Norsing Around: THOR: RAGNAROK

There’s not a lick of suspense to be found in Thor: Ragnarok, as weightless and mild-mannered as a superhero space epic can be. It’s partially because of its dedication to being a breezy lark. But it’s mostly due to its position as yet another widget dropping into the Marvel Cinematic Universe machine, every interlocking franchise entry continuing the pattern of containing endless forward momentum with little actual progress. The whole endeavor, diverting though it may be, is always moving to the next one, and the next and the next, with no time to shape its characters’ or settings’ development into anything more than whatever is convenient to serve up the latest flavors of fun lightshow action and design. That is how you end up with a movie that places beloved Norse God Avenger Thor in direct confrontation with the end of his home kingdom Asgard, an apocalyptic vision of Ragnarok coming true, and yet it feels like nothing is at stake. A people, a realm, a dazzling digital vista, might burn up into nothingness and there’s no danger. It’s too busy staging striking electric-day-glo Jack Kirby-styled CG adventure and lovingly holding on eccentric character actors in scene-stealing supporting roles. There’s plenty of fun to be had, but it adds up to the usual fleeting charms tied together with a climactic conflagration cliffhanger.

Like all the best of the MCU movies, the filmmakers behind Ragnarok make sure the production design is aesthetically pleasing in color and scale and the typical quipping script is handled with the peppy fizz of comic timing. The story features Thor knocking about space in lengthy sequences that team him up with a variety of lovable rouges and charming weirdos. It’s a nesting doll of buddy movies, director Taika Waititi taking the same loose, sweet, half-mumbled, aw-shucks delivery of his What We Do in the Shadows and tying it to the bombastic fish-out-of-water silly contrasts that are the Thor movies' stock in trade. It hardly matters that the plot’s engine is the God of Thunder’s long-lost older sister (Cate Blanchett) kicking him out of the family home, causing him to wander the cosmos in exile collecting a team that can take her down. What it really is up to is providing an excuse for colorful, half-funny/half-exciting set-pieces. That’s entertaining enough. He pals around with his slick trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston); he gets his feathers ruffled by Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch); he gets captured by an alcoholic swaggering-cool bounty hunter (Tessa Thompson, who should have her own spinoff); he is forced into gladiatorial combat by a trash-planet’s loopy ruler (Jeff Goldblum, delightful with every word); he befriends a soft-spoken rock monster (Waititi); he is knocked about by Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). It’s all fun and games, Thor so elastically invincible he can slam through walls and bounce back swinging, yet so mellowed by his many heroic deeds in the past that he now rides a chill pleasant vibe. He's in on the joke.

There’s a knockabout slapstick tone to the action that integrates the massive IMAX-sized spectacle and the little filigrees of personality allowed to the players involved. Waititi is given the space to build a massive painterly slow-mo vision of warriors atop winged horses diving toward a storm of arrows, and also let Thompson’s Valkyrie sparkle with a twinkle in her eye and a soft sway in her step. It has an enormous battle on a rainbow bridge for the fate of Asgard, and the soft splat of a body hitting the ground with a pratfall plunk. It has a concussive battle between a God and a monster – friends turned foe for the amusement of a rascally side-villain – and enough room to let Goldblum bring down the house with an arc of his eyebrow or a self-amused stammering surprise delivery of a wry line. (He confronts a captive with a seeming reprieve with a line bearing a stinging tail: the good news he’ll be spared…“from life.”) It’s all of a pleasant diverting piece, from the gleaming fake vistas – though why, in a movie with convincing mythological kingdoms and neon-landfill planets, a field in Norway is the phoniest setting is beyond me – to the likably bantering leads and every slick glowing digital swooping adventure sequence in between. There may be precious little there there, but at least the frivolity is enough for an entertaining couple of hours of shiny pictures, charming people, and a synthy noodling Mark Mothersbaugh score. Though it's fleeting and disposable, it's a successfully playful and tossed-off version of ingratiating Marvel bombast.

The Kong Who Would Be King: KONG: SKULL ISLAND

At least the latest big-budget creature feature, Kong: Skull Island, works where it really counts: the creatures. It presents an island full of creepy crawlies and monster mashes, not merely the expected ginormous ape, but also: towering water buffalo, massive birds, a gargantuan octopus, and a family of creepy skull-faced lizards so humungous they’d leave even the biggest, meanest dinosaur trembling in their shadows. It may not have much in the way of character or personality, either for its actors to inhabit or for its filmmaking to display – it’s all borrowed from other, better, inspirations and thinned out in the process – but the effects department earned its budget and then some. It may have the colorful aesthetic gloss of an expensive A-level picture, but its heart has more in common with the junky B-movie big monkey Kong rip-offs than the lean and mean 1933 original or the epic melancholy of Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake.

