Game Night:DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES and THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE

I never played Dungeons & Dragons. I am, however, familiar with the stereotype of the endless roleplaying game’s sessions with nerds huddled around convoluted backstories and their Dungeon Master’s maps and outlines while eagerly hanging on the results of each dice roll’s permission to activate their next move. I suppose that mental image of mine has to be somewhat true, since the new feature film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is true to that idea. It’s loose and rambling, packed with casually tossed off jargon and hyperventilated backstory. Flashbacks and narration nestle each new origin story into the main storyline when a character appears for the first time, like the actor pulled up to the table with their stats sheet ready to share. It gathers up a team of rascals in this way, each with a consequential backstory and a handy list of special skills that help the group assemble new plans to tackle each new fantasy obstacle in their episodic way. The overarching story finds a down-on-his-luck single dad (Chris Pine) and his best friend (Michelle Rodriguez) hoping to save his daughter (Chloe Coleman) from an evil wizard (I shan’t spoil his actor’s identity, nor the obvious reveal of who’s in charge of him). The path there is a daisy-chain of fetch quests, with shape-shifters, and self-serious knights, and enchanted objects, and magic spells, and creatures, and labyrinths, and lore, and portals, and undead warriors, and insecure wizards, and overweight dragons, and a gelatinous cube, and, and, and.

It’s all piled up vaguely amusingly and decently snappily, its bright frames and tone bending in the easy-going direction of The Princess Bride with some stretches of cleverness bending even closer to Monty Python circular silliness, albeit without either’s overtly meta edges. Is this fun? To a point. The personalities are fine, the effects suitably outsized, and the direction by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley hews closer to their plate-spinning ensemble Game Night than their rancid Vacation reboot. It’s bright, light on its feet, and finds reasonably clever fantasy flourishes throughout. I bet I would’ve liked it even more if I was 12 years old, or cared about its source material. The younger me who had affection for all the off-brand fantasy movies of the 80s and 90s—your Willows and Krulls and Dragonhearts—was pleased.

So often the movies today, at least at their biggest box office levels, are merely drafting off affection for stuff you liked before with little else to offer. On that level, The Super Mario Bros. Movie may be the most effective of its kind. Here’s Minion-maker Illumination’s computer animated recreation of the sights, sounds, and actions of Nintendo’s most famous video game creation. To watch it is to feel like you’re watching the game on autopilot, swaddled in the childhood sensations with the pressure off and the fond memories on. An early scene is even a bit of side-scrolling hopping and bopping. Ah, that’s the stuff. Here’s the plucky plumber Mario and his brother Luigi as they get yanked through a magic pipe and end up in a fantasyland where a giant turtle dinosaur is about to attack a peaceful mushroom kingdom. Luigi ends up in the villain’s dungeon, and Mario must ally with the powerful Princess Peach to save his brother, and her kingdom, and maybe the whole world. There are bright primary colors, briskly paced adventure sequences, with nonstop bouncy action, and bubbly voice work. (The all-star cast—including Chris Pratt and Charlie Day and Jack Black and Anya Taylor-Joy and more—downplay the broad cartoony voices of the games by about 15%.) The extremely simple story and tissue-thin characters are all about iconic poses and simple lessons as they bounce through a variety of recognizable lands—the spacious castle grounds, the Donkey Kong jungle kingdom, a winding race down Rainbow Road. You get the picture.

It worked on me, though I haven’t played a video game with any regularity in a couple decades now. I’m dispositionally closer to the infamous Adrian Childs’ column headlined “Video games are good for your mental health? Not if you play like me.” But I do consider Super Mario 64 the height of the form, so to see its aesthetics, along with Mario Kart’s and other recognizable Mario looks’, so faithfully recreated, down to the sound effects of each bop and kick and the synth chords on the score, was a Proustian reverie. Maybe that’s a little sad, but so is nostalgia. The movie’s a total delight on that score, even if it does nothing but recreate the fun of the games with blessedly little asked of you. At least it’s not cliches pretending to be depth like the dreary The Last of Us or hedging with new human characters like the agreeable Sonic the Hedgehogs. This movie promises only Mario and his world on the big screen and, by golly, here it is.

Mixed Metaphors: BLONDE and DON'T WORRY DARLING

Marilyn Monroe has always been treated as, to borrow a phrase from Rodgers and Hammerstein, an empty page that men would like to write on. This is certainly the case with every public figure who passes from famous to iconic. But for Monroe, whose objectification has long obscured her individuality, it’s denied her participation in her performances. She’s too much the image: the legs, the cleavage, the billowing skirt, the tasteful nudes, the mole, and, yes, the blonde hair. Her genius as a performer, perpetually underrated by some critics and reclaimed by other (smarter) ones, was typified in films such as Some Like it Hot or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She’d somehow play both the oblivious sexual object and the shrewd self-presenter as she subverted sexist expectations of those attempting to define her. And yet when she’s trapped in the cultural memory we are so often left with the shallow glamor and the sordid details. From made-for-TV biopics (1980’s Marilyn: The Untold Story) and the occasional prestige big screen effort (2011’s deadly dull My Week with Marilyn), the beats of her life are somehow placed on a pedestal of reverence even as such slobbering lends easily to condescension and objectification. Even when she died, as Elton John would remind us, all the papers had to say was that she was found in the nude.

