The Man Who Knew Infinity

In the prologue to Matt Brown’s interesting but undernourished film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, Irons’ character, Cambridge professor H.D. Hardy, suggests that he and the “man” of the title shared a deep friendship that the film does not relay. In fact, the movie does much to show Hardy and Indian mathematician Ramanujan (Patel) had a surface-y association for much of the time of their collaboration. Hardy brought Ramanujan to England in the 1910s after receiving a letter fro…m the young Hindi that contained imaginative mathematical formulas and a request for help publishing his work. Hardy spent many hours urging him to discipline his thinking and test his ideas by using established, accepted proofs. Ramanujan resisted at first but eventually conceded, all while suffering hateful treatment from teachers and classmates. That Hardy knew nothing of this or much else about the man speaks not only to his detachment from his protege but, as is slowly revealed, the scholar’s detachment from life outside his own study. Hardy eventually becomes Ramanujan’s champion and delivers a stirring case for his admission as a fellow to the Royal Society. The math is dense and its importance not clearly conveyed. Because of this, the story needed more about life away from the books and chalk. The few scenes of Ramanujan’s alienation only suggest the pain he must have endured to be heard.

X-men Apocalypse

Singer’s X-Men Apocalypse is a bad picture that is technically, er, Marvelous. It’s mishy-mashy, hodgy-podgy, unwieldy and tedious. Its tale of the End Times runs far too long; its battle scenes are blurry, illogical messes that made me squirm with irritation. It lacks wit and insight and nearly everything that made the original entries in the franchise classics. I’d read the film was weak but it’s astounding how awful it is.

Money Monster

Jodie Foster’s Money Monster crackled and popped like a first-rate thriller but lacked sufficient narrative to get me to care about the people at the center of the story (Clooney and Roberts). It is saved, ultimately, by actor Jack O'Connell, whose highly engaging angry young man Kyle Budwell drives the economical plot to what is, unfortunately, a predictable ending. Clooney stars as a television investment guru and Roberts the director of his circus of a show. Enter stage right disgruntled Everyman Kyle with a gun and a vest filled with explosives and a simple demand – to know why a stock Clooney’s Lee Gates had promoted as a sure thing only a few weeks before had recently lost 800 million dollars, ruining Budwell and thousands of other investors. As crafted by Foster, as serious a film director as any, the story of this catastrophe stays a little too murky, the last reel showdown a bit too rushed and pat for my taste. Still, the movie’s strength is the middle section when Budwell’s pain – in all of its human dimensions – becomes clear and the focus of the picture.

Captain America: Civil War

Captain America: Civil War is an explosively excessive treatise on loyalty, accountability and excess explosives. Evans and Downey lead teams on opposite sides of a movement to put the otherwise free-agents-of-justice Avengers under U.N. supervision. It seems that rampaging, enhanced vigilantes sometimes leave mass destruction and dead bodies in their wake. All of this death and regret makes for intensely dour (though wonderfully crafted) stuff by the Russo Bros. Leave the kids home.

Barbershop 3: The Next Cut

Ice Cube’s highly entertaining Barbershop series has been mostly a celebration of urban (black) culture and sexual politics with social consciousness as garnishing. The third outing amps up the polemics with not altogether satisfying results. Still, the laughs come honestly and are nearly devoid of pandering and buffoonery. Even though the film’s resolution feels more audacious than hopeful, its message to reject community impotence in the face of gang violence is sorely needed.

The Nice Guys

The Nice Guys is a funny flick about good guys doing bad things to worse people. Crowe and Gosling are a ball-busting Abbott & Costello in disco-era polyester with a 13-year-old moppet sidekick as they lay waste to half of L.A. while searching for a missing social activist porno actress. It’s all ludicrous but so much fun.

Eye in the Sky and Hello, My Name is Doris.

Gavin Hood's morality play Eye in the Sky about a multinational anti-terrorist operation led by the British (Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman) and supported by American drones asks important questions about the value of a single innocent life when the possibility of even greater loss resulting from inaction is nearly certain. Both Mirren and... Rickman play steely military commanders who want to take out a terrorist unit in Kenya in the worst way -- even though members of the suicide bomb squad they have been tracking include both British and American citizens who have been radicalized by Islamists. Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) plays the drone pilot whose reluctance to fire without full confidence collateral damage is at an acceptable level begins a fascinating (and frustrating) dialectic on the price of war. Highly recommended.

