Hive Mind: BUGONIA

A continuing delight of contemporary cinema is the Emma Stone collaboration with art house auteur Yorgos Lanthimos. Who’d have thought that her blend of screwball feistiness and laconic confidence would fit so perfectly in his dark deadpan extremity. And such variety! There was the snappy, fish-eyed period piece The Favourite, the explicit warped feminist Frankenstein riff Poor Things, and the bleakly wacky triptych Kinds of Kindness. In each, she pushes and pulls her physicality and psychological acuity with an intoxicating freedom, loose-limbed fearlessness launching through scenes both clever and exposing. They’ve re-teamed for the fourth time with Bugonia, and it’s the least of these. It’s no less well-photographed, rigorously sound designed, or precisely calibrated with discomfiting interpersonal dynamics. But the plot’s contortions, inspired by the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet, feel strangely stale and like an unusually disappointing dead end despite a live-wire contemporaneous flavor. Stone plays a calculated pharmaceutical CEO who is kidnapped by a desperately conspiratorial beekeeper (Jesse Plemons) convinced that she’s an alien in disguise. The bulk of the film concerns their mind games. He’s trying to get her to record a message for her mothership, demanding to be taken to her leader. He knows he's right because he's "done his own research." She’s trying to get in his head and talk him into letting her go. She never loses her sense of high status, even when her hair is shaved and she's shackled in a basement. It’s a tense standoff going nowhere fast. Screenwriter Will Tracy, of the similarly hollow The Menu, gets little deeper than the surface of the concept working despite all the right elements for something better buzzing around. 

It makes for a movie that’s largely a tense back and forth that’s also surprisingly static, going over the same points at progressively louder volumes. She’s so cruel and cutting, even in early scenes in which she’s a transparent, sanctimonious manipulator of a boss, and he’s so distressingly unhinged that we don’t get a good sense of where we stand. The movie is deliberately keeping us off balance, but it plays off our uncertainties with only easy points. We don’t much like the wealthy’s disregard for the common folk, but we also don’t want to see an innocent woman brutalized. We don’t much want a delusional man’s crackpot theories to be proven correct, but we also don’t want to see a grieving, mentally ill man taken advantage of, especially since he’s gotten his cousin (Aidan Delbis) wrapped up in this predicament, too. It’s a seemly intractable bit of unpleasantness surrounded by further characters who are either intensely vulnerable, like a comatose mother (Alicia Silverstone), or deeply disturbing, like a molester who’s now the town cop (Stavros Halkias). What could be bracingly misanthropic instead reads as empty provocation. It all adds up to a pretty grim straight line to a cosmic dark joke of a finale, and that’s hard to take. Where other Lanthimos movies are symphonies of bad feeling, this one’s pretty drearily one-note, despite his actors willing to go off on flights of fanatic nuance. He’s better than this. It takes a lot of talent to make a movie so well-made feel this much of a shrug in the end. 

We Wear the Mask: EDDINGTON

Over the course of his first four features, writer-director Ari Aster has made a habit of divisive movies, but, love them or hate them, you have to admit he has impressive control over the formal elements of filmmaking. He knows exactly what his movies should look and sound like, and every precise choice builds a coherent whole. Here’s a director in complete command of his craft, each movie a darkly funny, intensely upsetting experience. No wonder it gets people polarized as they stumble out. His first two pictures were solidly in the horror genre, with a possession passed down through the generations of a haunted family in Hereditary and a creepy cult in a folkloric freakout for Midsommar. Those movies built settings that closed in on their characters and thus trapped performances that built on a steady crescendo of madness and howling grief. His third effort was Beau is Afraid, a three-hour movie I often found endless and excruciating, but I’ll also acknowledge that that’s exactly Aster’s aim. Star Joaquin Phoenix plays a clinically anxious man with deep-rooted psychological issues relating to his mother. The entire movie is in his heightened mind as it clenches and extrapolates until its paranoid hallucinations reach a fever pitch of hyperbolic metaphors slipping further from our reality. It’s a movie that’s way more fun to talk about than watch, but it has some big laughs and such fascinating performances and Aster’s vision is so all-encompassing in layers of artifice and anxiety that it’s hard to dismiss. 

Now comes Eddington, perhaps his most straightforward movie and that’ll make it all the more upsetting. It’s a movie about what’s wrong with our modern American society, not in the easy talking points but in the core muck of broken relationships and festering paranoid suspicions. It’s about how often political stances are formed as reaction to personal slights or positive attention. It takes the idea of politics as personal deeper into wounded immediacy. This tendency isn’t new, but is certainly enhanced by the warped fun house mirror of online, a space that’s somehow both real and unreal at the same moment. Characters here are surrounded by screens, reflected in phone cameras and lit up at night by scrolling. Their sense of selves are both shallowly confident and so slippery as to be easily manipulated. But their digital selves and algorithmic diets move into the physical space of the world, and as they roam the dusty, empty streets of their tiny New Mexico town the movie pokes at the performative and the attention-seeking of the well- and ill-intentioned alike. There it finds a shared common void of purpose that leaves everyone floundering to feel important or at least needed. This emptiness is set in a No Country for Old Men-style modern Western, a needling, mordantly funny drama that becomes slow rolling thriller that erupts in violence and watches as characters scramble in its wake. This sense of alienation and division, of being trapped in your bubble and flailing in confused disconnection, is only enhanced by the decision to set the events in May 2020, with a pandemic raging and a public frightened and fractious. 

Tap-dancing on the third rail, the movie finds the town of Eddington’s exhausted sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) deeply ambivalent about the whole COVID precautions thing. He’s clearly imbibing some misinformation. As he’s drawn into deeper rivalry with the town’s mayor (Pedro Pascal), while seeking the approval of his troubled wife (Emma Stone) and avoiding the scorn of his conspiracy theorist mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell), he impulsively decides to run for the office himself. His platform of freedom from masks and business closures grows increasingly conspiratorial itself, making muddled baseless accusations and driving around in a truck covered in misspelled handwritten signs (“Your being manipulated!”) and speakers that broadcast his meandering stump speeches. (It’s an echo of Altman’s Nashville, another movie about an American town in a particular fractious moment.) Eddington is also currently home to: a handful of shop owners and restauranteurs, a black deputy (Michael Cole), a ranting unhoused man (Clifton Collins Jr.), a roving cultish influencer (Austin Butler) who makes hyperbolic speeches about trafficking, a tribal officer on the reservation (William Belleau), a white teen girl (Amélie Hoeferle) who organizes protests when she’s not doing TikTok dances celebrating, say, finishing a James Baldwin novel, and the teen boys (Matt Gomez Hidaka and Cameron Mann) who want to get her attention. They’re all rattled and on edge, growing increasingly suspicious of each other from within their quarantined misinformation inflammation and boxed in by the cinematography that keeps trapping them in isolation, alone together and apart.

