Winners and Losers:THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER and THE PRINCESS

A few dozen movies and TV shows in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe of colorful heroes and interconnected can-kicking narratives has basically nothing to do with anything recognizably human. It goes all the more awry when a project wants to nod back in the direction. Hence Thor: Love and Thunder. He was heretofore one of the MCU’s most consistently entertaining characters—his appearances in first two Shakespeare-by-way-of-Jack Kirby entries (or vice versa), his goofier Guardians of the Galaxy-lite Ragnarok, and best-in-show appearances in multiple Avengers pictures. Star Chris Hemsworth always provides him an appealing gym-bod arrogance in an oblivious goofball beneficence, a boisterous buffoonery that can still kick out the action when called upon. But that force of personality alone can’t lift a movie completely miscalculated from the jump. This new Thor movie is a near-stupefyingly ill-considered collection of inanities and tropes broken up by the most rankly manipulative sentiments.

Writer-director Taika Waititi, whose distinctively silly style from early genre-benders like What We Do in the Shadows worked well enough for Thor last time, shamelessly trots out cheap buttons to push. Here there’s a supporting character with cancer—nothing specific, just “cancer”—that’s used as mawkish motivation when it’s important and dropped entirely for antics when not. (As fine an actress as Natalie Portman is, she can’t get something from nothing.) Here there are kids in danger—kidnapped and held in a dark cave by a murderous villain who himself is motivated by the senseless death of his only child. We see the latter in a raw moment of mourning in a stark prologue. Christian Bale, as the grieving father, is almost too good at making us want to see him succeed in taking out his anger on the gods who remain indifferent to the suffering of the common man. The movie’s endless violence, indifferently handled seriousness, and badly calibrated humor merely prolongs the suffering for us all.

After all, the movie’s villain pokes holes in growing MCU blindspots, problems that have reached a nadir here. When the heroes skirt past consequences in order to continually churn new installments, nothing matters. The life of a normal person must be terribly unsettled—to be at the whims of these larger-than-life super-beings. How awful. Love and Thunder is an especially cluttered and confused outgrowth of this problem. It’s flatly imagined and deadened by its blunt pathos steamrolled by the studio’s house style of weightless gloop, bad blocking, and cheap wisecracks. Waititi opens his movie with a character angry when gods laugh at his pain, and then makes a movie in which characters constantly laugh off pain—giggling at dangers and hand-waving murders. This flippancy is self-defeating. It robs the potential for real character depths—not that the movie’s dull repetition of previous Thor arcs, like learning humility and forging a makeshift family, is anything to mine for such—by treating everything with the heaviest-handed light touch imaginable.

Somehow both thin and overcomplicated, the story takes forever to get nowhere, and grates with its wildly uneven stumbling through inscrutable digital noise and incomprehensibly cheap staginess. (There are whole sequences where it’s difficult to tell who’s doing what to what effect to whom.) It gathers up the requisite cameos, crowds the sloppy frame with little moments for a dozen characters to shuffle on stage, get off a joke that flops, and limp away. Even an evocative villain, and a potentially witty foil in a fatuous Zeus (Russell Crowe in a lisping Grecian accent), are used for little and, ultimately, naught. Of course the gods must be crazy—and careless—to kick off the story of a man who wants revenge on them. But the movie lacks the courage of its premise’s convictions, completely refuses to engage with its implications, and feels all the emptier and annoying for it. The villain is inadvertently proven right. This is nihilism togged up as forced frivolity. It says, yes, the gods don’t care, the world is devoid of hope for mere mortals, but, hey, at least Thor joked around with his pals before the love of his life kicked the bucket to inspire him.

Better heroism with a sense of style and perspective can be found in The Princess, a 20th Century Studios movie ignominiously sent straight to Hulu. (Sheesh, is it a bummer than Disney has turned that once-great studio into a feeder for its streaming services. Even a modestly received theatrical run still boosts a movie’s profile more than these straight-to-digital premiere.) It stars Joey King as a princess whose castle has been taken over by snarling villains. Their leader (Dominic Cooper) wants to marry her and take her kingdom. He’s locked her in a tower and menaces her parents and younger sister in the palace below. Good thing she knows how to fight back. This R-rated action flick, overseen by Vietnamese director Le-Van Kiet, becomes a rollicking rolling action sequence bursting with kicks and punches, whips and chains, tumbles and tangles as she has to fight down the tower, through layers of goons, to save the day. It’s neatly composed and briskly choreographed, rarely pausing for breath, or much psychological complexity.

