Hate Crime: THE ORDER

The Order is a tense and absorbing real-life thriller set against a backdrop of the American northwest, with stunning views of mountains and forests and rivers and farms on which plays out a standard procedural about good men with guns in pursuit of the bad men with guns. This gives it the feeling of a Western, albeit one with machine guns and pickup trucks from its mid-80’s milieu. It’s only fitting for a true crime story that’s about the very conflicts that continue to drive our country’s madness to take on the trappings of a genre that’s always about American identity. This picture finds an FBI agent (Jude Law) investigating the works of a white-supremacist militia. He’s a grizzled and exhausted veteran who rolls into town and soon teams up with a boyish local cop (Tye Sheridan) to start asking the right questions, and some wrong ones. The militia under suspicion is a recent breakaway group from a larger, slightly more sedate hate group. It’s led by a hot-headed extremist (Nicholas Hoult) who’s leading his small band of men in robberies and bombings, leading up to planned assassinations and more. Ominously, there’s a shot of blueprints for the United States capitol tacked up on his bulletin board. I half expected a title card at the end to tell us one of their group would go on decades later to storm it. Or be elected to Congress.

Director Justin Kurzel is a good fit for the material with his interest in man’s capacity for violence and the ways in which aimless men can bond over a sense of duty, misguided or not, that can emerge from its pursuit. (This makes for an interesting companion to Kurzel’s Macbeth, Assassin’s Creed, and True History of the Kelly Gang in its exploration of bloody codes of conduct and grim perspective.) He has a straight-faced somberness of tone and a steady grip on suspense erupting into violence. Here are long, crackling sequences of law enforcement jargon and investigation, jostling personalities behind the scenes of cops and criminals alike, and then the inevitable shootouts and bombings and chases. (There’s also an event that’ll be familiar to anyone who knows it inspired Oliver Stone’s electric underrated Talk Radio.) Kurzel moves the plot with a well-paced progression of clues and escalations, keeping a close eye on the revealing gestures of the performances. Law convincingly plays an older agent who was hoping to slow down, but finds he just can’t stay out of the game. He moves like an old pro, interrogates with a gruff edge, and runs with a hard-charging fervor that had me worried the character would give himself a heart attack. Sheridan is a fine youthful idealist coming into his own, making a fine pair with Law’s grizzled determination. (Jurnee Smollett is a good by-the-book third wheel when they call for backup.) They’re easy to root for. As their Hoult is scarily blank, a void of charisma that nonetheless has other racist young guys enthralled to his promise of a better, whiter America. There’s a sick dread to the FBI’s righteous pursuit of their group, as we know the sick appeal of their target's evil message will continue to linger past this particular flashpoint.

Game the System: READY PLAYER ONE

Leave it to Steven Spielberg, once the wunderkind of exceptional blockbusters, now the grand master of elegant Hollywood craft (two sides of the same coin, naturally), to make a gleaming, watchable, propulsive, largely entertaining movie out of a screenplay that’s charitably a pile of schlock. Plus, he’s too good a storyteller to avoid uncovering some small complexity where a lesser filmmaker would find none. This is Ready Player One, loosely adapted from Ernest Cline’s junk sci-fi novel by Cline himself and Zak Penn, a movie set in a future overcrowded with people and problems. In mostly off-hand and off-screen ways, it imagines we stopped caring about everything wrong with our society – the climate, the class struggles, the over-commercialized corporate surveillance state, the shallowness – and just wallowed in a late-capitalist decay. That’s frightening enough, but it also sees the entire populace plugged into and swallowed up by a Virtual Reality world called The OASIS. Bouncing between a heightened reality and this over-the-top imaginarium, Spielberg finds his typically expressive mise en scene, energetically filmic camera, and crisp editing patter letting the screen overflow with digital mayhem while almost entirely avoiding the senseless repetitiveness of his knockoff sub-Marvel competition. Only he would think to stage a second act set piece inside a recreation of a famous 1980 horror movie (a fine extra-textual tip-of-the-hat to a fellow auteur) and not only get the set perfectly realized, but to get the grain right, too.

