One for Them: THE BRUTALIST

Architect László Tóth is in the great tradition of Governor Willie Stark and cult leader Lancaster Dodd and conductor Lydia Tár. He’s a fictional life invented to tell us about his times. The Brutalist, like All the King’s Men and The Master, borrows the structure of the epic biographical picture to sweep us into the middle of the 20th century and interrogate something dark and beautiful and true about the ways in which an era transforms a man and a man transforms his era. Like The Master and TÁR, it builds into its structure a heavy seriousness and sense of formal play. Director Brady Corbet, who also co-wrote with partner Mona Fastvold, starts with an overture and ends with an epilogue, throwing a 15-minute intermission into the middle of a three-and-a-half hour experience shot on VistaVision film. Loading the enormous experience up with the throwback textures signifying importance, he gives it a sense of grandeur and detail in presentation that extends to the precision of its writing and framing. Here’s a sweeping historical fiction about art and commerce and politics and man’s capacity for cruelty—both intimately, and globally—colliding in the life of one man.

It’s a mid-century Americana epic as an inverted Ayn Rand parable, in which the troubled genius man does not selfishly retreat from society, but imposes his artistry upon the very landscape of society as an act of transformation and, maybe, generosity in taking his pain into imposing beauty built to last. Here’s where genius is put into the fleshy stuff of fallible men, where individualism is paradoxically built into the foundation of the totemic and impersonal, where wealth corrupts passions, and passions corrupt souls, even while reaching for transcendence. Three-and-a-half hours is a long time to contemplate these big ideas, and the movie’s reach and scope is matched by its bustling incident and hustling modes. It never feels long. (I would’ve sat there for a few more hours if it remained so compelling.) It feels immense and dense, worth wandering around in, being pulled along with, and left puzzling over its dimensions and implications. Corbet makes full use of every connotation of the title. It’s brutalist as style, the blocky concrete edifices of post-war European architecture, a reaction to earthshaking tragedies transformed into something solid and imposing. It’s brutalist as an adjective, implying cruelty, violence, a lack of feeling.

We follow Tóth (Adrian Brody), a Holocaust survivor who leaves a wife (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy) in Hungary as he immigrates to America, promising to send for them. He struggles in Pennsylvanian poverty—taking odd jobs with an assimilated cousin (Alessandro Nivola), later shoveling coal—until he happens to fall in with a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce) who learns this immigrant was once a brilliant, celebrated architect. He offers to bankroll a dream project, a seemingly fortuitous idea that grows only more complicated and fraught. The movie smartly moves with the deliberateness of a detailed character drama against the backdrop of ambition and ego and historical context. Thus begins an entwining of two families’ personalities and stories—haves and have-nots, privileged and impoverished, the tragic and the thriving. It’s as full of stark contrasts as the structure slowly building over the course of the film. The Brutalist architect and the brutal capitalist, each inflicting their brutalities through whims and wills altering their surroundings, leaving marks on the social and visual fabric of the nation. Here’s a movie about how tragedies personal and political—even, and especially, as they double up—write themselves onto our world and reshape our landscapes, leaving statements so obvious they become inscrutable.

The performers inhabit sequences of supple complexity and densely ambiguous beauty; it’s carried along by a fine filmic sense and a well-blocked interest in coaxing evocative realism around theatrical flourishes and sturdy, slippery visual metaphor. They start to feel like real people, and yet freed by its fictional biopic dimensions, it’s able to become all the more iconographic and symbolic. Corbet’s directorial efforts have so far been a series of solemn fictional biographies like this. His eerie Childhood of a Leader is an imagined origin for a dictator. His Vox Lux is a prickly, provocative tale of a teenager surviving a school shooting and then using that attention to become a troubled pop star. Those films are similarly stately and told in chapters and build with inevitable structures to clear theses. The Brutalist is a magisterial capstone to this trilogy, evolving those preoccupations and styles into something even more rich and transporting and novelistic in incident and detail, yet as showy and satisfying as the most enveloping moviegoing experiences.