Now here’s Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, which, like Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, is interested in a mid-century icon as the icon, attempting to excavate in a freewheeling, loosely (or, in this case, tangentially) factual way, but feeling right about how they moved through the culture. But unlike Luhrhman’s glitzy, heartfelt montage, which has a palpable love for Presley every second, Dominik is largely skeptical of what Monroe did, and what was done to her. The movie has a blitz of montage and mix of style—varied colors and ratios and CG flights of fancy that trade off with a cold logic—that could only look slow and tame compared to Luhrmann (or Oliver Stone at his most manic), as it looks at Monroe from a cool remove. She’s Norma Jeane abused and exploited and rendered hollow by a culture that looks only at the surface, and a personality that grinds itself into traumatized dust. She’s played by Ana de Armas in a state of fret and worry, really only alive on screen or in bed. Her voice slippery and tremulous, pulsing with breath and anxiety, she fidgets and darts her eyes, looks up from underneath the makeup and hair done in a perfect simulacrum and steps into the spotlight, before retreating into the shadows again—or forced into yet another abusive situation. She’s beaten, raped, forced to have an abortion, run through a meat grinder of casting couches. All the time, she clings to the men in her life—a procession of famous men (Bobby Cannavale as Joe DiMaggio, Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, Caspar Phillipson as JFK) who think only they really get her. The her she sees on the big screen, the one we all love, she doesn’t recognize herself in there.

Dominik has previously done good work exploring American myth-making. His The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a great late Western, casting a critical eye on the consequences of living out a life of disreputable legend, and, in its brilliant final sequences, what happens to those left after that life has gone. Similarly, his Killing Them Softly takes traditional crime movie tropes and makes them into a grubby mirror of capitalist self-congratulation, a talky swirl of potent political cynicism. With Blonde, adapting a Joyce Carol Oates novel that has a passing resemblance to reality, his vision of Monroe is troubled by superficial confusion. It’s interested in surfacing the real ugliness of parts of her life, and eliding any pleasure or control she may have had. Typical of the film’s interest in her work is a scene set in a theater playing the last scene of Some Like it Hot—with its hilarious final line chirped out with perfect timing by Joe E. Brown and wide-eyed reaction from Jack Lemmon. Dominik doesn’t let us hear any laughter from the crowd. Instead there’s eerie silence followed by sped-up footage of rapid-fire applause. Blonde creates a vision of Monroe’s stardom as nothing but product, served up to the masses in a va-va-voom wolf-whistle package. Watch the cross-cutting of the woman getting a—ahem—hand from a fella in a theater while the roaring waterfalls of the trailer for her film Niagara gush forth on the screen.

You can’t say the movie’s not boldly trying out its ideas. It’s lousy with thin Freudian analysis—the words “mother” and “daddy” are murmured here more often than in a Tennessee Williams play. Her mom (Julianne Nicholson) is cranked up near Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest levels (though “Get! In! The! Bath!” is no “No! Wire! Hangers!”), and pop is a black and white glamor shot that haunts her. (Echoes of familial tension are doubled by a CG fetus slowly twirling in amniotic fantasia.) It's perhaps perversely resistant to entertainment or nostalgia, dripping as it is with classic movie clips digitally altered to place new people in old shots, and copious period detail. Here Hollywood is shown as a suffocating spectacle that wraps Norma up in increasingly tight framing and sun-dappled faux-grain that cinches in just as her stardom expands. Her chaotic upbringing and tumultuous affairs are also grim—she never enjoys sex, and even the men who worship her body fall flat when getting access to it. JFK lounges with disinterest on the phone while she leans over his lap; more baroque configurations of bodies earlier in the film are blurred and bleakly mechanical; powerful men invade her and use her and think nothing of her. Here’s a stark movie that revels in its misery, and avoids all hero worship and vicarious success of the True Hollywood Story. Instead, it’s a burning Babylon of a city, with wildfires, broken women, and madmen whose suits buy them respect they don’t deserve. It’s a young woman with a tear running down her cheek. But Blonde isn’t interested in anything more that gorgeous misery. It just hurts. In doing so, the movie does the exact same thing it laments—turning her pain into its own narrative from which to profit. That leaves, no matter its intriguing qualities, its ambitions beyond its reach.

