Shaken and Stirred: NO TIME TO DIE

With No Time to Die, his fifth and reportedly final turn as 007, Daniel Craig gets something no James Bond ever has before: a satisfying finale. His Bond has worn his emotions closer to the surface, albeit just behind a steely exterior. Craig brings wounded eyes and tactical ease, springing into determined action with his blunt force instrument of a body—all blocky and taut and primed like an English foxhound to hunt and sniff. And there’s a soul there enlivening a character who could’ve, and sometimes has in previous versions, passed into a collection of cliches and traditions. In comparison to other actors’ runs as Ian Fleming’s British super-spy, Craig’s films, from the sturdy fuel-injection traditionalism of Casino Royale and scattered momentum of Quantum of Solace to the more stately glossiness of Skyfall and Spectre, have violence a little more real, and a tone that’s a balance between grandeur and grit, fan service and surprise. They share with their inspirations a willingness to let plot steep in the hot water of the usual movements, chases, snooping, and peril. What’s new has been a more serialized and serious Bond shorn of overt camp. Allowing the adventures, the danger, the deaths, and the loved ones lost along the way to accumulate from one entry to the next allows Craig to play emotional notes no other could, and this film leans into it with a weary professionalism and earnest appeal between the massive explosions and topsy-turvy supervillain nonsense plotting. As Bond sizes up the odds and realizes he’s yet again the only thing standing between a mad man and a mass casualty event, he knows what he has to do, and we’re glad to see him do it all again.

The experience is a real Movie movie with a capital M, and so much of one, stretching across the big screen and a runtime nearing three hours, every sequence luxuriating in its outsized images and spectacle. No weightless gloop and flimsy trickery here, no autopilot superheroic animatics or tossed off second unit coverage. One of the best innovations of Bond in the digital age is how the filmmakers have known there’s no better effect than picturesque filmic cinematography, stunning wardrobes, striking art direction, flirtatious sex appeal, and bone-thwacking, tire-squealing stunts. The effects of all that are expert, and there’s as much dazzle to an establishing shot sweeping over a lush forest or island or handsome European city as there is a car with machine guns in the headlights or a stealth plane with unfolding wings. Along the way, this movie confidently hits all the standard 007 tropes with the retrograde mostly bled away: a melancholy romance with a sad ending; a woman (Ana de Armas) in a deep-cut dress who can help in a fight; the tense debriefs with M (Ralph Fiennes) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris); the gadgets and tech help from Q (Ben Whishaw); the meetings with regular CIA contacts (Jeffrey Wright); the parties of villainous conspirators; the secret island base full of faceless factory workers making weapons of mass destruction. It’s pure Bond-ian pleasures done up in confidently outsized frames and well-photographed glamour. These pleasures are shot and staged by Cary Joji Fukunaga (True Detective) with a fine visual imagination—looking through beveled glass, sliding around corners, drawing out the spacial relationships in intricately designed sets. The appeal of each stunt and twist is given all due impact as the screenplay (credited to Fukunaga, Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and series regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade) makes sure action and pathos is delivered with clockwork precision.

The film is so very serious and elegantly muddled, with a dry crackle to the dialogue and the weight of weary finality to the suspense. Fittingly we get the iteration of this character our times deserve. His problems are adding up. He’s once again retired, his designation given to a younger recruit (Lashana Lynch) who appears to be his equal in skill, if not in baggage and bad habits. Nonetheless, he’s called into a plot that takes Bond through his usual motions in pursuit of a mysterious villain that’s all tangled up in plots of the past and ominous future danger. This foe, interestingly perpendicular to the usual Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) of it all, is a stock spooky weirdo (Rami Malek, well-cast) speaking in a strangled whisper. He’s out for the MacGuffin that’ll let him, well, who knows exactly, but it’ll kill a lot of people. (That it’s a bio-engineered virus stolen from a lab gives the story all the deadly charge it needs these days.) Meanwhile, a maybe-foreshortened love story carries over from the last one, with Léa Seydoux’s mysterious French blonde given added dimension and tragedy. And both throughlines are placed in the contemporaneous geopolitical confusion that’s replaced the Cold War for Craig’s Bond. (As a vector for British identity on the world stage, this iteration is framed by the Iraq War and Brexit, after all.) Everything’s complicated, everything’s connected, and everything’s important, but how, exactly, is a tangle. It is high-stakes Lucy-and-the-football with the same people on all sides making similar mistakes of apocalyptic contingency plans and misplaced trust, reaping unintended consequences over and over to calamitous effect.