Aster develops his plot with his usual deliberateness and an eerie surface calm, while the characters tussle with the complications of pandemic life and fall into conflicts that escalate until they’re out of control. They’re all operating with darkness and denial or just deprivation in their lives, these deep holes they’re desperately trying to fill. But you can never fill emptiness with hollowness. Here are characters who are constantly trying to have the right position, the right attention, the right purpose, and talk all around the big ideas of the moment. Yet for all their talk, they get nowhere, and believe only what they need to cling to in order to survive another day. And they’ll say whatever’s convenient in the moment, scrambling about for ways to provoke a reaction. Phoenix complains the mayor’s being performative, then heads out to his car to film a video for Facebook. The mayor tells his son not to go out with a group because of the optics, then later is blaring Katy Perry at a backyard fundraiser. But this isn’t an easy “both sides” view from nowhere. These are specific characters, and the movie draws a pretty clear moral vision, the end point of all this culture war division and who’s doing the dividing. (It has something to do with the A.I. data center going up outside town, a threat to further drain their resources and give them hallucinations in return.) It sees the powerless reaching for easy answers and sacrificing more of their power in the process. 

When people reach out to make a connection through culture war buzzwords or interpersonal grievances they’re playing a game they’re already losing. It’s a movie about the dangers of not wanting to believe, but being seen believing. Here’s a movie about people who use their speech not as a vessel for ideas but as weapons to wield. An anti-masker just has to disingenuously bark “six feet” to get his adversary to back off. And when your words are just a means to an end, you’ll say whatever gets you the attention you seek. No wonder the result is darkly funny despair and intense violence. They have no core truth on which to build themselves. The movie takes these impulses to extremes, then executes five or six sudden turns in the finale that’ll provoke most audiences into wondering how and if it works. For my money there’s a startling escalation that gives a sense of an ending without a sense of closure. And that’s what makes it feel all the more 2020. 

Triple Threat: KINDS OF KINDNESS

“Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you / Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused”
— Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”

“This were kindness?”
— The Merchant of Venice (1.3.154)

For anyone worried that Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos was drifting to the mainstream with his awards feted, and surprise box office hits, The Favourite and Poor Things, here’s Kinds of Kindness to most fully expose that bleeding heart of darkness within his works. Not that those other films aren’t wild with vulgarity and explicitness, too, but they were packaged in aesthetically pleasing historical intrigue or flights of fancy, respectively. Kindness is colder, slower, less immediately narratively legible, and without even the slightest hint of appealing character motives. That’s what makes it so compelling, too. One watches it trying to figure it out, and it's structured to keep slipping away. It’s fitting that it begins by blasting the iconic driving synths of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” as the movie is about people used and abused, in darkly comedic and deadpan absurd stories in which everyone is looking for something, and in which reality seems to take on the logic of an inscrutable dream. Lanthimos pins down his characters in clinically precise widescreen frames, and then spins out the surreal plot turns, scripted with his Killing of a Sacred Deer co-writer Efthimis Filippou. He does so with an unblinking, mannered realism, dialing back the style and coaxing underplayed reactions just when the stories are aching for excess.

As the characters wriggle their ways through the emotional and physical pain of their plots, the movie becomes a caustic acid bath of cynicism, watching toxic people give into base impulses, and work their wicked ways. The film is made up of three short films, each nearly an hour long and starring the same ensemble. Each tale would undoubtedly test the patience at feature length, each take a sick joke inside a sick joke that starts strange, grows even stranger, and then ends on its bleakest, gnarliest punchline. The first finds a businessman (Jesse Plemons) totally controlled by his boss (Willem Dafoe) and the old man’s mistresses (Emma Stone and Margaret Qualley), down to the food he eats and whether or not his wife (Hong Chau) will get pregnant. When he finds himself doubting his commitment to his latest grotesque task, his life instantly changes for the worse. The second story finds Plemons as a police officer whose wife (Stone) has been missing at sea. It’s odd enough that in his grief he invites their friends (Qualley and Mamoudou Athie) over to watch their sex tape; odder still is how he reacts when his wife is eventually discovered. Lastly, we find Stone and Plemons looking for a Chosen One at the behest of a cult leader (Dafoe) and his wife (Chau). It becomes a sort of desperate ritual as it goes on.

In each story, the cast is so good at inhabiting these extreme situations of sex and violence with shrugging acceptance that the bubbling surreality is played out quite naturally—subtext and text dancing with extreme literalness, down to the black-and-white flashes of dreams and visions that mingle with their mindsets. These characters are constantly doing acts of a selfish sort of kindness, casually blowing up lives, behaving as dangers to themselves and others. If this were kindness, who needs cruelty? Here’s a movie with a pretty low opinion of human behavior that’s as darkly upsetting as it is grimly funny, in a preposterous string of circumstances held in the grip of skilled filmmakers making each moment count. Lanthimos using the same faces in new roles uses each switch of the narrative to recombine them into dynamics of freedom and control, power and submission, responsibility and individualism. These characters keeps slamming into illusions they’ve created to make sense of lives spiraling out of control—often of their own doing. The bruising absurdism of each accumulates into the sickest joke of all: sometimes the only kindness is to give into the absurdity of your circumstances and hope for the best.

As an aside—how wild is it to think back to 2010, when Stone’s Easy A was a satisfying comedy that confirmed her a star and Lanthimos’ nasty, explicit Dogtooth got a surprise Academy Award nomination for foreign-language film. Imagine telling us moviegoers back then that those two would bring out the best in each other.

Vindication of the Rights of Woman: POOR THINGS

With Poor Things, director Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his pet themes: freedom and control, society and individualism, intellect and appetite. Within them, the Greek provocateur loves to push buttons and test the boundaries of discomfort. He sets up rigid systems and see his characters squirm under their demands. His international breakthrough Dogtooth is a tragedy set in a worst-case scenario disinformation-based homeschooling setup, while his dreary The Lobster is a depressing world of romantic pressure in which unlucky singles are turned into animals, and his gripping Killing of a Sacred Deer finds eerie body horror revenge inflicted on an alienated nuclear family unit by an unsettling interloper. Even his biggest hit to date, period piece of royal courtly intrigue The Favourite, drips with a devilishly funny satire of politicking and interest peddling within his usual concerns. In Poor Things he pushes his ideas to fanciful Frankensteined abstraction in a steampunk fantasy Europe of an imagined Industrial Revolution past—a little Mary Shelley, a little German Expressionism, a little Tim Burton, a little Jean-Pierre Jeunet. But it’s all of a piece for a work about a revived body stumbling into the world and slowly learning what life is all about.

Shot with his favored fisheye lenses and pushy, panning, zooming, looming cameras—and scored with a calliope-meets-theremin brio—the movie finds a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe) bringing a beautiful corpse (Emma Stone) to life with a mind made freshly tabula rasa. Named Bella Baxter, she flails and stumbles and babbles, trying to master language and motor skills, like a grown woman with a toddler’s mind. It’s quite a spectacle, funny and sad and off-putting and compelling all at once. It might give you a sense of Lanthimos’ approach here that the mad doctor’s new assistant (Ramy Youssef) takes one look at her and gasps: “what a beautiful retard.” The movie gawks and scowls at its characters’ madnesses and eccentricities. As Bella grows into her body, society fills her mind with ideas. She strains against the confines of her experimental status and demands to be let out into the world. There she encounters a variety of men—buffoonish seducers (Mark Ruffalo) and suave cynics (Jarrod Carmichael) and nasty brutes (Christopher Abbott)—who want to have her and control her and affect her and mold her. And yet Bella is so stubbornly, persistently herself that she’s uncontainable by societal standards. She hasn’t been indoctrinated with the shame  she’s expected to feel and stereotypes to which they assume she'd conform. There’s some pointed commentary in the fact that she’s most desirable to the men when she’s at her least capable. The more she learns, the more she confounds their expectations, the more they go mad for her, in all senses of the word. She navigates a series of gross-out gags and slapstick and drama and sexual encounters with a growing awareness and a blissfully inquisitive need to take it all in and understand.