High Hopes: WILD ROSE and THE AERONAUTS

The year 2019 turned out to be a big one for British director Tom Harper. Previously best known on these shores, if at all, for 2015’s perfectly agreeable modern Hammer horror effort The Woman in Black: Angel of Death, his output this year encompasses two major prestige efforts. At least, that’s how their American distributors have positioned them. The films themselves wear their prestige qualities lightly, and, though they hail from dependably Oscar-y sub-genres and have the glossy handsome look of respectability about them, there’s a generosity of tone and humanity of spirit that enlivens what could be predictable, and makes imminently watchable works. The more successful of the two was this past summer’s small sleeper hit Wild Rose, a film about a scrappy Scottish woman (Jessie Buckley) and her quixotic dream to be a big American country star. It may seem an improbable dream, especially once you see she’s a single mom just out of prison with two kids waiting for her with her mother (Julie Walters). Immediately, a cynical viewer might start slotting the potential storyline into a conventional mode. If she can’t make steps toward her goal, we’re looking at kitchen-sink social realism. If she can, we’re looking at a sentimental rags-to-riches. But Nicole Taylor’s sharp and entertaining screenplay is wiser than that, imbued with a sense of specificity and heart that never steps wrong. It has both heartbreak and hardship, every success hard-won, every setback painfully felt. The result is a movie as warm and wise and true as the best country story songs. Buckley plays the lead as determined, optimistic yet realistic, sparkling and spunky and, yes, a helluva country singer. (The music is wall-to-wall and excellent.) We can see her dream should become true, even if others can’t. She’s charming and talented, but only a half-step ahead of sadness or despair. She’s falling behind fast — bills to pay, kids to raise, an ankle monitor that limits her ability to take advantage of a fluke of good fortune, let alone take a gig. That her mother sternly advises her to give up feels as kind as it is cruel; but so, too, is her wealthy employer (Sophie Okonedo) as she advises her to go for it. There’s no easy answer. Here’s a movie that is an unusually warm and clear-eyed look at what so often becomes behind-the-music cliche or pat blindly-follow-your-dreams foolishness. It understands with poignant, matter-of-fact clarity how difficult in can be to accept a lucky break and turn it into something bigger when you’re starting from a place of such disadvantage. The quotidian struggle, the painful mistakes, and the missed opportunities make the glimpses of success all the more powerfully bittersweet in a movie this vibrant and full of life. It earns every ounce of its uplift.

Harper’s other film of the year, opening just in time for the holidays, is the shallower and yet more visually striking The Aeronauts. It’s a based-on-a-true-story period picture whose commitment to the true story ends with the fact that there was an important hot air balloon experiment in 1862 England. The film really is as simple as it sounds: a pilot (Felicity Jones) and a weather scientist (Eddie Redmayne) want to see how high they can take a hot air balloon. It goes up really high, which, as you might expect for the first time such a thing has happened, gives them all kinds of wonderful views and terrifying complications. It gets cold. There are storm clouds. And how does one land this thing? This is the full extent of the film’s present-tense action, with the characters’ backstories filled in with studious flashbacks that pad out the runtime and give some emotional scaffolding to the awe-struck imperiled figures adrift in the skies. With such a thin story structure, Harper is free to demonstrate a true This is Cinerama or even L'arrivée d'un train level of simple visual power. It’s a case of a wow, look at that thing go! conception executed well, expertly realized and utterly convincing in its blend of practical and computer effects. When on the ground, George Steel’s cinematography has fine, overfamiliar, burnished period piece style, shot in scope with all the finest frippery of mid-1800’s detail in the costuming and production design. But get it up in the air, and the frame opens to full IMAX height, conjuring the most vertiginous filmmaking this side of Zemeckis’ skyscraper tightrope The Walk as they lean over the edge or, worse still, climb up the rigging. It thus builds great tension out of the mere height of the thing, gaping in wonder as the balloon passes through clouds or drifts above a town, or gripping tight as the characters must scramble around the balloon. Because Jones and Redmayne are capable at playing charm and vulnerability, it’s always evident that they’re one wrong decision away from plummeting and they do enough to make one hope not to see such a thing. They hold their own against the immense backdrop of this spectacular view. From such a simple idea comes a movie that’s captivating enough, capable of reminding one that a relatively simple story’s ability to be told on a scale of this enormity is one of the reasons we go out to the movies.