Moving at an impossibly rushed clip – though to what end I don’t know, as there’s not much worth hurrying to that taking time to settle into the dread and fear couldn’t improve – the movie hurtles a large cast onto Skull Island. We’re told it is hidden behind a perpetual storm system, and the film is set in an analog 1973, a double explanation as to how the place has remained uncharted. The expedition helicopters over and almost immediately runs into the main attraction. This movie’s Kong is the size of a skyscraper. If he tried to climb the Empire State Building he’d crush it in a single stomp. (But though his enormity has grown, his personality, and the movie, is second rate to earlier Kings.) He quickly thrashes the interlopers, killing all the extras and leaving the Movie Stars to fend for themselves amongst the jungle beasties. Would that any of them be allowed a sliver of personality beyond audience recognition from previous roles. It’s hard to be dazzled by the destruction when Samuel L. Jackson’s stubborn colonel, John Goodman’s crackpot explorer, Tom Hiddleston’s tracker, and Brie Larson’s photographer, are merely there to pose in the pulp. They’re asked to sell unsellable empty roles, and thus hard to care about when juxtaposed with the senseless noise around them.

Also along for the ride are Shea Whigham, Toby Kebbel, Jiang Tian, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Thomas Mann, and John Ortiz. It’s a huge cast with little to do. What the film lacks in character in makes up in characters, splitting them up, sending them hither and thither across Skull Island, wandering aimlessly into one creature’s den after the next. When they encounter, say, a gargantuan log with eyes, their first instinct is to open fire. There’s no curiosity or awe here, only bloodlust. This extends to the lack of gravity given to the imagery, monsters treated as frivolous animal foes instead of creatures in their own right. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, plucked from Sundance to helm this Hollywood undertaking, loves watching the tech and the explosions and the bloodshed – and he likes seeing Kong the MMA brawler – but gives it none of the patient dazzlement of Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla. There is only the grubby beauty of the jungle landscapes – crudely standing in for Vietnam in the cinematic equivalent of mumbling your way through a muddled metaphor – and the drooling beasties as ILM dumps out their design book into the wilds of the frame.

Still, no matter how inane and inert the film often is, it crackles to life when John C. Reilly stumbles into the picture as a WWII pilot lost on the island for decades. He plays up the disorientation and madness of his character with unpredictable Brule-like spasms of awkward intensity and exasperation. He brags about his Kong lore, but is quick to admit he’s never actually spoken it aloud before. Single-handedly stealing the movie out from under the most talented cast assembled for something so frivolous in a long time (since, what, National Treasure: Book of Secrets or something?), Reilly offers up personality to spare. He upstages Kong, no mean feat when the sometimes-gentle giant’s every step rattles the subwoofers (except, of course, for the scene where he is suddenly in front of Larson in an open field despite what should’ve been an inescapably long, loud walk). The rest of the movie is just empty 70’s dress up run through a copycat Kaiju playbook, with whack-a-mole monsters and crudely manipulated archetypes. We’re supposed to thrill to the fussy visual touches around the edges – a crashing helicopter from the point of view of a bobble head on the dashboard; explosions seen reflected in sunglasses; a giant octopus slurped up like Kong-sized noodle soup – and forget we’re watching much less than meets the eye.

Shivering Heights: CRIMSON PEAK

“Ghosts are real,” Edith Cushing says. She tells us twice, bookending Crimson Peak with her declaration. The film’s writer/director Guillermo del Toro certainly believes this, too. He’s not playing around. He uses ghosts not for cheap shocks, but for deeply intertwined thematic importance and emotional resonance. He respects their mythological importance, as well as their psychological underpinnings. It’s what gives his dark fantasies such heft, mingling magical realism with more elaborate flights of fancy. He knows ghosts are not merely frightening. They’re expressions of deep sorrow, of lingering pain, of trauma’s echoes haunting those left behind. His latest film is indeed a ghost story, but one that uses the spirits as an added flavoring in a richly wondrous, baroquely designed story of high emotion and uncanny delights.

The ghosts are a metaphor. That’s another repeated line, as Ms. Cushing (her last name a tribute to Peter Cushing, no doubt) is an aspiring novelist in turn-of-the-20th-century New York. She's hard at work on a manuscript for a haunting story. Played by Mia Wasikowska as a smart, shy young woman bristling against patriarchal constraints, she’s determined to follow in her hero Mary Shelley’s footsteps and publish her macabre tale. An editor tells her to add a little romance. She reluctantly decides to do so, but only a few chapters’ worth. This is one of Del Toro’s meta winks, a flickering of levity in a serious, sumptuously appointed production imbued with his love for gothic romance in every frame. Cushing’s father (Jim Beaver) is a rich man who welcomes a mysterious Englishman (Tom Hiddleston) with an investment opportunity. The stranger doesn’t receive Mr. Cushing’s money, but walks away with the daughter’s heart, much to the chagrin of the charming young ophthalmologist (Charlie Hunnam) she ignores.