The potentially simple concept is exquisitely elaborated and vividly imagined in all its complications and contrasts. The screenplay by Tony McNamara, who brings some of The Favourite’s charmingly mean ear for dialogue, takes clear delight in running Bella through a crash course in philosophical constructs, a one-woman Enlightenment living the concepts Rousseau and Locke and Hobbes and Voltaire had to merely ponder. And it’s all so fleshy, too, with Lanthimos’ usual preoccupation with bodily fluids and functions, making her a Candide in situations that’d blush with frank vulgarity but in fact give nary a flinch. She likes to copulate as much as she cogitates. But for all the overt mixture of the highfalutin philosophizing and lowdown dirtiness, the movie’s at its most fun as it dances across that chasm. It’s a riot of production design—weird vehicles and elaborate sets—and costumes—all frills and flowing cutaways and cinched edges. And within that, the performers turn loose in masterfully silly eruptions of straight-faced shock and delicate pratfalls and casual nudity. It’s Stone’s show—a stunningly technical and deeply felt play with high drama and fearless comedy. But everyone in the cast joins in the fun. Every line reading turns into candy, and every serious swerve of intellect is chased with a grinning irreverence. Ultimately, this is Lanthimos’ most hopeful picture, embodied with a stubborn, grinning belief that the stuff of life is pleasurable and, though people may be as cruel as they are curious, the right fresh mind is capable of positive change. As Taylor Swift wrote, "we were built to fall apart / then fall back together."

Sympathy for de Vil: CRUELLA

Director Craig Gillespie’s energetic follow up to his swaggering true-crime I, Tonya plays out a rollicking rivalry between fashion designers in 70s London. One is an old fashioned grand dame Baroness (Emma Thompson) used to ruling the scene by any means necessary. The other is a prickly proto-punk misfit who gets a job as an underling, but all along is gunning for the older woman’s throne. There’s fun to be had here, as Gillespie keeps the pacing quick and camera fluid, catching sumptuous production design and snappy performances. That it happens to be a quasi-prequel to 101 Dalmatians is simply a fact of what elements get projects green lit in Hollywood these days. As such it suffers from some belabored backstory and a need to make everything connected. Who needed to know about Cruella de Vil’s unhappy childhood? However, the rest of the picture is such a feast of fashions and attitude that I hardly cared. It works best when it leans away from the need to provide token psychological underpinning to such a classic Disney villain — the standard formula in many of what Bob Iger so inelegantly coined “brand deposits” — and leans into giving us more of her beautiful wickedness. The result is great actors are swanning around in fabulous costumes and chewing every bit of snazzy scenery in sight. That it would be an enjoyably outsized glossy period melodrama drifting on a confident hodgepodge style and a soundtrack grooving on loud hits of the era without the cute references to an animated classic is a good sign.

The movie finds the most fun when it sticks with its charismatic cast colliding. Stone makes a good theatrical villain-in-the-making and Thompson a fine foil. There’s always been that underlying sarcasm, the self-satisfied smirk, underneath Stone’s work and here (as with the cunning schemer she played in The Favourite’s prickly palace intrigue, a role also scripted by this film’s co-writer) she can cut loose against Thompson serving her finest looking-down-the-nose casual cruelty. As Cruella enlists the help of longtime friends and flunkies (Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser) to help her plan elaborate revenge plots to get one over on the older woman and make herself a name in the fashion world, there’s a capering heist quality to the film’s best set pieces. She shows off her designs — all color-coded to match her natural shock of black-and-white hair — in elaborate prankish stunts, upstaging the fuming Baroness every step of the way, and provoking her potentially homicidal wrath. This tension is joined by a dash of twisty family drama that’s just over the top enough to fit the bill. But the focus is never pulled from the core contest of wills between two stubborn women jockeying for power. And that's where all the fun is. The more the project feints toward character study, the falser it feels; I could do without the cloying voice over and the attempts at making us feel sorry for Cruella instead of serving up what’s sure to become the marvelous whirling dervish of monstrous high-class privilege. Better to let the ladies plot and plan and fight. Unlike the 1996 live-action remake of Dalmatians, which gave Glenn Close similar excuse to cut loose with a howling well-dressed villain, Cruella, cut free from most constraints of a straight remake, has the ability to let Stone grow into that enjoyable cackle, taking a sudden chill the more she's prepared to take her rival down.

Song and Dance, Man: LA LA LAND

I saw La La Land a few weeks ago and, though fun, the more I’ve thought about it the less I’ve thought of it. There’s much to admire about its shaggy fastidiousness bringing the movie musical to an aw-shucks shuffle and mumble aesthetic bursting with glitter at the margins. Writer-director Damien Chazelle glides the Steadicam with dancers great and small, dialing up the colors in the smooth cinematography to just shy of Technicolor vibrancy. The songs don’t exactly burst forth in memorable wit or hummable melody, but noodle around with a passive aggressive earworm tendency to quietly wrap a measure or two around the back of the brain. There’s something appealing about sitting in the theater watching it unspool, but little to stick with you beyond the feeling of having seen something largely pleasant, a mostly empty exercise in style and self-satisfaction. But that's not so bad, considering.

It begins with one of the most exuberant curtain raisers in recent memory, pure joy as a traffic jam erupts in dance, buoyant and colorful gestures totally swept up in moving to the beat. The movie ends with an even better sequence: one of the loveliest sustained passages in any movie I’ve seen lately. I held my breath as the film steps into a poignant, melancholy, graceful dream ballet about fleeting moments, about love and loss and the fantasy of what might have been. In between the film isn’t quite as enchanting and transporting, but it’s really trying, you know? Chazelle has traded in cachet gained from the gruff, buzzy, and percussive Oscar-winning drama Whiplash for the chance to make an original movie musical. We don’t get too many of those anymore, let alone evocations of a Jacques Demy style peppered with allusions to MGM’s Freed unit fare all nestled in a quipping romantic comedy (another genre that’s fallen fallow of late).

Like his earlier film it’s an exploration of artists pushing their talents to the limit, unsure whether their passion is enough to get them to the level of success necessary to make a living, let alone becoming a Great. But instead of that film’s dark central relationship – a jockeying for power between a domineering professor and an aggressively ambitious student – this film is a fuzzy and light romance, as charming as can be while still maintaining a simmering striving sadness underneath. This film’s central couple is a pair of dreamers trotting through a fantasy Los Angeles. She wants to be an actress like her studio-era idols. A huge Golden Age Hollywood poster covers one wall of her tiny bedroom in a cramped apartment shared with three other girls, a place to crash between auditions and barista shifts at the Warner Bros. lot. He wants to run a jazz club. In the meantime he’s obsessively hording artifacts from when jazz was king and piecing together savings from small time gigs playing background noise piano in restaurants or New Wave cover bands at shallow parties.