Still, that’s just the background chatter and burbling subtext for another movie that interrogates the idea of whether or not a James Bond type of secret agent could make much progress in the world today, even in a fantasy like this. The movie’s answer is that he might as well try to make things better while he can. The result is lushly, and with even a kind of terse melodrama, presented. It’s a curtain call with real closure—studded with all of what Craig does well, and little of what Bond movies don’t. It’s large and romantic and thrilling and taking big satisfying chances. (I especially liked the ways in which it shifts the meaning of the term “Bond girl” in at least a couple ways never before tried.) Craig is allowed to play with a full range of set pieces and sentiment, showcasing his equal ease taking in sobering revelations or interpersonal humanity as he is driving a motorcycle up a large public staircase to launch himself over a wall. And in the end, the movie gives him a fine farewell, wrapping up loose ends without overworking the frayed edges, and delivering a heaping dose of stiff-upper-lip sentimentality. When so many franchises are playing safe and teasing more, how fulfilling to see an entry in a long-running series leave it all on the table. With real closure, and real poignancy, and even a gentle touch in its final scene, No Time to Die uses its time well.

Singles Mixer: THE LOBSTER

For an intensely sad and cynical movie, The Lobster’s one good idea is awfully whimsical. It imagines a dystopian parallel world much like our own, but which takes a dementedly strong pro-marriage stance. All single people must find a mate; if they do not, they’ll be turned into the animal of their choosing. When we meet sad-sack Colin Farrell – he’s put on some weight to make his hangdog mood look extra saggy – he’s just been dumped by his unseen wife, left to trudge to a singles’ resort with his brother, who had similar misfortune and is now a dog. It’s an irresistible concept, and one sure to provoke good conversation and perhaps some honest self-reflection. I think I’d be a house cat; they’ve all the pampered benefits of dogs with none of the expectations of excitation. (And I like napping in patches of sunshine.) Sadly, the movie’s not as playful as its animating concept might lead one to believe.

When Farrell is asked what animal he’d want to be if, after his allotted time to be unattached, he can’t find a suitable match, he has his answer ready: a lobster. The hotel’s chipper manager (Olivia Colman) finds that refreshing. Most people pick more popular animals. The fields around the hotel feature the occasional rabbit, horse, camel, flamingo, and so on. I found myself wondering who they might’ve been in an earlier life. That’s later, though. First we must trudge through a stay in this sad hotel, where Farrell meets friends like a dopey lisper (John C. Reilly) who would like to be a parrot, and a fussy limper (Ben Whishaw) who’d rather not think about that question thank you very much. There are also potential mates, like a shockingly youthful nose-bleeder (Jessica Barden), an anxious biscuit-chomping lady (Ashley Jensen), and a woman we learn has no feelings whatsoever (Angeliki Papoulia).

The film’s central premise is worked out with misanthropic deadpan. Writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose breakthrough feature was 2009’s memorable Dogtooth, an equally imprisoned and methodical exploration of a locked-in system of perverse human behavior, creates the hotel as the stifling inverse of a mischievous Wes Anderson mood. It has a suffocating rigidity to Thimios Bakatakis’s static cinematography, trapping its characters with either too much or not enough head space, squirming with resigned discomfort like butterflies pinned behind glass while barely alive, wriggling but clearly doomed. The patrons spend their days forced to watch silently as staff acts out skits about the dangers of being alone, and then they get death-marched into painfully stilted dances and awkward chitchat around sad little meals. Once daily they’re driven out to the wilderness on a hunt, told to use tranquilizer darts to shoot and collect loners who’ve escaped the hotel pre-transformation and now live illegally in the woods. Each person caught buys the hunter an extra day before the coupling deadline.

