Taking Direction: PARALLEL MOTHERSand NIGHTMARE ALLEY

One of the great pleasures of seeing a new film from a director who has done good, distinctive work over many decades is the comforting feeling of knowing we’re in familiar, reliable territory. Ah, one can think, here’s that recognizable style and those usual preoccupations, done up in their confident aesthetics and in their pleasurably recognizable rhythms. So here’s Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers. The latest film from the great Spanish filmmaker is another of his intricate narrative designs that plays out so easily one can still be surprised by its emotional impact despite recognizing its moves. It stars Penélope Cruz—whose expressive features graced a half-dozen of his films—and has other frequent collaborators in supporting roles. It’s set in plush Madrid apartments painted with deep reds and blues and greens, decorated with artful textures, vintage photographs, vinyl records, and jamón on the counter. It flows with the usual sumptuous string score from Alberto Iglesias. It concerns itself with: birth and death, mistaken identity, miscommunications, mothers, daughters, sex, family secrets, fallible men, and things long buried or repressed resurfacing. It is, in other words, an Almodóvar film. For all the familiarity of the surface appeal, it also has the beguiling narrative propulsion, pulled along by powerfully underplayed melodrama, with which his most effective films work best. Watching it, one wonders what will happen next, and how the characters will react, not in an edge-of-the-seat way so much as the deep well of feeling and humanity that comes from closely observed curiosity and earnest empathy.

Here, in delicately doubled parallel narratives that draw closer, separates and draw close again, Cruz plays a single middle-aged photographer whose affair with an anthropologist is the cause of an unexpected pregnancy. She decides, given her age and prospects, to have the child. He doesn’t want to be involved, which is fine by her. She ends up, nine months later, sharing the maternity ward with a teenager (Milena Smit) whose pregnancy is similarly shrouded in the unexpected and the unspoken. They agree to keep in touch. As Almodóvar follows these new mothers, the story develops with complications both normal—women recovering from birth, navigating new living arrangements, rebalancing a career (or adolescent desires to strike out) with their familial obligations—and dramatic. The plot ultimately hinges on a couple paternity tests, dark secrets, some held too long, and others not long enough, and, finally, one big devastating turn. There’s high drama here, or at least potentially. (Almodóvar even provides a running subplot of Cruz’s search for a mass grave in her small home village, where her grandmother long claimed her grandfather was buried during the Spanish Civil War. Talk about drama!) And yet the actors present these turns with such ease and naturalism, speaking in soothing soft tones and melodic warmth even as they might be evading or obscuring their true feelings. The movie sets its enormous emotions on a soft simmer, letting the full weight of its heaviest moments push down unexpectedly in the design.

Similarly, Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is a work recognizably his own, with a design that is its own reward. It might even be doubly familiar (or triply) to anyone who’s seen the 1947 Tyrone Power-starring adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel. It’s a noirish carnival con man picture, relishing the seedy inner workings of the freak show atmosphere. Del Toro usually works his affinity for misfits, monsters, and castoffs. See it expressed in the likes of Mimic, Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and his Oscar-winning The Shape of Water—a real monster mash of a filmography, always asking, who’s the real freak here? In this new film, that kinship finds, in some ways, its most human expression amid the dusty tents and flickering flames of its disreputable environment. Here’s a film that looks unflinchingly at a geek in the old fashioned sense of the term, a desperate man biting the head off a live chicken for a paying audience, clenching his teeth to slowly separate vein from muscle until the neck snaps. The film wonders what kind of a life takes someone to that moment. To answer, Del Toro, with co-writer Kim Morgan, finds a winding road through eccentric characters and blustering schemes. It’s a big cast—Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Ron Perlman, and Dave Strathairn, among others—of carny types, each given loving attention to the art of their grift and graft. It unfolds the ecosystem of the traveling show so patiently and in such detail I was reminded of Ricky Jay’s histories of magicians. The people in this movie are living on the margins, but there’s some kind of mad skill to what they do wrapped in the soft deception of audience appeal. They, like the film, and like a key image in the film, are a loaded pistol in a purse.