But at least it has reach, which is more than one can say for Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling. It, too, wants to interrogate the prison of pining for mid-century femininity. Too bad it’s just a slice of Swiss—thin, cheesy, full of holes. This misfire wants to be a mysterious mind-bender of a picture in which an idealized 50’s suburban community is slowly revealed to be Up To No Good. (Gee, where have were heard that before?) Because it’s 2022, that means it starts like a bad episode of The Twilight Zone and ends like a typical episode of Black Mirror. Florence Pugh stars as a seemingly happy housewife who cooks and cleans and shops and takes ballet lessons and hangs with the other neighborhood women. It’s a company town where the men drive off to the plant and are in constant admiration of their boss (Chris Pine). Pugh starts to suspect something’s up with the men’s double-talk and the other weird sub-WandaVision breaks with reality revealing that everything’s pretty empty in this existence. She’s literally trapped behind glass walls or cracking open empty eggs. Get it? But the free-floating symbolism never adds up and a potentially interesting stew of topical and philosophical ideas get buried in the movie’s long, slow trudge—flat declarations, muddled revelations, confused supporting characterizations, perplexingly fuzzy world-building.

The irritating lack of specifics here—everything’s burnished and polished and vacant—make the eventual revelations feel all the more inadequate. It’s the kind of dull thriller that one thinks back through with full knowledge of the twists and finds it even more lacking. If that’s what’s going on, then it makes even less sense, one thinks. You could probably talk for hours with your friends about every nagging loose end of confused sub-twist, but, gosh, how boring would that be? The movie does have Pugh giving it her all, even with as inconsistent a scene partner as Harry Styles as her husband who loves getting down to business on her, and also endlessly twirling on stage for his buddies. And Pine is perfectly sinister as her foil, a masculinist phony clearly cultivating a cult of personality—he’s like a few prominent poisonous alt-right faux-intellectual men you might think of. But the movie clicks into its most interesting ideas right as it all falls apart, and makes such a hash of its conclusion that one feels all the more intently the waste of time it took to get there. Sure, kids these days might not’ve seen—and here’s a warning that if you’ve seen the following you’ll start to glean this one’s twists—The Stepford Wives or The Truman Show or Pleasantville or The Village. (They should, though!) Even they might smell this one’s meager second-hand nature.

No Man's Land: WONDER WOMAN

Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman is exactly what a big budget superhero spectacle should be. The film is so effortlessly crowd-pleasing you might wonder why others of its ilk make it look so difficult to accomplish so much less. It’s serious fun, a red-blooded adventure and fantastic light show, telling a complete story with no need for prior knowledge and no sense of burdensome teases for future installments. Best of all, it is fully aware and taking advantage of its hero’s iconography and bolsters the action by taking some consideration to the emotional weight of its violence. There’s fun to be had, but it also feels like a full and humane movie, driven by Wonder Woman’s inherent goodness and a sense that she and the ensemble around her are people and not mere action figures. It heightens the stakes, and it helps ground the inevitable swirls of effects. This is a movie about a god, the way all DC superheroes are totemic symbols, but here she is shown not through corrosively crass soulless cynicism, but the bright, pure light of virtue. She is a paragon of self-sacrifice, fighting for what’s right, what’s just, what’s true. All that and in a hugely entertaining popcorn entertainment, too? What a relief.

For Diana (Gal Gadot), princess of the demigod Amazons, raised on a picturesque matriarchal Paradise Island by her Queen mother (Connie Nielsen) who preached pacifism and her pragmatic aunt (Robin Wright) who trained her to be prepared to fight, being good is not a burden. She is the most talented Amazon, capable with sword, shield, whip, and her superpowered strength. We see her first as a little girl, eager to learn the skillful athleticism of the women warriors. Then, as a young woman, she takes great enjoyment in her powers, grinning as she spars in scrimmage battles. She’s ready, although her mother still hopes war will not find them, praying the island will remain hidden from ominous threats from their Greek myth origins. Alas, beyond their magically shrouded hidden paradise, World War I rages. The outside world arrives when an American spy (Chris Pine) crash lands in their bay pursued by a German platoon. The women manage to fight off the invaders and remain hidden from the world. But the soldier’s tales of the War to End All Wars touch Diana’s heart and she must leave with him to save mankind from itself. “They do not deserve you,” her mother says as she bids her farewell. The film is sincere about Diana’s goodness, and does not view her earnestness with skepticism. It is her uncomplicated moral certitude that makes her wonderful, and the world’s broken, ugly combativeness the clear force for evil.