But its simplicity is its own asset, allowing it to focus narrowly on its strengths. It sure has personality, and the kind of bristling no-sweat casual feminism that its premise implies. King is a fine physical presence and fits the demands of the hard-charging role, playing up the exertion and panting effort of each move. And the supporting cast—key sidekicks for both good (Veronica Ngo) and bad (Olga Kurylenko)—is well-chosen in complementary skills with neat bladed weaponry and reasonably believable relationships to the leads. Here’s a movie that’s perched on the point where a teenage feminist fairy tale—The Princess Saves Herself in This One—meets vertical action levels—Die Hard meets The Raid. It knows what it wants to do, gets the job done, and leaves quickly before outstaying its welcome. The result is a slender and modestly satisfying genre effort.

In the Cards: KNIGHT OF CUPS

I always leave a Terrence Malick film with my mind still cloudy with its cadence, and my eyes seeing the world more closely. He’s always been a poetic filmmaker, prone to gliding away from obvious plot progression through visual metaphor and a roaming curiosity for finding the beauty, the sublime, in any given moment. Lately, though, he’s been drifting further away from narrative. Where once his artful and spiritual approach was tied to the likes of a World War II film (The Thin Red Line) or a tale of colonial America (The New World), he now digs into his character’s minds with increasingly elliptical and empathetic discursiveness. He builds repeating patterns of images and rhyming, rhythmic, trance-like editing. Through The Tree of Life and To the Wonder and now his latest, Knight of Cups, he’s been drawn to similar images: beatific but sad women, stern fathers, people running barefoot on wet sand, hands gliding along surfaces smooth (stone, sheets, running water, skin) and textured (hair, grass, leaves). Does he repeat himself? Very well, then he repeats himself.

In Knight of Cups story and character are gathered only in flashes, flowing forth not in scenes but in impressions, moods, juxtapositions. Malick’s recurring images are the only entry point, and as a result it continues his trend toward gradually more obscurant and opaque films, increasingly alienating for anyone who can’t quite get on his wavelength or forgo skepticism about the sincerity of his intentions. But there’s real meditative, contemplative power for those of us who can. This new film stars Christian Bale as a disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter wandering through a womanizing, glamorous life in Los Angeles. But this is no hectic star-struck satire. Malick takes his style and approach to urban environs for the first time, but finds the intimate and the natural growing through. Every woman the man interacts with gets taken to the beach and cavorts in the puddles and waves. Gardens and boulevards express themselves through concrete and surround glassy mansions. One cameo-stuffed sequence finds a party in a palatial mansion, but Malick’s eye is often drawn to the mountains beyond.

This is an ethereal and spiritual story of a man who feels hollow, who tries to fill the void with women (a terrific lineup: Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Freida Pinto, Imogen Poots, Teresa Palmer), with family (a deadbeat brother, Wes Bentley; an imposing father, Brian Dennehy; a warm mother, Cherry Jones), with nature, with religion (a priest played by Armin Mueller-Stahl). But he can’t quite make the pieces fit. He’s a pilgrim without progress (the first voice we hear is Ben Kingsley reading from John Bunyan’s 1678 text), going through the motions. Not even an earthquake or a robbery can shake him from his haze of disaffected yearning. He wants to be made whole, and yet can’t figure out how to fill the missing parts of his soul. There’s a solemn sadness to the film’s hovering beauty, Emmanuel Lubezki’s luminous camera breathing and moving on a plane of enlightenment the character can’t. It floats, slowly tracking or pushing, distracted by beauty all around. It follows a stream of consciousness, of memory, poetic associations, intuitive connections, casual and tactile expressions of faith and philosophy.

Bale walks along empty beaches and vacant backlots, stands stranded in the desert, sees homeless and hurting people on sidewalks and in clinics, hobnobs with Hollywood elites, rolls about with lithe naked women, sinks into pools. He’s drifting through experiences, part of them without being a part. Tarot cards, agents, parents, lovers, all have advice to impart about what gives life meaning. Each person - a talented cast posing and maneuvering, each bringing a different flavor and tone into the mix - has an effect on him. And yet there are no direct dialogue exchanges of any import as scenes slide and collide, linger on silences and flow with wall-to-wall impassioned murmuring voice over and classical music cut with bits of score and rock. The film is a fog, rootless, directionless, adding up to great meaning that the character can’t access. Strangely, this walls off the audience at times. I felt its yearning for completion, was often moved by it, and still had moments when I stared at the screen in befuddlement as images collected while only occasionally connecting.