This is distancing movie, slow and repetitive as it watches the sad desperate routines of its characters. A closed loop of behavior operating under cruel impenetrable logic, the rigorous framing drains the characters of agency. They’re trapped in a cruel world, explored by a cold story. It’s tedious and increasingly pointless, wallowing in misery, dispassionately nasty and mean. A dog is kicked to death. A woman is blinded. A man is forced to stick his hand in a hot toaster. For a movie purporting to have cutting or otherwise incisive ideas about relationships – the torture of loneliness, and the desperation it can breed for finding One True Love – it’s too hollow, forced, passionless. The actors speak uniformly in a flat affect, mumbling as they talk past each other, glumly focused on their fate. There’s no energy to their goals. They simply shrug and trudge, hunched over and preemptively drained. Maybe they would be better off as animals. Is that such a tragedy?

Lanthimos uses dreary colors to enhance the oppressive mood. Stings of classical music mix with self-amused straight-faced absurdism. One couple is dutifully celebrated in the hotel’s conference room, sent off to see if the marriage will stick with the encouragement that if they have problems they’ll be given children. “That usually helps,” the manager quips. We continue on, counting down the days until Farrell will be made into a lobster. The movie never progresses beyond the basics of its setup, with few complications, escalations, or contradictions to keep things moving along. Instead it just grinds on and on, a deadening effect rendering what starts as wry and shocking merely numbing. Eventually one character flees the hotel and meets a variety of characters hiding out in the woods – a group led by Léa Seydoux that includes Rachel Weisz, who has also been narrating the whole thing in a largely emotionless monotone. Alas, freedom of sorts is shot in the same stultifying icy precision as the hotel, and slumps on for ages in a tiresome slog.

This is the sort of infuriating movie that slowly and steadily drains all interest and inquisitiveness from a killer concept. At first I was leaning in, eager to see an imaginative vision. By the time it lost me, I found myself itching to leave, as one excruciating scene after the next failed to build or move or provoke. It strands charismatic performers in a flat, uninteresting style, punctuating long stretches of dead air with splashes of cruelty and depression. It creates an interesting allegory and proceeds to take care it almost never intersects with recognizable human emotions. It offers only empty futility, distended bleak glibness hoping its heaviness and pessimism get mistaken for profundity. What a waste. At one point a character asks if she could watch Stand By Me, and I wanted to go with her. Later, in the film’s final moments, a man prepares to stab himself in the eyes with a steak knife. By that time I could almost relate.

Whale of a Tale: IN THE HEART OF THE SEA

Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea tells of a whaling ship sunk by an enormous whale, this story nestled inside a framing device in which Herman Melville, many years later, interviews the last surviving crewman as research for writing Moby-Dick. This structure gives the movie a gloss of both history and literature, purporting to tell the real story that inspired a Great American Novel, while engaging with some of the same imagery and texture of the work itself. It’s a neat trick. The movie is slow and steady, lurching out to sea with the Essex and her crew of whalers, then watches patiently as rocky waves and clever whales go from a position of being conquered to the engines of the men’s ruin. It’s a sturdy maritime movie, of rudders and rigging, anchors and fish, hardtack and ambergris. The scenes of Melville earnestly listening to the old seaman’s tale are a bit obvious and clumsy, but the core of the picture is an admirably stripped-down survival story, vividly recreated, handsomely staged with convincing effects.

The screenplay by Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond), based on a book by historian Nathaniel Philbrick, introduces simple characters. The proud first mate (Chris Hemsworth), resentful after being passed over for a promotion, is driven to do what’s best for the ship. The captain (Benjamin Walker) is the son of the boat’s patron, and therefore worried about proving his toughness on this, his first whaling expedition. Meanwhile, the ship has a naïve newbie (Tom Holland), who has a lot to learn, and is therefore our guide into the blood and muck of harpooning a whale, butchering it on deck, and scooping out all the valuable goo inside it. (He’ll grow up to be Brendan Gleeson, reluctantly telling the story to Ben Whishaw’s Melville.) The rest of the crewmen blur together behind their tough beards and mumbling accents, a mostly undifferentiated ensemble to take orders, fill the frame, and get in harm’s way when the danger surfaces.