This is a movie about a heroine whose conflict is not the weary woe-is-me moping of recent superhero movies, but a stirring call to action. The problem isn’t an obligation to do what’s right, but a struggle to get others to see the elegant simplicity of righteousness and empathy. Gadot inhabits the role’s decency and determination, anchoring the fantastical backstory in a fully realized person who has an uncomplicatedly genuine sense of goodness and virtue. Upon arriving in the world of early-20th-century London, there is easy humor as the mythological woman is a fish-out-of-water, finding a ruffled dress and corset combo a puzzle. “How do women fight in this?” she wonders. Gadot and Pine play these scenes with unforced humor that neither tries too hard, nor deflates the tension of the picture. Adding in a funny side character (his plucky secretary (Lucy Davis), one of those rare supporting players who gets a laugh with every line) makes the film’s bright touch. So, too, how lightly Diana takes the sexism of a military made up of men (like David Thewlis) who refuse to even acknowledge her presence, let alone allow her to advise. She simply doesn’t understand why they behave so cowardly. Luckily her guide sees her strength and determination and helps her to the front lines. He’s investigating a dastardly German general (Danny Huston) and a mad scientist (Elena Anaya) who’re preparing a devastating new form of mustard gas that’ll kill thousands at a time, and will surely undermine the ongoing armistice talks. This evil must be stopped and the movie becomes a winning soldiers-on-a-mission movie.

As Diana leads a small group of men behind enemy lines in search of the new weapon and its villainous makers, the movie lights up with colorful action. It’s great fun, staged for maximum impact, impressive choreography and strategic splashes of slow-mo built to showcase glowing comic book panel images that pop in the flow of frenetic frames. See her knocking back machine gun bullets with a swing of her indestructible shield, or kicking an enemy combatant through a window while she leaps after him, or using her lasso to take a pack of attackers off their feet. But it’s always driven by her obvious moral outrage. She wants to save a village torn up by German invaders. She wants to protect a group of soldiers pinned down in a trench. She wants to help her new allies end the war. This is gripping retro-pulp fantasy in a sleek style. The action progresses in a logical escalating fashion, drawn from clear conflicts, sharply delineated motivations, and a crisp sense of place and space. A hurtling momentum of crisis nonetheless takes its time to build feeling for and take pleasure in the chemistry amongst its ensemble, allowing each new development in the plot to follow inexorably from the character’s decisions, personalities, and convictions. 

With a steady hand and a light touch, Jenkins directs a full-blooded movie here, wearing heroism sincerely and excitedly, and building full characters to care about. Inspired by over seven decades of comics, Allan Heinberg’s sturdy, clever screenplay allows for plenty of fluid visual fanfares of action, explosions in a vibrant color palate and a quick-paced serial cliffhanger adventure mode. Yet it never loses a sense of humanity, a decision as evident in its concern for the impact of every punch as it is in the lovely little character moments – sweet exchanges, prickly flirtations, charming misunderstandings. Best is how both assets work so perfectly together, like when Diana first arrives in the trenches and is told the soldiers have made no progress in months. The enemy is too heavily fortified behind a vast No Man’s Land. She shrugs off her coat to reveal her iconic battle armor, and steps out of the trench and onto the battlefield ready to fight. The movie need not speak the Homeric obvious, as she strides forward confidently wielding her shield and drawing her sword, the score swelling with the triumphant, moving, exciting anticipation of heroic acts. She is No Man.

Cops and Robbers: HELL OR HIGH WATER

Hell or High Water locates the western there for the taking underneath the modern post-industrial late-capitalism American west. It takes place in modern day, but it still has black hats and white hats and even some hats in between, and a preoccupation with who is allowed to make the rules and who is allowed to transgress the rules. The whole thing boils down to a hardtack cops and robbers movie, two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) hitting small-town Texas banks to raise enough money to keep their late mother’s farmland out of the bank’s hands. You see, there’s oil there, and the bank would very much like to sell it to a company willing to tap it and pump out liquid gold. The brothers would rather get out of foreclosure and see the profits themselves. So they pull on ski masks, hop in their dusty, beat-up cars, and drive from target to target. All the while, two cops (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham) are in laid-back, laconic pursuit.

Read the film of a piece with screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s previous script, for last year’s Drug War thriller Sicario, and it’s plainly another movie about contemporary frontier law and order, where people forgotten and ignored simply do the best they can to scrape out a living whether it be through crime or punishment. Taken with director David Mackenzie’s previous film, British father-and-son-in-prison movie Starred Up, it’s another masculine vision of family tension rippling across a surface disturbed by their mixed loyalties and the threat of violence (both from within and from outside the family unit). The tough, smart Hell or High Water is a synthesis of these ideas, held together as if by saltines and spittle as a dry and dusty combination of exposition and foreshadowing. As the brothers draw closer to their fundraising goal the lawmen draw closer to catching them. This won’t end well, but there’s an egalitarian respect on the part of the filmmakers, recognizing both halves of the equation have humanity worth considering.