Perhaps the key to unlocking this entrancing, beguiling, beautiful mystery of a film comes when Bale imagines (or is it actually happening?) a rooftop confrontation with his stubborn but frail father. The old man laments that he thought as he aged everything about life would begin to make sense, but instead he’s sad to find nothing but a confusing tangle of messy memories. The film finds moments of intense emotional drama and thoroughly somnambulant despair, holding them both at the same remove, behind artful glass and sacred aloofness. Moments of pain and moments of grace are swallowed up by the character’s depression and the film’s interest in turning his distress into beautiful suffering. It all adds up to a heavy spell I’ve found hard to shake, even as my mind struggled in the moment and afterwards to puzzle through its throughlines. This isn’t one of Malick’s best efforts, lacking his usual intuitiveness in its progression, but that’s mostly due to how closed off it feels. I get the sense this is intensely personal, a movie dragged kicking and screaming out of his innermost being and now sits there vulnerable and foreboding, full of raw spiritual power.

House of Cards: THE BIG SHORT

The world economy collapsed in 2008, brought down by the banking industry’s unchecked power to make gigantic risky bets on the housing market, an investment they’d somehow deluded themselves into thinking was a sure thing. Bankers decided to treat the savings and loans of millions upon millions of people as poker chips in their own personal casino. Eventually, they lost, and we were stuck bailing them out. But maybe poker is a bad metaphor. Maybe it was like they were playing blackjack, or spinning the roulette table. No, perhaps it’s more accurate to say they were playing Jenga, and when people in over their heads couldn’t make payments on subprime mortgages, the whole tower fell down. Wait, maybe it would help you understand it better if you thought of bankers bundling bad debt to resell as investments like chefs repurposing leftovers and hoping no one would be the wiser. But forget the metaphors for a second. Would you rather hear all this from a gorgeous woman in a bathtub?

Writer-director Adam McKay tries out every metaphor above and more too, even stooping to cutting to a lady in the bath to spice up exposition, as his latest movie, The Big Short, attempts to explain the 2008 financial crisis in a narrative feature form. You’d think the whole thing would be better suited to a documentary. (That’d be Charles Ferguson’s masterfully comprehensive doc Inside Job.) On the basis of this film, you’d be right. McKay’s clearly burning with anger over the conditions of unchecked, unregulated greed that led to these problems, and the stasis that led to exactly nothing being done to fix them in the years since. He communicates this fervor by bringing a raucous pace to scenes (shot in jittery style by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd) of men in suits sitting around talking numbers. But he also doesn’t trust his audience to follow along, and so drags down a rapid-fire pace and zippy editing with endless narration, fourth-wall breaking lectures, snarky asides, and endless explanations.

Inspired by the well-reported book of the same name by Michael Lewis (Moneyball), McKay, with co-writer Charles Randolph (Love & Other Drugs), focuses the story on the handful of people who, in the early 2000s, saw the housing bubble growing and braced for the impact of the burst. There’s an eccentric hedge fund analyst (Christian Bale), an angry money manager (Steve Carell), a high-stakes trader (Ryan Gosling), and more (including Brad Pitt, Hamish Linklater, Finn Wittrock, and John Magaro). They’re not really fully formed people, more like representations of worldviews and information, conduits through which we are shown aspects of the larger looming problem. Bale and Gosling concoct a scheme to short securitized subprime mortgages. Carell and his employees get in on the action, then research the instability in the housing market on the ground, visiting sleazy loan sharks, underemployed homeowners, and shallow realtors. Everyone’s laughing them out of meetings for betting against the housing market. But the more the characters we follow uncover about the financial system, the more they’re convinced catastrophe is around the corner.

These guys are smart enough to figure out the problems, but only use this knowledge to make themselves money off the inevitable calamity. Sure, they try to tell people about their discoveries – colleagues, journalists, credit rating agencies – but nothing is done to avert the crisis. No one wanted to hear. Powered on frustration and fury, McKay builds an argument that the economy as we know it is essentially a mass delusion built on stupidity and fraud. We the people will believe anything if it’s in rich people’s interest to make it seem true. As difficult as it is to watch this recent history reenacted, it’s even harder to take realizing it could easily happen again. The large ensemble does fine work communicating these ideas, condensing and dispensing piles of spreadsheets at the expense of becoming actual characters, but the movie goes ahead and overexplains anyway.