What comes next is a feast of period detail, as we waltz through a ballroom, glide into boardrooms, stroll along leafy autumnal parks, and end up nestled in drawing rooms where softly murmured sweet nothings are implied. Soon enough, Ms. Cushing is swept away to her new beau’s remote family mansion deep in the English countryside, where he and his severe sister (Jessica Chastain) intend to mine copious runny red clay out of the soil, turning a profit in the process. Chastain, in a series of dramatic flowing gowns, is bewitching, a completely controlled performance of a woman so elegantly tightly wound, it’s not if she’ll snap, but when. Hiddleston is suave and sinister, with something hollow about his affections. Wasikowska, showing eager curiosity mixed with grief and infatuation, plays a romantic slowly frightened by what she finds. It’s all so alluring, and so dreadful, even in the same instant.

The house is vast and creepy, crumbling with loose brick, sinking into the soft ground, the clay seeping around floorboards and bubbling out of pipes. It’s a lovingly photographed spooky place, one of the great movie spaces in recent memory. There are dark corridors, locked rooms, drafty windows, fluttering insects, dusty corners, voluminous curtains, dripping cavernous basements, looming portraits, a rickety elevator retrofitted along a spiraling staircase, and a hole in the entryway’s ceiling letting dead leaves or snow flurries flutter down. But it’s not just a visual feast of a haunted mansion. It’s a dark, creaking home full of cold mystery, richly decorated with rotting glamour, and possessed with the spectral memories of long buried secrets. Translucent skeletal ghosts howling while evaporating smoky red tendrils are an alarm alerting Ms. Cushing that all is not well in this house.

Del Toro, with co-writer Matthew Robbins, unravels mysteries with a pulpy brio, telling his tale with a studied patience for lurid detail and swooning with strong emotions: love, terror, and the riveting power of the sublimely, beautifully perverse. It transcends pastiche (or camp throwback) because he’s not interested in making a tribute to stories and styles he loves. He wants to make a story that’ll sit comfortably alongside the classics. This confidence of design and intention lends the film’s movement, structure, and appeal a sense of history. Its machinations resonate like an old tale, like settling in to read a great forgotten book you’ve discovered tucked away in the corner of a cozy library, rich in complex archaic language and lush generous plotting that slowly sinks in like a comfortable chair beside a roaring fireplace.

Del Toro draws on inspirations both literary – Austen and the Brontes, Ann Radcliffe and Daphne du Maurier – and cinematic – Hitchcock and Lewton, Corman’s Poe cycle, Hammer horror. The result is uniquely his own, preoccupied with hidden histories and deadly secrets, soulful monsters, and innocents most prepared to tremblingly, yet bravely, confront the evils around them. When Wasikowska, dressed in a lacy, frilly nightgown a slightly warmer white than her pale skin, heads down a dark clammy hallway armed only with a lit candelabra, it’s a classic image of this sort of story. It’s easy to see her as a source of hope amidst so much eerie unquiet. (There are also echoes of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, and other Del Toro films past.) Dan Lausten’s cinematography is soaked in colors: blood reds, bruising blacks and blues, velvety purples. The film is sensual and sensitive, a completely transporting waking dream.

As the dark truths about the situation bleed through the lush gothic romance, the film culminates with gore and shock, true to its melancholy heart. Through the paranormal activity, and the lavish historical setting, Del Toro swoops with his haunted characters, finding in swirling cloth and swift stabs personal tragedies exhumed, sins divulged, and betrayals revealed. It is hugely entertaining and entrancing, and in the swirling emotional climaxes, it finds great artful truth, wedded to brilliantly, intoxicatingly stylish horror-tinged melodrama. It says the past is rarely finished with us, so we may as well give over to what it wants, the better to help us fight our way to recovery. Ghosts come in a variety of forms. Some float down halls. Others live within us, reminding us of pain we need to heal, trauma we must endure. The suspense: how we emerge intact with a great story to tell.

Bored to Death: ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

Living a life as long as the average human lifespan can get pretty boring. Days can pass slowly, tasks growing monotonous. Maybe depression sets in. The great George Sanders, the actor who gave us, among many fine performances, All About Eve’s droll theater critic Addison DeWitt, committed suicide at the age of 65, his note reading, in part: “I am leaving because I am bored.” It’s a tragedy, to be sure, and one that the pale and reclusive Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is contemplating. He simply feels he’s been alive for so very long, finding his days – no, his years – passing in a blur of moping around his dilapidated and cluttered house in an abandoned corner of Detroit. Occasionally he rouses himself to noodle with his beloved antique instruments and archaic technologies, sometimes composing a song. He orders a custom-made bullet to be made out of dense wood and thinks he might shoot into his heart for real this time. You see, he’s a vampire, and the endless centuries have grown dull. You think living 80, 90 years seems daunting? Try 800, 900 years, or longer.

