Monster House: MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a Tim Burton movie through and through. It’s yet another of his stories about pale loner weirdos confronting an abrasive normality that has no idea what to do with them. Here’s where I’d list off a few relevant comparisons from the filmmaker’s back catalogue, but we all know in this case it’d just be a complete list of his work, from Pee Wee and Beetlejuice to Batman and Edward Scissorhands to Ed Wood and Big Eyes to Sweeney Todd and Dark Shadows and on and on. This particular iteration, adapted by screenwriter Jane Goldman (Stardust) from the book by Ransom Riggs, locates a group of fantastical freak show oddities hidden in an orphanage in Wales wilderness and a time-bending bubble of stasis that protects them from prying normal eyes. Their secret is out, though, in the creepy bedtime stories of a grandfather (Terrence Stamp) whose mysterious death sends his teenage grandson (Asa Butterfield) off in search of the peculiar children.

That sounds simple enough, and it’s certainly sufficient reason for Burton to play around with eerie horror imagery. By the time the grandson finds the peculiars he sees an invisible boy, a girl as strong as ten grown men, a firestarter, tiny twins in spooky masks and white burlap suits, a surly teen who can animate the inanimate, and a girl lighter than air who must wear lead shoes to keep her grounded. It’s the sort of hard-edged whimsy that’s fine creature fantasy and can also hit genuinely unsettling notes, especially by the time their headmistress, Miss Peregrine (Eva Green, underplaying her wild-eyed chirping mode), informs the lad that they’re being hunted by tall, pale, long-limbed, faceless tentacle-squirming invisible monsters and their haunting masters (led by a campy, pupil-less, white-haired Samuel L. Jackson). It involves a disgusting plot to eat the eyeballs of peculiars everywhere in a bid for immortality, a slight shift after the villains’ plan to suck the lifeforce out of shape-shifting birds backfired in gnarly fashion.

As I recount the basic facts of the plot this doesn’t sound so complicated. But in practice it plays out as a ton of unwieldy setup that must be hurdled to get to the fun parts. Instead of drawing its point-of-view character – and, by extension, the audience – into the world, clearly establishing lines of conflict and reasons for suspense, the film progresses as a jumble of fits and starts. It leads to confusion. As I watched grotesque tableaus and cute creepiness I took some delight in the off-kilter Burton-y visual aspects – although its images are curiously scrubbed clean of the textures and atmosphere with which his other films excel – but it wasn’t cohering. Worse, it wasn’t providing a narrative engine, or a reason to care. It’s one of those teen fantasy novel adaptations where every faction has a name and every backstory has its corresponding jargon and every gesture is imbued with meaning readers can intuit while leaving the unfamiliar in the cold. By the time it is finished introducing everybody and sets up the stakes, it turns into something much more reasonably diverting. But even then it’s hard to be too invested in the happenings.

There’s a fun conclusion involving nonsensical time travel, a tapestry of teamwork powers in action, teeth-gnashing villain monologuing, and fun unreal effects work. Burton’s facility with CG still doesn’t match the thrill of his early days with makeup, miniatures, and stop motion tricks, but at least here it’s blended in with the slightly softer visual sense. Until the movie finally dispenses with cloudy setup and gets down to action, there’s no sense of true invention, all the best moments passing quickly while the plot follows a glum drumbeat of its own convoluted internal logic. There’s an artifice that’s not like the giddy creativity of early Burton or even the confident self-referential Gothic Hammer Horror-riffing that he’s played so enjoyably before. No, here it’s just phony, with a stiff lead performance (Butterfield clearly stifled under a so-so American accent) animating a painfully routine Chosen One secret-powers-and-totally-unconvincing-romance-subplot scenario. Even the peculiars themselves aren’t full characters so much as visual gags we’re meant to love for their adorable qualities while being alternately charmed and creeped out by their macabre features. The whole movie is a mixed bag, with maybe just enough to like jumbled in with a lot to endure.