He’s usually directing comedies (Anchorman, Talladega Nights), but here McKay shifts to a serious message movie out of clear passion. After all, he’s the guy who put in the end credits of his 2010 buddy cop comedy The Other Guys a biting PowerPoint presentation explaining how Wall Street is essentially a Ponzi scheme. The Big Short is well intentioned, and argues a sharp political point. But it’s so tediously expositional and smirkingly condescending. The narration acts like the information it recounts is boring or complicated, often pausing to say, “Confusing, right?” It’s a faux jocular tone that assumes the audience will quickly lose focus on the jargon or get lost in the overflow of technical dialogue. McKay loads the film with celebrity cameos explaining concepts, characters lecturing to the camera, and rapid-fire pop culture signifiers representing the passage of time. It’s basic, but overcomplicated, a deeply irritating approach. I’m not saying the roots of the financial crisis are necessarily simple or quick to grok, but I bet the sorts of people who would go see this movie in the first place might be interested enough to keep up.

Let My People Go: EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS

Only a third of the way into Ridley Scott’s 150-minute Exodus: Gods and Kings, I was already feeling like Mort Sahl who, legend has it, impatiently stood up in the middle of the 1960 premiere of Otto Preminger’s 208-minute Exodus and shouted, “Let my people go!” Gods and Kings takes one of the most vital enduring stories in all of world history and literature and tells it in a manner that’s dull beyond belief. It hits familiar beats – Moses’ secret identity, exile, encounter with a burning bush, plagues of Egypt, and parting the Red Sea. But the telling is drained of passion, wonder, or intrigue. The flavorless screenplay is depressingly literal minded, and the characters are flat and thin. Nothing makes an impact, or follows an inner drive. It’s simply one boring sequence after another, not even rising to the level of kitsch DeMille’s Ten Commandments musters at its worst.

Scott is often associated with period epics, but he’s rarely made good ones. When you get right down to it, his best films are either sci-fi pictures (Alien, Blade Runner, Prometheus) or thrillers (American Gangster, Matchstick Men, The Counselor). For some reason, the canvas of historical sweep makes his usually striking set design go flat, even ugly. Worse, he often takes our interest in the main character for granted, as if content with the knowledge most will arrive well aware of who he is and what he did. Scott’s Christopher Columbus and Robin Hood movies suffer the same problem, and Gods and Kings follows suit. It provides cold shots of CGI crowds and crane shots devoid of personality, filling in ancient Egypt without stopping to make us care about what’s happening in it. Every bit of this film is perfunctory, almost apologetically shrugging about its source material’s familiarity.

Playing dress up amidst this boredom is a cast that’s to a person ill suited for what’s asked of them. As Moses we have Christian Bale, who behaves constipated throughout, gritting his teeth and staring in mock awe at the enormity of his situation. Pharaoh Ramses, the man raised with Moses and is now the stubborn ruler who won’t free the slaves at his former brother’s request, is played by a shaved, heavily made-up Joel Edgerton, who appears visibly uncomfortable most of the time. The supporting players are familiar faces (John Turturro, Aaron Paul, Ben Kingsley, Hiam Abbass, Sigourney Weaver) who pose in Egyptian dress and speak maybe two or three dozen lines combined. Funniest is Ben Mendelsohn, whose look here appears vaguely inspired by Michael Palin in Life of Brian. I just felt bad for everyone involved as I felt the pull of sleep tug me lower in my seat.

The screenplay, credited to four writers who’ve done good work in the past, clunks along with dismaying thuds where the drama, the emotion, the excitement, and rooting interest should be. Dialogue is painfully surface level exposition. There’s no “let my people go!” But its equivalent is met by Ramses saying, “From an economic standpoint what you’re asking is problematic.” See what I mean about the boredom? The film attempts to put new spins on old moments and iconography. Instead of talking to a burning bush, Moses gets knocked on the head in an avalanche, and then sits in the mud hallucinating a little boy speaking on the bush’s behalf. It’s certainly different, but I hesitate to call it an improvement. Also reimagined are the gross plagues, now presented in a moderately more realistic manner. Crocodiles attack, filling the Nile with blood, which drives out the frogs, who die and attract flies, which draw the locusts, and so on and so forth.

