Human Resource: THE INTERN

A cozy comedy of human connection with just enough drama to give its sweet conclusion some weight, The Intern is a mostly charming fantasy of intergenerational cooperation. The story follows a lonely retired boomer businessman (Robert De Niro) who is looking for a way to stay busy after the death of his wife. He finds a flyer for a local tech startup looking for senior citizen interns, a gimmicky outreach idea. They want people with experience (and, no doubt, pensions making lack of salary less of an issue) to help the growing online clothing retailer make ends meet. Of course the old guy gets the position, where he finds himself working closely with the company’s busy founder (Anne Hathaway). You might guess that the rest of the film shows that a 70-year-old and a group of twenty- and thirty-somethings can learn from each other, become friends, and all end up slightly happier for it. You’d be right.

Pleasant and comfortable, the movie is soft, fuzzy, and warm—the cinematic equivalent of a fancy comfy sweater fresh from an expensive dryer. It happily goes for surprisingly few cheap shots about the generation gap. De Niro wears a suit every day while his younger colleagues go fairly casual. But there’s no stumbling bumbling how-do-you-work-this-thing shtick. Hathaway is an ambitious techie small business owner juggling devices (and a marriage) while looking to grow her brand. But there’s no kids-these-days digital curmudgeon muttering. It’s not a story about a classy old guy helping a frazzled young lady build a better business. Nor is it a story about an out-of-touch grandpa doddering his way to hip style. Instead, the film in its quiet way asserts that all people are basically the same, friendships are important, and goofy grown children (De Niro’s desk is surrounded by young dopey dudes) and dapper old folks alike can bond over shared values. It’s sweet.

Undeniably sentimental, it’s nonetheless refreshing to see a big studio comedy deal in such small stakes. Hathaway and De Niro have warm sympathetic chemistry basically free of mansplaining, and never once tips over into icky romance. In fact, it’s a light movie about relationships that doesn’t feel an obligation to hit any romantic beats, slipping a few glimpses into subplots simply for extra flavoring. The bulk of the story follows the leads through the ups and downs of daily office life, going to meetings, talking to suppliers, debating strategy, or retrieving a errant nasty email (a stretch). The growing company has its problems, though not so many they can’t have a good masseuse (Rene Russo) on staff as an age-appropriate flirtation for De Niro. The movie is not really interested in the nuts and bolts of business anyway, using its setting as reason for little comic beats (mostly amusing, but occasionally too broad) on the way to its intended and effective gooey center.

Slowly but surely the leads open up to one another. It’s a rare story: an older man and younger woman who become completely platonic friends, admire one another, and provide much-needed support. De Niro meets his boss’s family (stay-at-home dad Anders Holm and adorable little daughter JoJo Kushner) and soon becomes a helpful assistant on that front as well. At work, he encourages an ensemble of young colleagues (Christina Scherer, Zack Pearlman, Jason Orley, Adam DeVine) to have more confidence. It’s a movie with a high-gloss sheen and a brightly photographed sunny disposition. Even when the plot gears turn up some potential melodrama in the final third, things remain bouncy and optimistic. Sure, these people have obstacles to deal with. But they’re so agreeable and capable it’s never much in doubt. You’d be excused for thinking every office of young’uns could use a magic grandpa figure.

Written and directed by Nancy Meyers (It’s Complicated, Something’s Gotta Give, The Parent Trap), an expert in exactly this sort of comfort food cinema, it has her typical beautifully appointed upper-middle-class interiors. Sets – vast open offices, handsome brownstones, and fine hotel rooms – are decorated like a two-page spread in an interior decorator’s portfolio. Characters’ clothes could just as easily be ready for upscale catalogue photo shoots. Every prop – Apple products, Stella Artois, a vintage briefcase – is photographed like it’ll be the basis of a new lifestyle newsletter. It’s all part of the fluffy good feelings, an aspirational setting for an aspirational story that finds a working mom and a retired man finding comfortable friendship, gets young guys a classy role model, and arrives at a cheerfully optimistic conclusion that’s so low-key and deeply sweet I didn’t mind I found myself wondering if this company (or any of the relationships involved) will last. It’s uncomplicated, but so committed to its twinkly feel-good conclusions that it makes sure it has leads so likable you need them to be happy.