Blast from the Past: CRISIS IN SIX SCENES

Woody Allen’s latest production, Crisis in Six Scenes, has his best premise since Midnight in Paris. Set in the late 1960s, the social unrest of the times comes right into the house of a stuck-in-their-ways elderly couple. Their cozy home in upstate New York becomes a refuge for a radical when the daughter of an old friend breaks in. She’s wanted by the government for her membership in a left-wing protest group whose activities include, in addition to the usual demonstrations and rabble rousing, bomb building, cop wounding, and sedition fomenting. The elderly couple wants to help the poor girl out, the more open-minded marriage counselor wife (the wonderful Elaine May in her first role in 16 years) eager to keep her hidden, while the paranoid ad man husband (Allen) descends into a stubborn bundle of helpless nerves as the youthful firebrand (Miley Cyrus) slowly unravels their lives’ predictable patterns. It’s all a great excuse for Allen to explore his usual interest in intermingling relationship tangles with philosophical inquiry.

By far his longest narrative project – clocking in at well over two hours total – it is a six-part miniseries for Amazon. (The shift in form would seem more of a leap if the consistency of his filmmaking over decades – the repetitive themes, recurring character types, the regular font, the usual jazz scores – weren’t already a version of television’s comforting familiarity.) He introduces a large cast of characters with competing loyalties, like the conservative business major (John Magaro) who is smitten by the fetching fugitive, much to the dismay of his debutante fiancé (Rachel Brosnahan). And then there’s a cornucopia of familiar and fun faces as neighbors, patients, parents, cops, and protestors (Becky Ann Baker, Lewis Black, Max Casella, David Harbour, Nina Arianda, Christine Ebersole, Joy Behar, Michael Rapaport, and more). It’s stuffed with personality, but not every character comes to life with as much fullness as the time could permit, like soggy and underdeveloped romantic triangles amongst the younger characters.

There’s also the matter of political rhetoric, for as loaded and provocative as it could be it is instead cozy and comfortable fuzzy hindsight. The prickliest it gets is an early lament about how divisive and polarized the country’s politics are, a wry what-goes-around-comes-around smirk at our circular national crises and our inability to move past them. The great premise is just an excuse to knock contentedly humdrum characters into frazzled situations. I imagine such areas of thinness would be excused if this were a shorter feature. With so much time on his hands, though, there’s simply too much room here for dead air, stiff setups, tone-deaf teasing (a tossed off one-liner about a troubled adopted daughter lands poorly), and lackadaisical reaches for obvious developments. In order to go about stretching this tight little farce over so many segments the plot takes some meandering and the zip in the tension falls slack.

Then there is, of course, the slight stiffness and stodginess that’s crept into Allen’s filmmaking of late, a half-theatrically stilted, half-literary dustbin approach in which exposition is a little too plainly displayed and some zingers come wheezing to the punchline. But even when the writing gets a tad stale, the cast is so energetic and pleasantly amusing, it coasts along on comfortable charms and relaxed charisma. Allen is the quintessential Allen type, May is totally at ease playing the slightly frazzled upper-middle-class pseudo-intellectual (her comfort zone since her Nichols and May days), and Cyrus is just the right young, earnest, half-idealistic/half-cynical goof to send them spinning. Per usual, the right ensemble can carry over slightly below par Allen writing, and this one is overflowing with the exact right casting to elevate the downtimes, the patches that could’ve used another draft or two.

The stage is set for the characters’ conflicts to pile up quite swimmingly, and find occasion in the unevenness for some of the funniest scenes Allen has written in a while. May’s counseling sessions are perfect little sketches, and recurring scenes with her lovable, and increasingly politically rambunctious, little old ladies’ book club are a terrific throughline. Allen and Cyrus spar over food, consumerism, and communist ideals in agreeably prickly wars of words. There’s even a scene in which May scrambles over rooftops after a briefcase of contraband Cuban currency, so this is the sort of story that escalates in sometimes satisfyingly silly and unpredictable ways. Allen has some fun with the historical context, dusting off old quips about Vietnam, hippies, Nixon, Black Panthers, war protestors, and Latin American revolutionaries. (There’s an echo of Bananas there, I suppose.) By the final twenty minutes, which include a sustained and hilarious homage to the Marx brothers’ famous Night at the Opera stateroom sequence, the whole fitfully farcical storyline has arrived at a satisfying crescendo that’s well worth the wait.

