straight shooter Those Who Wish Me Dead. Its opening act is a bow drawn simply back; the next 75 minutes or so are a direct flight of an arrow to a fiery conclusion. There’s something admirable about its easy confidence and sturdy execution. The thing delivers where it counts. The story starts with a boy and his father (Finn Little and Jake Weber) on the run from bad guys (Nicholas Hoult and Aidan Gillen) who want them dead. They flee to Montana, where you just know they’ll cross paths with the small-town cop (Jon Bernthal) and the troubled forest service firefighter (Angelina Jolie) whose introductions have been cross-cut with the rising action. Directed and co-written by Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water), with author Michael Koryta from his novel, the quick blooded tension rises fast. Soon enough, the film becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse game — machine gun hunters and their vulnerable prey — stalking through the woods. Shades of fairy tale logic, perhaps, with a little boy lost in the forest, wolves on his heels, a woodsman caught in a trap, and a beautiful lady by a lake who just might be able to help him survive. But the thing is too much a grizzled non-nonsense snap of a genre effort to push overmuch on its potential fable qualities. Instead, it rests on Jolie as an engine of redemption, a woman given a desk job, of sorts, after a deadly fire outcome that weighs heavily on her mind. Now there’s a rattled child who needs rescue. It’s easy to root for them.

The movie is short and simple, and all the more effective for knowing just how to lean on its best elements. It helps that Jolie, one of our great modern movie stars, has rarely had a straightforward starring role in the last decade—just four times above the title in live action and two of them were as Maleficent. She commands the screen and exudes competence, even in a role that’s so thinly drawn that there’s nothing else but her star power to generate interest. The plot itself, too, is built from stock parts, but Sheridan knows how to stage his thrills with brutal efficiency. The tension — close up threats against the wide open national park spaces — builds on a steady upswing as the various participants try to keep their cool and their control through strategies that eventually lead to gun fights and, by the end, a raging forest fire. There are efficient thrills to the sturdy brutality of its inevitable violence, the quickly sketched sympathy for the victims, and the consistently well-timed escalations of danger. If the movie still finds time for some loose ends — what’s in the letter? and did that Big Name villain just drive off after his one scene in hopes of a sequel? — there’s pretty much nothing important that isn’t driven to its logical conclusion. We don’t get solid mid-level star vehicles often enough any more. At least this one’s pretty good.

Village of Pandas: KUNG FU PANDA 3

A fine conclusion to its trilogy, Kung Fu Panda 3 is as energetic and visually dazzling as you’d hope and expect from one of DreamWorks Animation’s very best franchises. What’s so continually satisfying about this series is its tradition of making what are effectively animated kung fu movies. Sure, they feature anthropomorphic cartoon animals living in a cartoony simulacrum of ancient China. But these are films with interfamily conflict, wizards and warlords, masters and students, training montages, action balanced between clever slapstick and dangerous dance, and heaps of mystical spirituality where inner peace and self-knowledge are the most effective skills and power the most awesome moves. I like imagining that somewhere there’s a kid who gets into vintage Jackie Chan or Shaw Brothers films because they’re so over the moon about this fun string of movies about a panda who learns to be a kung fu master.

These movies are plenty fun on their own terms, too. 3 picks up with Po the panda (Jack Black) and his kung fu teammates (tiger Angelina Jolie, mantis Seth Rogen, viper Lucy Liu, crane David Cross, and monkey Jackie Chan) enjoying down time in the peaceful valley they’ve saved twice over. Having become The Dragon Warrior and coming to peace with his tragic past, what’s left for Po to do? Well, Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) tells Po he needs to complete his training by finding inner strength. To do so, he must truly know who he is. Luckily enough, his long-lost biological father (Bryan Cranston) shows up in the village, eager to reconnect with the son he had to abandon all those years ago, and teach him the panda way. This gets Po excited, even though his adopted goose father (James Hong) fears his little panda cub will leave him forever. There’s a moving and special adoption story told with care through these silly figures.

But what would a kung fu movie be without external conflict? This one has a growling bull (J.K. Simmons), a villain defeated five centuries ago, escape from the spirit realm with an army of solid jade henchmen in tow. He’s on the rampage, out to capture the souls of all kung fu practitioners who stand in his way, and turn their lifeless bodies into more zombie soldiers to do his bidding. To learn how to defeat them, Po must travel to a secret panda village where maybe, just maybe, he can connect with ancient, long-forgotten panda magic. Screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger neatly – maybe too neatly – tie together his inner struggles with the needs of the action plot, leaving plenty of time to deliver heaping helpings of cute roly-poly panda antics. They’re adorable, and love to eat, hug, roll, dance, and sleep. What’s not to like? And then, when it’s time to get serious about defeating evil, they spring into action with the best of them.