It Bleeds, It Leads: NIGHTCRAWLER

Nightcrawler is a slow burn thriller that gets the entirety of its suspense out of the electric sociopathy of its lead role. We first meet Louis Bloom stealing metal to sell for scrap. He’s desperate for employment, but possesses an eerie confidence, having pumped his head full of free online business courses, DIY sloganeering, self-help mumbo jumbo, and faux-MBA jargon. A chance encounter with a news crew starts the wheels in his head spinning. Soon, he’s roaming the Los Angeles night, police scanner running and camcorder at the ready, charging hard towards the first rung in the news business: collecting footage of accidents and violent crime for sale to the highest bidder. Because it’s clear that he’ll do anything to get ahead, and views people only as tools to either take advantage of or cast aside, this bottom-feeding can’t be good news for the rest of us. He’s a danger.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Bloom in an intense, unforgiving performance that takes everything appealing and earnest (sometimes overly so) about his screen persona and turns it rotten. His driven, desperate mania is scary. This man is capable of the same Gyllenhaal ingratiating puppy dog eyes and easy grin, but they are made creepy by his intensity of focus and the vacant space where his ethics and empathy should be. With an arresting, unblinking calm, he walks through the picture with big bug eyes, a gaunt wiry frame, and stringy hair pulled back. He’s part Gordon Gekko, part Travis Bickle, greedy with delusions of grandeur. We don’t know what he’s capable of. He’s awkward, and that’s darkly funny, until it’s clear he could very well hurt someone.

It starts with sneaking past police tape into a home, the better to film the bullet holes in the fridge, right between the family photos he slides around to get a better shot. At a later scene, having arrived before the police, he drags a dead body into a smashed car’s headlights to get a better angle. He’s not a murderer, but that’s the only thing separating him from the serial killing cameraman of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. He grins as he films the bloody messes he scavenges the scanner for, sees the violence of man only as a way to make a buck. Luckily for him, the culture is ready to abet his efforts. He meets a night shift news editor for the lowest rated local news station in the area. They just might be able to help each other.

She (Rene Russo, as a shark we’re never sure whether to fear or pity, maybe both) is desperate to increase station ratings, but not so interested in hiring a new freelance film crew, until he brings her gory footage of a mugging victim bleeding out on a gurney. “Call us first,” she tells him, asking specifically for footage of rich white people wronged by people of color. (It’s what really gets the audience scared, and ready to tune in to hear more.) That’s all the encouragement he needs. He hires an assistant, a poor street kid (Riz Ahmed) who takes $30 a night under the table, to help navigate and identify crimes in progress. Together they roar down dark streets, swerving down highways and residential areas alike, chasing the sound of sirens and the distant sight of flashing lights. Their goal is to get as close as possible, as early as possible. Bloom wants better footage than his competitor (Bill Paxton). Ideally, he’ll get there before the cops to ensure that perfect, untouched, lurid Red Asphalt-style fearmongering for the morning news.

Screenwriter Dan Gilroy, who co-wrote Tarsem’s The Fall as well as such gleaming, polished Hollywood product as Real Steel and The Bourne Legacy, here makes his directorial debut. He has written and directed a spare, unsettling character study that bristles with the uncomfortable danger of madness that can sit within the hearts of desperate men, especially those warped by the American dream into monsters of capitalism, who hear “pursuit of happiness” and think “pursuit of profit,” then add “at any cost necessary.” It’s a picture of symbiotic, parasitic dynamics, a business that relies on relaying human misery that makes more money the bloodier and more frightening the footage. It’s the right place for this sociopath to make a mark. Gyllenhaal commits to the ugly irredeemable monster and Gilroy builds a world for him to stalk.

Gilroy has cinematographer Robert Elswit shoot L.A. from unflattering angles, finding strip malls, barren expressways, and rundown parking lots to stage their crime scenes. In between we pass streetlights, stoplights, headlights, briefly providing light to the dark. It’s an unsparingly nocturnal movie, the nighttime shot in the same digital haze Michael Mann’s been working with for a decade, detailed blackness and glow. Daytime is bright, filmic textures, a different world entirely. Bloom doesn’t fit there. He’s a creature of the night. Violence is framed through Bloom’s camera, keeping it largely just off screen, mediated by screens within screens. It emphasizes the disconnectedness this character feels, and emphasizes the eerie, disturbing dispassion. We’re pulled so swiftly into an uneasy worldview that as we’re inexorably moved deeper, tumbling down the slippery slope towards exploitation and obstruction of justice, it feels only natural. And that’s what makes the suspense so effective. How far will he go? How far will we let him?