Winging It: STORKS

Storks is a rather unlikely animated family film. You can think of it as either a broad contemporization of the ancient European myth of large white birds delivering children. And you can say it’s a wacky cartoon about where babies come from brought to you by a Pixar alum (Doug Sweetland, of the energetic rabbit v. magician short Presto) and a writer-director of vulgar R-rated comedies (Nicholas Stoller, of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Neighbors). Either way it sounds improbable that it’d work, let alone be sweet, gentle, and good-natured. Nonetheless, here it is, a genial, amusing animated comedy that takes flight in lots of unexpected silliness and cleverly developed metaphor. You may question the need to reinvigorate and reinterpret the old storks legend. I don’t know what they’re teaching in health classes these days, but maybe a candy-colored kids’ movie about how loveable babies are, how easy they are to get, and how they can heal a broken family is not exactly a totally helpful message. Still, Sweetland and Stoller throw themselves into their high-concept with upbeat energy and a winning sense of fun.

When the story begins, storks have stopped delivering babies. Instead, their warehouse perched at the top of Stork Mountain is a distribution hub for CornerStore dot com, and they pride themselves on speedy delivery. With no more messy, demanding babies to fuss with, productivity is up and profitability is way up. Because you’ve seen this setup before, you know it’s a good thing that’s bound to be bad. The movie takes a bunch of component parts from other family movies of this ilk – a conventional journey narrative, character arcs of positive self-discovery, and workaholics who need to slow down and appreciate down time with family – and grinds them through a slapstick machine, making pleasant and enjoyable entertainment out of it. A stork on the precipice of a big promotion has a big problem when the one human around – a girl whose name tag was broken at birth, so she’s lived her entire life with the birds – inadvertently sends a dead letter into the dormant baby-making machine. Now the stork and the girl must work together to get the new baby to her parents before anyone realizes their mistake. Madcap goofiness ensues.

The filmmakers create a fairly typical CG animation style of rounded, squishy surfaces, but slather on a sheen of stretchiness that’s more malleable and rubbery than other studios’ house styles. Freed from the Pixar/DreamWorks/Sony/and so on mold, the movie is free to exercise its dusting of cartoony elasticity as it goes through familiar paces. Is there any doubt that the blustering bird boss (Kelsey Grammer) will be defeated, the toady pigeon (Stephen Kramer Glickman) will get his comeuppance, and the busy human parents (Jennifer Aniston and Ty Burrell) will grow closer to their adorable moppet (Anton Starkman)? Of course not. But what saves the movie are its loopy line-readings and whimsical nonsense. The slimy pigeon is a scene-stealer, a mushy Valley Guy accent stumbling through his vacuous scheming. A pack of wolves (its leaders voiced by Key and Peele) can form bridges, boats, and more with their fast reflexes and groupthink sync. Penguins do battle in silence, trying not to wake the baby. There are a lot of silly touches embellishing the edges of the familiar paces. My favorite was a bird singing a song to which he doesn’t know all the lyrics, the subtitles inviting us to sing along devolving into garbled gibberish right in step with him.

That’s the fun on the margins, though. Keeping the core throughline fun are the leads, a frazzled stork (Andy Samberg), way in over his head and desperate to prove himself even with a broken wing, and a cute, weird girl (Katie Crown), a determined and endearing string bean with a frizzy mop of red hair. The performers approach the material from odd angles, chirping and swooping around what in other hands would be obvious punchlines and sentimental button-pushing. In a movie built on a succession of improbable ideas, perhaps the most unlikely is the one that trusted an audience to care about the friendship between a stork and a girl, not to mention their commitment to caring for a babbling infant while taking her to her rightful family. It teeters on the edge of unbelievable, but somehow the movie is energetic and amiable enough, and the voices enjoyable enough, to sell it. In the end the whole zippy, cuddly thing is even a little moving in its story of humanity and diversity beating the soulless corporation, bringing joy back to families of all races, sizes, and compositions. You could do a lot worse than that.