Returning director Jennifer Yuh, who last time around broke the record for highest-grossing feature directed by a woman, works with co-director Alessandro Carloni (a longtime DreamWorks artist) to stage the film in bright, beautiful colors. It’s an extravagant explosion of fast-paced visual delights, swirling primary hues filling out lush exteriors and intricate architecture, snapping into high-contrast action when the adventure gets going. Where plot and character are concerned, this is a repetition, a riff on previous conflicts with character arcs consisting of reworked aspects of the first two films. But in motion, the movie moves and sings with contagious energy, each image colorful and intricately designed, bursting with zippy and clever choreography. Best are a mêlée that finds unexpectedly productive kung fu uses for pandas’ inherently cute lazy habits and bookending vibrant zero-g clashes in the spirit realm smashing swirls of glowing magic light through floating boulders.

The story boils down to the same be-yourself platitudes so many family films do, but at least it has the decency to be woo-woo mysto about it, and use it to hold up exciting, amusing, trippy, and striking imagery. The animators bring an elaborate fantasy look of the kind DreamWorks has been trying out these days (with this series, as well as their How to Train Your Dragons, Rise of the Guardians, and The Croods), even throwing split screens, hand-drawn interludes, and extreme color gradients into the mix of lush and buoyant imagery. As a combination reiteration and finale of the trilogy, it may not have the novelty of the first, or the weight of the second, but it is fun. If this is the last we see of Kung Fu Panda, it is a worthy conclusion and a perfect place to stop: with Po learning to love his two dads and be his best self, and with confetti, transcendence, warm and fuzzy reunions, and an angelic choir singing Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting” in Chinese translation.

Survivor of the Fittest: UNBROKEN

Unbroken tells a true story with bright, well-built, Hollywood epic storytelling. That’s fitting, since its subject, Louis Zamperini, lived a full and amazing life, built out of the stuff movies are made of. He’s a man for whom the adspeak “incredible true story” seems to have been made. He was born in 1917, became a juvenile delinquent, then a high school track star, an Olympic athlete, a World War II bombardier whose plane was lost at sea, a captive in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and a survivor of all the above. I’m sure he was one of the only people who could’ve seen Memphis Belle, Bridge on the River Kwai, Stalag 17, Chariots of Fire, and Life of Pi in their original theatrical runs and see something of his own life experience reflected back at him.

The film is an effective dramatization by turns unflinching – gaunt bodies caked in dirt and blood – and sentimental – wistful flashbacks and swelling score. It’s button pushing in that way. It coasts on the easily apparent drama of the story itself, which certainly has enough surface incident to fill a run time. It starts in the skies over the Pacific front in the middle of WWII, a tense dogfight shot completely inside Zamperini’s plane. We linger behind the various gunners and pilots, watching as small dots grow into enemy fighters, spraying bullets and getting return fire. It’s exciting stuff, brightly lit, displayed with convincing effects courtesy Industrial Light and Magic. We then cut back to our hero’s early life, following childhood scrapes through his Olympic competition, notable backstory swiftly filled in. Then we’re back to the war, where his dangers are just beginning.

Directed with smooth competence by Angelina Jolie from a screenplay with credited drafts by Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese, and William Nicholson, the film has clear admiration for Zamperini’s resilience. They’re most concerned with portraying his indomitable spirit, returning again and again to his face as Jack O’Connell plays the man staring purposefully past the problems at hand. He’s stranded on a lifeboat with the survivors of his plane’s crash (Finn Wittrock, Domhnall Glesson). They’re lucky enough to be rescued, but unlucky enough to find their rescuers are the enemy. He ends up at a POW camp where he’s beaten by a cruel Japanese sergeant (Miyavi), and falls in with the scarred and weary prisoners (Garrett Hedlund, Luke Treadaway). He looks purposefully into every obstacle, the punches, the backbreaking labor, the blood and bruises. He grits his teeth and lives to see another day. He’s unbreakable.