At the center is a charismatically recessive movie star performance from Bradley Cooper, one of those magnetic work of gestures and implication that’s compelling, and then only grows in power when he doesn’t speak. He simply exists, first as a lost man stumbling into this world, and then as a figure of increasing power within his person as he turns on the charm and shines up to move in fancier circles. That gets Cate Blanchett and, later, Richard Jenkins involved as high society becomes the scene of a newer, edgier, more personal con. No more swindling quarters out of gullible folk; it’s time to put on more elaborate faux-psychic charades for the high-rollers. The trick of the movie is how easily it moves between these early-20th-century spaces—the rural outskirts and the electric urban interiors, Dust Bowl chic and Art Deco glamor—with a consistency of tone and style. Here are damaged people damaging people, but their wounded souls are attracted and repulsed by the endeavor, and each other. The movie follows suit. It takes grand delight in the low pleasures of its population, and sinks ever deeper into the melancholic romance and eerie despair, both of which are all part of the game, too. It’s not dissimilar from an Edward Hopper painting in its look and feel some of the time—figures of loneliness in the vastness of (retro) modern life. If the movie sometime feels long, it’s because Del Toro can’t pull himself out of these scenes in these visual spaces with these complicated stock of characters; they’re too well-inhabited and handsomely dressed in sets expertly designed. I didn’t mind spending that time. These days, when movies can often feel so impersonal and bland, to groove on a distinct style and mood can be a tonic.

Deux Thrillers de Netflix: WASP NETWORK andLOST BULLET

The new Olivier Assayas film, Wasp Network, now on Netflix, isn’t one of his better works. It’s oddly paced, and sometimes inscrutable, in ways that resist drawing the audience in. But it all draws together with a satisfying melancholic snap in the end. It’s also threaded through with Assayas’ typical interests in a setting’s specificities, and in the subtle shifts of interpersonal power dynamics. It’s a worthy effort. This based-on-a-true-story quasi-thriller criss-crosses between Cuba and Florida during the 1990s, following a Cuban pilot (Edgar Ramírez, reuniting with his Carlos director) who escapes to Miami and defects. There he is drawn into a crowd of covert operatives working to subvert Castro’s grip on their home country. Or at least, that’s what they claim. The film moves with methodical procedural tension, slowly developing the characters’ plans and plots, while also cutting back to the people left behind, especially the pilot’s wife (Penélope Cruz) who kindly tells their daughter her father is a hero, while privately nursing a wounded pride over his desertion. Double and triple crosses are patiently teased out as we get a few gripping sequences of high-flying spy missions, small bright white planes dipping and rattling against the tropical blue sea and sky, with terse cuts between crackling radios. The performers (including Gael García Bernal and Ana de Armas) sink into their roles so that the high drama plays less like amped-up movie spy-craft, and more docudrama matter-of-factness most of the time. It sparks to life best when the filmmaking leans in harder: spilt screen heist-like exposition, or elaborate shuffling of allegiances revealed with a confident ta-da. The film is a professional, sharply photographed, competently designed work fitted to the story it tells. Assayas is too good a filmmaker to totally disappoint. This one just takes a little longer for its parts to click into place.

Slightly more lowbrow, and all the better for it, is a few clicks away from the Assayas: the terrific actioner Lost Bullet. This debut feature for French writer-director Guillaume Pierret is a tense B-movie, so lean and satisfying that it features a handful of exciting action sequences in a compellingly simple plot, wrapped up nice and tight in just under 88 minutes. Its lead is a prisoner (Alban Lenoir) allowed to work souping up the cars of a special cop brigade so that they can more effectively chase down high-speed criminals. These cops turn out to be mostly crooked, and, as one thing leads to another, our lead is on the run, framed for a murder he didn’t commit. The rest of the film is in a mad dash to find the eponymous lost bullet before the bad guys do. There are sensational car stunts on the regular, culminating in a great, crunchy symphony of squealing tires, revved engines, and vehicular destruction that literally tears cars apart and leaves them trailing glass, bleeding oil or even bursting into flame as they continue to race to their final destinations. It’s not non-stop car chases, as it pauses for just enough characterization to care about, and the occasional well-staged shoot-out or hand-to-hand combat. Meanwhile, the good apples back at the station don’t believe the only cop who knows what’s actually going on. (That she’s a woman of color (Stéfi Celma) plays potently in this summer of reckoning with police prejudice.) The action is portioned out perfectly, and the connective tissue is taut thriller plotting. There’s not a wasted second or spare shot to be found. It’s filmed in clean, bright, frames cut with quick, legible montage. It’s a blast. Pierret may be a first-timer, but he knows what he’s doing. It’s exactly what you’d want this movie to be.