Cruel and Usual: GOAT

Here comes Goat to give us the disgusting flip side of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!! That was a nostalgia-soaked film about the upsides of sunny homosocial bonding and collegiate identity formation. Goat is the grimier underbelly, concerned mostly with a fraternity’s Hell Week hazing, showing in extended, unblinking, and repellent detail the extent to which these ritualized houses of horrors cater to every worst impulse a young man might have. Pledges are humiliated, stripped, attacked, pelted with garbage, caged, beaten, and made to imbibe as much alcohol as possible. And that’s only the first night. They’ll be put through a gauntlet of torture, beaten down emotionally and physically night after night. And for what? To say they belong to a fraternity? To gain access to the sociological benefits that come from such intense relationship forming coupled with a direct historical lineage for this brotherhood? One side character is affronted when his roommate suggests quitting mid-rush. “If the frat goes away, everything goes,” he says.

The lead character is a nice enough young man (Ben Schnetzer) who, in the summer before his freshman year in college, is assaulted. His attackers jump him outside an off-campus party where he was visiting his older brother (Nick Jonas). Bloodied and bruised, he’s clearly still suffering from post-traumatic stress when the fall semester rolls around. This is clearly someone who is psychologically not ready to endure the tortures of rushing a fraternity. But his brother is in the big frat on campus, and he wants to prove to him, and himself, that he’s man enough to become one of the guys. The fragility of his mental state isn’t hammered home, but it certainly amplifies the torture on display. As if seeing the slaps and hearing the shouting, watching the nauseating slurries of food and fluids and seeing the brutal pranks (urinated on while stuck in a large dog cage; blindfolded and marched to a bathroom where a banana is floating in the toilet, made to reach in and grab it; forced to down vast quantities of beer with the threat of a being forced to defile a goat as punishment for failure) weren’t hard enough, we have subtextual knowledge that makes it even harder to take.

What is it that makes the robbery in the film’s opening something worth investigating and punishing – one frat member sneers bileful scorn at “townies” – while the hazing goes on with near total immunity? The fuzzy dichotomy between lawful and unlawful beatings set up by writer-director Andrew Neel and co-writers Mike Roberts and David Gordon Green shows plainly that frats aren’t the root of all evil, but the way they codify and condone systematized toxic masculinity isn’t healthy. It’s societal rot. These aren’t boyish antics excused as japes and capers. These aren’t charming jerks redeemed – even only partially – by their camaraderie. The frat’s leadership is presented as entirely scary, even when feigning care or talking up the good of their unity. They hide behind tradition, proud it’s been this way for a hundred years, and excusing it because what they do is no different, they say, than what other frats do. Emboldened by their perceived immunity, they enact a torturous relationship with their pledges.

It’s enough to make one wonder if frats nationwide are nothing but hundreds of replicas of the Stanford prison experiment, authority inevitably corrupting to and emboldening of every testosterone-drunk freedom of impressionable young men. When they hear another frat has ratted them out for their intense hazing, they flip out. As the movie progresses there are cracks in the frat’s façade, with one member’s slow dismay over the recruits’ extra-nasty treatment leading him to ask, “is it harder this year?” When the dean brings extra scrutiny to bear, investigating charges, they are aggrieved. How dare they face consequences? The performances are committed, wild-eyed, at a fever pitch that approaches frightening intensity. Here are lost young men, radicalized by the pure adrenaline of power, big fish in a small pond allowed to devour anyone they wish.

Neel’s filmmaking is sensitive and restrained, simply recording the specifics in long, uncomfortable, unadorned sequences. Many are harrowing. Some are merely sad, like when an alum (James Franco) storms in for a visit, expressing great disappointment a job, wife, and child are keeping him from partying like the old days. He, too, has bought into the toxicity of the structure, and can’t get it out of his system. It’s poisoned at the root. As the lead character must decide what kind of a man he wants to be, how fully he wants to buy into this cracked situation, the movie gathers a quiet moral force. We see the pain on the pledges’ faces, see it swallowed back with a forced stoicism as they allow abuse to be piled on them even when it stings, even when it hurts, even when it bleeds, even when they should know better, even when their lives could be endangered. The vomit and the blood and the bruises cake the grotesque tableaus. It’s as good a reminder as any that no good frat is good enough to excuse the existence of the worst.