Scott and his writers get too tangled up in wanting to make gritty origin story detail out of broad archetypes and oft told legend, a blend of modern 3D pyrotechnics and reverent Bible Movie earnestness. What they end up with is neither here nor there, a big waste of time with no sense of character, pace, or atmosphere. There’s just no sense of perspective. They didn’t find a great new angle with which to tell the old story, or have a good handle on some point of view or clear throughline. Character relationships remain half-formed, setpieces are on auto-pilot, and the plot develops for no clear reason other than that’s the way it’s supposed to go. The Bible told them so, except for the parts where the swords and arrows come out and goose the action elements. It’s one big, phony faux-gravitas machine whirring away at one droning pitch for so long it simply sounds like white (very white) noise after awhile. I struggled to pay attention, stay awake, and keep my eyes from glazing over. It doesn’t work as drama. It doesn’t work as spectacle. It just doesn’t work.

Games People Play: AMERICAN HUSTLE

There are no sincere moments in David O. Russell’s American Hustle. It goes beyond the narrative, which follows an F.B.I. operation in the late 1970s that involved blackmail, bribery, corruption, and con men. And that’s just the guys doing the investigating. The film’s characters are constantly pulling one over on each other, trying to make any given situation slippery enough to wiggle away with the upper hand. The problem is the film takes after its characters and in doing so refuses to take them seriously. It’s a true(ish) story filled with great heist movie-style brinksmanship and game playing, but I didn’t believe any of it for one second. That’s not to say I called foul on the facts, but that I never bought into the stakes or emotions of the story. The whole thing is exhaustingly inauthentic, full of pushy camera moves, fussily casual period piece production design, and self-satisfied banter. It expends lots of effort, but ends up with only awfully thin insight. Turns out people, given the right circumstances, might con other people to get what they want. You don’t say.

The film is a nesting doll of deceit, cons within cons within cons. Christian Bale plays a con man sleazily juggling many cons at once. He supplements his laundromat business by selling forged paintings on the side, as well as accepting payment from sleazeballs in return for trying to set them up with loans that will, of course, never materialize. His partner in crime is his mistress (Amy Adams), so there’s another con, this one the relationship he’s hiding from his boozy young housewife (Jennifer Lawrence). Bale and Adams are busted for fraud by an ambitious FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) who says they’ll walk free if they help him bust some of their fellow fraudsters. It takes a con to run a con to find a con or two.

With no choice, that’s what they do, helping to create an elaborate entrapment scheme that soon involves a New Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner), a fake sheik (Michael Peña), and increasing amounts of FBI money sitting in bank accounts and renting private jets and hotel suites. With each new expenditure request, Cooper’s boss (Louis C.K., a welcome sight) grows increasingly exasperated, denying them until his boss (Alessandro Nivola), another guy smelling good career moves, overrules him. Cooper keeps urging the project’s expansion, using each new mark to get to another mark. It’s a tangled web of competing interests that’s bound to ensnare some of the people laying the traps as well as their targets.

In the middle of it all, the cast’s central quartet delivers big booming performances that fit the film’s swaggering shallowness. Bale, with a protruding gut and complicated combover, exudes frustrated confidence mixed with desperation, while Adams, shifting her accent around, comes across as a fiercely determined faker and striver. Cooper’s a hard-charging naïve, smart enough to cook up a plan, but overeager to see it through. He’s too earnest for his own good. When one mark says something incriminating, Cooper smiles a little too broadly and exclaims, “That’s great!” Lawrence, meanwhile, thinks she’s scheming, but she’s just good old flighty passive aggressive. Her performance is a whirlwind. The film’s phoniness is hardly their fault. They’re giving the best possible performances this material could get. They’re so good I kept wishing I could like the movie more, if only to reward their likable hard work. They throw themselves into unflattering clothing, funny hairdos, and silly accents, chewing through the script with energy and humor.

