Job Insecurity: SEND HELP

If the only thing exciting in Send Help is the filmmaking and the lead performance, well, oh boy, that’s enough. It’s an unsurprising bit of genre fluff—a little Lord of the Flies here, a little Triangle of Sadness there, a splash of Misery elsewhere—in which a plane crash leaves a frumpy office worker (Rachel McAdams) on a deserted island with her callow young boss (Dylan O’Brien). The situation leads to an expected role reversal as the boss is laid up with a sprained ankle and a total lack of survival skills. Meanwhile his employee is a survivalist with a vindictive streak. It’s all good, nasty fun as orchestrated by director Sam Raimi, who at long last gets to stretch his horror-comic talents again for a sustained exercise in tension. His glee for near-cartoonish reaction shots, swirling establishing shots, and punchy pushes and pans are a fine match for a movie which needs that kind of egging on. The performers are game, with McAdams a fine, slippery protagonist made astonishingly unglamorous at first, and steelier as the show goes on. O’Brien, for his part, transforms into a perfect weasel, weaponizing his good looks until he’s untrustworthy even when he’s playing at earnestness. The cat and mouse game is made up of traditional jungle beats, the kinds any boomer filmmaker would’ve imbibed with every local late show or weekend matinee: spears, rafts, vines, coconut cups, wild boar, cliffs off which to dangle. It has everything but the quicksand. And to each twist of the script’s knife, Raimi is willing to add gallons of fluids from arterial spray and vomit and snot. Even early office-set scenes have a zippy, mean-spirited satiric edge, and the later mind games and inevitable violence—from an off-screen slice leading to an eruption of bloody gobs, to a literally eye-gouging thumb under an eyelid—are jumps and jolts with a sick glee. It may not have the novelty of his Evil Dead or heft of Drag Me to Hell, two far superior comic horror efforts rocking and rolling with laughs and screams. But this new picture has a similar vivid, cynical spirit of a karmic comic book. Raimi knows how to pace horror and violence so satisfyingly like a comedy, literal sight gags and punch lines. It’s why his Spider-Man trilogy remains some of the only superhero movies to do justice to every bit of the phrase comic book movie. And it’s why even as slight a screenplay as Send Help comes jumping to life with invigorating style. 

Puberty Blues: PETER PAN & WENDY andARE YOU THERE GOD? IT'S ME, MARGARET.

When Disney wants a live-action version of an animated classic to have some weight and elegance and freshness, it turns out David Lowery is the writer-director on whom to call. His Pete’s Dragon was a lovely, low-key coming-of-age fantasy that turned its fantastical conceit into something shaggier—a boy-and-his-dragon tale. Lowery’s non-Disney work, like The Green Knight, also proves he’s a literate, sensitive filmmaker. He can dig into a classic text and draw out its deep, resonant inner life while making it his own. And with these skills, he can, in the case of Peter Pan & Wendy, hook into authentically Edwardian romanticism while cleverly adapting the mythos to make it resonant for his purposes. He doesn’t exactly revive J.M. Barrie’s original text, or Disney’s animated version, beat for beat, though there’s a flourish of “You Can Fly” in the score. Nor does he draw out everything that makes the work last, the work of a scholar who might capture it by pinning it down. But what he does do is provide it a sense of life and space with windswept verisimilitude—location photography that’s lush and vivid on grassy cliffs and verdant forests full of moss and shadow. And within this convincing locale captured with a filmic eye, he pulls on one simple lively thread from the classic story of a girl who’s given a glimpse of Neverland: the dread of growing older.

Perched on the precipice of puberty—Peter and Wendy are here cast in the last possible week they can be simultaneously the oldest children and youngest adolescents possible, depending on the angle—here’s a movie that pushes on the urgency of aging. They’re at an age where choices and fantasies mingle—and where growing up might be the biggest, bravest adventure. There’s the usual tangle of business with Lost Boys and Captain Hook and Tiger Lily, though all that’s done with a graceful shorthand. And the beautifully casual diversity of the Boys—some are even girls—and the melancholy backstory for Hook (Jude Law, with more real pain than sneering cartoon) feeds into the ideas of aging as a process by which you discover truths about yourself. To deny yourself, or others, that adventure, even through fantasy, is, after all, a kind of conflict that Lowery’s happy to explore outwards with some fairy tale logic and a bit of piratical swordplay. The film’s most moving moment finds Wendy, having walked off the plank, seeing her life flash before her eyes—but forward, not back. That’s a perfectly sentimental moment. And so, though the movie has swashbuckling with weight and peril, and a grand, old-fashioned Kids’ Adventure spirit, it falls back on that smaller, tremulous time where anything is possible, and the passage of time is just about to fall in with the limits of age and nothing can stay the same.