Seven Up: THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven is a rare sight: the straightforward all-star Hollywood Western. That alone is almost enough to make it fun, as the film gets down to business fulfilling every basic core comfort its designation promises. That it is also a glossy high-budget big studio movie that’s slickly competent, highly efficient, uncomplicated, completely confident in its easy genre pleasures and totally solid in its narrative drive heightens the fun. This is an energetic, red-blooded action movie leaning hard into a Wild West fantasy of righteous violence, in which gunplay and good intentions are enough to win the day. Fuqua has made a career out of movies about violent men – Training Day, King Arthur, Shooter, Southpaw. Here, though, the violence is pure sensation above all else, satisfying and enjoyably expressive. Remaking John Sturges’ sturdy 1960 Western, itself inspired by Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, he tells a firm, old-fashioned oater in amped-up and appealing 2016 style.

The setup is familiar. A small frontier town is beset by an evil robber baron (Peter Sarsgaard, who all but twirls his mustache as the slimy villain). The narcissistic land-grabber is determined to run the townsfolk from the place, the better for him to expand his mine and get richer. He shoots some of them and burns their church to the ground, throwing in the insult-to-injury offer of $20 each if they skedaddle. Obviously this doesn’t sit well with the kindly townspeople, so a freshly widowed young woman (Haley Bennett) heads out to find the help they need to fight back. The first chunk of the movie is devoted to her search, introducing a grand total of seven men willing to lend a hand and a weapon to this noble cause. The next chunk involves the posse wrangling up a plan. Finally, there’s the big blowout gunfight as rounds of ammunition blast back and forth in creatively staged bouts of battle. There’s no surprise to the outline, but that’s to the film’s credit. The fun is in the reliable old narrative working again, and in the fine, unfussy character work that fills in the details.

It helps that the lead hero is Denzel Washington, as great a hero as we could hope for. Here he fits the wide-brimmed cowboy hat that shadows his tough-but-kind eyes in mystery. He sits in the saddle or struts down the dusty street with the complete and total moral and physical self-confidence with which he’s become synonymous. He plays a marshal roaming the west hunting bad guys. Of course he’s willing to help a nice little town defeat their wannabe corporate despot. (Co-writers Richard The Expendables 2 Wenk and Nic True Detective Pizzolatto’s chewy dialogue gives the villain a speech up top where he explicitly conflates profit with patriotism.) Of course he’s also driven by revenge, as we eventually learn his own sad reason to hate the man. But because he’s Denzel we have all the faith in the world that he’s on the side of truth and good, lassoing a diverse group of misfits into following his lead and rescuing this town from its looming doom.

In the extended, explosive and violent finale, Washington, seemingly without effort, slides off the saddle and hangs on the side, using the horse as cover while firing at baddies, then jumps back up and gets off another perfect shot as the horse rears back. I wanted to applaud. He’s that cool. The rest of his gang are an enjoyable bunch as well, and the movie’s smart not to load them down with intergroup conflict or subplots about grudges or romances. It’s lean, and straight to the point, allowing the invited actors to have fun with Western types while bringing the personality required of them. There’s Ethan Hawke as a doubting sharpshooter, Byung-hun Lee as an expert bladesman (styled like Lee Van Cleef), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as a Mexican bandit, Martin Sensmeier as a Native American archer, and best is Vincent D’Onofrio as a burly mountain man he plays with a funny, soulful high-pitched roughness. Bringing the total to seven is Chris Pratt in another of his slanted Harrison Ford impressions, bringing a sly grin and unexpected/expected dusting of goofiness to his quips. Within the first second they appear, we quickly know who they are, what they’re good at, and how the action will rely on them.

Though Fuqua amps up the speed, volume, and violence in his Magnificent Seven, stripping away all but the essential story beats and drawing the character’s distinctions quickly in broad strokes, he still knows how to provide what a Western needs to really get cooking. He lets the downtime breathe with an awareness of just how long it takes to gallop from one place to another. When Washington and crew stroll into town, after doing battle with crooked deputies (including Cam Gigandet), they tell the worried citizens they have a week to prepare – three days for the stooges to ride back to the boss, a day for them to plan, and three days for their army of deplorables to ride back armed to the teeth. Add to that the time spent putting their own group and plan together, and that leaves a lot of good quality time with the pistols, buttes, baked beans, campfires, church meetings, poker games, and swinging saloon doors that sell the genre setting between High Noon shootouts.