The movie’s sharp plotting and unassuming concern with its characters’ lives put me in mind of Cormac McCarthy and Elmore Leonard. Hardly a scene goes by without a line of dialogue that’s pleasing to the ear – an eccentric spin on a common sentiment, or a revealing exchange that casually illuminates some nook or cranny of personality a more single-mindedly plot-focused film would ignore. This extends to the robbers, as one fresh from prison remains jumpy and unpredictable, but also wounded that the other had their mother’s favor right up until the end. And then there are the cops, Bridges’ the old vet on the brink of retirement out for one last big case needling his Native American partner with the kind of affectionate racially-charged teasing he thinks is fine because it’s meant well, but lands with studied stoic exasperation on Birmingham’s face. Then there are the one-scene-wonders, bank tellers and managers, waitresses and patrons, casino employees and gamblers. Each of them makes the most of their moment, the heroes of their own stories living their own lives, only coming into focus for us because they happen to cross paths with the main event.

It plays out by turns thrilling and suspenseful, but often at a relaxed downbeat, building at a slow, steady pace. The robberies are sudden, messy, scary, dangerous. The investigation is methodical and folksy. It’s told in a style that’s terse, matter-of-fact. Vast desert landscapes and run-down small towns are the new Western terrain. In the forgotten corners of the Great Recession, poverty, Chevron, and concealed carry permits are the constants. But it’s not just recent downturn. Factories have dried up. Family farms can’t make ends meet. One old man stares out across a quaint but deserted downtown and intones, “No one’s made a living here in 150 years.” Who can blame the robbers for getting creative about getting by? They steal from the bank like the bank is allowed to steal from them. And yet who can say that they shouldn’t pay for their sins? With a strong, steady hand the movie finds an exciting climax, and a resigned headshake of an ambiguous conclusion. The movie’s like an old narrative folk-country ballad where the lyrics might err on the side of clumsy and derivative, but the chords are strong, the personality is bright, and the sentiment rings true.

To Infinity and STAR TREK BEYOND

Star Trek Beyond is a fine entry in a venerable franchise that’s celebrating its fiftieth year. The movie is colorful and clever, with effective adventure sequences, cool visual concepts, and the core intelligence mixed with compassionate character moments that have allowed this whole endeavor to endure, from its original 1966 TV show through five more series and 13 movies with more on the way. Through its ups and downs, the late Gene Roddenberry’s creation remains sci-fi’s shining beacon of utopian spirit. What a pleasure in these dark times, when the world feels irreparably torn by forces of division, hatred, fear, and anti-intellectualism, to settle in for a journey to a possible future where the values of science, progress, and unity have built a better society. The values are comforting, but no less an adventure when the noble crew of the starship Enterprise find themselves drawn into a conflict in uncharted space. It’s a series that dares to dream of a better tomorrow, not one without conflict, but one in which the better angels of our nature can succeed through cooperation between heart and logic.

Beyond continues the recent string of Treks set in an alternate timeline of the first series, with J.J. Abrams’ 2009 entry sending time travel ripples imagining new rebooted, recast stories for familiar characters while avoiding tampering with or otherwise erasing classic lore. This time around director Justin Lin, fresh from making four Fast & Furious movies (including a few of that series’ best), takes a step back from his predecessor’s Into Darkness, a fast, exciting movie that was nonetheless more militarized, destructive, and paranoid than the franchise’s comfort zone. Lin’s film is more in line with the show’s original goals – to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before – in a movie that’s slightly smaller in scale, like a pleasing two-part episode with action blown out to blockbuster proportions between small character work and a journey through an alien landscape. Lin gets the spirit of the enterprise, and the simple appeal of sending a likable crew into a difficult situation and watching them think their way out.

It begins with Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) feeling that life in year three of their five-year exploration mission is growing “episodic.” (That’s a cute meta wink.) He’s starting to doubt his desire to captain. Likewise, his crewmates, like stoic half-Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto) and irascible doctor McCoy (Karl Urban), wear the weariness of space heavily on their shoulders. The ship docks at a Federation station in deep space – a wondrously imagined thing that’s an idealized spacious metropolis complicatedly constructed on the inside arcs of a gigantic sphere, the tops of skyscrapers nearly meeting in the middle – for some rest and relaxation. But they must cut their vacation short when a distress call comes in from beyond an uncharted nebula. Duty calls, and so off they go, Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Sulu (John Cho), Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and the rest, straight into an ambush. A mysterious creature calling himself Krall (Idris Elba under layers of grayish-blue makeup) attacks them with swarms of bug-like ships, which results in the crash of the starship and the capture of most of the crew.