Much less metaphoric about growing older is Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, in which burgeoning young adulthood is a source of much literal curiosity and angst. Here’s a movie tenderly attentive to the tenderest of times in a girl’s life. Based on the classic Judy Blume book, it tells the story of Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson), a sixth grader whose life seems to be nothing but changes. Her parents (Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie) have moved her from New York City to suburban New Jersey. She has a new school with new kids, and suddenly she’s getting crushes on cute boys and needs to ask her mom to go bra shopping for the first time, and her new friend group is made up of popular girls jealously testing their new ideas. Their gossipy preoccupations are starting to make Margaret nervous about when, exactly, she’ll be getting her period. Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig keeps the movie loose, light, and episodic, so casually specific about moments in this girl’s life that there’s a generosity of insight just in the act of watching it unfold. There’s a comforting normality to what feels like, to its lead character, the first time anyone’s ever gone through such outsized changes. I suppose it’s true that, though most women go through this, for every woman it’s a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. This movie respects that balance.

But, also true to life, Craig keeps the movie balanced on all manner of youthful preoccupations—grades, parties, holidays, family dynamics, friendships, gossip, and vacations. Here’s a movie about a year in a life that doesn’t hurry toward big climactic melodramas, but instead leans back into the usual ups and downs of young adolescent life. Craig, whose previous film was the sharp and unusually perceptive teen comedy The Edge of Seventeen, in which a high schooler’s life goes flailing after her brother starts dating her best friend, is a writer-director smartly able to balance the intensity of youthful emotions with the perspective to see them clearly in a more mature context. So here the girls’ fluttering of fears and fantasies is both intensely focused and cut with cute dramatic ironies. They don’t know what they don’t know, and it’s exciting and exasperating all at once for them, and their loved ones. The movie becomes a fully realized world for Margaret, a cozy 70s period piece that doesn’t condescend to its times or its characters. It simply lets them be.

Here’s a movie that knows life is a continual process of self-discovery. As such, it has the conviction to also dig plainly into thornier issues of family and spirituality, as our lead finds herself questioning whether she should be Christian like her mother or Jewish like her father. Neither parent particularly cares, but her loving paternal grandmother (Kathy Bates) and estranged maternal grandparents certainly do. The movie has a multi-generational generosity as it brings to life a story of mothers and daughters—especially in McAdams’ glowingly natural performance, built entirely out of lovely grace notes and simple gestures that communicate so much love and good intentions built out of an aging uncertainty. It ties Margaret and her mother together, as potential adolescent conflicts share space with an older vision of daily social struggles. Here’s a movie that says you’re never too old to feel awkward, and never too young to start discovering your confidence. You just have to find those who love you either way. Craig’s compassionate and clear approach is both respectful and honest—just the encouraging balance a young audience might need, and their parents can appreciate. This is a charming movie—so sweet and simple that it casts the gentlest of spells, and clears space for earning its characters’ learning.