Dark Side: ROGUE ONE

Rogue One takes what could’ve been trivial noodling around in Star Wars lore and turns it into a proficient sci-fi action movie building to intimations of grand space operatic tragedy. It’s the second film made after creator George Lucas sold his remarkable galaxy to Disney, who have thus far been studious, respectful, and cautious custodians. Instead of an idiosyncratic vision from one artist’s mind, it’s a committee polishing up effective fan service. (At least the emphasis is on “effective.”) For promising new narrative future, this latest film has nothing on last year’s The Force Awakens, with its immediately vibrant new personalities and their lingering unresolved promise: the simmering twisted villain Kylo Ren and fresh Force heroine Rey. But in staging Star Wars-ian action, Rogue One is the more complete experience, with a beginning, middle, and end, a style more efficiently beholden to what came before without strain, and a tone more willing to fit the enormity of the sacrifice in this conflict. It’s overly engineered to be a gleaming widget, fitting seamlessly into the larger franchise plan instead of springing from a singular revelation. But at least this is still a film that dreams a little bigger than most blockbuster product, playing in a hugely enjoyable and intricately imagined fantastical universe with some sense of the painful struggle to resisting brutal fascism.

This entry tells a big, confident tale of a dark corner of the galactic conflict we’d long known about but never seen: the process by which the Rebel Alliance discovered the existence of the super-weapon Death Star and stole plans that’ll end up given by Princess Leia to R2-D2 in the 1977 original’s opening moments. A self-contained – despite the endless references and offshoots into other areas of franchise canon – and admirably scruffy combat heist film – think The Guns of Navarone…In Space!! – it has a motley diverse crew of insurgents striking back against the forces of an evil empire. Better symbols than characters, the underwritten rebels make decent action figures. Through swooping, crashing, clamorous adventure sequences across all manner of terrain – deserts, villages, space stations, jungles, and tropical beaches – they fight. Reluctant rebel Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) joins a spy (Diego Luna), a comic-relief combat robot (Alan Tudyk), an Imperial defector (Riz Ahmed), and two monk-like warriors (legendary Chinese action stars Donnie Yen and Wen Jiang bringing fun choreography). Their mission: contact her father (Mads Mikkelsen), an unhappy Imperial scientist who knows how to take the Death Star down.

This leads to varied action beats, like an ambush in a far-flung marketplace, a mountainous recon mission in a downpour, and a dizzying dogfight above a gleaming citadel. Along the way we learn a little more about the Rebellion than the earlier films had time to explore, with different factions of the Alliance debating battle plans and how to deal with extremists (like an under-used Forest Whitaker) in their midst. This mirrors the Empire’s side, as a commander (Ben Mendelsohn) fights off the life-and-death office politics of battle-station life. The script, pieced together by four credited contributors (Chris Weitz, Tony Gilroy, Gary Whitta, and John Knoll) juggles the movie’s hard-charging tough-minded warfare with hit-and-miss cameos, fun one-liners, smart retcons, terse exposition, and shorthand emotion. That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air – and the strain sometimes shows, especially in the final product’s clearly tinkered dropped connections and foreshortened beats – but there’s fun to be had in the tactile look and crisp pace. There’s even a welcome commitment to feeling the losses, culminating in a staggering shot of good characters embracing certain doom knowing they’ve done all they could to win some small hope for their cause.

Although this is a side story, a spin-off, it’s identifiably Star Wars in its concern with family dramas writ large in galactic conflict and a sense of spirituality amidst tactics, plus gearhead love of spaceships taking off and landing and fantasy anthropologist appreciation of interesting creatures and beasties. (We get all the old familiar X-Wings and TIE Fighters and fish-heads and tentacle-haired beings, as well as slick new designs and goofy new aliens, like a massive Force-sensitive slug used as a lie-detector test.) Plus it has a key insight to style the cast like they’re actors from the 70’s – shaggy hair, groovy mustaches – playing the characters. Though cinematographer Greig Fraser shot gorgeous location photography and ILM filled it up with top-of-the-line digital fakery, it has the scuffed retro-future look of the original trilogy, like a modern re-creation of a 70’s vision. The much-ballyhooed lived-in universe aesthetic of Lucas’s original trilogy still draws visual appeal because it’s so densely designed. It proves there’s still a sense you could find a fascinating new story around every corner in every frame of this series. It also proves once more director Gareth Edwards (of 2014’s great Godzilla) is a master popcorn image-maker (despite many eye-popping shots featured in trailers ending up on the cutting room floor).