She is Emma Stone. He is Ryan Gosling. They turn up the movie star charm and crackling chemistry as they perform the expected rom-com moves, starting out prickly, jabbing at each other with glowing conversational daggers. They don’t like each other, each quick with an insult. But they dance so swimmingly in sync, a soft shuffle of steps, a sudden graceful motion, a swooping flourish. In true Astaire and Rogers fashion (in spirit, but definitely not in skill) feet tell the real story of feelings. We know they’re meant to be, and soon they’re giving it a go. Their only problem is being young in 2016, a time in which it’s awfully hard to make jazz pianist or glamorous star a career goal. (Not that it was ever easy to succeed in those professions, but it sure was a lot smoother when there was popular demand.) This makes La La Land, a self-consciously colorful and charmingly artificial romantic musical, a bittersweet tale of people who just weren’t made for these times. They bond over artistic passions – he explaining jazz, she taking a backlot tour – and fall in love, before the demands of selling-out start them on separate paths.

Chazelle makes use of his leads’ appealing banter and expressive moves, turning this into a slight two-hander. No time to flesh out others, it is a duet for young talent with enough experience to shoulder the demands of the roles and smooth-enough faces to play striving ingénues and ambitious self-starters. They are figures conjured for genre play, the types we’d expect to find in a movie like this, their movements and behavior dictated by the way a dress should ruffle, the way glitter should float on a puff of breeze, the way a hop-skip-slide should gleam under a lamppost at night. It’s all rather sweet, but narrow. Their pursuit of success (and each other) is the movie’s exclusive interest, crowding an ace supporting cast (fleeting glimpses of Rosemarie DeWitt, J.K Simmons, Finn Wittrock, and others) out of the chance to strut their stuff. And in the end, even their relationship is lopsided – far more interested in his jazz than her acting – and remains vague on their actual progress to career destinations.

The central question for the characters is whether or not they’ll be true to their artistic ambitions – he likes real jazz; she prefers serious roles – or give in to temptation. And maybe choosing one means losing the other, or each other. That their potential sell-out moves – a gig playing fun popular music with a John Legend type (played by the man himself); a role on a series described as Dangerous Minds meets The OC – sound at least as, if not more, fun than their dream art maybe muddies the movie’s point. Gorgeous widescreen colors stretch across the screen, and the film’s protagonists’ swooning, naïve worship of modes of artistic expression fallen from peak popularity (clinging to an ideal that keeps their prospects slim and dusty instead of embracing the actual mess of creating art) is mirrored in the fussy (and sometimes fusty) evocation of genre gone by. I was frustrated by all this inconsistency, but then there’s that final dreamy conclusion that practically lifted me out of my seat. And, hey, it was worth hanging in there after all. Any movie with two great scenes bookending a technically accomplished (if hollow) middle can’t be all bad.

Crimes and Misbehaviors: IRRATIONAL MAN

Once you open the door to a little lie, you live in a world full of reasons to lie. At least that’s a philosophical perspective a depressed professor tries to explain early in Irrational Man, Woody Allen’s latest film. The academic doesn’t really believe it, and that’s not just because he disagrees professionally. He’s not sure he believes in anything at all, having a reached a point of real and deep psychological despair some point before arriving on campus to start his new teaching position during a sunny summer term. At the film’s core is this man’s search for meaning, a solution for his melancholy impotence, creative and otherwise. He finds it not in drinking or flirting with a pretty student, though they’re sickly good stopgaps, but by deciding suddenly and forcefully to commit a perfect crime. He thinks he's smart enough to get away with murder. Once he’s allowed himself to think about it, he’s in a world full of reasons to transgress.

This is hardly the first film from Woody Allen to consider existential crises, the cruelty of mankind, and the cold possibility of evil going unpunished. (See: Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Match Point, and so on.) But in the breezy drama he makes of it this time sits one of its bitterest expressions. Those interested in biographical criticism will surely find it noteworthy to point out that Allen made this film after renewed scrutiny on his personal life and alleged crimes. Irrational Man makes its professor a source of scorn and gossip, who clings to his sense of self-righteous self-justification, and who ultimately must pay for his hubris. If this is to be read as an expression of Allen, it’s a self-loathing statement. But it’s not a poisoned or stunted film. No, he’s up to his usual lively artifice.

Like so much of his recent output, the film plays like a draft, another sketch of ideas and themes he’s obsessively working over, varying the tone and plot, but flowing from a consistent voice. Here he is once more with the American songbook score, white Windsor font credits, and characters cloaked in the brisk patter of stuffy East Coast midcentury pseudo-intellectuals that maybe only ever really existed in this precise manner in the world of Woody Allen movies. Indeed, here the characters are signifiers in an intellectual exercise, but what a fascinating, dryly nasty little work this is. There’s an extra sting to thinly imagined characters as an expert cast enlivens arch wordiness and cinematographer Darius Khondji (in his fourth collaboration with Allen) creates bright tableaus pinning them in. The result is like a frustrated English major turned half-hearted gag writer punched up a minor forgotten Hitchcock concept.

What lets the picture breathe is ultimately the cold jazzy syncopation of dueling narrators, puncturing the depressed professor’s murderous ideas with the naïve beaming lights of a student. What starts as a typical vaguely queasy older man/younger woman relationship is played for its inappropriateness, and is made to seem wrong as a factor in the plot. We meet the man (Joaquin Phoenix, draining potential ticks from the dialogue with a flattened affect) as he arrives on campus just about ready to kill himself. The woman (Emma Stone, as cheerful as ever) is in his class, and responds eagerly to his praise. When they first embrace, Khondji finds them in the reflection of a funhouse mirror. There’s no denying the warped relationship now, especially as the clearly troubled man soon begins secret murder planning and everyone around the woman – her boyfriend (Jamie Blackley), parents (Betsy Aidem and Ethan Phillips), and chemistry teacher (Parker Posey) – advises her to keep her distance.

A key image is the film’s most striking shot. (It may very well be among the best shots in Allen’s career.) Phoenix stands at the end of a pier, the setting sun silhouetting him, reflecting off the water in a way that ripples his form. He looks like a ghostly shadow lurking in the middle of a picturesque landscape. He’s a figure unknowable, and as Stone questions how much she really understands about him, he grows all the more unspeakably creepy. By allowing us access to both character’s thoughts, we’re allowed full knowledge neither have. Their conflict, present even when neither is aware, gains an interesting friction. They arrive at logical conclusions for their situations, the film snapping shut with a clanging moral, neatly deployed. Philosophy in action, or philosophy inaction, leads them to unsettled conclusions, the sort of world-weary worldview of an old man who once thought his intellectual posturing could beat back despair but isn’t so sure anymore. Here’s a film that says the only rational philosophy is one that sees those who damage others fall to dooms of their own making.