The screenplay by Pegg and Doug Jung is a little undercooked, but still a cleverly paired down and contained conflict of a familiar Trek kind. The crew must learn about this strange villain’s behavior – why has he captured them? what does he want? where is his army headed next? – and explore the planet to figure out how best to escape and warn Starfleet that this unknown being is bent on its destruction. There are lengthy sequences of dazzling spectacle, Lin bringing considerable visual energy with shiny future surfaces, baroque CG fleets of vessels, and complicated layers of lights and screens. With his usual cinematographer Stephen F. Windon he finds freedom in the floating vacuum of space to turn the camera topsy-turvy, then locks down in the craggy terrain of the unknown planet. But it all depends in the downtimes on the chemistry between the loyal friends aboard the Enterprise, separated in the crash and trying to reunite with each other, trade the information they’ve gleaned, and escape the villain’s evil clutches.

Through three films together, this cast has gelled naturally. Pine’s brash Kirk, Quinto’s logical Spock, and Urban’s crackling McCoy are a perfect Trek trinity, not merely resting on nostalgia for the old cast’s interpretations, but with distinct familiarity of their own. Cho’s Sulu and Saldana’s Uhura are allowed shadings and complications on the margins that make them fresh, while Yelchin (despite his appearance tinged with melancholy brought on by his untimely death) is fun comic relief as the lively and irrepressible Chekov. He gets a moment where he taps his foot to a catchy tune while he confidently pilots the Enterprise just ahead of a wave of fiery doom, a fun needle-drop melded with a fleeting grace note. Lin’s confidence as an action filmmaker is easy to spot, but it’s his light touches with actors that really animates the thrills. Here it’s a pleasure to see this ensemble reunite, and new additions – like a young tough alien scavenger woman also marooned on this planet (Sofia Boutella) – quickly fit right in with the team. Even Elba is allowed just enough brief moments to take a seemingly one-dimensional MacGuffin hunter under a pile of makeup and project his charisma and compelling fascination through it.

Lin knows it’s the eye on humanity that makes for good Star Trek and here he delivers the goods. Beyond might be smaller and thinner than you’d expect after the more slam-bang large-scale entries that came before, but there’s a bright throwback appeal and energy to the whole piece similar to spotting an old rerun while flipping channels. The characters and their world are so engaging that I couldn’t help but be drawn in, intrigued to see how they were going to outsmart their attackers and keep the galaxy safe. In the end the dazzling action climax – zipping in and around an outer space locale in supremely clever use of its lovingly imagined structure – isn’t only about shooting and punching, but more importantly thinking through the best course of action and executing it to perfection by luck and by pluck. There are no grand character arcs or overly heavy thematic preoccupations. It’s simply good old-fashioned space adventure that’s light on its feet, loves its characters, and can tap into the uniquely Star Trek sense of exploring the galaxy with a group of likeminded individuals committed to caring.

Watership Down: THE FINEST HOURS

Like a Norman Rockwell painting poured over The Perfect Storm, The Finest Hours is a sturdy, old-fashioned picture. Based on the true story of a 1952 Coast Guard rescue of a tanker split in two by horrendous winter weather, the film tells its tale in a rather conventional way. We meet a stubborn do-gooder guardsman (Chris Pine) and the sweet girl (Holliday Grainger) who’d like to marry him. Then the storm hits, the tanker is in trouble, and the man’s commanding officer (Eric Bana) sends him out on a small boat with a small crew (Ben Foster, Kyle Gallner, and John Magaro) to do the impossible. Their boat is tossed about by the waves and winds, equipment malfunctions, and the sun sets. Meanwhile, the men on the tanker (over 30 of them, including Casey Affleck and John Ortiz) are struggling to stay afloat, with no way to make contact, and thus no way of knowing if help is even on the way. It’s a simple story, but the story is simply engaging.

A live action Disney movie, it looks and feels more or less like it would if the company made it in 1956, 66, 76, 86, 96, or 2006, modern tech aside. There’s a fine layer of timeless Hollywood gloss over it, and a proficient element of spectacle as special effects buffet the boats out in the storm and softly falling snow coats the coast in a sparkling snow globe lighthouse look. And in the midst of this is a dependable cast playing people who are largely identifiable types, but given just enough personality and interior lives for rooting interest beyond making it out alive, and to suggest a reality beyond the big studio lights on the sets and CG. The situation is inherently dramatic – true life-or-death stakes, with survival hinging on how well these people can do their jobs, and on the whims of nature. The screenplay (by The Fighter’s Eric Johnson, Scott Silver, and Paul Tamasy) is smart not to undercut the proceedings. It crests perilous waves of cliché to find clear sailing to the heartstrings.