The movie works best when it has soaring spectacle clued into the enormity of its scale – a shuttle dwarfed by a planet behind it, the orbiting Death Star creating a solar eclipse, a city destroyed by laser-blast sending enormous shockwaves ripping up surrounding terrain in waves, and massive space structures colliding in the way everyone has played with the toys has dreamed about. But even in the moments when it’s merely workmanlike – or overworked franchise caretaking – it has some of the appeal the old Expanded Universe paperbacks did, varying in quality but consistently a drip, drip, drip of more, more, more for fans. It has all the bells and whistles, the immediately identifiable sound effects, music cues, and visual hallmarks of the series, even if it now has an over-polished committee’s recreation of what was once a singular personal pulp remix. The best thrills – a sensational final battle like something out of N64’s Rogue Squadron video game – feature dazzling effects and action better staged than Abrams’. It may still be imitation Lucas – or maybe imitation Kershner at this point – but it’s sturdy and entertaining nonetheless.

Bored to Death: INFERNO

There are worse movies than Inferno, movies so inept, confused, ill-considered, or offensive they’re impossible to defend let alone sit through. But that makes it all the more depressing to realize Inferno is the only thing a movie can be that’s worse than bad. It is boring. I don’t mean to say it is slow or off-putting or strange or lazy. No, it is just deafeningly empty from the first frame to the last, completely devoid of interest or entertainment. If it was a bad movie it could at least kick up ludicrous silliness or something so mind-bogglingly tone deaf it’d be worth unpacking. Here we simply have a movie with no real reason to exist, incapable of making an argument for itself. It merely is, playing out with all the excitement and urgency of a talented group of Hollywood craftspeople signing off on a contractual obligation. It’s the kind of movie so tediously uninteresting you wonder if it was possible everyone was sleepwalking behind the scenes, or maybe trading sightseeing tips for their European downtime on Sony’s dime.

Clearly a commercial commitment, Sony couldn’t indefinitely sit on the rights to Dan Brown’s successful books about Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, not after director Ron Howard and star Tom Hanks turned them into two good-sized hits already. The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Angels & Demons (2009) were not great thrillers, but at least they had their pulpy fun pretending their plot mechanics were wrapped in learning, with history lectures and Catholic conspiracy. Any movies that can feature both lengthy art appreciation monologues and Paul Bettany as a self-flagellating albino monk (in the first) or Ewan McGregor as a Cardinal parachuting out of an exploding helicopter (in the second) can’t be all bad. These were fairly self-serious works, B-movies impressed by their own footnotes and inflated with big budgets and big stars. Still, nothing prepared me for how exhausted and joyless Inferno was. Compared to this new film, its predecessors are models of humble, slight, and economical filmmaking. This one stumbles through an endless bleary plot without a single second of rooting interest, believable stakes, or photographic interest. 

It starts with Langdon (Hanks) waking up in a Florence hospital suffering amnesia from a head wound. His doctor (Felicity Jones) tells him he was attacked. Confused and suffering hallucinogenic flashes of horror imagery – the movie takes glum grotesqueries as humdrum – Langdon flees with his caretaker after a policewoman opens fire on them. Now he must remember why he’s now wrapped up in a globetrotting art-adjacent adventure, racing to prevent an apocalyptic event. Because he’s done sort of thing twice before he’s well equipped to get up to speed as he fumbles around the scrambled passages of his mind. Maybe it has something to do with the visual representation of Dante’s Inferno he finds in his pocket, and which has been altered to include clues to a hidden cache of plague virus that would wipe out 95% of the world’s population if unleashed. You can see why the World Health Organization, which this movie imagines operates as an international SWAT team, is hot on their trail. The mystery is why they think Langdon has something to do with it.

I can forgive many an incredulously strained plot, but see if you can follow this. Say you were a brilliant but eccentric sociopathic billionaire scientist with a goal of reversing the world’s overpopulation with your custom-made plague. You’ve hidden it in a bag that’ll blow up on a certain day and time. Would you: A.) tell no one, sit back quietly, and let it do its thing; or B.) throw yourself off a building, leaving behind an elaborate set of art-history scavenger hunt clues leading to your biological weapon of mass destruction? I get when Langdon is investigating a conspiracy with historical roots why sussing out clues in paintings and monuments is a helpful strategy, but why would Inferno’s villain (Ben Foster) create new clues on old art? If he was really intent on kickstarting the apocalypse, why leave room for a professor to figure it out and stop you? There’s little motivation behind anyone’s behavior in this movie, including WHO agents (Sidse Babett Knudsen and Omar Sy) and a mysterious fixer whose office is aboard a freighter in the Adriatic (Irrfan Khan). They change sides a couple times each for seemingly no reason other than cheap surprise.