Cold Case: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

I’d love an all-star murder mystery, which makes it hurt all the worse that Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express isn’t a good one. He takes Agatha Christie’s classic novel (to both direct and star as the persnickety, mustachioed, world-famous detective Poirot) and runs it through the handsome, high-gloss, literary-toned approach that served him so well in the past. He has treated familiar stories from Hamlet to Cinderella with the same tone of high-minded, playfully gorgeous, deliciously melodramatic classicism. They’re reverent, but impassioned, heavy and light in the same moment. But somehow the translation to screen for this latest adaptation is stuffy and slow, every emotion muted, every turn and twist of the whodunnit plot bungled and stumbled in a ham-fisted clumsiness that never lets the puzzle pieces click together with pleasing precision. Instead, amid the fastidious production design of a luxury train lovingly photographed in 65mm and cramped tracking shots of beveled glass and ornate décor, he somehow never gets a good sense of the space. The characters are indifferently introduced; the investigation develops in fits and starts; the space is inelegantly portrayed – a jumble of close cuts and overhead shots that hardly gives us a window into the layout. The lumbering film neglects good mystery development at every turn. 

The story deals with a mystery of a murdered man on a snowbound train full of trapped suspects (including the likes of luminaries Judi Dench, Penelope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Derek Jacobi, Olivia Colman, Michelle Pfeiffer, and on and on). Branagh never gets around to cluing us into who is in which compartment, the order of the cars, the timeline of the night in question. Part of the pleasure in a story such as this – understood by Christie and the best of her imitators and adapters – is to follow the clues as they stack up, then hold the big picture in our own heads as the detective tests theories and develops new leads. Here, the screenplay by Michael Green (Blade Runner 2049, a better expensive Hollywood detective story) simply asserts and accrues its mystery’s complications rather than presenting them in a more aesthetically or investigatively satisfying process. I barely had a sense of who the suspects were, let alone where there are on the train or with whom they trade meaningful red herrings. The cast is under-utilized, their star power and screen presence used to substitute or shorthand characterization, the film’s dull crackles of wit and tension carried over as best they can manage as little as they’re allowed. Why such a delicious intrigue is left to fizzle is beyond me. Branagh doesn’t even allow his Poirot more than a somnambulant personality. This prime place for some showboating (and, boy, is he one of our best showboats) is given over to soft, dry cracks and sleepy mumbling. There’s no spark of energy or life here, the big, fancy, unmoving train left stuck in the snow slowly turning away from any inherent suspense and into its own conspicuous metaphor.

Feels Like Taking Crazy Pills: ZOOLANDER 2

You have to be a smart filmmaker to make something so gloriously dumb. Fifteen years after directing, co-writing, and starring in Zoolander, a featherlight and endearingly silly cult comedy about a dim male model caught up in an assassination plot, Ben Stiller has revived his character for a sequel that’s bigger, louder, and dumber. It’s uneven and unnecessary, and takes some time to really get going. But it’s also an admirable sustained effort of Hollywood money and craftsmanship put towards utter nonsense. Absurd and unusual, Stiller strains the limits of the studio comedy for completely unsubstantial goofing around with a ridiculously good-looking and totally preposterous premise. Is it a good movie? That’s hard to say. It barely hangs together at times, overstuffed with story and unconcerned with anything but a wobbly weirdness. But who says it has to be any more than that?