What gives Zamperini the strength to go on? How did he survive? Was it luck or happenstance? Determination or divine intervention? Optimism or sloganeering? I don’t know. The movie’s more enamored with the facts of his survival than investigating him as a character. It’s a surface level examination, which is fine when the plot’s hopping, but drags down the occasionally monotonous dark night of the soul in the POW camp. The film hits every big mark, but I was starving for small details to color in the time between. There’s never a sense of who the characters are, just what misery they’ve been through.

I couldn’t tell you much of anything about the people trapped in various conditions with Zamperini, or his family, or his captors. They’re simply facts of his life, the elements that make the miraculous extremes possible. There’s some great early details in the young man’s homelife, scenes of discipline, religion, and discovery of his talents. In some ways it plays like the opening moments of a superhero origin story. The film’s first hour is its best, time to follow an eventful life on its first, positive trajectory with energetic sequences of sports and war. But it seems to skip so quickly through these vital foundational moments that by the second hour it starts to feel like a catalogue of miserable incidents where I’d hoped to find a character study wrapped up in epic trappings. Instead, it’s all smaller.

But Unbroken is respectful, handsomely made, and technically proficient. Jolie has cinematographer Roger Deakins behind the camera and he does sharp, solid work. She has a fine cast, and they inhabit their roles convincingly. The editing is propulsive, the sound crackling, the score syrupy strong. In style and perspective – the square, proud, sturdy take – it could’ve been made more or less exactly like this ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more years ago. It’s old-fashioned, made with professionalism and care, but it’s also anonymously produced and a bit bland. There’s plenty of craftsmanship put into a story interesting enough on its own the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to really dig into the details. They simply evoke the big moments and trust our interest will follow enough to excuse the all-surface approach.

Like a Villain: MALEFICENT

Maleficent, the sorceress who gives Sleeping Beauty her cursed slumber, is one of Walt Disney Animation’s greatest accomplishments. Frightening and elegant, she has a tall, statuesque presence, high model features, towering horns growing from her head, and flowing dark robes swooshing around her. She glows green with dark magic, and by the end uses her powers to conjure the form of a dragon to fight off the Princess’s chances for True Love’s Kiss. She’s an iconic image. Thus the challenge for Maleficent, a live-action retelling of the story from the sorceress’s point of view. How to fill the role with a mere flesh and blood actor? How to recapture the power of those drawn images, so striking and so fearsome? Luckily, the filmmakers were able to meet the challenge and cast Angelina Jolie, whose high cheekbones, piercing eyes, and elegant silhouette make her an imposing presence when draped in the makeup and wardrobe to match the character’s iconic look. Here her eyes are fierce, her face is sculpted and angular. She’s a perfect fit.

But making Maleficent the center of this story is not without its problems. In the 1959 film, as in the fairy tale upon which it was based, she’s pure evil, bestowing an awful curse on an infant for her parent’s crime of failing to invite the witch to a party. Maleficent is a force of destruction and looms large over the plot as pure threat, casting a dark shadow over innocent first love, worried parents, and sweet dotty fairies in a colorful Disney kingdom. Maleficent is out to make some changes, moving the title character into the position of protagonist. This isn’t Sleeping Beauty of old. It opens with a narrator (Janet McTeer) telling us about two lands that sit side by side. One is a kingdom ruled by man. The other is a magical forest ruled by no one, the better for fairies, living trees, sprites, and other fanciful creatures to frolic freely. In this forest a young Maleficent lives, carefree until the day a man (Sharlto Copley) appears, tells her he loves her, and then steals her wings.

The man presents the wings to the dying king in order to be named his successor. Now the new king, he has a daughter. She is cursed on the day of her christening by the vengeful, violated Maleficent who lashes out at the man who hurt her by attacking his child. Hidden away in the forest by three largely incompetent fairies (Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville, and Juno Temple, great actresses doing bad comic relief), the baby grows up to be Aurora (Elle Fanning). Something - lingering guilt, perhaps, over hurting a child for the crimes of her father – makes Maleficent hang around, offering unseen assistance to Aurora as she grows, becoming something like a fairy godmother to her. And so, regretting her curse, Maleficent and her raven sidekick (Sam Riley) try to undo it before it is too late. Meanwhile, the evil king is plotting to invade the enchanted forest and slay the sorceress once and for all.