This is the world of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, a vampire movie that thrums to its own frequency, vibrating on a chill and melancholic mood. It’s not a horror movie, or rather, not exactly a horror movie. It’s more a come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-vampirism party, a slow and consuming hangout movie with ghoulish and existential underpinnings. It doesn’t move quickly so as not to break the spell. Adam is quiet, still, contemplative. His wife, Eve (Tilda Swinton), leaves her home in Tangiers to come for a visit, blaming all the time spent with Romantic poets a couple centuries ago for her husband’s current funk. They move on a different time-scale than ours, able to big-picture our mortal world, sighing at our stasis, our cyclical crises. They watch humans making a mess of the world from the helplessness of the shadows. They’re tired of us. Says he to she, “They’re still fighting over Darwin. Still.”

The vampires of Jarmusch’s imagination here are neither suave bloodsuckers nor skulking monsters and they certainly aren’t out stalking human prey. No, they sit at home, sleep all day and sulk all night. They’re cultured, have read all the great books, seen all the great art, heard all the great songs. They have all the time in the world to appreciate their surroundings, but are tired of doing it and seeing human failings endlessly repeated. When hungry, they just go the blood bank and bribe their usual accomplice (Jeffrey Wright) for the bags of liquid life they need to sustain themselves, sipping small amounts for nourishment and what seems like a bit of a high. The camera pushes forwards as they tip their heads back, eyes ecstatic, mouth agape in dopey fangs-baring grins.

The vampires rarely go out, at most driving down dark, empty streets. Adam has something like a human buddy, a young man (Anton Yelchin) who stops by with vintage music equipment for sale and acts as a middleman between the secret vampire and Detroit’s underground music scene. He and the blood doctor are the film’s only connection to the human world. Jarmusch spends the runtime immersed in the day-to-day drudgery of these vampires, intensely observing the loneliness and alienation of the marginalized. What’s more marginal, fringe, than being literally unable to step into the daylight? They are in the world without being of the world. There’s an authentic ice-cold elitism in their attitudes, superiority and isolation accumulated over the centuries.

Hiddleston and Swinton are convincingly vampiric with flowing hair and dark eyes in ghostly white faces accentuating their cheekbones. When they go out at night, they wear sunglasses. They’re cool. They move deliberately and with grace, totally comfortable with their bodies and with each other, romantically entangled for what seems like hundreds upon hundreds of years. Of course, after centuries of practice, you would be awfully comfortable, too. These are enigmatic performances, drawing focus in any given frame with nothing more than their presences. Confident performers, they use stillness and quiet to great effect, engendering great curiosity with a strong sense of history and sadness. The vampires have had time to cultivate both. They have seen and experienced so much and yet only have each other to share it with.

A few others of their kind drift into the picture. One is Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt). Yes, that Marlowe. He’s just a little bitter that Shakespeare took credit for his plays on the small technicality that everyone thought Marlowe was dead. Oh, well. A secret is a secret. Another guest is Eve’s adopted sister (Mia Wasikowska). They haven’t seen her in 87 years. She’s clearly a younger vampire, relatively speaking. Inhabiting the body of a blonde party girl, she embraces entirely unselfconsciously her status as a flighty, impulsive, adorably energetic disruption and danger to her relatives’ stasis. She crinkles her nose in an ingratiatingly cute way, but she’s as needy as she is deadly. “You know how it is with family,” Eve deadpans. The story, such as it is, concerns the way these characters interact with each other and with the world of the humans, but it’s mostly an intoxicating mood piece and character study.

The film’s characters are written with bone-dry wit of a familiar Jarmusch style, speaking leisurely and precisely in diction that’s bookish, moody, and in keeping with deliberately paced actions, cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s brooding slowly or unmoving shots, and the sound design’s extended patches of silence mixed with the low throb of a score. It coheres as a picture of a long, slow, philosophical existence. The vampires are often condescending, secure in the knowledge that they’ve seen so much and understand the world from a large first-hand sample size of history that the humans around them have no hope of catching up. They stick together because only another vampire can understand the particular, peculiar, entrancing boredom of immortality.

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.

Superhero Supergroup: THE AVENGERS

The Avengers is not the greatest superhero film ever made, but it sure is a great time at the movies. It’s a high-impact spectacle full of loud, funny, and satisfying sequences that send characters slamming into each other into full-tilt superheroics in broad, bright, colorful collisions. We’ve met the characters in question before, which is just as well since that’s also where their characterizations reside. This isn’t a movie that’s about telling a story with much in the way of emotional character arcs or weighty personal journeys. It’s a movie that gathers up the main characters from recent Marvel Comics adaptations, the one’s they’ve had the exclusive rights to, that is, and teams them up to save the planet. Original, it’s not. (And not just in film. Comics have been orchestrating crossovers like this almost as long as comics have existed.) But the skill, energy, and good will of it all makes it fun all the same.