The movie finds Zoolander retired, living, as he puts it, “as a hermit crab” in the remote wintry wilderness of northernmost New Jersey. We’re told in a blitz of fake news footage that shortly after the first movie his wife was killed and his son was taken away by child services. That’s awfully heavy backstory to ladle on such a frivolous film, especially paired with a strange sideways 9/11 reference. But then Billy Zane (playing himself) treks out to convince Zoolander to start modeling again and win back his son from the orphanage. This kicks off an overflowing movie that’s in addition concerned with Zoolander’s equally dim old rival Hansel (Owen Wilson), who has also been retired for over a decade, nursing anxiety over a facial scar and a complicated polyamorous romance with a dozen people, including surprising celebrities and a handful of random people (my favorite: a chimney sweep who lingers in the background of shots). He agrees to join Zoolander on the quest to be relevant in the modeling world once again.

Together they encounter a whole mess of plot. There are professional frustrations with a hotshot hipster designer (Kyle Mooney, hilariously affecting dopey mispronunciations and fumbling confidence), a conniving Italian fashion mogul (Kristen Wiig, wearing Lady Gaga gowns and adding three extra syllables to every word), a suspicious orphanage manager (Justin Theroux, with a powdered George Washington wig slapped on top of dreadlocks), and the looming threat of old villain Mugatu (Will Ferrell, deliriously and wildly campy). There’s also an Interpol agent (Penélope Cruz) investigating the mysterious murders of several pop stars (including Justin Bieber, in a cameo that’s 90% stunt double which serves as the film’s violent cold open) and a search for the Fountain of Youth. There’s a lot going on. The movie feeds exaggerated excesses of the fashion industry into a glossy spy movie’s extremes, inane ornate designs mixed with thundering score, concussive transitions, and a hurtling tangle of conspiracies.

A key early mistake is assuming we care about Zoolander and Hansel as characters, but by the time the plot’s spinning on its crazy way, the movie itself has forgotten that it ever even feinted towards taking any emotional underpinning at anything close to face value. Even as the subplot involving the long-lost son becomes the best part, Stiller knows this is all totally unserious, an elaborate goof. He, with co-writers Theroux, Nicholas Stoller, and John Hamburg, create a reason to stuff the film chockablock with innuendos, misunderstandings, malapropisms, sight gags, cameos, baroquely offbeat production design, wackadoodle characterizations, and more than a few baffling decisions (like making Fred Armisen play a freakish, mostly CGI 11-year-old for one scene). Cinematographer Dan Mindel (of The Force Awakens and other fantastical action films) gives it all a shiny thriller gloss and bright comedy sheen, playing up every absurd detail with a grainy poker face.

Stiller simply lets the unexpected striking nonsense flow. There’s a scene late in the picture where a boy is locked in a clown-themed dungeon with a giant plastic pig face on the wall drizzling lard out of its snout. Elsewhere a car flips over a dozen more times than you’d expect. A former swimsuit model explains she became a secret agent because her large breasts prevented her from graduating to runway work. A ghost serenely explains that she doesn’t care about anything anymore, because she’s dead. A long-secret connection between male models and rock stars is revealed by a music legend who patiently says they’re only separated by two genes (talent and intelligence). Not every joke lands. (An extended bit with Benedict Cumberbatch as a gender fluid model is cringe-worthy.) But with a movie this densely dizzy with oddball ideas loosely held together by a flimsy plot, it’s a pleasure just to be along for the ride. I had a big dumb grin while waiting to see what insubstantial surprise silliness was around the next corner.

Drug War: THE COUNSELOR

A murky drug war thriller, The Counselor keeps its focus on the people in the middle. This isn’t a story of drug lords and D.E.A. agents. It’s a story of lawyers, money launderers, logisticians, and truck drivers. There’s the Counselor (Michael Fassbender), a lawyer who finds himself nebulously floating between a sleazy nightclub owner (an unnaturally tan Javier Bardem) and a guy with connections (Brad Pitt) as a whole lot of drugs are making their way across the border and through the American West, with Chicago, and a $20 million payday, as a final destination. These three men form the core of the film, although there are choice roles for women (Cameron Diaz and Penélope Cruz) who have more and less power than you’d initially assume. These people are involved to greater or lesser extents in moving drugs and money around the world. They all seem to be in control of their part of the plan, but unexpected variables bring danger quicker than anyone expects. As Pitt explains, for the cartels, decapitation isn’t a result of anger or malice. It’s just business.