But that’s not enough to make it anything more than sporadically entertaining. It’s breezy enough – well over two hours and rarely dragging – but scene after scene, I found myself feeling emptier. Russell and co-writer Eric Warren Singer’s script follows the hodgepodge of cons in a slapdash manner, sometimes revealing too much or too little and scrambling up who we should care about at any given time. It’s shifting allegiances, but always tilting towards mockery – a style that scoffs at strong feelings, a howl of emotion seen as a plot point and a joke and little more. When it all shakes out in the end, it doesn’t feel like resolution for characters as much as it is checking off boxes with little sense of what it all means for the individuals in question beyond the surface level of winners and losers. No matter how fine the performances are, there’s nothing to latch onto.

Why am I to care about the results of any of these cons when the film is only interested in playing them out to play them out? It only cares about pulling out rugs and staring at scheming. When it comes to the whys and who cares, it could care less. The actors give it their all, and to the extent the film is watchable and compelling, it’s that they manage to break through the film’s suffocating artifice with some actual emotion. The rest of the time, Russell’s swooping, energetic camera and non-stop period rock, pop, and disco soundtrack – often the only aspects of the film Russell seems interested in, and a passable, if muddled, copy of every other big swinging 70s-set crime film's style – pounds out and counteracts every genuine emotion with insistent inauthenticity.

Knightfall: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

After Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight concluded with Batman (Christian Bale) fleeing into the night, taking the fall for a series of crimes so that Gotham City may still have hope, or something like that, it makes a certain amount of sense that The Dark Knight Rises would position the caped crusader as a public figure who has slunk away from the spotlight and is poised to earn back the city’s trust. There’s no such trust problem for this big-screen iteration of the famed comic book hero. If anything, Nolan has earned, rightfully or not, an astounding surplus of fan trust, a rabid kind of fervor that had a great many convinced of the movie’s perfection sight unseen. It’s to Nolan’s credit that the film doesn’t coast on franchise loyalty and therefore manages to avoid the major problems that typically befall the third entry in these sorts of series. It’s a movie of high-quality craftsmanship from all involved, nicely shot and terrifically staged. It's a startlingly big movie, containing sweeping establishing shots and grand gestures of spectacle (the better to maximize the added value of your IMAX tickets), a rapidly expanding ensemble of characters, and the most apocalyptic villainous plot yet. The film can’t live up to its own best moments, but it’s still a solid entertainment that builds to a tremendous finale.

In the murky rising action of this spectacle, a cult of angry anarchists led by a fearsome mask-wearing savage called Bane (Tom Hardy) are gathering strength and numbers, planning nothing less than a terrifying full-scale takeover of Gotham city, propping up faux-populist sentiments to mask their violent lawlessness, to use the leverage of a scared, powerless populace to get what’s best for a few reckless ideologues, all under the threat of mutually assured destruction. And where is the Batman while all this is going on right underneath the unsuspecting city? He’s slowly but surely getting coaxed back into his cowl, after living a Howard Hughes existence as his true self, Bruce Wayne, holed up in his mansion with only Alfred the butler (Michael Caine) to keep him company. And what’s the inciting incident that causes the Batman to climb out of his cave? Why, it’s nothing less than a daring robbery from cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway). It might not take lifelong Batman fandom to figure out that she’s Catwoman, even though she goes without that moniker here.

That’s about as much plot as I’ll get into here, seeing as this happens to be a film that people seem particularly averse to having spoiled. It’s just as well, for the movie is indeed a large twisting narrative filled with lots of little surprises coiled around scenes of spectacular effects and effective tension. Let me just suggest that a great deal of the film’s pleasure comes from the new members of the cast. Of course Bale and Caine are solid as always, as are Morgan Freeman as Wayne’s resident technical expert and Gary Oldman as good old Commissioner Gordon. Of the new additions, Hardy’s Bane is fearsome, even though the design of the mask means his performance is mostly communicated through forceful eye acting and a muffled voice over in a stylized accent. Just turning towards the camera is enough for his intensity to crumple the surroundings in anxiety.

But best of the new here is Hathaway, who plays Catwoman as a sort of slinky Robin Hood by way of Han Solo, a mercenary thief and black market operative who is both a help and a hindrance. Runner up is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, playing an especially determined and skilled cop. Hathway’s take on her iconic character is that of a satisfyingly sleek, glamorous anti-hero. (I was ready to follow her Catwoman into a different movie where she could stretch out in a starring role). Gordon-Levitt’s part calls for steely professionalism and sympathetic humanity, both of which he provides quite nicely. And I quite liked the little twist given to his character in the final moments that caused me to strike a brewing quip about his role from my mental rough draft. The two of them add immeasurably to this world, bringing real vitality to what, let’s face it, would otherwise become insufferably dower.