The OASIS is an entire digital hellscape traveled via vision-enveloping goggles, omni-directional treadmills with bungee straps, and gloves and suits for sensory input. The thing is a combination social media and video game. There are casinos, branded game worlds, VR vacations, battles royale, sports, arcades, zero-G dance clubs, libraries, chat bots, and avatars representing several dozen Brand Name Intellectual Properties meant to be greeted with grinning recognition. It’s a chaos – like an entire universe made up of a Facebook that was also endless-Las Vegas inside a Grand Theft Auto Disney World – presented at once naïve and ugly (with just one winking nod toward the world’s digital Love Hotel pointing to how dirty the corners of such a place would inevitably become). I often found it flatly horrific, but the screenplay seems to find it praise-worthy. The structure of the story rests on a quest for three Easter eggs hidden by the late game’s creator (Mark Rylance). These special, well-hidden prizes, once obtained, will give the winner ownership of The OASIS, and thus, considering how many manhours and economic activity take place in the fictional space, the future itself. Spielberg splits the difference between my cynicism and the source material’s slobbering, following a team of scrappy underdogs fighting to beat cold-hearted corporate goons to the Eggs, while still fleetingly recognizing that maybe they should just unplug and chill out, at least for a couple days a week.

So perhaps it’s a shade too acquiescent to its society – and, by extension, ours – taking a bland, gamified approach to pop culture. It's as visually clear as any Spielberg, but undoubtedly his most thematically incoherent. Our heroes – orphan Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and his online friends (Olivia Cooke, Lena Waithe, Win Morisaki, and Philip Zhao) who don’t know they all live in the same towering future-Ohio slums – view art and pop culture as trivia to be acquired, points to be won, hardly ever interacting with them as experiences or creations unto themselves. The kids mine the taste of the game’s creator – a child of the 80’s obsessed with Atari, John Hughes, Back to the Future, Van Halen and so on – for clues on how to win the game. It echoes the hollow nostalgia listicles and empty snark of some of the worst contemporary discourse from people who want points for catching references instead of experiencing and interpreting. But, though Spielberg serves it up, he can also see this problem. For all his rah-rah bombast about the underdog protagonists – and cheery hissing at the corporate baddies, including a boardroom tech company shark (Ben Mendelsohn) who is all-too chipper announcing they’ve been able to pinpoint exactly how many ads can be in one’s field of vision without “inducing seizures” – he watches as all their checklist skill pales in comparison to fleeting moments of real-world connection. OASIS may find them fantasy heroes, but the real world is where you can meet eye to eye, shuck off artifice, really know someone, and maybe even kiss. Only sometimes does the movie see this as the better option.

The point, ultimately, is that the game’s creator, given a quiet, recessive affect by Rylance’s charmingly soft performance, was terrified of the real world. He hated his inability to connect with others and therefore built a digital simulacrum of his fantasy life and cultural diet to share, yes, but in which he could have complete control. All he wanted was to make people happy, but watched as people loved it so much it slipped out of his control, even as he was made into a tech god. (A slyly stupid faux-archival headline reads: “Bigger Than Jobs?”) His genuine, eccentric fanboy love and isolation is lost inside too much muchness. What to do with this tension in the larger context? Spielberg, similarly deified by many who see his creations as shallow entertainments and miss the real humanity in every frame, builds a film that’s a dazzling modern sci-fi construct (climaxing in a CG characters swarming a computerized battlefield) uninterested in the bigger picture. How does this world operate? What are its technological practicalities? What is its economic outlook? The movie doesn’t know or care. (This is no A.I. or Minority Report.) It’s simply attuned to the rhythms of the action bopping through eye-popping Janusz Kaminski frames – the washed-out reality intercut with a vivid, colorful, almost-real animated space. The performers are charming, the world is a constantly shifting fantasy of the creative and the derivative, and the spirited pace is zippy. Its vision of a fight to save a massive VR world is simultaneously Pollyannaish and cynical, twinkling Spielbergian touches over a yawning void. It’s exuberant celebration of shallow pop culture love, and a melancholy vision of the creator’s need to let go. It’s a busy visual explosion of an anything-is-possible tech-dystopia, and a recognition that no matter how fun a virtual world may be, it’s healthy to take a break. In the end, it’s perhaps the most excessive argument for moderation ever mounted.

Days of Alternate Past: X-MEN: APOCALYPSE

X-Men: Apocalypse lives up to its name, putting the entire globe in jeopardy, but also proving high stakes spectacles work if you tap into the dread of them. There’s a sequence here where an all-powerful ancient superbeing launches every nuke in the world and it’s shot with such solemn gravity, taking in the faces of regular humans looking up in awe at their imminent possible demise, that it has weight and terror many films of this ilk either skip right past or take for granted. When Bryan Singer’s X-Men was released in 2000 it was considered acceptable stakes for a sci-fi action movie to merely menace a small gathering of dignitaries in New York. But recently, with movies like Batman v. Superman and the Transformers and Avengers regularly tearing up entire cities, there’s been something of a superhero stakes race, threatening ever more danger and destruction for less and less of an effect. When everything’s the end of the world, nothing is.