Silly Season: MY SPY, SCOOB!, & EUROVISION SONG CONTEST: THE STORY OF FIRE SAGA

And so our strangest summer movie season in quite some time marches on. This weekend spent trawling the streaming services for new movies has turned up a motley assortment. My Spy, a formulaic tough-guy-teams-up-with-a-kid comedy, has finally been released, having been bounced from a few prime release dates over the past year by struggling distributor STX, then running into the misfortune of its last known theatrical debut penciled in right before COVID shut that all down. It’s now on Amazon Prime, which is just as well, because it seems destined to be the sort of movie that plays best in the background. (I wouldn’t rush out and get a Prime subscription for it, or for anything, really.) It stars Dave Bautista, an unusually contemplative wrestler-turned-thespian, who modulates his sensitive gravel pit of a voice down to layers of real melancholy and up to stoic fish-out-of-water deadpan. I always like that. Here he’s a tough CIA operative who messes up and gets demoted to surveillance duty with an energetic tech helper (Kristen Schaal). Quite accidentally, he gets roped into the life of the woman they’re supposed to protect after her precocious daughter (Chloe Coleman) breaks his cover and blackmails him into helping her with typical kid problems and events — bullies, career day, ice skating parties, and so on. I suppose if you’ve never seen this sort of movie before, it might play better to you. The kid is cute. Bautista plays reluctant warmth well. And Schaal gets off a few good one-liners. But director Peter Segal (Grudge Match) has no facility for the requisite action scenes in the third act, and the villain is a real drip, just a standard slightly-accented guy with stringy hair, a neat coat, and a remote detonator. It’s the sort of movie where you can figure out not just the ending, but every major plot beat, and there’s not an ounce of surprise or invention between.

At least Scoob! is out here trying something sort of new for what it is before it fails. It was going to be Warner Brothers’ big theatrical summer family movie until last month it got shuffled to VOD at $20 bucks a rental. Now it’s on HBO Max, a far better price for something that really only has curiosity and nostalgia going for it, and even then only for the first ten minutes or so. This CG animated Scooby reboot tries to turn the something-like-beloved cartoon series of teens solving mysteries with their pet talking dog into a whole Hanna-Barbera Cinematic Universe. So although it starts with a sugary-sweet how-they-met prequel prologue, followed by the original theme song lovingly recreated, it quickly pivots into noisy action-adventure fetch quest nonsense cobbling together bits of lore involving Dastardly and Muttley, Dynomutt, and Captain Caveman in a not-as-wacky-as-it-sounds 70’s Saturday Morning stew peppered with stale japes and instantly-dated pop culture references. The good vibes stop cold about 15 minutes in, when Simon Cowell steps in voicing his own waxy CG facsimile. This whole project plays like a bunch of wires got crossed back at the Intellectual Property mine, getting just enough other cartoons mixed up into Scooby’s to take it away from what makes that show fun, and not enough to make it into its own new thing. It’s just a standard whiplash candy rush of a nothing, shaping up along the same fault lines forgettable kids fare often does. I wish they’d gone all the way and also involved Josie and the Pussycats and Huckleberry Hound and Top Cat and Inch High Private Eye and what have you. No sense dipping a toe into the shallow end. Go full Roger Rabbit with it! Have some real fun! This is just a bland half-measure.

Over on Netflix is another familiar story: the underdog competition comedy. Here it’s set in the world of Eurovision, that extraordinary international campy pop music battle that has never really caught on in America as more than a niche interest. Like mimes, certain cheeses, and good pandemic response, some things are just more European than could catch on here, I suppose. Eurovision, although cancelled this year, is generally an annual delight, with winners over the years ranging from ABBA’s “Waterloo” to Celine Dion’s “Ne parter pas sans moi.” My personal favorite, and more typical of the event’s unique charms, is Finnish heavy metal band Lordi’s “Hard Rock Hallelujah,” a song performed with an electric organ pounding along with howling guitars while the band yelps out the melody while dressed like escapees from Mordor. So you can see why Will Ferrell might think he could fit right in. Thus Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is born. Here he co-stars with Rachel McAdams as an unlikely Icelandic band who’ve never gone farther than their small town’s pub, where the locals barely tolerate them unless they’re revving up the old drinking standard, “Jaja Ding Dong.” (The original songs in the movie are quite good, from this rinky-dink local tune, to the more elaborate contest songs, especially for how specifically chintzy and authentically over-produced they are.) One crazy thing leads to another, however, and the duo is improbably representing their home country on the Eurovision stage. There’s some little-fish-in-the-big-pond comedy here, and a mix of wackadoodle sentimentality as, gosh-darn-it, these over-the-hill wannabes just might pull it off and prove their doubters wrong.