It’s not so much a narrative of character and incident as it is interested in details of sailing and whaling, in the sensations of life at sea, and in the specifics of the survivors’ endurance. Howard is always great with directing reenactments, from the space shuttle mechanics of Apollo 13, his best film, to the visceral car races of Rush and impressive fires of Backdraft. With his latest film, he has cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire) shooting from interesting vantage points, with a seasick woozy feeling to the cameras’ movements. Perhaps they were inspired by Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab’s experimental fishing documentary Leviathan, because they make liberal use of canted or otherwise unusual angles to show off details of labor at sea. A repeated shot will hold extreme close-ups of a rope or knife, an oar or bucket, the man manipulating any given tool in the extreme background as we focus on the work being done. In less stylized moments, dialogue scenes, the camera bobs and sways, rocking with the waves. It wouldn’t surprise me if people seeing this in IMAX get seasick.

There’s a certain element of spectacle in this film that’s big, satisfying, and striking. I’m thinking of a side shot of a rowboat, the camera just underneath the water, pulling downwards as a whale’s tail slaps, shattering the boat and plunging silhouetted figures into the depths. Elsewhere, wide-angle shots show tiny boats against vast expanses of sun-dappled water. And one late moment finds blurry fish-eyed angles on sea gulls chattering above, while a sun-dried groggy man (so starved he looks scarily skeletal) spies land. Howard directs with an interesting eye, perhaps the most visually experimental he’s ever been. You never know who’ll surprise you, I suppose. But where In the Heart of the Sea, which is otherwise often curiously unengaging, most resonates is in connections it draws between images that catch one by surprise and man’s hopelessness in the face of nature.

No wonder the characters are thinly drawn, and their journey simple. It’s not about individuals who are in conflict against the storm of unpredictable weather and wildlife. It’s more elemental, about a Herzog-ian conflict between the inherent dangers of the wild, and the struggle for men to make meaning out of it. The climax is not a moment of terror or violence, but a moment of grace, a man and a whale making eye contact, and finding some silent understanding. (From a whale’s perspective, Moby-Dick must be not only metaphor, but also a superhero.) The film is wrapped in a conclusion that tidies up the plot in comforting middlebrow ways on the surface, but underneath lingers the pain and struggle of the men’s survival, and the violence that we do to the creatures that share our planet. It’s a cycle: the power of storytelling to communicate the darkness we’re capable of committing to live to tell the tale.

Live and Let Bond: SPECTRE

For all their reliably repeated elements – tailored suits, tricky gadgets, glamorous women, outlandish villains, M, Q, and Moneypenny – the oft-rebooted James Bond movies are one of our culture’s most reliable barometers. (Or should I say they are reliable cultural dipsticks, a more fittingly utilitarian and phallic metaphor?) The series is awfully good, for better and worse, at reading the zeitgeist’s mood and reflecting our current storytelling obsessions back at us. That’s evident in Spectre, the fourth to feature Daniel Craig as 007. His decidedly post-9/11 entries have viewed geopolitical dangers with dread and a greater interest in personal demons, threats in the business of wounding a more human Bond more closely. This latest one pushes further into the postmodern blockbuster’s main interests: being grim and dark, obsessed with backstory, and paranoid about surveillance but ambivalent about its necessity. And yet director Sam Mendes, returning from the last, terrific entry, continues to find a way to make a film both derivatively modern and classically Bond. It’s a tough balance, but he mostly pulls it off.

From the opening shot – a long, unbroken one dancing through a crowded festival, into a hotel, up an elevator, out a window, over a ledge, and across some roofs – it’s clear Mendes knows great cinematography can be as good as any dazzling special effect. With Hoyte Van Hoytema behind the camera (he who is responsible for the austere beauty of films like Interstellar, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Let the Right One In), Mendes crafts a movie with not a single misjudged image. (Call it cinema du “One Perfect Shot.”) The movie globetrots with Bond as he follows a series of clues on the trail of a mysterious villainous organization. Each stop is appealingly photographed, exquisite in its rendering of bright snow, crackling desert expanses, warm Italian villas, and chilly grey London streets. Handsome, expertly constructed frames find silhouettes and reflections, smooth glass and flickering flames. The movie is as well put together and aesthetically pleasing as a luxury car, a perfectly fitted tux, or a supermodel in high-fashion attire.