Now, returning for his fourth time directing this series, Singer knows every other superhero movie somehow takes outsized cataclysms and boils down to the same punching and shooting. Apocalypse understands we really want to see psychic energy swords, teleportation, shape shifting, bolts of lightening, and two telekinetic beings fighting each other on a mental battlefield. It ends with a symphony of superpowers, creatively sent into battle against others in clever combinations. And this CGI slugfest is earned by taking time to introduce its menagerie of mutants, adroitly and organically integrating a dozen or more characters, giving them each great splash page show-off moments as well as an emotional grounding for interwoven arcs. Singer crafts compelling images interested in the visceral horror and whimsical delight of having these powers, never losing sight of either’s impact on the characters in the face of glowing effects-heavy sequences.

This is all part of Singer’s approach to the X-Men, now in its ninth iteration, counting spinoffs. He set a template for the movie world of mutants trying to find acceptance and family. Saving the world is simply an outgrowth of their interpersonal dramas, calamities brought about by their angst. As this movie begins – on a reset timeline after the time-travel loop-de-loop of Days of Future Past – Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is running his school for mutants, including new students like Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) and Scott Summers, who will become Cyclops (Tye Sheridan).  Teachers include Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and Havoc (Lucas Till). Meanwhile, chameleon Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is running an underground rescue operation for abused or captured mutants like young teleporter Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), while Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is in hiding, living a quiet small-town life in Poland. They just want to live comfortably and secretly with their powers, and Singer, with a screenplay by Simon Kinberg, finds time to seriously consider their attempts at understanding their powers.

Alas, peace is not to be, as the aforementioned superbeing who wants to destroy the world awakens with much fanfare. He is Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac under a pile of blue makeup), the world’s first mutant, an ancient Egyptian worshiped as a God for all his wild powers, then buried comatose under a pyramid for thousands of years. When he wakes up to be the villain of this 1983-set alt-history, he wants to destroy the world, but only because he’s lashing out from jealousy and a God complex. While a CIA agent (Rose Byrne) investigating his return warns Professor X about the looming danger, Apocalypse wanders around gathering up rogue mutants for his army, using his power to tempt them to the dark side by amplifying their gifts. He finds: Storm (Alexandra Shipp), an orphan who can control the weather; Angel (Ben Hardy), a cage-fighter with an impressive wingspan; and Psylocke (Olivia Munn), a psychic with energy blades. As he picks them up, he gives them makeovers and snazzy costumes he conjures out of thin air, a neat, convenient trick.

Apocalypse – a fairly one-note villain, but at least he’s new – gains in power, eventually convincing Magneto to join his crusade to remake the world by bringing it to an end, the better to start over with proper mutant worship again. Magneto is torn between a desire to avenge his tragic past – which adds another heart-wrenching trauma early on here – and a need to prove his power and the potential for mutant dominance. He excavates his pain in a sequence at Auschwitz that’s borderline tasteless before gaining eerie pop power as the conflicted villainous man pulls the entire concentration camp apart in a cloud of debris as exorcism. Fassbender does admirable work bringing real sorrow and grief to his portrayal of Magneto, and makes it fit seamlessly into a big Hollywood sci-fi action confection in which a team of superhero teens led by a bald man in a wheelchair must stop an ancient blue God from ending humanity. Singer maintains an engaged and gripping thriller pace slowly drawing many strands together to the inevitable climactic conflagration.

It sounds complicated, bringing so many characters together and sending them into conflict with each other in a tone that’s both gravely serious and goofy fluff. But Singer pulls off this balancing act while confidently shrugging off baggage of prior films and wearing expectations of so much muchness lightly, engaging in straight-faced comic book appeal without pandering to nerds or apologizing to everyone else. He cares about using the characters in interesting and creative ways, whether it’s sending Quicksilver (Evan Peters) through an exploding building, in a fine repeat and escalation of the last film’s show-stopping slow-mo sequence, or setting Cyclops loose at a target, reveling in the surprise force of his uncontrollable laser-vision. Apocalypse puts aside Civil Rights subtext for a gripping globetrotting adventure on its way to an electric light show spectacle shot for wonderment and dopey-cool impact. But because Singer and his team treat the whole project earnestly – cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel shooting brightly and steadily, capturing performances and effects alike in images that takes in the whole movement and expression of the actions – it has a convincing result.