Along the way to the expected results — a long, long way, running just over two hours — we get many elaborate production numbers cut with all the grace of a live awards show, silly costumes and props, wobbly accents, patter from rivals (like a slinky Russian pop star played with swivel-hipped sleaze by Dan Stevens), and loopy asides (like repeated references to a belief in elves that escalates to a Will-Ferrell-ian payoff). It’s all shot and paced rather indifferently by director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers) in an over-lit, flat style. Strangely, the cinematography looks better as a TikTok ad than on my 4K TV, for whatever that’s worth. It has the cheap Netflix look of their lesser programmers. And the plot itself is bone-deep derivative, certainly not worth the emotional investment it keeps trying to jolt to life with its estranged parents and scoffing suits and preening overdogs. It just doesn’t jell with the loose silliness of boat explosions and elaborate stage flops and endless cul-de-sac plot turns. Still, like the contest itself, the movie is never less than affectionate toward these misfits, and the songs are where it’s at. There’s a killer soundtrack of these goofy things — “Lion of Love,” “Volcano Man,” “Coolin with the Homies,” “Hit My Itch” — including a high-point faux-impromptu cameo-stuffed mashup singalong party. A leaner, tighter musical comedy would keep the good times rolling without the downtime for lumpy asides. But, hey, we’ll always have “Jaja Ding Dong.” And, if you squint a little, it’s almost like we got a Eurovision this year after all.

Games People Play: GAME NIGHT

Game Night is comedy played fast and tight, an action thriller paced like a farce and overflowing with choice one-liners and witty banter. It’s a hoot. My favorite running joke involves various characters over the course of one-crazy-night falling into surprisingly sturdy glass tables. There’s such a satisfyingly goofy thunk as a body goes bouncing off where every other movie would give us a pleasing shattering smash. The action around this funny thread – just one of many, and besides the movie is so fast-paced all the jokes could count as running jokes – involves a group of friends whose weekly get-together goes very, very wrong. A competitive husband and wife (Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams) find their game night (pals played by Billy Magnussen, Sharon Horgan, Lamorne Morris, and Kylie Bunbury) invited to a murder mystery night by his rich, arrogant brother (Kyle Chandler). But, on the night in question, before the man can even explain all the rules past the ominous “it will look real,” actual criminals barge in, beat him up, and kidnap him. Now the group jets off on what they think is a scavenger hunt to find where a group of actors have taken him, but are instead pulled deeper and deeper into a black market conspiracy where the guns, blood, cops, criminals, car chases, and stolen goods are all-too real. 

Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (helming a superior project to their Vacation) take seriously the goofy script by Mark Perez (The Country Bears, improbably enough). Watch with the sound off and you might convince yourself you’re watching a Fincher knockoff. The shots are crisp, the violence bruises, and the lighting is dramatic shadows and rain-slick streets. But then there is the rapid-fire patter of bickering friends, treating it with all the tension and drama that’d be a little exaggerated were it a game of Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit, but is dramatically underplayed given the life-and-death situation of which they’re barely aware. Gradually, as they realize how in-over-their-heads they really are, the comedy is in the sudden scared flailing they have to keep in check in order to survive the night. That they’re also still so competitive that they can’t help but continue sniping little digs at one another is a fine touch. Beyond the high-energy excitement and the high-spirited joke-a-minute dialogue shot through with visual wit and whimsy – game board tilt-shift establishing shots; composited one-take mad-dash chases – the movie finds itself smartly rooted in the genuine affection of its participants. No matter how harried and dangerous the proceedings become, Bateman and McAdams are allowed to keep the suspense entirely out of their relationship. They’re a close-knit pair, clearly in love, adorably competitive with one another in a way that shows them to be enjoying playing the games because they actually like each other. The same extends to the friend group itself, which might get at each other’s throats, but never more than any gathering around the Sorry board. Even when a thug gets bloodily killed, there’s a nod to the stakes without skipping a laugh. This is big, broad, studio comedy-making operating at a consistently entertaining high.