Fuqua knows the long setup earns a sharp and cleverly staged crescendo of action. My favorite bit, outside of Washington’s cool horse stunt, was a scowling baddie gunned down falling back into an empty open coffin outside the coroner’s. But Fuqua, with his frequent cinematographer Mauro Fiore, also makes the violence with some attention to horror. This won’t end with all seven standing, and the townspeople really are outgunned. Shots of terrified children huddled in a basement, or farmers nervously clutching rifles under cover as bullets rattle by, are welcome splashes of perspective in a movie that’s otherwise shooting for the iconic with cowboys astride faithful steeds silhouetted against the sunrise and dastardly villains squaring off against those whose purity of intention should win in the end. It’s this balance – Movie Stars and character actors; brilliant iconography and intimations of humanity – that make for a compelling, enjoyable, and satisfying entertainment beginning to end.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at CAMERAPERSON

Cameraperson is singular. It’s a complicated and entrancing autobiography built out of footage from other nonfiction films. What we see and hear becomes a reconfiguring of what it means to see and hear a film, the various sequences united only by the vision they represent. As a movie about vision – about what we see, about what filmmakers’ choose to show, about how these sights affect those who create and those who view – there’s a multitude of vantage points one can take to begin to make sense of it.

Here are a few.

1. It’s a movie as memoir. The cameraperson in question is Kirsten Johnson, cinematographer and camera operator on dozens of documentary projects over the past 20 years. In making this movie, she has collected and compiled shots and scenes from her career, placing them together, not chronologically but in some intuitive memory logic. Individually they are compelling, fascinating, carrying the intellectual charge that brought the documentary crew to capture them in the first place. But there’s a larger goal at work. We see moments that have, as she writes, “marked” her and “leave me wondering still.” Slowly, she adds personal footage, of her mother and father and children. Together they add up to a portrait of a woman’s professional and personal life. There is no narration. There is little explanatory text beyond a brief note at the beginning telling us to take the following as memoir. We’re to view her in every frame. She is her occupation.

2. It’s a movie about the woman behind the curtain. But it doesn’t pull the curtain back or peek behind. She simply wants us to be aware of the person there.

3. It’s a movie about work. We can get swept up in stories, people, and vivid tableaus presented, but there’s always the understanding Johnson is behind the camera. The film is a procession of images and sequences, artful and intense, by turns emotional and clinical. But unlike their sources, here there is new awareness placed on the hard work of their making. It draws attention to the labor involved. What does a cameraperson do? She gets the shots. She crafts the images. (One moment shows her hand dart in front of the lens to pluck an errant clump of grass from distracting.) By showing us the process through this context, she makes it clear we see what we see because she decides we could. The movie features little in the way of looks behind the scenes. What it does show us is what’s in the frame – and implies what’s outside the frame – in the margins of the original works. Fleeting moments reveal the personality behind the camera through a gasp, an command, an admission of emotional investment, a worried concern, and hushed indications of found profundity.

4. It’s a movie as clip reel, a portfolio. This is no diminishment, because this is no That’s Entertainment! comprehensive overview or utilitarian résumé. We’re not seeing greatest hits or notable outtakes. We’re seeing moments. Through the scope of the projects presented, as well as the diversity of subjects tackled, one can see the expertise Johnson brings to each film on which she works. There’s a casual beauty to the way she takes in landscapes and architecture, and an acute sensitivity to the emotions of her interviews. Whatever it is, she throws herself into getting a good shot. She races along next to philosopher Jacques Derrida down a street, trips walking backwards in front of The New Yorker’s cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, listens with empathy to a devastating story from a child injured in an I.E.D. explosion (telling him she’s deeply moved). It’s a movie of considerable skill, aptitude in every shot, a testament to her talents.

5. It’s a movie of poetry, knowledgeably and thoughtfully assembled. The details are precise, sharply drawn, well observed. Its tapestry assembles slowly, deliberately, and patiently. What are we to make of the connections between projects with disparate topics? Reading the surface you could see a simple travelogue (Afghanistan, Alabama, Bosnia, Brooklyn, Nigeria…) or a look at the varieties of modern documentary concerns (hot-button politics, shameful tragedies, quirky character studies). Or you could look closer, get beneath the tenuous and obvious strands, and see an interconnected web of sensitive emotional connections and endless possibility for interpretation. Recurring ideas of parents, children, emotional and literal violence, and the aftermath of trauma (one haunting montage includes empty buildings and fields where atrocities have taken place) are both specific and symbolic. It feels like a carefully composed ode to her career, its meaning in the world, and impact on her soul.