Hello Goodbye: ALOHA

Aloha is another Cameron Crowe picture about a successful man who finds his professional life in jeopardy while his inner life is restored by romance. Furthermore, it’s another of his romantic comedies spiked with office drama, like Jerry Maguire was falling in love while negotiating sports agent business and Matt Damon fell for Scarlett Johansson while she helped him with his zoo in We Bought a Zoo. There’s also Orlando Bloom’s disgraced suit meeting Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, and you could throw the reality-scrambling Vanilla Sky into the mix, with publisher Tom Cruise crushing on Penelope Cruz, if you view its twisty ending optimistically. In Aloha, a depressed defense contractor (Bradley Cooper) survives an explosive encounter in Kabul and is reassigned to Hawaii, where he’s to negotiate a new roadway through Native Hawaiian territory. His military liaison is a bright charming young woman (Emma Stone). If you already think he’ll fall in love and grow a conscience, you’ve been paying attention.

Because Crowe is a warm writer sincere in his sentimentality, he can usually make his formulaic tendencies work. (Of course, he’s even better when drifting away from formula. It’s why Say Anything… is still his best film.) What’s most peculiar about Aloha is how everything around this central romance plot is much more fascinating and effective than what is inside it. Cooper and Stone have fine chemistry playing two people who have to fall in love because they’re the stars of the movie and the script keeps pushing them together. It’s largely unconvincing, following a period of initial irritation, then intense love, then a tearful misunderstanding, and so on. What’s far more interesting is watching Cooper’s interactions with other characters in a breezy, low-key, undemanding story of a man slowly regrowing his conscience.

This growth takes root as Cooper works with his boss (Bill Murray), a tycoon trying to launch a satellite with the armed forces’ help. One gets the impression Cooper has been unscrupulous in the past. Half-articulated military industrial commentary abounds in a guardedly biting way, as the rich man’s real aims are hidden from the brass (Danny McBride and Alec Baldwin). Meanwhile, both public and private interests are all too willing to manipulate Native Hawaiians to go along with their schemes, trading them land and assistance to wave construction through sacred spaces. This thread is far more interesting than whether or not the girl will fall for the guy, especially when their relationship is so thinly sketched and taken for granted. The story is dusted with a few intimations of magical realism that never amounts to anything, and is resolved far too neatly and softly to retain its teeth, but is a more intriguing element in every way.

Better still is a subplot involving an ex-fiancé of Cooper’s, played by Rachel McAdams with glowing happiness tinged with a hint of regret. It's been a dozen years since their break up. She has two kids (Danielle Rose Russell and Jaeden Lieberher) with a military man (John Krasinski). She loves her family. And yet the appearance of her old love gets her thinking. This storyline features the best writing and acting in the film, Crowe at his best drawing relationships that play out with real compassion and unexpected developments. It’s a reflection of where the main character’s life went wrong, a cozy family unit he’s invited to spend time with, but left just on the outside of embracing. There’s too much history there, and too much pressure to get his job done. If the corruption he encounters is the seed of his moral reawakening, seeing the love he left is the fertilizer for this new growth. 

There are plenty of worthwhile pieces to Aloha, but Crowe doesn’t put them together. They play like separate elements instead of a cohesive whole, connected by character and only faint echoes of each other. It’s telling that the conclusion finds several final moments, tying up individual threads – an arrest, several reconciliations, a tearful reveal – without a feeling of overall finality. This is a film of gentle rhythms and light tropical breezes. French cinematographer Eric Gautier captures lovely island landscapes and floats between the performers with ease. Crowe writes a handful of terrific lines and finds some nice cuts from his record collection for the soundtrack. It’s certainly well intentioned. But why does it feel so slight and disconnected? The writing lacks a certain sparkle, and lingers in disjunction between disparate elements. There are strange asides – a grisly toe injury, a ghostly vision – distractingly out of place, appearing once, then never mentioned again. Hardly a disaster, it’s perhaps best to approach Aloha as a sweet, earnest jumble, likable parts in search of a whole.

An Actor on the Verge: BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE)

At the corner of anxious depression and artistic frustration is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), an emotionally and physically claustrophobic backstage comedy of sorts. It stars Michael Keaton as an actor on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He plays Riggan Thomson, an actor whose stardom peaked two decades ago with his role as Birdman in a series of superhero movies and now sees his mental state rapidly deteriorating as his passion project comeback – writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway play based on a Carver story – nears opening night. If the first part of the conceit sounds a lot like Keaton, who two decades ago left the Batman series and is now in what’s being touted as a “comeback role,” lets hope his psyche’s in a better state.

The film floats through lengthy Steadicam takes from master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki edited to look (nearly) like one long fluid shot. Hardly novel, Hitchcock made one film look like one shot all the way back in 1948 with Rope. But it’s a trick so few attempt that it retains an impressive power. It’s transfixing, sliding through rehearsals and previews with smart elisions of time as the camera roams in and around this New York theater on the week leading up to the opening night. As characters zip in and out of scenes with expertly timed dialogue and blocking, I sometimes sat back from the proceedings, simply enjoying the logistical satisfaction of so many moving parts coming together. It’s a little better than a gimmick, effectively trapping the audience in the film’s headspace with no down time. The pressure is high. The walls are closing in.

Keaton, one of our finest actors when it comes to exploring the wilds between id and ego, does a terrific job holding down the increasingly mad center of the film. His character is a pitiable narcissist who has bitten off more than he can chew. He’s doing this to be relevant, to be loved, and to make art, definitely in that order. He’s frazzled, overwhelmed by the multitasking asked of a multi-hyphenate, his only solace talking to the voice hallucinating inside his head egging him on for better or usually worse. Surrounding him is a fine collection of showbiz types. There’s the exasperated producer (Zack Galifianakis), the leading ladies (Naomi Watts and Andrea Riseborough), the preening Method actor (Edward Norton), the ex-wife (Amy Ryan), a critic (Lindsay Duncan), and stagehands (including Merrit Wever). Best is Emma Stone as Keaton’s ex-addict daughter working as his assistant, a non-showbiz voice in rooms of people rapidly disappearing up their own egos.

The parts are performed with great precision, words spat out in rapid-fire monologues and tense dialogues that harmonize with the all-drum-solo score from Antonio Sanchez. Together they’re an endless clanging keeping the entire experience off balance and driving forward. The cast is free of the usual shot/reverse shot coverage, allowing them greater control over the rhythms and pauses, the psychological space as well as the physical. They create a world of people symbiotically clinging to each other as both a career move and an artistic expression, acting out their interpersonal dramas in the wings and dressing rooms before sublimating those energies into performances on stage. Their banter is as crisp and funny as it is painful, and the laughs start to choke off the more desperately the sweat appears. Narcissism and insecurity make a potent mix, one the film is unrelenting in conjuring.

At first it appears tonally different and a stylistic outlier in Iñárritu’s oeuvre. It’s lighter, more fluid, and about a feeling of emotional constipation and professional frustration that, though deeply felt and important to the characters, pales in severity to the violence and misery on display in his Very Serious Dramas Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel. I appreciated those film’s miserabilist impulses, but he hit a wall with the dire Biutiful, luxuriating in signifiers of importance without much more to say with them. So on the one hand, Birdman’s relative lightness on its feet is a much-needed artistic rejuvenation. On the other, it’s as deeply pessimistic as anything he’s made. It loathes, thinking artists are egomaniacs, Hollywood is hollow, critics are lazy, and audiences are stupid at worst, gullible at best. The core of rage in Keaton’s performance, playing a character who feels most upset that after all this effort he may not receive affection for it, plays off this omnidirectional frustration that assumes the worst out of everyone.