Stranger Things: DOCTOR STRANGE

Behold Doctor Strange, the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to grow significantly better in its action sequences. This massive franchise of interlocking superhero series tends to stuff appealing comic book conceits full of bantering character actors for fun setups that dim through endless pro forma digital destruction. The best keep the same light touch from zinging dialogue in the violence choreography, but they often err on the side of wearing out their welcome. Strange, though, finds itself dealing with cosmic transdimensional threats above the Avengers’ pay grade, so the movie is free to spiral out into wild visual invention. And somehow Marvel has allowed director Scott Derrickson – shifting tone from his usual horror beat – enough room to create some appealing, mind-boggling popcorn adventure images. Maybe the entire creative team was carried away by the intoxicating silliness of sorcerers, ancient magic, enchanted relics, pulpy gobbledygook jargon, and loopy fantasy. This isn’t a great film, but it’s a pleasant surprise to see Marvel’s ossifying superhero formula find some glimmers of new life.

The plot itself is standard origin story stuff, with quippy arrogance humbled by exposure to great power and great responsibility. Doctor Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a hotshot brain surgeon who struts onto the operating theater like all his life is a show devoted to his brilliance. He plays his medical prowess as a Sherlockian neurologist, like Dr. House crossed with Tony Stark. So of course he’s distraught when a hyperbolic car crash – his sleek sports car pinwheeling off a cliff, down a ravine, through a shack, and into shallow water – leaves his hands smashed to bits. Recovery is slow, and will likely never allow him to wield a scalpel again, let alone with anything remotely approaching his former skill. Out of options, he journeys to Katmandu where he’s heard tell of a magical healer, a guru known only as The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton, otherworldly as ever, bald and beautiful, and maybe the best, coolest MCU performance yet). He’s initially put off by her ideas about astral projection, chakra alignment, and infinite alternate dimensions, but soon can’t deny the power she offers him. Open your mind, she says. He doesn’t even hesitate long enough to ask if she takes his insurance.

Moving through the typical training montages, Derrickson (from a screenplay he co-wrote with Jon Spaiths and C. Robert Cargill) finds hallucinogenic imagery. As Strange trains with The Ancient One and her talented acolytes (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Benedict Wong) in the ways of the Sorcerer Supreme, he encounters glowing spells floating in the air, energy fields, swirling portals, glowing martial arts weaponry, mirrored dimensions fracturing the world in front of his very eyes, and abstract flourishes of phantasmagorical, mind-bending, reality-contorting travel. Marvel steers into the visual possibilities opened up by this concept, letting Derrickson and crew stage creative adventure. You can see in the effects’ department’s talented kaleidoscopic manipulation of matter – a city bending and warping in on itself, time moving backwards for some and forwards for others in the same frame, doorways to anywhere – Inception’s topsy-turvy hallway fight and Matrix bullet time plus Fantastic Voyage’s titanic molecules and 2001’s trippy wormhole. Here landscapes shift, tile patterns double and redouble, reality blurs and slurs, slips and slides. This isn’t dull shooting and punching interrupting fun characters’ hangouts. It’s, well, a visual Marvel much of the time.

And yet as much as it is fun to watch, it’s still in service of business as usual plot machinations. Strange’s training is about to come in handy, and the groundwork the early going lays for the imaginative imagery will pay off, when the villain (Mads Mikkelsen, with his eyes surrounded in a craggy dark glitter) appears, threatening the entire world with total destruction. He’s the type of bad guy who is splintering our dimension in exchange for immortality promised to him and his followers by an alternate universe ruled by a writhing purple goop monster. The conflict plays out like you’d expect, with fun side characters cycling in and out seeding future entries and forthcoming conflicts. (No less than Rachel McAdams, Benjamin Bratt, and Michael Stuhlbarg appear in such foreshortened subplots I couldn’t help but wonder if they’re only there for the promise of sequels.) But the details of the narrative, and the regular Marvel blend of light humor and apocalyptic stakes, take a back seat. It’s their usual crowd-pleasing formula done up with a genuinely pleasing visual snap. Compare it to their flat, dishwater grey, CGI airport tarmac in Civil War and it’s even more like a whole new dimension of possibilities opening up in a dull world.