The look is all well and good, but what’s happening in this artful design? Well, it’s more or less a typical Bond film, but with its recent tonal habit of sustained seriousness. The super-spy is suave and flirtatious. His boss (Ralph Fiennes), assistant (Naomie Harris), and gadget supplier (Ben Whishaw) are alternately impressed and exasperated by his antics. A slimy villain (Christoph Waltz) hides in the shadows, pulling strings on an elaborate megalomaniacal plan. The antagonist’s brutish henchman (Dave Bautista) is lurking around every other corner. And two beautiful women (Léa Seydoux and Monica Bellucci) are tough, hold valuable information, and want nothing to do with Bond until he proves just too irresistible to not make out with for a bit. The plot develops in a controlled, subdued manner, the better to hide the grinding formula, I suppose. When the action arrives, it’s tough and smashing, flipping helicopters, flinging cars, smashing planes, and exploding buildings. The best is a close quarters hand-to-hand fight aboard a train, echoes of From Russia with Love.

It’s built around a need to draw connections, not just to traditional Bond elements, but most obviously to Craig’s previous outings. The screenplay (credited to John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Jez Butterworth) brings back a character from Quantum of Solace (Jesper Christensen’s Mr. White), references the events of Skyfall (Judi Dench briefly appears in a message from beyond the spoiler), and alludes to Casino Royale’s villains. This is supposed to make its conspiracy-minded plot more impactful because we can recognize threads from the last few Bond films. I like it in theory, but in practice it’s muddy and forced, full of loose ends and plot holes. Besides, it puts too much faith in Bond as a character instead of a construct. It’s one thing to groove on the franchise’s persona. It’s another thing entirely to care about James Bond the man, especially when there’s not a lot of evidence pointing to characterization worth caring about.

Craig’s Bond is best at projecting unflappable competence and wounded backstory while never dropping the strong mostly silent type act. The movie’s at its best when it sends him hurtling into wordless action – it’s unfailingly sharply staged and thrillingly paced – or poses him in attractive tableaus against striking scenery and painterly light and shadow. There’s not much depth here, which makes it hard to care when the movie pretends there is. The characters, though inhabited by great actors, are ultimately nothing more than sparsely developed types. And the political interests are strictly unserious despite the gravity with which it frets over the double-oh’s future in the face of a digital dragnet, amounting to nothing more than an argument for ditching cold computerized snooping in favor of artisanal spying. And yet, for all two-plus hours, it basically works. The look is impressive, and it slides along seductively enough on expert craftsmanship. As a delivery device for slick surfaces and fun setpieces, Mendes and crew give you your money’s worth.

Grin and Bear It: PADDINGTON

Based on Michael Bond’s popular picture book of the same name, Paddington is a movie about a bear cub who speaks English, wears a red hat and blue coat, and likes marmalade. You’d think that’s not a lot to hang a feature film upon. But in a pleasant surprise, the result is easily the best live action talking animal family comedy since Babe: Pig in the City, though that might say more about the usual level of quality in this particular subgenre than anything else. In the movie, Paddington and his bear family are CGI creations that at first look creepily real, more Country Bears than Alvin and the Chipmunks. But once I got used to looking at him and his interactions with a real human world, the more adorable he became. He’s an inquisitive little guy, pluckily charging forward hoping for the best. That’s a good description of the movie, too. It’s a pleasant, affable, likable little thing, funny, fuzzy, warm and goodhearted.

Paddington (Ben Whishaw) grew up in darkest Peru, where he was taught about London by his aunt (Imelda Staunton) and uncle (Michael Gambon). They had become Anglophiles after an explorer (Tim Downie) visited years earlier. After an earthquake destroys their jungle home, Paddington is sent off to London in search of a better life. His aunt lovingly places around his neck a note asking the recipient to take care of this little bear. It’s a softly downplayed immigrant story, with the bear washing up on London shores in need of help making sense of a new place, but with plenty of qualities – a killer marmalade recipe, for one – that’ll enrich the lives of those he meets. There’s some quiet metaphor work going on, especially with the cranky neighbor who worries about bears moving into his neighborhood.