Birdman’s bravura cinematography is also a reflection of this cramped, thematically repetitive expression, as pressure mounts and the play stumbles on its way to opening night, the drums clanging, the camera ceaselessly swirling, the cast executing their tightly choreographed blocking. It plays on the surface pleasures of the backstage drama, threading it with humor sometimes so dark it borders on gallows. By the end, it’s miserable. Still, it’s hard to look away from such a high wire act on the last nerve’s edge tension between comedy and tragedy. You get the sense Riggan’s entire existence depends on this play going well. And given his, and the film’s, tendency to assume the worst, the outcome looks bleak, indeed.

Stale Act: MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT

Woody Allen works so quickly that it’s hardly surprising he tends to alternate his more interesting efforts with movies that clearly could’ve used some extra revisions before filming. You don’t make a film a year for over forty years without making a statistically notable batch of stinkers. (There’s your obligatory reference to Allen’s large body of work.) When he’s good, he’s good, but when he’s bad, the movies sit there slowly dying before your eyes. To make a metaphor out of his favorite music style, he’s a jazz virtuoso who has noodled around the same notes for so long, he’d rather hit bum notes than stop. His latest feature, Magic in the Moonlight, is as somnambulant a picture as he’s ever made, a snooze from frame one. It’s easily one of his weakest efforts.

It tells a dusty story of a world-famous magician (Colin Firth) asked by his best friend (Simon McBurney) to help investigate a pretty young psychic (Emma Stone) and her stage mother (Marcia Gay Harden). He fears they are scamming a rich widow (Jacki Weaver) and her grown son (Hamish Linklater) who have fallen for a phony baloney medium act hook, line, and sinker. It’s a fine screwball setup, but it’s played without a pulse, without wit, and completely devoid of inner life. It looks pleasant, filled up with sun-dappled cinematography by Darius Khondji in widescreen compositions showing off sumptuous locations in the south of France. Set in the Jazz Age that was deftly exploited in Midnight in Paris, there’s no magical realism here, just characters in period garb trading the stalest of bon mots.

There’s a dash of Pygmalion in reverse to the proceedings, as a stuffy British gentleman is determined to unmask the young lady’s attempts to pass herself off as something she’s not. In inverting the classic concept, comedy is lost to condescension. It’s not about a man helping a woman, but instead tearing her down and lording his superior position and power over her. (It’s hard to escape thinking of various Allen scandals with such flatly played underlying ugliness.) That there’s a romance involved – not to mention one with such an age difference – makes it all the more difficult to get on board. Firth is a perfect pompous fussbudget and Stone’s wide eyes and flapper’s physique make a fine foil. I especially liked the way she twitched her eyes wider when receiving her “mental vibrations.” But the plot turns so slowly, situations developing without much in the way of conflict or character. There’s nothing to latch onto.

The worst of it is, I can easily imagine a charming period comedy that could be made with this ensemble and crew. It looks wonderful, the ensemble has a talent for crisp comic scenarios, and Allen can be a funny writer. But none of that appears on screen. It’s so thinly developed, with supporting roles fading away and the leads dutifully making their characters’ arcs hit their marks. Allen’s investigation of a skeptic and a scam artist matching wits is tired. The characters can only be as witty as the script allows, so they come across as gullible drips. And every time a character finds something close to genuine emotion, it’s played off with a scoff. If the movie wasn’t going to take itself too seriously, that’s one thing. But to be light and airy without providing a single pleasing development, tickling thematic construct, or interesting turn of phrase is to be nothing at all.

Caught in a Web: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2

What makes Spider-Man fundamentally engaging and enjoyable is his relatable humanity. Peter Parker is just a normal young guy with real problems with family, school, girls, and employment. That provides a ground-level rooting interest that’s a more direct emotional appeal in all his action sequences than in all the boring climactic near-apocalyptic scenarios that pervade the superhero genre. That’s what I found most charming about The Amazing Spider-Man. With Andrew Garfield the reboot’s filmmakers found, like Sam Raimi found in Tobey Maguire for their superior films, a likable guy. Even if Peter didn’t always do the right thing, you knew the decisions pile up and weigh on him without getting in the way of the high-flying fun of being Spider-Man. What was most refreshing about that retelling of Spidey’s origin story was its relatively self-contained narrative. It didn’t seem to be spending too much of its time teasing future installments or leaving storylines conspicuously hanging at loose ends like so many superhero movies do these days. It simply found good performers in a narrative that had a beginning, middle, and end.

But when it comes to The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the charm of a complete story has been entirely thrown out. It consists of 142 minutes of scenes – some better than others – that never cohere. The whole production exists for the moment, chasing a this-happens-then-this-happens high where everything is pitched at a consistent level of spectacle and import. I thought of Ebert’s criticism of Michael Bay’s Armageddon as a feature-length trailer. The problem is, this Spider-Man isn’t just cut together like its own highlights. It’s cut together like a teaser for its own sequel. It’s all color, noise, and shapeless plot, stuffed full of subplots and character introductions foreshadowing and previewing where the studio would like to take this franchise in the future. As a result, the movie plays out busily with much happening, but little impact. There’s no clear through-line. Narrative, character, theme, and style exist in a haze, constantly threatening to take shape, but never getting there.

To even briefly summarize the plot seems a losing proposition. Instead I’ll describe some of the variables bouncing around. Peter (Garfield) is on-again-off-again with the lovable Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone, continuing her appealing performance from the first movie). He’s also trying to hide his superhero identity from sweet Aunt May (Sally Field). Meanwhile, the heir to the CEO throne of the omnipresent and obviously menacing Oscorp Industries, Harry Osborne (Dane DeHaan), skulks about looking to cure his mysterious hereditary ailment. A dweeby and unjustly ignored scientist (Jamie Foxx) gets electrocuted and then falls into a tank of genetically altered eels, an experience that leaves him blue, translucent, able to manipulate energy, and has rattled his brain in a way that leads him to decide he’s a supervillain and take the name Electro. He must know he’s in a superhero movie. The rest of the movie is filled with bit parts for the likes of Paul Giamatti, B.J. Novak, Felicity Jones, and Sarah Gadon, all clearly sitting around hoping they get to play more important roles in a future installment.

Director Marc Webb, with cinematographer Dan Mindel, shoots it all clearly and colorfully, juggling the plotlines as best he can. It’s all broad and comic-booky, with cartoony fluidity to the bright special effects and shots of action that twist gymnastically around Spidey in sometimes-exciting ways. But it is when Webb gets the chance to narrow in on the human relationships that the movie works best. The scenes are not particularly well written, but Garfield and Stone continue to have nice chemistry and manage to have a believable romantic spark as they juggle their lives individually and together. He’s a freelance photographer and Spider-Man. She’s an Oscorp intern and wants to go to Oxford in the fall. The question of what their future looks like, and whether they’re a couple beyond the present, is treated with some gravity. It works only because the performances are convincing.