Marvel has been building to The Avengers for five years now, kicking off superhero franchises one by one with the express purpose of bringing them together for this one big blockbuster. And so, when Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the brotherly villain of Thor, comes shooting out of the vastness of space through a glowing portal into the middle of a top secret military installation and, promising war, makes off with a brainwashed archer (Jeremy Renner) and a volatile blue energy cube, the otherworldly MacGuffin from Captain America, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the connective cameo from all of the earlier films, assembles his team of avengers. The film takes its time – a bit too much, perhaps – reintroducing the superheroes one by one, and it’s a credit to the consistency of quality in this many-pronged experiment in comic book adaptation that it’s nice to see them all again.

Fury himself calls in super-strong Captain Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and dispatches right-hand man, Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg), to round up the rest of the recruits. He has master assassin Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) pick up the cursed Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, taking over for Ed Norton, who took over for Eric Bana – maybe stretching into the Hulk causes slow shifts in appearance). Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) flies in with his high-tech suit of armor; Thor (Chris Hemsworth) thunders down from the land of Asgard swinging his mighty hammer. The gang’s all here, though not without some complications on their way to assembling as a group. With such variety in powers and personality, interpersonal conflicts are bound to arise even as Loki’s threat of intergalactic war draws closer to reality.

This is a movie juggling multiple characters (even Stellan Skarsgard and Gwyneth Paltrow return, briefly) while fitting them into one coherent film narrative. Even the tones these heroes bring from their separate films could have easily competed instead of blending. The sarcasm of Iron Man, the pseudo-Shakespearean goof of Thor, the earnestness of Captain America, and the brooding pulp emotion of Hulk gave their films a personality of their own. Removed from their solo efforts the supergroup as a whole has less emotional resonance, as this film is unable to fully explore their outsized, but recognizably human, personalities through the metaphors supplied by their powers. In that sense, the movie is thin. It’s a lot of fun, but the characters arrive fully formed from other movies and end this one with little in the way of growth or development. But, still, this is a movie that throws together great characters and watches them interact asking, “isn’t that cool?” And, yeah, it’s cool.

With so many characters it could have been nothing more than a clash of tones while characters jockeyed for the spotlight. Luckily writer-director Joss Whedon has given these characters a movie in which there is no need to compete for attention. It plays out like the work of a fan who deeply loves these Avengers, each and every one of them, and has spent time thinking about the ways in which the powers and personalities could clash and connect. It’s an affectionate film. Whedon has always had a warm wit which shines clearly through genre material and that’s certainly the case here. This is a movie just crammed full of one-liners that actually land. He seems most comfortable writing for Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, but the other characters certainly have funny moments of their own as well.

But it’s more than funny quips and clearly defined characters. It’s all about timing. There’s just enough room for the one-liners and amusing visual gags to breathe, but just enough concision to make them unexpected. That’s where Whedon’s pet theme – teamwork – comes into play. (His work, mostly and most notably in TV with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, consistently revolves around a group of people who must learn to work together.) This movie is filled with long sequences of the characters talking to one another, strategizing, arguing, joking, threatening, comparing internal struggles, and finding common ground. The actors are up to the task; dialogue pings around the room with precision. (It’s almost enough to make one think that if Howard Hawks had made a superhero movie, it might have looked a little like this.) Later, in the action scenes, the way characters spring into motion utilizes the best each has to offer in terrific synchronization. This is a film that plays to the strengths of everyone involved.

Like his fellow TV-to-film auteur J.J. Abrams, Whedon is a writer and director who has a way of injecting a serialized slam-bang cliffhanger style into a film. The Avengers starts with what is essentially a cold open, slams into a title card, and then moves from set-piece to set-piece finding some surprises along its fairly standard action movie path. It is an efficient spectacle delivery device. It’s a bright, loud, crashing crowd-pleaser, a blockbuster superhero movie with an impressive sense of narrative escalation. Each action sequence feels bigger and more complicated with higher stakes than the one before. By the time the film hurtles into a lengthy, chaotic, but coherent, climax (that has a few similarities to a similarly sprawling big-city brawl in Transformers: Dark of the Moon), it’s hard not to get swept up in it all. It is a movie designed to show off cool effects while likable, familiar characters clash and jest, explosions seasoned with genuinely funny one-liners, and some neat visuals, and, with a light touch and fondness for the material, Whedon more than gets the job done.