Paddington’s found by a sweet family who take him to stay in their house that appears to be on the same street as the Banks in Mary Poppins. It’s definitely a Poppins set up, with a free-spirited mother (Sally Hawkins), stuffy all-business father (Hugh Bonneville), and a daughter and son (Madeleine Harris and Samuel Joslin) who are having troubles of their own. Then in comes Paddington, an openhearted, open-minded little fellow who quite by accident brings the family closer together. It’s a film that has lots of dependable bits of family film plot mechanics, from the boring dad who’s softened up by the events herein, to the kids who find a friend in a magical guest, to a protagonist who’s thrust into a new world and, despite some difficulties, learns to love it.

But it’s all so sweetly done, and writer-director Paul King brings a kind sense of humor and lovely visual style, from intricate whimsical production design, to Wes-Anderson-esque dollhouse constructions, to clever cutting and crisp wordplay. The funniest joke is also the simplest: no one finds the talking bear strange at all, and treat him like they would a human child. There are amusing sequences in which he slowly destroys his surroundings while attempting a simple task, wrecking a bathroom or covering himself head to toe in tape. My favorite was a chase scene in which the bear floats by a schoolroom studying Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. “Exit pursued by a— ” “Paddington!” The amusing slapstick and cute misunderstandings are bolstered by an undemanding plot and a troop of fine British actors (the leads, as well as Julie Walters, Peter Capaldi, and Jim Broadbent in supporting roles) who kids growing up on this movie will later recognize if they ever catch up on old BBC programming or the films of Mike Leigh.

I’m not sure if a film so sugary English, with nicely small character moments and a charming shaggy tone, needs a villain, but Nicole Kidman plays an ice cold taxidermist about as well as she could. She’s a Cruella de Vil type with a Hitchcockian blonde bob, strutting about wanting to add a talking bear to her collection. Her scenes are few, and of a slightly different tone than the sentimental slapstick culture clash comedy elsewhere, but such pro forma kids’ film villainy is the impetus to finally bring all the characters together in support of the bear they’ve come to love. And by then, I’d also found much to love in Paddington, and was glad to see the film resolve so neatly.

License to Thrill: SKYFALL

Does the world still need James Bond? Born out of Cold War tensions, Ian Fleming’s character has been spying, fighting, and romancing his way across the screen for fifty years now. The world has changed. In a post-9/11 world – not to mention a post-Jason Bourne cinema – the lines between ally and enemy are no longer as clear as they once seemed to be. No longer is the main threat to a country the outsized villain with a diabolical plot involving superweapons of mass destruction. Now, more than ever, we are aware of the threat that comes from anywhere, can be a single person or a single cyberattack, one single unpredictable moment of terror. Is there room these days for a suave, smart, force of nature secret agent out in the field?

This is the very question that forms the core of the newest Bond film, Skyfall, which is an elegant argument for its own existence, a crisp, modern espionage film with a fluid forward momentum. Director Sam Mendes, an Academy Award winner best know for projects dripping with prestige like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, working from a screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan, hits the ground running with a great action set-piece involving a car chase that becomes a motorcycle chase that becomes a tussle on top of a train. By the time Daniel Craig, in his third Bond film, leaps through a freshly ripped hole in the back of a train car and, without missing a beat, unflappably fixes his cufflinks, it’s clear that this is without a doubt the classic character expertly portrayed.

But Craig’s Bond is troubled. The curtain raiser ends with a botched mission, the import felt through the opening credits set to a great Bond theme belted out by Adele. When we rejoin the action three months have passed. We learn that 007 failed to retrieve a stolen hard drive containing the identities of every agent embedded in terrorist organizations around the globe. His boss, M (Judi Dench, never better in this role), is confronted by a higher-up (Ralph Fiennes) who wonders if it’s time to retire the double-O program. Losing the drive is a massive security breach even before the person who stole it blows up M’s office and sends her threatening messages. Is it possible for Bond to stop such a new threat, one for which they have no face or name and certainly no sense of a grand villainous scheme at play? And thus the movie’s stakes are tied to the very future of the program (and, by extension, the franchise). It’s a battle between tradition and the future, between old mistakes and hope for a better world of tomorrow.

When Daniel Craig took over the role of Bond in 2006’s Casino Royale, he found himself in a skillful reimagining of the franchise, an attempt to scale back the overblown theatrics of gadgets and gals and tell a simpler, more direct and emotional action movie with blunter, more immediate geopolitical stakes. Gone were the trappings of Bond movies before. Gone were the gadgets and Q, their maker. Gone too was the flirtatious secretary Moneypenny and the broad, splashy setpieces. This was a successful attempt to rein in the franchise’s self-parodic tendencies and redefine the iconography of 007 for the 21st century. Sadly his ’08 follow up, Quantum of Solace, went dour and choppy for the worse.