The screenplay is by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy. In his unflinchingly hard-bitten narratives like Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road (the latter two adapted into recent films), he specializes in prose so economical and spare he doesn’t even have time for such frills as quotation marks or indented paragraphs. In The Counselor, he finds something of a cinematic equivalent as scenes unfold pertinent information slowly, leaving plenty of gaps that may or may not be filled. It’s a thriller that doesn’t hurtle with propulsion, but rather takes its time rewarding patient and indulgent attention on the part of the audience. It’s a chilly red-blooded literary accumulation of details. The sparsely characterized cast of characters shows us these details through their actions, their personas, their crisply written dialogue that leans heavily on its sense of drive and negotiation. Characters are always jostling for the upper hand, feeling each other out, and moving with confident wariness. When not speaking of negotiations and logistics, they’re prone to speaking in sour metaphor or baring their souls accidentally in eccentric anecdotes.

McCarthy invents characters so tersely individual and specific that it’s little wonder that the Coen brothers are the only ones to get his prose exactly right on the screen. Here, without the benefit of his tough descriptions, his narrative leans on the strength of the cast to imbue the characters with life. They do, creating characters who are at times as inscrutable as they are committed to whatever their goals happen to be. It’s a story that finds a new, welcome character actor around every corner, with room for a diamond dealer played by Bruno Ganz, a prisoner played by Rosie Perez, a priest played by Edgar Ramirez, a supplier played by Dean Norris, and more. Each arriving for only a scene or two, they add immediate richness around the edges, a sense that the world of the ensemble contains multitudes, options and tracks that fade out as the plot narrows its focus and the dangers of the game begin to tighten around our leads’ necks.

Long build ups of methodical process, trucks of drugs packed and unpacked, secret meetings in hotel lobbies, revelations of who is spying and who is being spied upon, move along slowly and glossily. Violence comes fast, frightening, and ends just as quickly, leaving only eerie silences behind. Sudden gore gives way to sudden nothing. It’s all subdued, elegantly terse tension, nasty in a dour, matter-of-fact way with flashes of odd dark humor. A motorcyclist’s severed head sits in its helmet. The murderer hits the top with a thwack, sending the head flying out with a thunk. It’s as awful as it is strangely funny in execution, an extra little detail in a production that’s obsessed with finding moments like these. It’s a muted, grimly determined thriller that’s sleekly designed, handsomely photographed, and loves to get darkly strange from time to time. It’s appealing and unpleasant, sensual and a little funny. Just listen to Bardem’s monologue about what Diaz did to his car and tell me that it’s not all of the above.

Director Ridley Scott, in one of his rare modern day efforts (no Gladiator or Blade Runner here), takes a perfume commercial approach to glassy modern architecture and grimy black market transactional back alleys alike. (Scenes set around Bardem’s pool can’t help but unconsciously echo Scott’s 1979 work for Chanel.) When he, with cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, finds an image like a pet cheetah stalking a jackrabbit in a southwestern desert, or severed fingertips falling onto wet pavement, he lingers with stoic stylishness, finding the fussy details, but showing them with minimal excitement beyond their visual punch. He and McCarthy blend styles quite nicely here. They were at one point working together on an adaptation of Blood Meridian, but this eccentric original screenplay manages to blend their styles in ways a straight adaptation might not. It’s big, striking, and commercial, but granular, elusive, and specific as well. The Counselor is a movie that looks like a big Hollywood thriller, but it moves with sometimes-unexpected tones and rhythms. It is beautifully ugly, fitting for a movie that regards its characters and story with the cold logic and icy gaze of a predator moving in on its prey.

Built in a Day: TO ROME WITH LOVE

To Rome with Love, Woody Allen’s forty-third film, is far too slight to hate outright. It’s a light, whimsical concoction made up of various plotlines following various sets of characters through Rome with no real sense of connection or cohesion. The film’s structure is of mild interest, the postcard-ready cinematography from Darius Khondji is gorgeous, the actors are fine and Allen’s writing is occasionally funny, but the whole enterprise feels so undercooked. Unlike the best of his European films – Vicky Cristina Barcelona, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and, my favorite of the bunch, Midnight in Paris – there’s no clear reason why the characters, stories or themes within should find themselves set in this particular city. Instead, we’re cycling through a fairly typical series of Allen plots with the lowest amount of charm and dramatic interest necessary to provoke a modicum of my affection in response.