It borders on corny, but it never quite gets there, kept afloat by its forward momentum and reliably sturdy construction. Who’d have thought Craig Gillespie, the director of the Ryan-Gosling-in-love-with-a-RealDoll movie Lars and the Real Girl and the fun Fright Night remake, would turn into a decent helmer for Disney based-on-a-true-story fare? With Finest Hours he improves on his dull sports movie Million Dollar Arm, this time telling an interesting and compelling narrative with good clarity for its process and perspective. We follow each boat’s progress through the storm, cutting between them, and some judicious glimpses of those fretting on the shore, hoping against hope that their guys will make it back alive. There’s a chaste romance at stake, and a couple dozen souls stranded in a rapidly failing craft. That’s plenty heart-tugging drama to get invested in, and a cast willing to play it earnestly.

The sequences on the listing half-tanker are the strongest, Javier Aguirresarobe’s camera and Tatiana S. Riegel’s editing crisply following a committed cast of character actors chewing on accents and sloshing around a convincingly dangerous waterlogged set, coming to terms with the long odds confronting them. The film is full of towering waves, howling winds, groaning bulkheads, straining chains, swinging beams, straining rudders, whirring propellers, and spasms of sparks and smoke. Gillespie focuses on these tactile details, in sharp, routine frames constructed to show off the heroic efforts taken by various crewmembers to save as many lives as they can. It’s a film that feels the movement of the bobbing waves, the strain on an engine as a boat takes on weight, and the taxing whir of overpowered pumps slowly letting water creep higher up the engine room. It’s an engaging film of sturdy craftsmanship, the sort of feel-good inspirational fact-based family film I’m glad Disney hasn’t entirely given up on making in the shadow of their mega-blockbuster fantasies.

The World's End, Again: Z FOR ZACHARIAH

Here we are again after the end of the world. Some unknown calamity has befallen the earth an unknown time before our story begins. There are few survivors. The world they left behind is contaminated, perhaps irreparably. All that remains is a haunted landscape of abandoned places. We’ve been here before, the post-apocalyptic narrative being one of our most common lately. Maybe we’re preparing ourselves for the worst. Maybe we think we’re already living in the early stages of our own apocalypse and need doomsday prepping. Or maybe we’re captives of a pessimism that’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. (See Tomorrowland for the corrective there, I suppose.) Director Craig Zobel’s Z for Zachariah takes this familiar premise into tiny intimate spaces, finding the subgenre simply a convenient excuse to strip away society and all but a few characters, the better to focus on the slightest and narrowest of interpersonal conflicts.

Zobel’s films are about marginalized characters. Think of his low-level con men in Great World of Sound and fast food workers in Compliance. But you don’t get much more marginal than Margot Robbie in Zachariah who, as the movie begins, may as well be the last person on earth, for all she knows. We see her head into town in a HAZMAT suit, scavenge some essentials, then trudge back to her isolated farmhouse where, miraculously, the radiation levels remain at hospitable levels. This has been her life for who knows how long. She credits her survival on her faith in God, praying and playing the organ in a chapel built on her property. We learn she had a family who left to find other survivors and never returned. It’s just her, a dog, a rifle, and God. Zobel treats her daily existence with a deliberate pace and a bright digital glaze.

Soon enough, another person enters her solitary life. He (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is in almost every way her exact opposite. She’s a young white southern Christian farm girl. He’s a middle-aged black northern big city scientist. He left his relative safety on a quest of curiosity, to find the state of the world since the crisis that decimated it. His trip through contaminated spaces has left him half-dead. They’re surprised to see each other, and form a tentative alliance. She lets him stay on her property, nurses him back to health, and accepts his help with survivalist tasks. Together they forage, farm, and plan ways to improve their lives. They maybe even fall in love a little bit, but it’s also clear they’re not sure how much the affection they feel is more a factor of the slow ebbing of overwhelming loneliness.

This is all well and good, an intimate if schematic character study nestled in picturesque uninhabited lush green natural spaces. Taking inspiration from Robert C. O’Brien’s cult classic sci-fi novel of the same name, the story plays out by running softly along the natural fault lines in the characters’ relationships, letting interactions of tabula rasa impressions drift backwards. Into this dynamic arrives a third character, a man (Chris Pine) who stumbles onto the farm desperate for water and shelter. He, too, has gone looking for survivors. He, too, is accepted into their isolated commune. But now that there are three, petty jealousies encroach. What was a restrained two-hander becomes a spare and wan love triangle, so softly and delicately played it may as well be a slight chill on the breeze. It makes for a much less interesting second half, as overfamiliar as it is uninvolving.

Zobel’s commitment to a slow and steady pace keeps the plot’s thematic interests slowly boiling, despite the obvious directions it’s headed. It’s admirably restrained, feeling no need to adhere to what an audience might expect from post-apocalyptic stories. The problem is just that it’s ultimately all so slight and inert. A finely acted drama, it lacks narrative tension or character insight deeper than first glance assumptions, playing out like a didactic Twilight Zone knockoff with the broad strokes in which characterization is painted never becoming a satisfying larger picture. It’s the sort of film that’s just barely compelling enough in the moment, setting up its variables with reasonable control, but concludes with the distinct feeling of neglecting to add up. Where it ends is hardly worth the trouble getting there. We’ve not only been here before, but it’s been far more satisfying, too.