With Skyfall, the franchise has fully activated the promise of its latest reboot, finding a happy middle ground between respecting what’s come before and discovering room to grow, between nods towards depth and a genuine sense of fun. Mendes, while coaxing some really terrific acting from the entire cast from Craig and Dench on down, brings a seamless flow to picture, running smoothly between modern demands and playful winks towards the franchise’s past. Bringing new faces to familiar types of roles, there’s a young Q (a charming Ben Whishaw), as well as lovely women, one helpful (Naomi Harris) and one potentially dangerous (Bérénice Marlohe). Rather than becoming comedic relief or set dressing, the characters are given meaningful places within the plot. When we finally meet the main villain (hammily, in a good way, played by Javier Bardem), he’s a speechifying revengeful egomaniac with a surprising hairstyle and a chewy accent, but he also has a worryingly small operation built around superior tech-savvy knowhow that he wields to devastating psychopathic ends. Instead of playing the Bond-movie tropes in the same old way, this movie takes them apart only to build them back up again in a more modern and generous way.

The involving story moves inevitably along a one-thing-after-another course with cascading sequences of spycraft and action that progress inevitably to a climactic battle. Though it hits many of the beats you’d expect from an action film, it’s the high level of craftsmanship from all involved that make this a compulsively watchable, tense and amusing experience. This is a gorgeous globetrotting thriller, strikingly shot by Roger Deakins, the greatest living cinematographer. He captures the sweeping scenery from Shanghai to Scotland with a detailed beauty, just as he films the sensational effects and small-scale brawls with a deft touch and good eye for stunning compositions with unexpectedly rich sources of illumination. I especially liked the one-on-one fistfight in a skyscraper that plays out mostly in one long shot that finds the combatants silhouetted against neon light pouring in through the window. There’s great fun to be found in the way the beautifully shot beatings mirror the conflict between elegance and destruction that runs throughout this franchise.

So does the world still need James Bond? I don’t know about need, but there's something comforting about seeing this character and his world, at once a constant cultural presence and constantly maleable, once more. By the end of this film, Bond's world has been rebuilt, recognizable in unexpected and wholly satisfying ways, back up from its bare bones Casino Royale restart. On the basis of this strong outing I’d say that I’m awfully glad he’s still around and that talented filmmakers have been given the freedom to do right by him. The result is an entertaining film that’s at or near the high-water marks of the series. 

What is Any Ocean but a Multitude of Drops? CLOUD ATLAS

Starting with nothing less than a Homeric incantation in which a white-haired old man stares into a crackling fire and seems to summon the fiction into being, Cloud Atlas, an ambitious adaptation of David Mitchell’s tricky novel, is the kind of movie that’s easy to recommend and admire, if for no other reason than that nothing quite like it has ever existed and is unlikely to come around again any time soon. It wobbles at times, but luckily it’s ultimately better than the sum of its gimmicks. This is a complicated film about simple truths: love, ambition, knowledge, power. A major motif is a musical composition that one of the characters writes called “The Cloud Atlas Sextet.” It’s a lush, haunting piece of music that winds its way through the soundtrack and, by its very nature, echoes the major structural conceit of the film. A sextet is a piece of music to be played by six musicians. This film – like the novel before it – contains six stories, any one of which could easily expand into its own film, but together combine into one gorgeous whole.

Spanning centuries and genres, the film breaks apart the book’s chronological and mirrored presentation and instead places the six stories parallel to each other, cutting between the stories with a gleeful, witty, dexterous montage that recalls D.W. Griffith’s 1916 feature Intolerance in the way it so skillfully weaves in and out of varying plotlines. A massive undertaking, three directors, Tom Tykwer (of Run Lola Run and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) and Lana and Andy Wachowski (of The Matrix films and Speed Racer) split the six sections among them, adapting and directing separately but from a shared common vision so that the story flows both stylistically and emotionally. Like some strange geometric object with many sides and layers, the film grows all the more epic by expanding outwards through time and space.