The various plotlines that make up the film are arranged in a dawn-to-dusk structure that opens on the beautiful sunny streets of Rome and ends underneath a sky of twinkling stars, which makes the various timelines of the stories themselves – one takes place over the course of an afternoon, others during few weeks, one over several months – a mildly diverting jumble to keep straight. These plots, the simplest, most gently surrealistic and overtly comic conceits to come from Allen in quite some time, could hardly support a full feature on their own, so it’s good to see that the prolific writer-director has shuffled a handful of half-baked concepts into one film so that we could get them all over with in one underwhelming lump so he and we can move on to better things.

One story in the film follows a pair of native Italians, country newlyweds who arrive in the big city. The wife (Alessandra Mastronardi) gets lost and the husband (Alessandro Tiberi) finds himself mistaken by a prostitute (Penélope Cruz) for her newest client and they’re in the process of arguing when the husband’s family shows up and create a drawn-out case of mistaken identity. The wife ends up stumbling into her own convoluted storyline with mistaken identity and mixed-up romantic signals and so the couple finds their fresh marriage tested in somnambulant screwball scenarios. I couldn’t find this story convincing or effective, although there’s a nice payoff when the husband ends up at a business meeting accompanied by the prostitute and all the business men start sweating bullets upon recognizing the new guy’s companion.

And that’s not even the broadest story in the film. That would be the scenario that finds Roberto Benigni as an average Italian family man who suddenly, inexplicably, becomes famous. He’s hounded everywhere he goes by photographers and reporters, gets invited to fabulous parties and on talk shows, and has beautiful women throwing themselves at them. It’s Allen’s attempt at lampooning those famous for being famous, but the mystery of it all here generates a lack of specificity that stretches too thin for effective satire. A much better comment on celebrity (in a roundabout way) is a storyline starring Allen himself as a retired classical music executive who travels to Rome with his wife (Judy Davis) to meet their daughter (Alison Pill) and her fiancé (Flavio Parenti), as well as their future in-laws. Allen’s delighted to find that the fiancé’s mortician father (Fabio Armiliato) has a great voice for opera, but will only sing in the shower.

All this is mere garnish, however, for the main course of the piece, a somewhat structurally complicated story about a middle-aged architect (Alec Baldwin) who wanders away from his wife’s sightseeing in order to visit the neighborhood in Rome where he spent some post-collegiate years. Once wandering down this memory lane, he meets a young man (Jesse Eisenberg) who recognizes him and invites him to visit his apartment he shares with his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) and where they are anticipating the arrival of one of her friends from college (Ellen Page). Baldwin lingers around the edges of the scenes that follow, interacting with the characters in ways that make him seem removed from the actual physical, temporal reality of the goings-on. It soon becomes clear (although the film never spells it out) that the young man he met is in fact his younger self. He is literally wandering around, reliving his past. This is the only thread in the film that would almost be enough, with some expansion, to fill up a satisfying feature on its own.

What Woody Allen has here is a collection of scenes and sketches with little reason to be thrown together in this way in this city. But what he does have is a nice sense of commitment to the various conceits of varying realism and broadness, complete and unwavering. And once again Allen proves that he knows good ways to make use of actors, feeding off of their screen personas in ways that make them at once utterly believable in character and completely of a piece within the Allen oeuvre. Of the cast, I’d most like to see Pill, Gerwig, Page, and Eisenberg in a future Allen film. They’re pretty terrific here, finding good ways to perform Allen’s dialogue and scenarios while breathing life into what is ultimately fairly uninvolving lightweight material. 