6. (It’s a movie of fonts. Here is where I must point out Johnson’s incredible attention to detail extends to the typefaces. I didn’t think of this on my own. Read Charlie Lyne in Filmmaker Magazine with a brilliant dissection here.)

7. It’s a movie as an invitation to think. Johnson doesn’t want a passive viewer. No, by recontextualizing her past work in this new form she invites a focus on why a shot was made, and on why we’re seeing it now. She wants your intellectual involvement, not to take in and feel and react passively, but to let the sounds and images light up your mind. All movies – with the exception of the egregiously brain dead – activate thoughts. But here’s one that cultivates a rhythm and space for active wondering about the construction, drawing unavoidable attention to every artistic choice, each frame, each cut.

8. It’s a movie that blends the personal and political, as if there’s a difference to begin with. Jobs have taken her to troubled areas all around the world. Everywhere, political strife has hurt. We glimpse it with a USB drive from Citizenfour ground up in cement. And Michael Moore mid-Fahrenheit 9/11 promising he’ll try to help a soldier who admits he plans to go AWOL before his next deployment. And women in every corner of the globe bravely explaining their rapes, their kidnappings, their decisions to have abortions. Johnson’s camera has captured much pain, and the weight of these encounters make it clear that nothing is ever a simple case of partisan or ideological talking points. Life is as political as it is messy.

9. It’s a movie of one life reflected in other people. Late in the film is footage of Johnson returning to a small village to visit a family she recorded years before. (We’ve seen some of them earlier, including one harrowing shot of a toddler playing with a hatchet, hearing and sympathizing with Johnson’s off-camera winces, aching with tension as she, and the camera, keep an objective distance.) She wants to show them the final product and tell them how much their kindness meant to her. Here’s something we don’t often see in a documentary. Yes, there are the facts recorded. But what impact did it have on those filmed, and those doing the filming? What we see as cinema vérité has an unseen reverse shot. Taken together they’d be a slice of life for the fly on the wall, too. When we see glimpses of home movies, Johnson’s twins or her dying mother or her aging father, we see a mostly happy family with usual problems, and yet we also see a stark contrast to the human misery she’s devoted her life to chronicling. When we hear her voice from behind the camera, she’s not breaking the fourth wall. She’s behind it, the engaged and empathetic artist and witness.

10. It’s a movie of juxtapositions. With editor Nels Bangerter (who has worked on some of the same projects as Johnson) images, ideas, feelings, impressions, and stories sit side by side. We see a tough boxer taking a hard loss, then getting comforted by his mother. We see Johnson’s mother slipping into Alzheimer’s. We see people around the world recounting past trauma. We hear the urgent warnings of a translator and guide as military in a far flung conflict zone suspiciously sizes up the presence of a doc crew outside a prison. We see a creaking Ferris Wheel in Afghanistan. The world is large, and full of surprise. Johnson finds the serendipity and logic behind the vast differences and confluences, forcing to think about moments in new contexts. We see the resilience of those who face the unthinkable, carry unspeakable devastation, and continue forward, living their lives. The mundane and the moving sit comfortably together.

11. It’s a movie as a way of understanding a mediator. What is a cameraperson but the one who sees the things we can’t and brings it back to us for our consideration? It’s her decision that shapes a moment, notices detail, frames a narrative. With a director and editor it becomes a documentary’s message. But she’s the source. It starts with her. Now she shapes it to her own purposes, aiming it directly at the audience, with an understanding that they’ll make of it what they will. Here’s what she saw. What do you make of it?