Inferno is a movie that’ll test a lot of assumptions. Think between Ron Howard directing and David Koepp writing they could surely cobble together a half-interesting story? Think national treasure Tom Hanks could reliably deploy his star power? Think a supporting cast of fine actors could bring something to the table? Think some solid, reliable Hollywood craft – cinematography from occasional Howard collaborator Salvatore Totino, score from the busy Hans Zimmer – could at least render a movie watchable? Prepare to be disappointed. It’s an entire movie of people going through the motions. It can’t even make stunning locales in Florence, Venice, and Istanbul look like the good museum-hopping travelogue thriller it could’ve been. The movie is cramped and ugly – maybe the better to emphasize its villain’s complaint about too many people? – and the way the plot unfolds around an amnesiac hero is treated for mere confusion. This only serves to hobble what should be a swaggering Hanks by making him squint and stagger while reading clues to the other characters, dragged along by the boring plot without clear drive or goals of his own. He can’t remember why he’s there or why he should care, and I could relate. The only reason to see this movie is if you want a dark room in which you could nap for a couple hours.

A Brief History of Hawking: THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

Stephen Hawking, the great theoretical physicist, has contributed mightily to our understanding of the universe. Through his academic work on black holes, the Big Bang Theory and the history of time, and his bestselling books on the subjects, his name has become shorthand for scientific progress and the power of the human mind. Surely, he belongs on the public imagination’s shortlist of notable scientists with Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. That he’s done all this from the confines of a wheelchair, a form of ALS having left him able to write and speak only with the assistance of a custom computer that digitizes his thoughts one click at a time, is nothing short of extraordinary. His theories are important, his life impressive.

But when it comes to making a movie out of his life, director James Marsh and screenwriter Anthony McCarten have made his story into the same fawning biopic we’d see about any Great Man. It shows his early promise in brisk, energetic moments, falls into his tragic setbacks, then watches in sentimental pride his eventual standing-ovation worthy triumphs. All the while, his supportive wife is by his side, even though understandable difficulties cause their marriage to drift apart. The Theory of Everything is any and every biopic, sturdy and uncomplicated, even in its subjects’ darkest moments. It’s not interested in pushing too hard. It’s all about playing it safe and glossy, comfortable.

The film’s a straightforward retelling of Hawking’s life and work, complete with recreations of several key anecdotes that’ll be recognizable to anyone familiar with A Brief History of Time, either his book or Errol Morris’ documentary based on it. Our story begins in the 1960s, when Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) was a smart student hard at work on his PhD at Cambridge. He was on the rowing team, rode his bike across campus, and generally had a good time while impressing everyone with his intimidating intellect. What startled his peers most was how easily his work came to him. At an off-campus party he meets Jane (Felicity Jones), who will become the most important person in his life. They’re a fine pair, he, a man of science and math, and she, a woman of art and religion.

Marsh and McCarten draw out these opposites as Redmayne and Jones fill in the charm that brought the couple together. The film makes the most out of this central relationship, making it far more about the Hawkings’ relationship than about his work. We’re left knowing only that he’s brilliant and popular, but with a more in-depth understanding of the compassion he was shown that enabled him to continue his work. He’s diagnosed with ALS before he’s finished with his Doctorate, before he and Jane get married. It’s a slow decline, losing feeling and muscle in all his limbs bit by bit. First he’s limping, then leaning on canes. Eventually, he can only move his lips and eyes, barely making a sound but for the computer that arrives in his life when his thoughts threaten to remain trapped in his mind.

It is through the vibrant young man’s slow arrival as the Hawking we’ve long known that Redmayne’s acting shines. If a biopic is going to get just one variable exactly right, it might as well be the lead performance. Here, the charming redhead you might remember from Les Miserables delivers an uncanny inhabitation, somewhere beyond imitation, of an intelligent man wrestling with the pain and fear of losing physical abilities. By the time he sits in the wheelchair, crumpled and limp, he does more with his curled upper lip and bright eyes than some actors manage with their whole bodies. He’s everything the movie should be, precise in his charting of the disease’s progression, moving in the resilience of Hawking’s intellect in the face of a diagnosis that even a decade earlier would’ve left him forever locked in.

Marsh, whose other biopic (of sorts) Man on Wire played around with form as much as Theory of Everything plays it safe, populates the film with some of the finest character actors in England, from David Thewlis and Emily Watson to Charlie Cox and Simon McBurney. There’s period flavor in every corner with convincing production design. Bruno Delhomme’s cinematography is handsome and gauzy. The problem is that it’s all in service of a film so rote, going through the biopic motions instead of digging into what makes Hawking’s life so compelling. There’s little care taken to flesh out his theories or personality beyond surface level anecdotal evidence. And then it expects us to cry on command with one of its treacly music cues or misty-eyed crane shots. Instead of matching the level of technical command and unsentimental pathos of Redmayne’s performance, it’s loaded up with the dullest gloss. It’s well made, but conventional and, acting aside, feels awfully hollow.