Like the Thor movies, Doctor Strange is swept up in its terrifically silly/serious concoction. Moments like a slapstick fight involving a sentient red cape or a head-spinning M.C. Escher chase through a scrambled sideways New York City are right up there with Asgardian rainbow bridges and pseudo-Shakespearean Norse god mythos as the closest the whole MCU behemoth gets to massive pop art spectacle, eye-popping splash-page fantasy filmmaking driven by an imaginative use of screen space instead of the overused and overfamiliar slam-bang drudgery. Strange is best when it lets its visuals overpower its plot, taking off into uncharted cosmic wilderness. No wonder it leaves behind its characters’ emotional journeys and down-to-earth formulaic interactions by the end, consigning their mortal problems to get sorted out later. It has a multicolored psychedelic lightshow to stage, stretching out across a 3D IMAX screen every which way and then some. Its spectacle may be no more or less empty than any other MCU smash-‘em-up, but at least it’s entertaining spectacle used strikingly, surprisingly, and enjoyably down to the last pixel.

Let it Shine: SPOTLIGHT

Unadorned filmmaking of burnished and unobtrusive professional polish, Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight is a good example of how little you have to do to create an absorbing movie, provided you have the right story and the right cast. Writer-director McCarthy, who, when not being a terrific character actor, spends his time making nice small character dramas (The Station Agent, The Visitor, Win Win), takes for his material here the true story of the Boston Globe’s 2001 investigation into allegations of child abuse committed by Catholic priests which resulted in a detailed and powerful series of exposés. He, with co-writer Josh Singer (The West Wing), turns this into a movie about people simply doing their jobs, removing all narrative adornments a more conventionally crowd-pleasing picture would require: artificial drama, character arcs, a main character, grand pronouncements, easy symbolism, cheap moralizing. Instead he simply shows us an ensemble of journalists working studiously and methodically, making sure they get the facts right before going to print. They know they’re onto something big, a story of massive importance and moral imperative, but it’s also just their job.

The result of McCarthy’s approach is an inspirational story about journalism at its finest boiled down to tense scenes of research, interviews, and fact checking. This is a procedural about workaday reporters doing the best they can, a movie committed to being something like an accurate portrayal of the daily grind of a noble profession done right. The Globe’s editors (Liev Schreiber, John Slattery) task the in-depth investigative reporting “Spotlight” team (Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d’Arcy James) to take a closer look at a small court case involving a tenacious lawyer (Stanley Tucci) suing the local Catholic Archdiocese on behalf of clients who were abused by priests. As the reporters track down sources and gather archival background information, they discover a pattern of priests pulled from parishes under suspicious circumstances and quietly reassigned. It’s a clue that something’s rotten, and as a number of victims agree to interviews, it’s clear they’re about to uncover a devastating conspiracy of abuse and cover-ups, staggering in scope, heartbreaking in depth.

Every step of the way, these men and women make sure to get every detail right, to ensure the story is airtight. They’re working in secret, trying to avoid raising the suspicions of local Catholic officials who form an integral part of Boston’s civic and philanthropic society. Some lawyers for the church (Billy Crudup, Jamey Sheridan) are suspicious, refusing even to corroborate basic details. As the undeniable facts of the case start to add up, the journalists are even more driven to follow facts, beyond assumptions or pre-existing worldviews, into the simple, pure, disturbing truth. McCarthy simply sits back and lets the actors go to work in a movie of conversations – cautious interviews, heated arguments, tense debates, tricky negotiations – as the reporters struggle to get a handle on the story’s reach and implications, as well as deciding how best to break the news to the people. It’s unshowy. The blocking is simple, the editing briskly functional, the photography bright and clean. The filmmaking is so uninsistent, Howard Shore’s score, which would seem sparse in any other film, sounds overbearing. The focus is only on process.

The performers are subtle, natural, inhabiting real people whose day jobs are a combination of craft and calling. Keaton sinks into a tired newsman’s humble fortitude, McAdams carries quiet confidence, Ruffalo leans into inquisitive doggedness, and d’Arcy James wears sturdy moral force. There are no heroes, just normal people patiently doing what they must to root out hidden facts. Here’s a movie about nothing more than the value of a job well done. The job in this case just happens to be one that uncovered one of the most significant news stories of this century. A telling moment comes when September 11, 2001 rolls around, sending the newsroom scrambling in the wake of that day’s tragedy. It pushes the Spotlight team’s work on the backburner, and yet McCarthy treats this huge moment of recent history as a background detail. It’s a moment of world-changing impact, sensitively and appropriately somber in its portrayal, but the decades of spiritual and sexual abuse uncovered by their investigation is just as monumental.