At its best, this is a film of terrific blockbuster entertainment with charming asides and great flourishes of action, but for long stretches of this 164-minute movie, Nolan is grabbing hold of more ambition than he can wrangle as he gets bogged down in slow scenes of uncertain stakes and confused tension. In Bane’s evil plot grows a scattershot Rorschach test of tangled political messages that coast off of current unease and generate tension in odd ways that are at once potent and dispiriting. It’s hard to make out whether the film is a relentless fascist machine or just rotting cynicism underneath which lies nothing but nihilism. Either way, this is an extremely bleak film, through which the fun (the kind of sugary, lighthearted, propulsive excitement of The Avengers) pokes through like a small circle of light glimpsed from the bottom of a deep dark pit. Such a pit – a hardly-believable quasi-Middle-Eastern prison that works more as metaphor than literal location – makes a pivotal appearance in the lengthy middle section of the film that finds Gotham closer to ruin than ever before. Although Tom Hardy’s Bane certainly doesn’t make for as memorable a villain as Heath Ledger’s Joker – the script and character design simply don't allow it – his scheme, once it explodes into action, ups the all-consuming anxiety of Dark Knight until the only thing rising in this film is the sense of despair.

Perhaps it’s precisely because of the ways in which Nolan, no longer content to just use the series as a way to mix around with the iconography of Batman, scrambles ideology so thoroughly that the movie is so difficult to parse, so deeply unsettling. Here when a revolutionary rhetoric is twisted with evil intentions until chaos and anarchy in turn provokes a scrappy cop counter-coup, the resonances, as dissonant and confused as they are, become Triumph of the Will versus Battleship Potemkin, propaganda without a cause. Maybe Nolan knew that there was simply no way of satisfying the typical requirements of sequel escalation and superhero bloat and decided to steer his massive blockbuster right into the skid.

The film is, for quite a while, nothing less than a series of exceptionally well-executed extraneous noise and action. A prisoner’s mid-air escape from a plane, a couple of Catwoman heists, and the inevitable triumphant return from retirement for Batman are all early, satisfying, summer movie moments, but upon reflection they’re actually tangential to the plot. It’s not until a brutal mid-movie one-on-one fight scene, shockingly bone crunching and hard to watch, that I felt honest dread wash over me. But soon, the massiveness of the plotting sidelines one major character or another (in a hospital bed, in prison, or both at once) for what feels like ages. The film grows as fuzzy and slow as it is dark. But from there, Nolan nonetheless manages to pull out a startling and effective escalation of tension that becomes a series of exciting climactic action sequences. The film grows horrifyingly high stakes, blowing out destruction more vividly shot and more destabilizing in its implications than I could possibly have expected.

It’s difficult to think of The Dark Knight Rises in terms of the superhero genre. It hits all the right story beats, but it’s so oppressively grim, with only the faintest glimmers of fun, and far less Batman, at least before the massive and intense climax, than many will be expecting. What it represents is a filmmaker given total control to make whatever crazy ambitious blockbuster spectacle he felt like making and an assertion that he was the one who brought this big-screen Batman into this world and only he can bring this particular version to a close. (That said, there’s plenty of room left for a sequel.) He makes a Batman movie that brings the Batman legend, the tortured nature of the hero, the intense, incomprehensible insanity of the villains, and all those corruptible, flawed characters in between, to a depressingly, almost totally hopeless endpoint, into a climactic conflagration that’s unlikely to be easily matched. I’m not sure I’d want anyone to try.

The sparkle of hope that rises from Gotham’s rubble in the film’s final minutes is barely enough to wipe out the preceding barrage of paranoia and despair. The movie is too confused about its underlying themes, its plot too eager to make leaps of logic despite its otherwise dense build-up, to make use of its potent moods beyond that pure sensation of it all. It’s an impressive film, technically accomplished and overwhelming in many ways. But it’s so unrelentingly without thematic coherence that, for all the sensational spectacle, in the end it feels somewhat underwhelming. And that’s difficult to reconcile. Here is a film that at once thinks big and thinks small, mechanically creating grim spectacle for entirely surface reasons. Its best moments land with such confident grandiosity that, despite some shaky elements and disappointing moments, it’s still a film with an undeniable impact. At least this trilogy of Batman films doesn’t fade away in disgrace. It goes out with a big and mostly satisfying finale.