Drink Up Me Hearties Yo Ho: PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES

In 2003, when Walt Disney Pictures and producer Jerry Bruckheimer released Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, they had the element of surprise on their side. They had a hugely enjoyable crowd-pleaser, and a pirate film, no less, based on a theme park ride, an idea that then (and now) sounds improbable. Yet the film worked with its big rollicking set pieces, it’s playful treatment of the iconography of swashbuckling (Errol Flynn might have fit right in), and its lilting off-kilter star-turn from Johnny Depp as the instant breakout hit character Captain Jack Sparrow.

As a drunken, improvisatory scoundrel who loves being a pirate more than anything other than his own cleverness, Depp’s mumbling, mascara-wearing, stumbling swordsman was an unlikely hero. Hindsight, however, makes it all seem so inevitable. Depp can be a charming actor and in the film he’s given an infinitely charming character that he not only inhabits but also seems to have emerged fully created from deep within himself. He’s the secret genius amongst all of the characters, able to play people off of each other to achieve his goals while trying (or seemingly trying) to avoid doing the hard work. All he wants to do is to captain his beloved ship and he effortlessly steals away the show in the process, even if he’s actually a bit of a supporting character to the overarching damsel/hero romance between Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley.

The pure charm and excitement (not to mention the surprise) was dampened with a second feature, Dead Man’s Chest. With the sequel Disney via Verbinski attempted an expansion of the mythos of the first film that tried to retroactively turn that film into a trilogy starter. It’s nothing more than two-and-a-half hours of exposition with a few sequences of fun thrown in for good measure. It is, however, a booming, cluttered messy film of impressive, immersive design that is occasionally very enjoyable. It successfully moves the first film away from a standalone plot and puts it in a larger universe of details and characters engaged in and rebelling against various interconnected curses and codes.

By the time the trilogy ended with At World’s End, I enjoyed diving into the complicated, overextended, multilayered plotting. At three hours, the film is no quick, breezy blockbuster but Verbinski uses its heft to find voluminous weirdness almost hallucinatory in their meticulously odd construction. (There’s a lengthy sequence involving a topsy-turvy trip into Davy Jones’s Locker of all things, not to mention the climax that kicks off when a voodoo giant bursts into a river of crabs). Some find it tiresome; I find it exhilaratingly dense in its commitment to seeing just how odd a summer tent-pole release can get, how light on its feet a film can be while lumbering around with so many subplots and side characters.

After some time off, Disney has Depp back for more time as Captain Jack. By this point, he’s the clear backbone of the series. In this new film, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, he’s just about all that remains of the old mythos. The scene-stealer has become the focus. Most of the ensemble accrued over the course of three films has been stripped away. (Say goodbye to Bloom, Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård, and others). This is a simpler film, the simplest of all these Pirates, but it has some of the old pleasures without being nearly as bizarre or intricate. The biggest pleasure of these movies has been their denseness; this one's biggest flaw is it's relatively straightforward nature. It’s comparatively thin and, by the end, a bit anticlimactic; it’s eventful, but less epic in scope. Part of the fun of the bloat has been lost in the new focus on leanness, but I still found just enough to enjoy.

When Johnny Depp makes his entrance, I realized yet again what fun it is to see him as Jack Sparrow. I had forgotten how enjoyable he is to watch, the charmer, scamp, wobbly drunk and perpetual schemer. He commands the screen with ease. Here he’s positioned as the star of the show; he’s playing second fiddle to no one. What works, however, is the way he’s pulled into a plot that both could and couldn’t go on without him. In an opening sequence in London, he impersonates a judge, flees, is caught, and ends up in front of babbling fool King George (Richard Griffiths) who implores him to help his privateer (none other than Sparrow’s long-time rival, Geoffrey Rush’s Captain Barbossa) beat the Spanish to the Fountain of Youth.

This race to the fountain will be going on without Sparrow, but so many of the principal players seem to think he knows the way that he ends up accidentally helping out. But that’s Sparrow for you. He has a way of playing all sides against each other in a way that seems like he’d rather be anywhere else than amongst such intricate scheming. By not seeming to care (actually, he just might not care) he wriggles his way out of each situation, usually with the upper hand.