Aside from one poignant montage set to “Silent Night,” featuring what has to be cinema’s most moving and upsetting Excel spreadsheet-making scene, the movie doesn’t push buttons. It speaks as clearly and directly as its characters, knowing the details will speak for themselves. It knows the actors are dialed-in to both the import of their characters’ jobs and the processes of doing them. It has faith in the inherent compelling nature of carefully piecing together a news story, trying to be fair to subjects, and do right by the people of the world by telling the truth. Spotlight may not be quite as richly rewarding a cinematic experience as other great newspaper movies like All the President’s Men and Zodiac, but it belongs on the same Journalism 101 syllabus. Scene by scene, line by line, McCarthy finds a quietly gripping approach, building to a low-key finale both triumphant and daunting. The article has gone to print. But the work continues.

Fight Night: SOUTHPAW

I suppose it was inevitable Antoine Fuqua would direct a boxing picture. The one thing that connects his diverse (and uneven) filmography – from fine genre fare like Training Day and King Arthur to lesser junk like Olympus Has Fallen and The Equalizer – is intense, gory, bruising violence. So when an early shot in Southpaw has Jake Gyllenhaal looking straight into the camera, howling in slow motion as blood and sweat rain off his straining muscles, it’s clear we’re in a place of macho intensity. Fuqua shoots the boxing matches with reasonable force, and wisely uses the camera to teach the audience how to read the strategies involved. But the story between the bouts is merely programmatic, a broad and bludgeoning collection of tropes. It’s a boxing picture. What do you want, a roadmap?

It starts with Gyllenhaal’s boxer at the top of his game – undefeated, even. Soon, he’s fallen on hard times due to a set of tragic circumstances and his own bad habits – temper, alcohol, and so on. He loses his wife (Rachel McAdams), is abandoned by his sleazy manager (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson), and has his daughter (Oona Laurence) taken away. Now he has to rely on a tough-but-fair wise old trainer (Forest Whitaker) to help him get back in fighting shape. If you already think this all ends with a big comeback fight against a perfectly loathsome rival (Miguel Gomez), you’ve definitively seen a boxing picture before. Besides, Gyllenhaal’s surname here is Hope. You’ve got to know where the symbolism is pointing. Sons of Anarchy showrunner Kurt Sutter’s screenplay plays every note you’d expect, doing so with a swaggering clobbering melodrama, confident in its ability to use an audience’s emotions as its speed bag. It thumps away.

Fuqua obliges the formulaic intentions of the material while keeping the visual interest on the performer’s bodies. He focuses attention on McAdams’ relaxed sensuality, Jackson’s broad-shouldered business posture, and Gomez’s slippery fighting stance. But most of all Fuqua takes in Gyllenhaal’s ripped musculature, a painful display of tense tautness. He clearly worked hard for this role, and is eager to show off every bit of the gain from the pain. But it also serves a purpose in telling us everything we need to know about this boxer. He likes the pain. Thanks to the announcers helpfully shouting out the subtext during the fights, we learn boxing fans know it’s not a Hope match until he’s bleeding. His wife tells him he needs to retire before he’s irreparably punch-drunk. But we soon learn how desperately he needs to keep going.

We get plenty of Hope’s frustration with his situation, followed by training montages as he works his way back to some semblance of normalcy. With a daughter’s happiness imperiled, it’s easy to root for him. But I appreciated the film’s ability to look somewhat askance at its protagonist, wondering if his cyclical bad behavior is something that can be fixed. But of course it can, and he can learn to control his temper in everyday life by learning to fight better in the ring. Instead of settling into the reality of its characters’ lives, the movie hops to the next expected beat. It never feels like a real situation, but an artificial construct built to fit the needs of its subgenre. It doesn’t breathe like the best of its brethren, where Rocky or Raging Bull or Million Dollar Baby (or even Real Steel) color in the specifics of their environments.