It takes us to the Pacific Ocean in the nineteenth century aboard a ship sailing towards America. Then, we’re in Europe in the 1930s, following a disinherited, but ambitious and talented, music student to the home of an elderly composer. Next, we’re in 1970s America, following an intrepid reporter into a conspiracy at a new nuclear power plant. On to the present, where we find a publisher who is the victim of a mean brotherly prank and stuck in an unexpected place. Then we’re to the future, where a clone slave describes her story of finding awareness of the consumerist dystopia she lives in. Finally, to the far future, where we find a post-apocalyptic world that has returned to clannish living in the wilderness, where the peaceful people are terrorized by a tribe of aggressive cannibals. Tykwer and the Wachowskis present each setting with handsomely realized production design and detailed special effects. Moving between them is anything but disorienting; it’s, more often than not, invigorating.

Almost too much to handle in one sitting, this film is a rush of character and incident, themes and patterns, echoes upon echoes, all distinctive melodies that fade and reoccur time and again. Some sequences play more successfully than others, but the film is largely fascinating and generally gripping as it becomes a symphony of imagery and genre, returning again and again to mistakes humankind makes, the benefits and constraints of orderly society, and the way underdogs try to find the right thing to do against all odds. The themes play out repeatedly in a flurry of glancingly interconnected genre variations. What appears as drama later plays as comedy, as action, as mystery, as tragedy. Tykwer and the Wachowskis have put the film together in such a way that the editing escalates with the intensity of each plotline, bouncing in an echoing flurry during rhyming plot points (escapes, reversals of fortune, setbacks, reunions) and settling down for more languid idylls when the plots simply simmer along. By turns thrilling, romantic, disturbing, suspenseful, and sexy, there’s a fluidity here that makes this a breathless three-hour experience. The film moves smoothly and sharply between six richly imagined stories that connect more spiritually and metaphysically than they do literally, and yet artifacts of one story may appear in another, sets may be redressed for maximum déjà vu, characters in one story may dream glimpses of another. This isn’t a puzzle to be solved, but rather a stylish assertion that people are inescapably connected to their circumstances and to those who lived before and will live after.

In order to underline its insistence upon the connectedness of mankind then, now, and always, the film features the same cast in each story, making it possible to get a sense of the progression of a soul through time, each reincarnation living up (or down) to the example of earlier experiences and choices. Through mostly convincing makeup, actors cross all manner of conventions, playing not just against type, but crossing race, gender, age, and sexual orientation in unexpected ways. (Some of the biggest pleasant surprises in the film are in the end credits, so I’ll attempt to preserve them.) For example, Tom Hanks appears as a crackpot doctor, then again as a thuggish wannabe writer, then again as a haunted future tribesman, among other roles. This is a large, talented and eclectic cast with Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Keith David, Doona Bae, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, James D’Arcy, David Gyasi, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant delivering strong performances, appearing over and over, sometimes obviously, sometimes unrecognizably or for only a moment. This allows the filmmakers to dovetail the storylines even further, for what is denied in one (lovers torn apart, say) may be given back in the space of an edit (lovers, not the same people, but played by the same performers, reunited).

Though some will undoubtedly be turned away by its earnest (if vague) spirituality and messy philosophical bombast, this is the kind of film that, if you let it, opens up an endless spiral of deep thoughts. You could think it over and spin theories about what it all means for hours. To me, that’s part of the fun. It’s a historical drama, a romance, a mystery, a sci-fi epic, a comedy, and a post-apocalyptic fantasy all at once. In placing them all in the same film and running them concurrently Tykwer and the Wachowskis have created a moving and exciting epic that seems to circle human nature as each iteration finds characters struggling against societal conventions to do the right thing. The powerful scheme and rationalize ways to stay on top; those below them yearn for greater freedom and greater meaning. There’s much talk about connection and kindred spirits; at one point a character idly wonders why “we keep making the same mistakes…” It accumulates more than it coheres, and yet that’s the bold, beautiful mystery of Cloud Atlas, that it invites a viewer into a swirl of imagery, genre, and character, to be dazzled by virtuosic acting and effective filmmaking, to get lost amongst the connections and coincidences, to enjoy and perhaps be moved by the shapes and patterns formed by souls drifting through time and space.