In a time when superhero movies are churned out as mere content, Singer still makes movies. Apocalypse isn’t short on incident or timeline triangulation. But rather than hitting preordained marks and providing coverage with enough space for teasing future features, he shapes a narrative, building characters to care about with problems to invest in, sending them through varied crescendos and climaxes in setpieces rewarding viewers’ interest with real consequences and fine setups and payoffs contained within the borders of its runtime. (There are echoes and cameos to flatter franchise knowledge, but they aren’t integral to their effect, and add to a genuine comic sense of unashamed retconning.) He deploys polished and poised frames that stand back and handsomely photograph superpowers while understanding that having them and using them takes an emotional toll. It’s fun and involving, all of an exciting, entertaining piece. This isn’t like Captain America: Civil War where characters pop up, show off a power, and then disappear with a tease for their own offshoot. It’s one of the best X-Men movies yet, a full and satisfying ensemble spectacle unto itself.

That's ENTERTAINMENT

The joke of Entertainment is that it’s rarely entertaining. That’s on purpose. It’s a movie following two entertainers – a middle-aged stand-up (Gregg Turkington) and a teen clown (Tye Sheridan) – as they travel a sad-sack route of decrepit bars, prison cafeterias, and anonymous hotels, gigs in the middle of American southwest nowhere for people who’d just as soon hear a jukebox or some light ambient Muzak. The grind is getting to them: a repetitive cycle of unappreciative audiences and lonely days, punctuated only by the downbeat, awkward surrealism of late nights and small towns, Americana dried up and ready to blow away. Director and co-writer Rick Alverson, whose previous film, 2012’s The Comedy, had a similarly alienating conceit – what if a smugly quipping comedy antihero was in the real world and therefore just a jerk? – has loaded Entertainment with endless pauses and cringingly desperate flop sweat. The extent to which you’ll enjoy it is determined by how much you can take, and how much you decide it matters in the end.

Disheveled, sporting a stringy wet combover, wearing an ill-fitting outdated suit, clutching free drinks in both hands while perching the microphone too close to his mouth, the better to sniff and gargle phlegm into it during the long silent stretches between jokes, Turkington’s comedian is a hopeless figure. He speaks with the sort of affected bluster and unstudied obliviousness a better stand-up might affect to make fun of hack comics. (He also sounds more than a little like Yukon Cornelius.) His every joke starts with a wheezy, drawn-out “Why did…” trailing off into dirty, gross, or just plain odd punchlines about celebrities who’ve long passed their peak name recognition. You get the feeling he’s been performing this material in rooms just like these for a long time. It’s anti-comedy, awfully funny in its awkwardly unfunny desperation, although certainly not the humor expected by the befuddled audiences he greets every night.

This isn’t far removed from Turkington’s usual act, a long and successful run as an aggressively offbeat stand-up he calls Neil Hamburger. I suppose the version we see in Entertainment is a worst-case scenario, the life he could’ve had if he didn’t find audiences to connect with this strange persona. Co-writing with Alverson and Tim Heidecker, Turkington has created a vision of a sad, isolated man out of time. A bad Borscht Belt comedian gone to seed in a present that has little use for him and his traveling act-mate, a mugging miming young man who nonetheless sometimes manages to coax engagement out of stone-faced crowds. A partnership, but not a friendship, the comedian and the clown are in every moment isolated and alone, even when around others. A depressed cloud hangs over the movie, twisting into wistful melancholy (the older man makes phone calls to his estranged daughter) or bitter nastiness (lashing out in cruel and misogynistic language at a heckler). It’s intriguing and off-putting, compelling and uncomfortable.

Equally fascinating and dull, the movie trudges along with its characters in frames of dull colors and casual absurdities. Turkington exudes exhaustion and generalized loathing. Sheridan (who, having worked for a handful of interesting auteurs, on an ABC sitcom, and in an upcoming X-Men, is quietly amassing one of the most impressive resumes of any young actor working today) has a more youthful energy, but the same hazy miserable fog. Along the way are strange characters (including John C. Reilly as a well-meaning oaf who says he “consults about business”) and glum detours. Every stop interrogates what it means to find entertainment, arguing that enjoyment is where you find it. It opens with a tour of an airplane graveyard, and later finds a brief respite in a tiny hotel conference room hosting a color seminar. We meet bartenders, clerks, tour guides, and mysterious strangers, each with their own troubles. The life of a low-rent entertainer is coldly and slowly considered, drawing pessimistic conclusions about the ability to overcome one’s own problems when you’re barely scraping by trying and largely failing to help others forget theirs.