Garfield is enjoying himself, creating a Peter Parker who is having so much fun being Spider-Man, swinging down New York City skyscrapers and wisecracking with bad guys, that darker shadings of grief and mystery almost don’t have room to stretch out comfortably. Stone, for her part, is even better. Not just a prop or an object to be rescued, she holds her own. Smart, she helps think Spidey’s way out of a number of predicaments, and is her own independent-minded person. It’s a shame that she has to reenact one of the source material’s most famous plot developments, a decision that turns her into yet another female character we’re only supposed to care about because of how what happens to her makes the male lead feel.

But it’s not just her. Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci’s screenplay makes the wrong moves by having every character and event become simply an overtly reverential and referential signpost on the way to the next spectacle, moving the pieces and gears into place for the next installment instead of becoming a wholly satisfying story of its own. (That Kurtzman/Orci scripts have sometimes made this a bad habit is not encouraging. I went into the film unaware of its writers and when their credit appeared I groaned and thought “makes sense.”) If I’m being charitable, the movie is an accidental post-narrative experiment. If I’m not being charitable, it’s desperately laying track just ahead of a franchise barreling down a route-in-progress. Either way, the flop sweat starts to show. It leads to a wobbly tone and confused plot.

Take Jamie Foxx for example. He’s delivering an amused big, campy performance that appears to belong in a different movie. Electro is a jumble of shifting personalities, goofy jealousies, and legitimate complaints, not to mention some serious-minded hints of metaphoric marginalization that remain largely inactive, all mixed into one convincingly weird persona. His scenes rise to match his nutty intensity and scattered evolution. I thoroughly enjoyed his scene opposite the exquisitely named Dr. Ashley Kafka (Marton Csokas), a man with a thick German accent who captures Electro in an Oscorp-funded insane asylum’s contraption that looks like a rubber body suit welded into a giant circuit board suspended over a hot tub. (Why would such a thing even exist other than to accommodate the plot of a superhero movie?) It’s a scene that feels one or two notches away from pure comedy.

But it is hard to square that tone with what we see elsewhere. We get straining emotional scenes of Dane DeHaan brooding with intensity in a heightened sickly torment that nearly breaks past the quick and dirty token characterization given to him. There is light relationship comedy, intimations of fatherly secrets for Spidey and Osborne alike, an opening phony-baloney plane crash flashback, a concluding manipulative little-kid-in-danger scene, a perilous blackout, a couple of winking references to the sadly still-unseen J. Jonah Jameson (the best of all Spider-Man supporting characters), and a funeral. It’s a sequel that does so much, it ends up feeling like nothing at all. I didn’t exactly have a bad time, but its diverting qualities are fleeting and its frustrations linger.

Modern Stone Age Family: THE CROODS

The Croods is a basic plot told with zip, color, generous slapstick, and absolutely dazzling visuals that represent the height of modern 3D CG cartooning. Following an isolated family of cavepeople, the movie finds as its center, as so many family films do, a character who yearns for more than the simple existence she knows. In this case, the family’s father (Nicolas Cage) preaches fear, keeping the group huddled in a cave when they aren’t on a mad dash hunting and gathering for the day. The daughter (Emma Stone) is the one who wants more while her mother (Catherine Keener), brother (Clark Duke), baby sister (Randy Thom), and grandmother (Cloris Leachman) are comfortable in their routine. One night, the daughter sneaks out to go exploring. She meets a young man (Ryan Reynolds) who has strange new talents – like making fire – and appears way more homo sapien than the latter day Neanderthals she’s stuck with. He’s running one step ahead of the collapsing landscape caused by the shifting tectonic plates, but the dad refuses to listen to the interloper. Soon enough, though, the cave collapses and they need to find a new home, too.

The exceedingly simple plot finds the family (plus the new guy) walking through lush digital jungles, vast detailed plains, and swooping vistas, trying to get to a safe new place to call home to the tune of a suitably larger-than-life Alan Silvestri score. Their world is populated by creatures that have more in common with the animals of James Cameron’s Pandora than our own prehistory, but that only enhances the pleasures of the design. These aren’t modern-day behaviors placed upon a cavepeople template a la The Flinstones. Nor are they entirely without cartoonish charms. This is a nicely imagined fantasy prehistoric landscape of wild sights and goofy critters and the people we follow are likably designed as well, unconventionally shaped, squat and scrunched, perched halfway between the photorealism of wax tableaus you’d see in a natural history museum and the rounded cartoonish flesh-colored globs of the designs more typical of a Dreamworks Animation picture. They interact with their environment in fast-paced setpieces of danger and comedy, usually both at once. They tumble over waterfalls, gasp through deserts, traverse grand canyons, and make wild leaps across chasms. Along the way, they encounter ravenous piranha-birds, tenacious, stalkerish giant saber-toothed cats, goofy little crocodile dogs, packs of punching monkeys, and at least one clingy primate they call “Belt.”

It’s all so colorful and appealing, with the characters featuring fine voice acting (Cage and Stone are particularly good, able to modulate their distinctive voices in actorly ways) and appealingly broad characteristics. It’s nothing out of the ordinary – the grandma’s crotchety and snappy, the brother’s a rounded goofball – but the family has a fine dynamic that feels genuinely loving and antagonistic only in the stuck-on-a-road-trip way that develops in even the best of families during cross-country travel. That there will be valuable lessons learned about being yourself, trusting others and trying new things is, of course, inevitable. But, as written and directed by Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders, it features some of the same warmth and charm in an earnest family-centered narrative that Sanders used in his great films Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon. He’s one of the great unsung animation directors working these days and, though The Croods can’t quite match those earlier efforts in overall quality, he puts in a respectable effort in making this an enjoyable entertainment. The key is the speed, humor and beauty of it all. It may be thin and expected in many ways, but it’s gorgeous to behold – visual consultant Roger Deakins surely had something to do with the tactile sense of light playing across the vivid designs – sprinkled with good-natured laughs, and never lets up on the narrative gas pedal. 

Badfellas: GANGSTER SQUAD

Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad is a movie that’s, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Sarris, less than meets the eye. This period piece gangster picture is great looking, slickly costumed and impeccably production designed. The sharp cinematography is shiny and Fleischer has a nice eye for visual compositions that’s put to good, crisp use. The color timing gives it all a vivid Fiestaware palate that’s just south of Technicolor. It’s a recreation of 1949 Los Angeles that’s less realism and more a sense of movie realism with dapper movie stars running around town speaking with a rat-a-tat cadence similar to the gunfire they set off from time to time. Unfortunately, this handsomely mounted cinematic world is wasted on a thin script by Will Beall, a document made up of leathery clichés and characterization that leans back on star presence rather than creating anything worth caring about.