Uses of Enchantment: INTO THE WOODS

After over a decade of box office success with revisionist fairy tales of one sort (Shrek) or another (Snow White and the Huntsman) or another (Maleficent), I suppose it was about time Hollywood got around to adapting Stephen Sondheim’s original Grimm mashup, Into the Woods. That musical, co-written with James Lapine, was first produced in 1986. It took long enough for something so cinematic and imaginative as this series of head-on collisions between a variety of classic tales made it to the screen. Perhaps the delay was simply how much further the material takes its revisionist impulses, to a place darker and more destabilizing to the very idea of fairy tales than those others dare.

Disney, no stranger to wonderful fairy tales, but rarely willing to overtly dig down dark, has brought the stage to the screen with director Rob Marshall, whose Chicago put a layer of dreamy glitz on a sordid murder musical. The resulting Into the Woods adaptation, scripted by Lapine with music supervision by Sondheim, gets at what’s most provocative about the story, stripping away layers of feel-good fantasy while attempting to still let some sentimental magic in around the edges. It’s a partial equivocation to crowd pleasing in a more conventional sense, pulling back from a few of the nastier moments, but remains admirably committed to being a big feel-bad musical, a bunch of great lyrics and melody with a bittersweet aftertaste.

The opening sets a collection of familiar characters – Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Jack who will have the Beanstalk (Daniel Huttlestone), Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) – off on their recognizable stories. The first twist is placing them all in the same world, crossing paths, each story’s simple patterns trailing ripple effects through the others’. The second twist is a baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt), childless because of a witch (Meryl Streep) and her curse, heading out into the woods to get the curse reversed. The ingredients they must collect: a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair yellow as corn, and a slipper pure as gold. This quest brings them into direct conflict with the other plotlines, further complicating simple tales.

By the midpoint, every story has reached its happy ending, everyone happily married off or with child or rich. The only people disfigured or blinded are wicked stepsisters. But then the real story begins, revealing happily ever after to be short lived. Their wishes have been granted, and yet their lives are no easier, and choices they made to get there have unintended consequences. The easy morality of fairy tales leaves these characters unprepared for dissatisfaction, revenge, abandonment, infidelity, and death. That’s the sour note of real life infecting giddy childhood fantasy. And so the movie follows suit, buzzing with clever Grimm knottiness for an hour before tipping over into sadness and upsetting developments. Sondheim’s play is about the limits of life lessons gleaned from these tales, and how destabilizing it can be to feel alone in the world without easy answers to guide you.

The movie version gets there, but it’s by its very nature flashier, cutting between storylines quickly and inelegantly, making an occasional jumble out of its various strands. Trims to the plot, especially in the back half, foreshorten motivations and rush the revelations. But there are smaller miscues of editing. Early on we’re told about a prince, singular, throwing a festival. Then a few cuts later, we meet a prince, a different one. In the last third, two characters die in different ways, presented so obliquely it may as well be off screen. Their fates aren’t clear until other characters tell us later. One literally falls out of frame, later revealed to have been a fatal plunge from a cliff, not a trip over a branch as one could reasonably assume.

Stumbles of staging aside, there’s a fine patina of fakery to it all. The woods never feel like a real place, just a soundstage. I didn’t mind it much.  The set has its charms and Marshall finds real emotional engagement between his actors that enlivens the glittering falsehoods around them. Corden and Blunt’s bakers are especially good, with breezy repartee and excellent timing. Kendrick’s charming as always, this time as a flustered indecisive young woman. These three are the heart of the picture, shouldering the burden of the tonal shifts while Streep hams it up howling and cackling in the background as the witch goads the stories forward. Elsewhere, there’s room for small but juicy comic parts played with aplomb by Chris Pine, Christine Baranski, Tracey Ullman, Johnny Depp, Lucy Punch, and more. They’re welcome flavoring to this world.

Marshall steps out of his cast’s way and lets them spill forth with Sondheim’s delectable wordplay, rhyming, punning, and clattering with all manner of delightful alliterations that trip off the tongue and sweet simple poetic constructions that sit pleasantly on the ear. The big musical moments land because of the writing, and the skill with which the performers feel it. These little moments, aching with yearning and surprise, work wonders. But the big picture doesn’t cohere in the way it should. The story’s pacing’s off and the staging imprecise, but the hopeful bittersweet conclusion is affecting, even if the remaining pieces feel a tad forced to fit. Masterpieces of one medium rarely retain that status in the leap to another. That Into the Woods is a good movie, but not a great one, is only a minor disappointment.