Flipping the script on a classic villain, Linda Woolverton (of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland) has written a screenplay that’s a bit of a mess, but at least finds thorny thematic issues with which to wrestle. Now it is not a fairy tale about unexplained evil and the pat True Love that will conquer all. Instead, it’s a movie about the marginalization of women, in which the king sees both Maleficent and Aurora as pawns in his life story instead of people with thoughts, feelings, and ambitions of their own. Just as surely as Maleficent is wounded for the sake of his promotion, his daughter is cast aside for his peace of mind. In the end, Maleficent made huge mistakes, but it’s the king who is the real bad guy.

That’s all interesting, but if only the film had the patience to stop and wrestle with the ideas. Instead, it’s content to only suggest deeper thoughts as it hustles its way through exposition and character beats with a sense of obligation instead of enchantment. Even the appearance of Prince Phillip (Brenton Thwaites) is a huge non-event, which is at once a hilarious example of the movie’s welcome shifting of gender roles and an example of its half-hearted plotting. I love how it takes a story about a young woman whose fate is decided by her father and her love and makes it a story about misunderstood and victimized women and their complicated relationship with each other, but the movie is simply too frustratingly thin to support these deeper concerns.

While Sleeping Beauty is less emotionally complex, it has a stronger and more direct sense of storytelling. Maleficent has a vague understanding of what a story looks like, but often plays like a series of haphazardly connected scenes. Characters have changes of heart and evolutions of thinking for no other reason than because the movie needs them to do so. Consequently, there is not a lot of momentum here and the film grows mushy and aimless in the center as it spends its time telling us what we need to know instead of allowing it to unfold. The result is a small cast standing against flat, over-lit CGI backgrounds reciting dialogue that sounds like someone left all the subtext on the surface of the rough draft and never did a rewrite to bury it.

At least it fits the general phoniness of everything around them. There is never a sense this fantasy world is real. It just doesn’t look good. Director Robert Stromberg is a visual effects artist making his directorial debut. The picture is filled with competently visualized spectacle, with tree-creatures and strange little fantasy animals wandering around. When Maleficent flies about it’s with a convincing woosh and the dragon in the climax is as big, scaly, and fiery as you’d expect. But the action is repetitive and dull. The environments are stiff and dead. It never feels like a coherent vision of a place or time. It’s just disconnected digital frippery. If it was chintzier, you could almost accuse it of feeling like it was shot in a corner of the Disney backlot. Instead, it just looks like endlessly green-screened busyness. This is the movie’s biggest downfall. On a visual level, it simply isn’t as convincing, as inky dark and richly imagined as its lead performance.

Jolie stands in the center of the movie as iconic a screen creation as ever there was. The scene in which the screen darkens as shadows cast by scary green fire flicker over her face as she bellows sinister magic into a crib is genuinely spooky. And yet, Jolie sells her character’s hurt and regret, her elegance and her frozen mask of emotions that slowly melts for the child she has doomed. She’s a sympathetic, complicated creature, capable of glowering harm and glimmering compassion. It’s a great, full-blooded performance in a movie that’s simply not up to the task of working on her level. She’s so good I wished there was enough to the scenes to allow her to really sink her teeth in and chew. She’s big. It’s the picture that’s small.

Quick Look: IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY

Some people seem to have a knee-jerk reaction against actors who decide they’d like to try their hand at directing. That’s too bad. You never know which actor will end up being the next Clint Eastwood or Charles Laughton (Night of the Hunter, an all-time classic) or Gene Kelly (co-director of his Singin’ in the Rain), just to name a few. So when mega-celebrity Angelina Jolie decides she wants to write and direct a movie, I say, “why not?” When she decides to make a film about the Bosnian War of the early-90s and make that film a resolutely uncommercial one starring no marquee names, that’s a little over two hours long, with mostly Bosnian dialogue, even better. It’s just too bad her commercial daring couldn’t have made In the Land of Blood and Honey a better film. It’s a war movie laced with poisoned romance and rarely blinking brutality. Oh, sure, it’s quite well made on a technical level. The two leads – Zana Marjanovic and Goran Kostic – do good work and are capable of fascinating chemistry together. The grim, grey look of the film from cinematographer Dean Semler is polished and textured. But it’s all so Very Important, a seems-longer-than-it-is slog in which the good intentions and the weak melodrama drag each other down. It’s a punishing film with only the faintest flashes of interest, a message movie so heavy-handed and long-winded I felt beaten down by well-meaning bleakness. By the time pre-credit title cards spell out some facts of the tragedy that was the Bosnian War, I found myself angry. A compelling film could be made out of this material and Angelina Jolie clearly has the righteous indignation needed to power and shape a devastating character study that could actually make me feel through the film’s story and style the sadness and frustration of these facts. It just didn’t happen here, leaving it a big, empty, trudge through tough material. If she keeps trying, Jolie may yet become the next great actor-turned-director. Based on the evidence of this film, she’s most definitely not there yet.