Horse Sense: WAR HORSE

Steven Spielberg’s War Horse starts as a pastoral, an ode to living off the land that’s soured under bad economics.  In the opening shots a horse is born as a farmer’s son (Jeremy Irvine) watches. We know right away that this will be one special horse, if for no other reason than that the boy loves him. But he doesn’t own the horse yet. His father (Peter Mullan) buys the animal at auction despite the fact that money is tight and what he spends would have been better off going to pay the rent to their condescending landlord (David Thewlis). The farmer’s wife (Emily Watson, sweet and tough) expresses dismay. This horse better help them plow a new field so they can have even a small chance to make some kind of rent payment. The boy stares at the creature with such wonder, what Matt Patches calls “the Spielberg face,” that the immediate connection between boy and horse is made clear with merely a shot and a reverse-shot.

On a certain level, this is a film about looking, about the power of the reaction shot. Not only is this used to create a sense of an animal’s emotions – as the boy trains the horse, we see them growing closer, growing in trust and friendship – but characters come to care about the horse, and we about the characters, in the space of an edit. Spielberg knows the power of images and the even greater effect in juxtaposing powerful visuals. There’s may be no more iconic image in all of cinema than that of a galloping horse, from Muybridge’s experiments to westerns and period pieces, from National Velvet to The Black Stallion. Engaged with this history, War Horse is a film that’s an epic of Fordian fields and Lean landscapes mixed with intimate close ups and stunning sequences of the kind that by now can certainly be called Spielbergian.

It’s also a film that’s literally about looking at the effects of war. Under all the intensely sympathetic human detail that opens the film, the Great War is looming. The farmer, much to his son’s dismay, sells their horse to the army after which the animal is sent along to help the war effort. The script by Lee Hall and Richard Cutris (from the novel by Michael Morpurgo) has us follow the horse. As we do, we get to know the many varied people who come into contact with him. There’s, among others, the brave and honorable British officer (Tom Hiddleston), two German brothers (Leonhard Carow and David Kross), and a French farmer (Niels Arestrup) and his granddaughter (Celine Buckens). It becomes a knockout of a film that gallops across World War I, catching glimpses of its effect on all lives the conflict intersects, no matter the age, no matter the social station, no matter the nationality.

Through the horse’s path we see the devastation of this war for civilians and soldiers alike. Spielberg stages the horror of trench warfare as a PG-13 Saving Private Ryan, grim and overwhelming. When he moves away from the front lines, there’s a terrific patience given over to the brief respites of uncertain solitude, the booming cannonade that can be heard from miles away intruding upon the hesitant daily lives of people desperately trying to avoid trouble if it can be helped. The fleeing soldiers who try to hide from the fight, the brief return to pastoral setting on the French farm, these are moments away from the front that feel nearly, if not just as devastating as the battles themselves. The horror of war may not always be foregrounded, but it’s always encroaching, booming off in the distance.

This is a film with emotion quivering right on the surface in John Williams moving, memorable, and rich score, in the painterly cinematography of deep red Hollywood sunsets, rolling green hills, and muddy gray trenches, in the scenes capable of evoking great warmth and great horror that Janusz Kaminski so handsomely photographs and that Spielberg arranges to play like a sympathy of empathy. Is this manipulative? Yes, in that Spielberg has the audience held captive by his ability to evoke any emotion, to trigger sympathy for any character. That’s hardly a bad thing. Getting a film to work on such a high level is hardly cheap and easy. This is a deliriously accomplished film of powerful emotion. An early battle scene features the cavalry charging a line of enemy machine guns. We hear the roar of the brave men as they ride their horses forward, and then cut to riderless horses leaping over enemy lines to only the sounds of gunfire. With elegant, devastating editing of sounds and shots, just one of many such examples that could be singled out, Spielberg creates a memorable and striking moment of deep emotional impact.

This film is epic Hollywood filmmaking on a scale that’s sure to satisfy those who grumble “they don’t make them like they used to.” While it’s a bit of a throwback in that regard – at times it plays almost like a new classic – it’s hardly old-fashioned or stuffy. It’s a lively, tremendously modern work. Only today’s effects and techniques could build its period piece world in such a visually accomplished way. This is no studio backlot. But what really works in the film, what marks it as neither old nor new, but timeless, is its deep, pure humanistic expression. Each and every character we meet becomes a fully fleshed human being.  We learn their hopes and fears and then plunge with them into awful war-torn circumstances. Spielberg and his uniformly excellent cast have us fall in love with these characters in order to better break our hearts.