Southpaw is on a one-way track to the Big Match. It’s an athletic, well-coordinated display. Gyllenhaal can land convincing blows, and, because the emotions involved are so big, heavy, and unsurprising, the stakes are completely clear. The result is a good replica of a boxing match. It’s exciting and visceral, punches booming so forcefully in the sound mix I wondered what the Foley artists had to do, every jab timed to the usual orchestra of crowd reactions. It’s well made without being completely involving. I sat admiring the technique more than feeling the tension. Because the way there is so pro-forma, it’s hard to stay invested. The movie remains a glossy, well intentioned, but over-familiar narrative beginning to end.

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.

Spies World: A MOST WANTED MAN

Based on the book by John le Carré, A Most Wanted Man is another of his spy stories that turn on complicated clockwork plotting but play out as deliberately paced character studies. It’s what makes his Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy a landmark for the genre. In Tomas Alfredson’s masterful 2011 adaptation of that novel, a Cold War-era British spy played by Gary Oldman quietly, methodically maneuvers a mole into the light of day. It’s a tricky, deeply felt work that sits entirely on the shoulders of its characters, watching for the slightest adjustments of body language to reveal undercurrents of emotion and truth.

A Most Wanted Man does something similar with the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his final roles as Günther, a tired German spy stationed in Hamburg who goes about his daily life with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He’s very good at his job and confident in his conclusions. There’s a quiet moment in which he consults with a United States operative (Robin Wright) at a café. He matter-of-factly takes a flask out of his pocket, pours some liquor into his coffee, and takes a sip, all the while laying out his plan to use an illegal immigrant (Grigoriy Dobrygin) to determine how a professor (Homayoun Ershadi) is sending money from his charity to terrorist groups. It’s risky, but it just might work. He’s so confident, he doesn’t need to hide his functional alcoholism from his colleague.

Director Anton Corbijn, whose last film was the gripping Le Samourai­-esque art house George Clooney assassin movie The American, sets the gears of the plot turning with considered patience. We meet several characters working with skill and precision, playing their parts in parallel plans that converge with the icy grip of Andrew Bovell’s screenplay. There’s a banker (Willem Dafoe), a human rights lawyer (Rachel McAdams), and several spies (Daniel Brühl, Nina Hoss, Mehdi Dehbi, Martin Wuttke). It’s all one big high-stakes chess game, people moving pawns into position, hoping to make it to the end with their careers, if not their lives, intact. But with this great cast and excellently controlled direction, the result is merely serviceable.

The espionage thriller moves slowly and confidently through its knotty plotting. Characters trudge about as pieces gradually drop into place. I could appreciate its terse, subtle character work from the ensemble and grimly chilly imagery from cinematographer Benoît Delhomme. But the movie remained firmly on screen. It never grabbed me or pulled me in. I was entirely unmoved and disinterested. There’s geopolitical specificity and lived-in performances, and yet it somehow feels fuzzy. We see actions and reaction, but little to impact the world beyond these characters.

It has to do with the point of view. While Le Carré’s methods of plotting are great for distant Cold War analog spying, making the cat-and-mouse genre pleasures a current War on Terror digital prospect grows disquieting. The film raises important questions without paying much attention. It shows us a broken world of imperfect systems and flawed people given horrible power and great responsibility. And yet it never grapples with this observation beyond the grist for character work.

We sit with the characters on their level, the better to see that these people have remarkable and frightening power. It’s upsetting, but played off as mere plot mechanics. A lawyer is grabbed off the street, thrown into the back of an unmarked van, and held captive. An innocent man never learns his apartment is bugged with hidden cameras. Hoffman’s character says he runs a secret department dedicated to going outside the law to keep Europe safe from terrorists. But his team has the suspects’ best interests at heart. A rival department just wants to spirit them away forever to some undisclosed top-secret interrogation detainment. In the end, we’re supposed to feel disappointment that things didn’t work out the way our leads wanted. It suggests that our civil liberties may be trampled at the slightest whim of an agent, but at least the good spies feel bad while they do it. Cold comfort.