12. It’s a movie as metaphor. The cameraperson is a conduit for so much human existence. She’s a purifier, collecting the most wrenching moments of someone’s life (a limp newborn baby not breathing, the film’s most harrowing sustained sequence; or an old woman’s testimony of kidnapping and torture, hard even to hear) and making such grief useful to a wide audience. There is the old concept of the sin-eater, a person who absolves the departed of their pain by engaging in a ritual meal that allows them eternal peace. Taking in others’ pain can be an act of kindness. Johnson includes an interview with people investigating war crimes. They explain what a relief it is to the victims to unburden themselves, and yet how difficult it is that now the investigators must carry that burden with no release. Isn’t that true, also, of the cameraperson along with them? Where can she go to take the pain she’s recorded? She’s taken in the strong emotions, good and bad, of everything she’s seen, and now it is a part of her. The only release is to share it with us.

13. Cameraperson is a masterpiece.

BRIDGET JONES'S BABY Makes Three

Seeing Bridget Jones’s Baby is like reconnecting with an old friend you thought and hoped would have her life together by now. It’s not her fault. That’s just what life keeps throwing her way. In her case, life is the plot novelist Helen Fielding and filmmakers like Sharon Maguire keep serving up. Each movie forces her to awkwardly relearn the same lessons: to roll with the punches, have self-confidence, and be happy with who she is whether or not there’s a man in her life. Fifteen years have passed since the socially awkward Bridget (Renée Zellweger) first strode on screen in the sweet and charming Bridget Jones’s Diary, the story of sad single woman in London who can’t decide between two rakish men, a slick cad (Hugh Grant) and a cold, but secretly warm-hearted, stuffed shirt (Colin Firth). The sequel, 2004’s Edge of Reason, reset the relationships to have the same men fighting over her in much the same emotional beats. At least Baby makes three a slightly different dynamic, finding Bridget a new fling and a nine-month surprise growing throughout.

For the better part of an hour the movie gets by on nothing more than the sheer pleasure of seeing the twinkly-eyed Zellweger back on the screen. She hasn’t had a role in six years, and hasn’t been Bridget, her most famous character, in over a decade. So when a now-43-year-old Jones walks into a sad, lonely birthday convinced her work life will be her satisfying replacement for romantic travails, it feels awfully nice to have her driven and desirous of nothing more than self-improvement and self-care. Alas, it’s too good to be true, as a hoookup at a music festival with a mysterious billionaire (Patrick Dempsey) and an unexpected rekindling of passions with her old love (Firth) leave her pregnant. Once more, two men fight for her affections, this time with the ticking time bomb of a DNA test (which she decides to make post-partum instead of an amniocentesis) adding an extra layer of squirmy comic tension.

That’s a decent start to a good Bridget reunion, progressing her story slightly, creating new conflict, upping the stakes, and inviting new handsome middle-aged men into her world. Now she’s committed to having a baby (she bristles at being called a “geriatric mother,” but also recognizes this might be her one chance at pregnancy) and settling into a new aspect of life. To help her do so, she faces the Solomon-like task of figuring out which man gets to raise the baby as her co-parent. Will it be the man she has loved, or the man she could love? Not a bad question. This certainly isn’t a calamitous late sequel. But it lacks its original nimble spark. Running a galumphing 122 minutes, co-writers Fielding, Dan Mazer (Dirty Grandpa), and the great Emma Thompson have simply not enough plot or charm to last. Especially lumpy, there are underfed subplots, forced short cameos for familiar faces past (though Jim Broadbent never hurts), and a central farce with far too much dead air for how urgent its mysteries are. Bridget’s dithering about informing one prospective father of the other, and indeed her confusion about whether biology should inform her choice at all, creates a long, awkward stasis.

Beyond the wheel-spinning at its center, the movie can’t quite place Bridget in a believable 2016. There’s tepid social media commentary and millennial bashing in the form a new team brought in to run the newsroom where Bridget works. (A few exhausted swipes at man buns, live streams, and hashtags aren’t as nervy as the movie seems to think.) Similarly, an endless gag in which Bridget doesn’t recognize Ed Sheeran falls flat, but not as deadly behind-the-times as an enthusiastic dance floor “Gangnam Style” discussion. What is this? 2012? Ditto the recurring references to a court case and subsequent protest parade concerning a Russian women’s punk band. These are weak distractions from the questions at hand. Who is the father? Who is best for Bridget? Will she finally get her life together? All is answered, and reasonably satisfactorily if you ask me. And Zellweger and Firth are good enough at selling the long history and misty-eyed potential in their relationship. But the distended phoniness around them is more than I could take.