Captain Jack won’t help Barbossa and instead strikes off on his own and gets tricked into working aboard Blackbeard’s ship. This glowering baddie (played growly by Ian McShane) and his fiery long-lost daughter (Penélope Cruz) are foils for Jack’s half-planned bumbling. The daughter, especially, has it out for Jack, but mostly because years earlier she was all set to become a nun until she had an affair with him. On Blackbeard’s ship is also a captive missionary (Sam Claflin), just because there needs to be someone younger around to fall for a mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) who gets captured to provide a tear with which to activate the magic of the fountain’s water.

So, the whole thing’s a race (though a fairly rudderless one) and a somewhat overcomplicated quest. Gone are the elaborate curses and multitude of side characters from the first three Pirates. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (who’ve actually scripted all four of these things) are trying something new, plotwise. It more or less worked for me, although some of the action beats fall flat (swordplay isn't always edited for clarity or even impact) and the whole thing feels a little overstretched. But the cast is fully on board with the loud fantasy of it all and the proceedings don’t swallow them up. (Rush even does a fantastic bit of acting that involves readjusting his balance after he loses a bit of weight from one leg).

Speaking of new, the director this time around is Rob Marshall. He’s no Verbinski, but he handles the spectacle well. His 2002 film Chicago is, despite what Oscar might say, no Best Picture, but fun enough I suppose. This success had the unfortunate effect of causing him to think that he should be making Very Important Movies. His hollow Memoirs of a Geisha and god-awful Nine are a one-two punch in which he pushed his filmmaking to the limits of insufferableness and beyond. Here he finds his inner showman and stages the swordplay and effects with a degree of competency he has heretofore never displayed. (No, not even in the Academy Award winning Chicago).

Of course, that’s because Marshall is swallowed up in the machine. Bruckheimer and Disney are making product and while someone like Verbinski (take another look at this year’s Rango and you can see the kind of distinct vision he can have) could in some ways assert his own identity as a filmmaker, Marshall is just a cog. No one would let him mess this up too badly. There’s a sense that this movie could almost have churned itself out. But not quite. There’s a small wit and the occasional nice visual staging going on (the 3D is even used strikingly at times) and the action beats arrive on time. Some, like the series of escapes at the film’s opening and, later, a ship’s bewitched rigging tangling up mutineers, are done with a likable, unexpected, flourish.

The movie’s not great (I doubt the series will ever be as good as the original, and not just for lack of surprise) but it’s fun. Definitely not for those already tired of the series or cynical about this one’s very existence, it’s at least not too insistent about your approval. It’s sufficiently good-natured (relaxed, even) and I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying a film I was fully prepared to find unnecessary. Every buckle gets swashed (leaving lots of dangling plot lines for future installments) with a degree of energy that can make for a pleasant night at the movies.

Quick Look: Broken Embraces (2009)

I adore the films of Pedro Almodóvar. Aside from making a handful of justifiable masterpieces and earning his spot as one of the major figures in world cinema, he’s a master of melodrama, able to whip up a frothy delight and make it sizzle with deep emotion and vibrant color. Why, then, was I so quickly bored by Broken Embraces? It has an intriguing plot about a blind screenwriter whose past secrets start bubbling up inconveniently into his present. We get all kinds of flashbacks and films-within-films and surveillance and deceit and sex and romance and unknown parentage and a car crash and an impeccably shot tumble down a flight of stairs. It’s filled with incredible colors and patterns; in one scene I found myself staring at a set of curtains, the hue and floral prints so intense and striking that it was boggling my mind. It has incredible performances from Lluís Homar (as the aforementioned blind screenwriter) and Penélope Cruz, the lovers, or would-be lovers, at the center of some of the potentially torrid mystery. I also enjoyed the presence of Tamar Novas and Blanca Portillo, as a son and his mother who help the blind man continue his work. There are a few great scenes and a handful of good ones, but the film quickly grew stale for me. For all its outward pleasures, the narrative felt slack, the story was just not as engaging as I expect from Almodóvar. As it moves back into its lengthy flashbacks and endless exposition, I found I didn’t particularly care how the story would unravel or how the mysteries would be solved. It’s a shiny bauble, but a hollow one. It looks great, but I was disappointed I could not engage more with the story. It simply doesn’t sizzle like it should.