Paws of Fury: KUNG FU PANDA 2

Dreamworks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda 2, like Kung Fu Panda before it, delivers lively action sequences (and slapstick) with choreography capable of equaling, even besting, live-action adventure. Animation has the possibility to be the triumph of imagination over practicality, and here that’s completely the case with characters flipping, punching, flying, kicking, and stomping through intricate hand-to-hand combat in ways that would simply be too dangerous and impractical to ask of real creatures. In the summer of 2008, Kung Fu Panda had the best action sequences you could find on the big screen. I’m not so sure 2 will end up in a similar place – the novelty’s gone, for one thing – but it sure is fun.

The first film, set in a medieval China populated solely by anthropomorphized English-speaking animals, featured Po (Jack Black), a roly-poly panda, discovering his true calling to be a kung fu master. He trained with red panda Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) to become one of a group of kung fu masters (a Lucy Liu viper, an Angelina Jolie tiger, a Jackie Chan monkey, a David Cross crane, and a Seth Rogen mantis) who protect a humble little valley. That film gained its fun and its momentum from the challenges in the training of the Kung Fu Panda as he prepared to help his new colleagues defeat an outside threat to their safety.

In good sequel form, Kung Fu Panda 2 ups the ante. There’s an evil peacock (Gary Oldman) who has become determined to take over China by harnessing the power of fireworks to blast away any kung fu challenge that comes his way. His first step towards this goal took place a couple dozen years earlier when, after receiving a prophecy that a black and white warrior would defeat him, he slaughtered a village of innocent pandas. One panda, a baby, managed to escape unharmed and was found and adopted by a noodle-cooking goose (James Hong). That panda was Po. So, this time the conflict’s personal, but only for the audience at first. Po doesn’t know where he came from, and his adopted father only knows so much. It’s a mystery to him.

Rather than merely recycle the plot beats of the earlier film, screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger (with uncredited assistance from Charlie Kaufman) take the opportunity to flesh out the backstory of the central character. Rooting the new plot’s impetus in Po’s past, along with his desire to learn more about it, helps to propel the emotions as well as the action, giving it a bit of pleasing depth. The fighting animals head off across the wilderness once they hear that this peacock has taken over his ancestral town and is planning to use it as a base from which to launch his dastardly deeds. With the mystery of Po’s origins weighing heavily on the plotting, exposition here is given a satisfying kick of emotion.

Under the direction of Jennifer Yuh Nelson, the animation is gorgeously rendered, tactile and fluid, beautifully lit in all the right ways. This could be a film just to look at, worth the price of admission just to stare. But luckily the story the visuals tell is worthy of attention as well, though it feels a bit too formulaic in its structure, which isn’t helped by the opening prologue that tells the audience all about the panda massacre which robs Po’s late discovery of much of it’s power. But he’s searching not just for information. Most importantly, he’s searching for a way to find inner peace. It may be trite, it may be an easy indefinable plot point, but it’s also a quest imbued with such elemental qualities that it’s hard to argue with it.

It’s not a film of zen meditation and grim personal history. There’s boundless irrepressible energy that pushes the whole thing forward. Not just a fast zip to the credits, this is a speedy sprightly delight with a surprising level of emotion. It’s a fun time even though, with an all-too-obvious structure and an inelegantly deployed ensemble (other than Po, characterization remains surface level), I felt the fun was ultimately a little less than what the first film dished out. This is shaping up to be a fine series of kung fu movies for kids, and one that feels respectful of the live-action genre used as inspiration. And if some of those kids, as they get a little older, feel driven to dive deeper into said genre, that could only be an added value to cinephilia.

Added note: It’s a shame that a fun teaser of a final scene, that hints at a direction for a future plot line, is separated from the end credits by the words “The End.” Who do they think they’re fooling?