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.

Fools Rush In: LIKE CRAZY

Like Crazy is not quite the worst movie of the year, but it has a good chance of being one of the least interesting. It’s a romance that attempts to bring a more realistic edge to its story, showing the difficulties in the central relationship that cause the couple to strain and to stray, all the while cooing at each other and declaring their soul mate status. Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones play the college kids who fall head over heels over the course of a montage. It, the movie, has barely started and they’re already eating ice cream cones and driving around the go-kart track together. Is there anything less interesting than watching, devoid of context, two people snuggle and whisper and say that they’re in love? These two say it, but I don’t believe it. I believe they like spending time together and they’re attracted to each other. But love? I’m not buying it.

They’re a couple with no obvious chemistry and have almost nothing of interest to say. When I read that the many scenes in the film were largely improvised I wasn’t surprised. That means the blame for the unimpressive dialogue, mumbled and repetitive, should fall on the cast for being bad improvisers as well as the writer-director Drake Doremus and his co-writer Ben York Jones for creating such unconvincing scenarios. There’s such a vague, wobbly feeling to it all as these two characters are living lives that are hastily sketched.

It’s a feeling brought about by the annoying, carefully careless hand-held camerawork as well as the facts of the story. Yelchin wants to make furniture. Jones is on a student visa and has to return to England soon. That’s the extent of what we know when they start staring longingly at one another and saying that they’re in love. I guess we’ll just have to take their word for it. They think they’re in love simply because they whispered to each other, swapped life stories, had a little bit of fun, and can’t stand to be apart. Not that they’d had any real experience apart before they reached that conclusion.

The real conflict of the picture comes out of their bad decisions. She doesn’t want to part with her college sweetheart so she decides to stay for a few months past her visa’s expiration. She either naively believes that True Love will erase the very real rules of immigration or she’s really stupid. By overstaying her visa, all because she literally tells her boyfriend that she “doesn’t want to be sad,” she is unable to reenter the country after she goes back to her homeland for a week’s stay for her friend’s wedding.

This leads to a tearful scene when she’s denied reentry to the United States and is told she’s being put on the next plane back. It’s played as tragic, but this could hardly be less so. If she had left when her visa expired, there would be no problem if she wanted to come back as a tourist. Instead, she just made things harder on herself. Those couple of months – yes, two whole months! – of separation she skipped are replaced with endless red tape and a much longer separation. This isn’t a story about runaway bureaucracy catching up innocent lovers in inscrutable, unfortunate rules. This is a story about a couple that know the rules, break them anyways, and then are surprised they can’t be together.

But, of course, they can be together. Yelchin could move to England. He just seems like he doesn’t want to. Besides, he’s started his furniture business and his secretary is the very pretty Jennifer Lawrence (she deserves much better than this). So, he’s not going. He’ll visit a few times, but he won’t make the move. Jones’s lawyer goes to work on her visa and she goes to work at a magazine. Their lives move on. They should just acknowledge a good time, a learning experience, and get on with better things. But the movie, for some strange reason, keeps trying to push them together. This is a futile film romance with all subplot and detail stripped away. It’s not really interested in their careers or affairs. It’s not even interested in their families, even though Jones’s sweet, loving parents (Oliver Muirhead and Alex Kingston) are the only interesting, well-acted characters in the entire movie. No, the whole the film is focused on why these two characters need to be together despite, or more likely because of, their total stupidity.

Jones turns in what has to be the whiniest performance of the year, Yelchin, one of the least energetic. It is so very hard to care about them. I didn’t buy it as a romance. I didn’t even buy it as a movie romance. The whole thing’s cruising towards an unhappy ending and, when it gets there, it rings just as false as the opening mush. It’s a movie that improbably pushes its leads together at every turn, only to end up saying sometimes love can go wrong. Of course it can, but the film’s structure of coincidences and celebration of soul mate status sure did a good job of convincing these characters otherwise. I nearly strained my eyes with all the rolling they were doing. It’s the kind of movie that, after a while, I merely sat through, seething with impatience, desperately awaiting the end credits.