Terminator Salvation (2009)

The first Terminator, way back in 1984, is a B-movie blast: a dark – and darkly funny – sci-fi actioner that uses a cool time-travel hook only to get us into a merciless hunt-hunt-hunt kill-kill-kill chase movie. By the time 1991 rolled around, director James Cameron had made, with Terminator 2, the universe of his initial film more expansive with a more daring exercise in mythmaking. The film is looser and longer, but the budget, and the boom, is bigger and more resonant. There’s a real sense of inevitable tragedy as Linda Hamilton, as Sarah Connor, and Edward Furlong, as her son John, race against time to stop the evil robots from taking over the world, all the while knowing that if they succeed, John would never exist because the events leading up to his birth would never have been put into place. The two movies work so well, both together and separately, that there was never any time to slow down and think about the logic of the time travel contained within.

With the blander third picture and a TV spinoff, there was ample time to consider why the time travel plots used in this franchise open up too many questions that lead down ridiculous roads. If any thought is put into it, the franchise really shouldn’t exist at all. Why don’t the evil robots send a terminator even farther back in time where the humans wouldn’t be able to fight back? Why don’t the evil robots just fill the world with poison which would kill off humanity while leaving mechanical objects intact? But that’s a dangerous road to go down if one wishes to keep enjoyment of these movies intact.

The biggest question I had going in to the fourth film, Terminator Salvation, was whether or not the film would successfully get past the time travel hangups and allow me the pure enjoyment of a summer action picture. The answer is: yes, for the most part. The movie, directed by the relatively lightweight McG, is a big, grim, action movie with satisfying visuals and cool special effects. It suffers from a serious case of mid-film drag but manages to shake loose for a fun climax. It doesn’t add much to the overall mythology of the franchise but at least it entertains. It succeeds in a way that the first Terminator film does; it takes a standard sci-fi trope (the man with no memory and the machine with a consciousness) and uses it for a bit of pathos, but mostly an excuse for more action.

The center of this subplot is actor Sam Worthington, who first appears in the opening scenes of the film as a prisoner on death row who signs away his body to science. He shows up again years later, after the opening credits and an explosive action sequence, mysteriously the same age and with no memory of the intermediate years. He may or may not be a robot now, but he becomes the emotional center of the movie for me. The emotional center of the movie is certainly not Christian Bale, as John Connor, fine actor though he may be. Here he operates in two modes: intense and grim. He doesn’t elicit my compassion or my sympathy, although, to give Bale credit, the script is definitely no helper in that department. I cared about John Connor only because I had seen the other Terminator movies.

This movie takes place in the future, after the robot uprising, and contains thrilling scenes of robotic combat. Although the Terminators have none of the personality or singular scariness of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s or Robert Patrick’s models, they generate a kind of terror and awe of their own. The gears grind as the mechanical beasts clang forward and shoot and punch. There are slick robotic motorcycles that zoom through the barren landscape, charging down renegade humans, the ones that haven’t been picked up by startling appearances by giant metal claws. Struggling to survive being hunted by these technological terrors is Kyle Reese (franchise devotees will recognize that name), played by Anton Yelchin – young Chekov in Star Trek just a few weeks ago. If Worthington is the emotional center of the movie, then Yelchin is the emotional drive. I cared about him, not just because I had seen the earlier movies, but because Yelchin, with no help from the script, plays at the genuine human beneath the cog in the plotting.

This film has more in common with Star Trek than just Yelchin. It reinvigorates a sagging story, although here it is less radical reinvention and more canonical doodling in margins. It’s filled with all kinds of winks to franchise history that cause me to smile. You can believe someone says “come with me if you want to live” and you would be kidding yourself if you thought no one would say “I’ll be back.” Linda Hamilton shows up in a vocal performance only and I felt a surge of excitement when Ahhnold himself (with somewhat convincing CGI de-aging) steps out of a cloud of steam. It felt earned – it felt right – that the original Terminator was doing battle again. But also, like Star Trek, this movie made my inner thirteen-year-old very happy. It’s not as good a movie, or as satisfying an overall experience, but Terminator Salvation sets out some modest action-oriented goals and meets them, while taking the franchise a step back from mediocrity with fresh promise for future endeavors.