Quick Look: THE TOURIST

Glamour should rarely be the sole purpose of a film, but in the case of The Tourist it’s very nearly enough. This is a laid back comic thriller with beautiful people in beautiful places. There’s Angelina Jolie as some kind of stylish criminal and Johnny Depp as a seemingly bumbling everyman. (There are also some nice supporting roles for the likes of Paul Bettany and Timothy Dalton). Together they become entangled, perhaps purposefully so, in all kinds of international espionage that takes place against the backdrop of stunning European scenery starting in Paris and ending up in Venice. Following up his heavy 2006 Oscar winning Stasi thriller The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck capably directs with light professionalism. He’s a solid craftsman who should direct more often, if only for the pleasure of seeing his lengthy credit stretch out across the entire wide screen. The Tourist is all fizz, but it’s prime fizz. The screenplay by von Donnersmarck, Christopher McQuarrie, and Julian Fellowes, Oscar winners all, is a bit of a prestige-hued mess, but it’s on the whole a delightful throwback, perhaps even homage, to the lighter side of Hitchcock. I was reminded not entirely unfavorably of To Catch a Thief, a similarly enjoyably thin exercise in style, star power and glamour. When The Tourist arrived last December, it was generally derided by critics and considered a flop domestically (though it’s been quite the hit in international markets), but now it’s easier to see that all the fuss was misguided. This is not, by any means, a great movie, but it has enough diverting pleasure to entertain. It’s a classy popcorn star vehicle with plenty of beauty and surface contentment. The last shot is a nice Freudian sight gag served up with a line that could be seen, with a wink and a shrug, as the film’s summation of its own quality: “It’ll do.”

Scary Spice: SALT

If nothing else, Salt proves that movie star driven filmmaking can still work when given a tight script, solid craftsmanship and an exciting premise. Luckily, it’s also an elegant, exhilarating spy movie, a throwback to simpler times when the Russians were our clear-cut Cold War enemies and a wholehearted embrace of cutting-edge techno-gadgets and shiny modern surfaces. But it’s mostly about the movie star who fills nearly every scene with megawatt presence.

Angelina Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a C.I.A. agent who is accused of being a Russian spy. She claims innocence, but then takes off running. She’s not an easy protagonist, distant and uncommunicative once the action gets going. We don’t see her in many soft moments, nor does she explain herself on the rare occasions that she stops to catch her breath. She always seems to be one step ahead of us, and it’s fun to try and catch up. Jolie is much different here than her last solo action effort, the two Lara Croft: Tomb Raider movies from nearly 10 years ago in which she was called upon to do little more than fill a tight T-shirt while posing her way through elaborate special effects. Here Jolie delivers layers of ambiguity and holds her own in striking close ups that play up her high cheek-bones and her ability to look severe one moment and fragile the next. She’s a remarkably nuanced action hero, made all the more remarkable by how the movie is so willing to make her look so cool.

Evelyn Salt is a mix of LeCarre’s career spies and Jason Bourne, with a dash of The Manchurian Candidate for added flavor, but none of the above were clever, fashionable, capable women. She’s a striking image to see dashing across the screen. She’s running full speed through dangerous stunts, delivering punches and kicks while bouncing off the walls or darting through traffic. She’s clever and resourceful, pulling off surprising escapes. Salt is undeniably awesome. The movie may not always let the audience in on her plans, but I still really wanted her to succeed. Salt is pursued by C.I.A. agents played by Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who happen to be two consistently undervalued performers. They bring weight and shades of gray to what could easily have become nothing more than a pair of forgettable foils. The way they balance out the conflicts in the movie (they have to catch her, but could they trust her claim to innocence?) reminded me of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. They’re not quite up to that level – the script doesn’t allow them that opportunity – but they’re close.

The film careens through tense action beats and all kinds of twisty spy skullduggery. (Even Lee Harvey Oswald is name-dropped). All the while, it makes good use of Jolie’s simultaneous vulnerability and distance, her essential apparent unknowableness. She’s both our anchor and our source of doubt. We care about her survival even though we don’t even know if we can believe her. Director Phillip Noyce has made films across different genres over the course of his career while never enforcing a strong auteur vision on the projects. He has a fine eye for action and a good sense of narrative clarity. Here, he’s working from an enjoyable and efficient script from Kurt Wimmer. It’s a film with hardly any wasted space; the whole thing’s over in barely 100 minutes. This is solid, engaging action filmmaking.

It’s not often that a movie of any kind leaves me anxious for a follow-up, especially a non-franchise property like Salt (though I’d bet Sony is hoping for a Bourne-style franchise in-the-making), but I would have watched the sequel right then and there when the end credits stopped rolling. This movie has such a strong sense of momentum that it flies right into the credits while still speeding forward. Leaving the multiplex, I practically jogged to my car.