War Horse is stirring and moving and unabashedly sentimental in ways that never feel forced. So strongly thematically engaged – and with the horse as such a strong visual and emotional anchor – that what could easily have been episodic and clunky is rendered powerfully, elegantly unified. By the end, which has brought back some of the previously left behind characters in rewarding, sometimes surprising, ways, there’s the feeling of having had a filmgoing experience so completely full and fulfilling, a rare complete and total satisfaction. Spielberg is a master filmmaker, capable of marshalling the best techniques of the past to give us thrilling and moving new examples of filmmaking at its best. Moments like the final shots of a deeply heartfelt reunion silhouetted against a gorgeous sunset, accompanied by Williams’s soaring main theme, could be straight out of a Hollywood epic of any era.  This is terrific, earnest, empathetic filmmaking that cuts straight to the heart with strong, direct emotion. It’s a film that’s involving, upsetting, and in the end somehow uplifting, that thrills and moves and lingers.

Anything Goes: MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

Note: Many critics have no problem launching into spoiler territory while discussing this film, but I’ll keep it relatively spoiler free here, discussing themes and plot in such a way as to preserve the surprise of utterly splendid paths the movie takes.

Who could have guessed that the most transporting fantasy of the summer would take place in a film that never really leaves the real world? Woody Allen’s latest, his forty-first film, is Midnight in Paris, a wholly enveloping diversion, a pleasantly layered delight. It presents Paris as a city of real magic with an irresistible draw that pulls in anyone on the right wavelength. I must admit that I fell in love with the city myself while on a school trip last year. It’s a city of such beauty, such fine art, and with a clear, direct sense of connection to times gone by, a city that I felt had always resided in my soul, that I found myself nodding with agreement when a character in the film mentions that Paris just might be the hottest spot in the universe.

Allen opens his film with a dreamy tourist’s gaze. He draws his film slowly and patiently into being with a loving sightseeing montage that looks, really looks, at Paris. It’s plain to see why it’s so easy to fall in love with this city, the cobblestone streets, the stunning architecture, and the extraordinary sights around every corner. It’s also easy to see why a self-proclaimed Hollywood hack like Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) would want to use his visit as the perfect opportunity to buckle down and finish his first novel. His fiancé (Rachel McAdams) and her parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy) would rather zip along on a tight schedule to shop and taste wine. They’re not attuned to the magic of their surroundings. “If I see one more charming bistro…” the fiancé grumbles.

Gil’s not like his future in-laws. He lets the city simmer in his psyche. He knows the place has great magic. He reveres the Paris of the 20’s, a time when American artists of all kinds showed up to create masterpieces, and sees himself, the struggling author that he is, as one of a long, continuous line of talents living, partying, and creating during their time as Parisians. Gil is so inspired that one night he leaves his fiancé and her finicky pseudo-intellectual friends (Michael Sheen and Nina Arianda) behind just to wander the city, to get his creative energy sizzling and buzzing. Paris contains such magic in this film that when a car pulls up and partygoers wave at him and ask him to join them not only does he go along, he finds only ever more to delight and surprise him. When he ends up at a party where everyone is dressed in 20’s garb and a man is playing Cole Porter songs at a piano, why, it only seems natural that he’s fallen immediately into the right crowd.

While his increasingly befuddled family resign themselves to letting him wander off to enjoy himself, he gets to mingle with all manner of Parisians. Wilson plays the part of the yearning nostalgic neurotic artist perfectly with the right blend of anxiety and affability. He comes into contact with all sorts of interesting characters, a gruff, manly writer (Corey Stoll), a socialite (Alison Pill) and her author husband (Tom Hiddleston), a gorgeous fashionable muse (Marion Cotillard), a self-absorbed surrealist (Adrien Brody), and a warm, encouraging editor (Kathy Bates), among many others.

This is a love-drunk fan letter to Paris, literature, and art that makes for a casually dense, parable-like tale that’s a warm rebuke and sentimental smirk to nostalgia and a loving embrace of all that makes us human. Here’s a film that falls in love with a city that forever repays that love. Here’s a film that says artists are human, heroes are flawed, and yet can’t creating and experiencing art be a source of endless joy? One simply can’t live in the past, but isn’t it pretty to think so? To create is to look forwards and backwards at once, a tricky prospect. Here Allen has made a film that seems to do just that for him. It pulls together some of his favorite themes (artists, art, relationships) and passions (literature, jazz, history) and repackages them in ways new and surprising, comforting and familiar.