The plot’s a loose elaboration on a true story that follows a squad of police officers tasked with a secret vigilante mission to dismantle gangster Mickey Cohen’s criminal operation and free L.A. of organized crime. The grizzled police chief (Nick Nolte) puts Sergeant John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) in charge of this mission. The team comes together in quick montage fashion. It’s your typical collection of loose cannons, the charming youngster (Ryan Gosling), the aging gunslinger (Robert Patrick), the technical expert (Giovanni Ribisi), and the rest (Anthony Mackie and Michael Peña). I’d complain about how the script so undervalues those last two I couldn’t even explain them with a trope, but I can barely explain any these characters even with the simplest of terms. They’re all only here to look good in a suit and get into brutal shootouts with gangsters

Big bad Cohen, played by an exaggerated Sean Penn under a layer of makeup like he’s playing a Dick Tracy villain, grumbles and growls his way through the film, intimidating all he comes into contact with. We know he means bloody business when the opening scene features him drawing and quartering a Chicago rival between two automobiles, a gross moment that plays out fully in frame behind the Hollywoodland sign. This is a violent movie that quickly sets up its bad guy as very bad, as if that excuses the all out war that the gangster squad takes to him in endless sequences of destruction and death that play out in stylish, flashily filmed takes that sometimes slow into glamorizing slow motion. The squad is made up of guys that stand shoulder to shoulder in billowing trench coats and nice hats; they’re iconographically pleasing, but dramatically predictable.

Token romance brings the most dispiriting aspect of the movie’s wasteful approach to its ensemble, counting on charm alone to paper over lazy plotting and dull, routine character beats. And if anyone could do just that, you’d think it could be Emma Stone, so sparkling in every single movie in which she’s appeared. Not so here, playing Cohen’s girl who has a Gosling on the side. Although she fills her beautiful gowns with a sense of old school glamour, she can’t bring enough sparkle to spark life in predictable scenes in which she’s romantic, concerned, or in danger. Similarly misused is Mireille Enos as Brolin’s wife. She has the understandable yet all too typical scenes where the wife worries about her husband and tells him that his work’s important, but not as important as her. It’s the kind of role we’ve seen a thousand times over and here is nothing more than a blatant attempt to add rooting interest to a flat character.

All dressed up with nowhere to go, this broadly played gangster picture ends up well short of greatness, but since it’s not swinging for the fences it doesn’t quite backfire into terrible either. If anything, it’s a slight modulation away from parody, especially in a finale that ends in a laughably overwrought shootout followed by a credulity straining one-on-one fistfight. For something so stylishly handled, it’s so easily ignored as it plays, a big empty clattering homage to films far better, from similar genre revivals like De Palma’s The Untouchables all the way back to classic Warner Brothers crime pictures of the film’s time period and slightly before. (They could very well be playing a block away from any of the settings on screen here.) Fleischer is a director of great visual zing who burst onto the scene in 2009 with Zombieland, a funny genre riff that I found entertaining at the time, although I haven’t revisited it in the years since. With Gangster Squad, he has almost all the right pieces in place, but it’s a film that frustratingly resists becoming as good as it looks.

With Great Power: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

At last, a big budget superhero movie that doesn’t seem to be holding anything back for the sequel. Unlike the planning and groundwork that consumed so much of even the best of Marvel’s pre-Avengers films – those films were all leading up to the admittedly spectacular climax that was all two-hours-plus of this summer’s biggest hit – The Amazing Spider-man tells a good story all the way through. There are peaks and valleys with escalating, relatable stakes every step closer to a spectacular, surprisingly moving action finale. It’s a film that takes it’s time to build characters, lives with them, thinks through the impact of the plot’s events on them, and creates a wholly convincing fantasy world in which superpowers can come along and be the biggest blessing or the most horrible curse.

It’s only been ten years since Sam Raimi helped kick off the superhero blockbuster craze with a buoyant, charming, action film, only eight years since his Spider-man 2, quite possibly the greatest superhero movie ever made, and only five years since his Spider-man 3 was a modest disappointment to fans like me. That series, with Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, the teen nerd who gets bitten by a radioactive spider to become the titular hero, is still so fresh in my mind that the biggest problem I had with this new version was clearing the old out of my mind. It didn’t take too long before I had and soon enough I was swinging right along with this fresh take. It may not contain anything as iconic as the rain-soaked upside-down kiss, but it has plenty of emotional heft to call its own.

Director Marc Webb made his debut three years ago with (500) Days of Summer, one of the best romantic comedies in recent memory. He may not be the most obvious choice to helm such a colossal effects-oriented undertaking, but he handles that showy, explosive material quite well. The impact of his first film can be felt in the nicely observed early stretches of this film where we’re introduced to our new Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) as he shuffles and mumbles his way through his average life with his Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field). It’s been said many times before, but bears repeating, that Spider-man is the best of all superheroes precisely because of his everyman qualities. He has problems with family, with school, with girls. For him, being bitten by that spider (the exact details of the new version need not be recounted here) is both an exhilarating puzzle of an athletic workout, puzzling over new skills and powers, and a deeply dangerous worry.  Swinging from building to building may be fun, but once you start to take on greater responsibility, danger to himself and the ones he loves become all too real.

The plot of the film (the screenplay is from James Vanderbilt and Alvin Sargent, who worked on Raimi’s Spideys and Steve Kloves, who adapted the Harry Potters) involves Dr. Connors (Rhys Ifans), a man without an arm who is desperately trying to find a way to regenerate tissue in humans by crossing with a patient’s genes the DNA of animals like lizards, who can grow back lopped off limbs whenever they please. Peter’s late father used to work for Connors, so he’s drawn into the scientific plot fairly early, and is soon after committed to help fix things after they, of course, go wrong, as they must in a superhero movie. One thing leads to another and the good Dr. becomes a slimy villain. At least his schemes doesn’t grow too outlandish and, though his own physical attributes gain something like superpowers, he can’t exactly be called a supervillain, He’s a mad scientist who becomes a force of nature. Complicating the issue is that his intern is one Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), a pretty girl from Peter’s school who picks up on his Spidey confidence and asks him out. Their relationship develops tenderly, in beautifully played scenes that dance between comedy, romance, and awkwardness. Peter woos her, even confides in her, to a point, despite the tension of her police chief father (Denis Leary), who is currently on the hunt for both Connors and the masked vigilante known as Spider-man.

As you can tell, the movie tells a fairly routine superhero origin story, but it tells it with such a depth of feeling and passion. The effects are convincing, yes. But the real attraction here is the warmth and emotion behind the suit and mask, the real sense of physicality and danger in the chases and confrontations. The cinematography from John Schwartzman is nimble and acrobatic, swinging through New York’s concrete caverns and slipping with clean, clear movements through fast-moving, mostly comprehensible action sequences. The actors are uniformly terrific, from the parental compassion in Sheen and Field, to the beautiful brainy Emma Stone and her pragmatic, funny tough-guy dad in Leary. And Garfield, for his part, carries the movie, selling the transformation from socially paralyzed underdog to superpowered, sometimes overconfident, underdog as well as his soft romanticism, sharp smarts, and heavy guilt.

I never expected to like The Amazing Spider-man to the extent I did, loving as I do two-thirds of what Raimi did with this classic comics’ character over the past decade. (As much as I liked it, Amazing has nothing on Raimi's first two Spider-man films.) And yet this happens all the time in comics where one writer or illustrator ends his or her run on a series and a new artist (or group of artists) comes on board to make the character new again. That’s what happens here, thrillingly, refreshingly so. Marc Webb has made a terrifically compelling superhero movie with genuinely tense action set pieces, many with vertiginous heights and scary drops, and a welcome focus on characters that helps ground it all in very high stakes. What a thoroughly enjoyable spectacle. At the risk of sounding too corny, this Spider-man is amazing, indeed.