Hammer of Justice: THOR: THE DARK WORLD

Thor is an outlier in these interlocking Avengers franchises. He’s not a character who invents, like Iron Man, or is given, like Captain America, or is accidentally imbued, like the Hulk, with his powers. He may be supernaturally strong, wields a mighty hammer, and can fly, but that doesn’t make him just your average superhero. He was born that way. The first Thor movie was a funny little thing, part fish-out-of-water comedy with the title character stuck on Earth, part swooshing pseudo-Shakespearean drama back at his home where Norse Gods are stomping around their extraterrestrial kingdom of Asgard. It’s a film of bleeping sci-fi gewgaws and a glowing intergalactic rainbow bridge, a strange mix to be sure, but it’s precisely what I found so endearing about it. After all, it’s not everyday you see a superhero movie that’s modestly scaled, yet still ends with a robot terrorizing a one-stoplight New Mexico town and two God-like brothers punching each other atop a multicolor interdimensional portal.

Now the sequel, Thor: The Dark World, picking up the characters from the first film after the events of the crossover event that was The Avengers, is an across the board improvement, doubling down on the arch genre-bending of its predecessor and finding a winning groove by amplifying its every disparate aspect. It’s a fast-paced action adventure spectacle bubbling with unexpected wit and finding great pleasure in smashing its shiny toys together into one exciting jumble. Quipping sci-fi scientists like straight out of a Jack Kirby comic get swept up into an outer space conflict that has a visual style of Frank Frazetta fantasy and Ralph McQuarrie space opera. It’s all rippling muscles, flowing capes, gleaming weapons, and shiny mechanical detail. On Earth, love-struck scientist Natalie Portman is investigating, with her comic relief colleagues Kat Dennings, Stellan Skarsgård, and Jonathan Howard, strange gravitational disturbances when her boyfriend Thor (Chris Hemsworth) at long last reappears. With his glowing blonde locks and strapping physique, he spirits her to his homeworld, having sensed that she’s become infected with the film’s MacGuffin. It exists simply to propel all the characters into action either defending or upending the known universes.

The villains want the glop that’s wormed its way into her veins. They’re Dark Elves, who look like they’ve wandered in out of a Guillermo del Toro notebook or a well-financed Lord of the Rings cosplay club. Thought long extinct, they’ve been hibernating in an H.R. Giger-style spaceship for 5,000 years awaiting the convergence of the Nine Realms. That’s when their leader (Christopher Eccleston) knows it is the best time to unleash spindly clouds of evil red dust upon the denizens of the universes. Meanwhile, Anthony Hopkin’s Odin, king of Asgard and father of Thor, glowers ominously as he consults ancient manuscripts. He gravely informs his allies that he knows of no way to stop the Elves. Thor suspects his disgraced brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) might be able to help, despite all warnings that he’s been the villain in two of these movies already and thus locked up in the castle’s dungeon. How can he possibly be trusted? The film manages to add contentious buddy action comedy to its long list of genre influences as Thor and Loki bristle and snipe at each other, reluctantly helping or betraying the other as the film moves along.

Rich visual splendor makes the film stand out, its aesthetic influences synthesized into something that manages to largely skirt camp on its way to gloriously serious silliness. I love the way the fanciful designs make it look like a cast of pseudo-futuristic Ancient Romans with swords, shields, spears, and ray guns is holding court in a space castle. Taking the director’s chair is Alan Taylor, a longtime TV director who has recently done great work on HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones. He fills the screen with the best special effects and production design Marvel Studios has to offer. With them and within it he stages spectacular action setpieces, some of the best this whole Avengers behemoth has managed in any of the various films and franchises. Because they’re done up in fantastically gripping and wonderfully silly ways, with characters who sparkle with delightful up-tempo chemistry the whole way through, it manages to avoid collapsing into yet another superhero-whaling-on-a-giant-alien-contraption climax. It’s fun and funny, playing with its fantasy rules and sci-fi conceits in exuberant and at times unexpected ways.

The screenplay credited to Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely (with additional story credit to Don Payne and Robert Rodat) bristles with slam-bang setpieces: epic battles, one-on-one slugfests, shootouts, dogfights, and swooshing disruptions of time and space. Helpfully, the chirpy chemistry between the characters and the gleefully complicated mythology is threaded throughout. We’re not pausing for action and character. It’s intertwined in the best big bustling overstuffed blockbuster way. It’s beyond endearing. It ups the ante. Supporting characters who mostly stood on the sidelines in the first Thor here get to leap into the action, from Idris Elba and Rene Russo to Jaimie Alexander and Ray Stevenson. And the core characters retain their initial novelty while gaining a sense of fine actors settling even more comfortably into their roles. It’s a film full of big action and broad character moments that add up to a satisfying red-blooded adventure every step of the way.