The beauty of the film is that it can be so thoughtful, philosophical even, and yet so utterly transporting, so completely and utterly entertaining that the outside world melts away for a while. It’s the flat out funniest picture Allen’s made in one or two decades. It’s a grand hug of a film that loves France, loves art, loves love and only grows richer the more you are able to catch the historical references. It’s a sort of romantic comedy, but it succeeds by treating the romance as almost a side-thought. It’s an artful, sweet tourist’s fantasy that succeeds by being so matter-of-fact about its movie magic. What a wonderful film! I practically floated out of the theater with the film resonating so deeply and beautifully, filling me with total joy. Living in the present might not always be so beautiful, so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Hammer Out Danger: THOR

The latest Marvel superhero to make it to the big screen is Thor, to my knowledge the only superhero with origins as a Norse God. That might seem tricky to assimilate into the ever-growing on-screen overlap between the various Marvel properties, especially with more Earthbound sci-fi heroes like Iron Man and the Hulk, but this big flashy summer tentpole is up to the task, especially with its nimble mixing of genres. The director is Kenneth Branagh, a fine actor, member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, turned director most notable for his Shakespearean adaptations, some of them quite good. With Thor he mixes a bit of high drama with a bit of low comedy and, to my surprise, it works quite well. It may not make a lot of sense some of the time, but it sure is fun while it lasts.

After a little teaser of an opening scene, the movie dives straight into mythological bombast and fantasy spectacle with the dramas of Odin (a fun Anthony Hopkins) and his royal court. He’s a Norse God who rules over Asgard, a kingdom set up in a towering mountain that emerges out of a cloudy nebula in space. (You read that right). He is a wise warrior who has successfully beaten back the Frost Giants of Jotunheim. This is the kind of movie that throws out crazy names and elaborate backstory without a second thought but is ultimately better off for it. This is a movie that starts with a fast pace and then keeps it up throughout, thundering towards its conclusion. No need to linger on nomenclature and fantasy semantics when there’s matters of grave importance to get to, namely the matter of the royal lineage in Asgard.

Odin has two sons and heirs. One is Thor (Chris Hemsworth), strong and impetuous, who has flowing blonde locks, a heavy magic hammer and a billowing red cape. His brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), slim with slicked-back hair and dark attire, is a jealous conniver. We can practically tell good and evil by nothing more than hairstyle and costuming but Hemsworth and Hiddleston are a bit subtler with their roles than you might expect. They do, however, fit perfectly in the oversized world in which they live.

Theirs is a big glittery world with sweeping colorful vistas and gleaming flying buttresses and a portal to other worlds that sits at the end of a rainbow bridge and sends these Norse God warriors off in a cloud of dust and lightning. After some Frost Giants sneak into the palace (and are promptly vaporized), it’s through this mode of transportation that Thor and some warrior pals show up at Jotunheim and beat up on them for breaking the treaty. Furious that Thor would try to provoke a new war, Odin banishes him to Earth, stripping him of his Godlike powers in the process.

Once on Earth, the movie plays out on parallel tracks. Thor finds himself in a fish-out-of-water story in a small New Mexico town. There he is found by a scientist (Natalie Portman) who has been studying the strange patterns of the night sky of the kind that he arrived in. With her mentor (Stellan Skarsgård) and intern (Kat Dennings), the three of them provide a mortal chorus of skeptics and incredulous observers to counterbalance the rush of entertaining gobbledygook that forms the opening sequences.

But that gobbledygook is turned into the stuff of pseudo-Shakespearian drama back in Asgard, where the other track of plotting is given over to Machiavellian scheming. Loki wants the throne for himself and the question of lineage and politics weighs heavy on the Asgardians. In gilded rooms featuring the perfect combination of regality and gaudiness designed by Bo Welch, Thor’s warrior pals (including great cinematic tough-guys Ray Stevenson and Tadanobu Asano as well as relative unknowns Jamie Alexander and Josh Dallas) fret and scheme about how to ensure Loki doesn’t end up sitting on the throne.

The constant juggling between earthbound conflicts – a mysterious (though recognizable from the Iron Mans) governmental organization has set up camp outside town to research a strange hammer that fell in the desert – and the epic tale of Asgard merges nicely. It’s a potentially unsteady mix, but it works because of the seriousness with which the filmmakers take both the drama and the comedy. Never once do they condescend to their own material. The film uses the humans to comment on the oversized nature of Thor in a little coffee shop or Asgard’s warriors strutting down Main Street, but it doesn’t stop these larger-than-life characters from feeling perfectly scaled to fit their homeworld. Both realms are filmed in deep, rich colors with the striking cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos making liberal use of oblique angles that join the realms with a similar sense of slinking dread. There’s a feeling that something is rotten in Asgard and it could escape to infect Earth where Thor better learn how to get his powers (and hammer) back in fighting shape.

This is a movie of zippy action mixed with genuinely funny laughs, but it never undermines itself. It frontloads a lot of dense exposition but manages to make it entertaining. It’s a movie with a high silliness quotient and sets out to prove that it’s worthy of using its set-up for some hammer-slamming, breastplate-knocking battles and some not entirely insignificant drama. It’s not primarily a movie of action, though it fulfills that promise, more or less. This is a movie of plot and noise that pays attention to its mood, off-kilter ponderousness that, when mixed with a healthy serving of intentional comedy, ultimately makes this lively effects-heavy blockbuster fairly addictive.