Michael Showalter's sweetly delightful Hello, My Name is Doris asks questions about the value of human life in an entirely different way. Sally Field plays Doris, a meek though colorful data enterer in New York, who takes the ferry over from her family home on Staten Island and two trains to get to her office. She's a lonely hoarder of other people's refuse who is taken by her company's new ad director John (Max Greenfield), who notices her and treats her kindly. That's just enough attention to lead Doris into some benign cyber-stalking with the granddaughter of her best friend (Tyne Daly). Doris and John become friends but the spinster's desiccated social life and over-stimulated imagination leads her into some fairly cringe-inducing moments that are handled brilliantly by Field, Greenfield and director Showalter. The film can be either funny or sad, depending on your age, or both, if you are close to your own humanity. Highly Recommended.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Zack Snyder's high energy Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is fueled by pain, grief and regret -- like the characters at its center. Their stories are familiar and fretful tales of personal (Batman) and planetary (Superman) devastation that they wear like a second skin, or like the uniforms they don to fight evildoers. The film is gorgeous but terribly bleak, the battle scenes stupendous and interminable and the acting not entirely engaging but totally serviceable. The much-maligned Ben Affleck makes a studly though surprisingly dense Bruce Wayne / Batman, and the studlier Henry Cavill a surprisingly randy and adolescent Clark Kent / Superman, whom the hapless Lois Lane (Amy Adams) doesn't know exactly what to do with. I would not suggest that any of this is alien to Snyder's world; they just feel a bit flat for a movie that contains a hefty amount of religio-philosophy about the nature of God and godliness and man's duty. This deep-thinking is delivered mostly by a frantic Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), whose daddy issues have turned him into an affluenza psychopath. As annoying as his tics might be, I enjoyed watching Eisenberg chew scenery; he's one of the best. This introduction to the upcoming DC Universe film series (Flash, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Justice League are all either in production or being planned) is not the film disaster some claim but it will probably be savored mostly by DC comic hounds and admirers of high dollar Hollywood beefcake.

Deadpool

Tim Miller's Deadpool is counterpoint (counterpunch?) to the Marvel Universe's customary earnestness -- much like 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy and 2015's Ant-Man, both of which starred enormously likable leads (Chris Pratt and Paul Rudd, respectively) playing characters who reluctantly pulled on a hero's mantle. In Deadpool, Ryan Reynolds' Wade Wilson -- cancer survivor and mutated vigilante badass -- is no more interested in being one of the sanctimonious X-men (he's being courted by Xavier's emissaries) than he is in flying to the moon. That is to say his aspirations are pretty base. Deadpool, the character, is a lethal, indestructible vulgar hedonist, who delights in both eviscerating his enemies (Ed Skrein and Gina Carano) and in holiday-themed sex play with his squeeze (Morena Baccarin). Deadpool, the film, is a celebration (and also a bit of a denunciation) of fame and fandom, targeted at fanboys who still think a quick punch to the nads is hilarious and the fangirls who hang with them. It's glib hyper-violence and a good amount of tightly choreographed mayhem and destruction. Don't forget to wear your cups -- boys and girls.

Hail, Caesar!

Joel and Ethan Coen's Hail, Caesar! is not exactly a motion picture. To me, it's more of an entertaining notion realized by Coen Brother cache and connections. I enjoyed both the idea and the execution of this movie about movies and moviemakers. They've written and staged dozens of hilarious moments -- a couple of mildly risible scenes -- and packed the story of movie producer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) who's trying to make a movie about Jesus (this Ben-Hur) with crafty insights and commentary about power, faith, fidelity, communism and a half dozen other important issues but, interestingly, at least for this viewer, doesn't close the deal on any of them. And that's OK because I don't think they intended to. And I think they, self-referentially, make that point in the last reel when studio megastar Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) as a Roman centurion (think The Robe) delivers what should be the crescendo moment at the foot of the cross on Mt. Calvary but, alas, it doesn't come off as planned. And that, in Coen Brother style (Think Blood Simple, Raising Arizona), is the way it goes. Sometimes you blow the line, lose the girl, drop the cash and the deal, but, because this is life, you carry one. Highly recommended for folks who love the Coen Brothers and/or the movies.

Anomalisa

The animated feature film Anomalisa, conceived and directed by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) and Duke Johnson, is an insightful treatment of disconnection and alienation -- portrayed through stop-motion puppetry. It's astonishing not simply because of the fluid detai in its crafting but the smartness of its conceit: As we age and retreat from life a stifling and stiffening sameness descends that is lifted, occasionally, if we're lucky, by something (someone) genuine and unaffected. That's the story of human relations guru Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewliss) who flies from L.A. to Cincinnati to deliver yet another talk to customer service personnel who read and "loved" his book on the importance of recognizing the humanity in our patrons. Oddly, for Stone, every other person looks and sounds the same (voiced by Tom Noonan) except the shy and damaged (physically and emotionally) Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who drove down from Akron with a friend just for Michael's speech. They provide one another reprieve for a night and the morning delivers, along with scrambled eggs and Belgian waffles, a glimpse of new possibilities. Though the characters are cozy felt figurines, this is no children's feature, as it includes scenes of graphic nudity and simulated sexual relations. Highly recommended.

The Revenant

The fellow in front of me at the cinema asked the clerk for a ticket to the "mountain man movie." I'm not sure if Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's The Revenant delivered the kind of story that patron was expecting but it IS a tale of a primordial survivalist, who rises from a snowy grave to seek revenge with nothing but his will and a knife.

Leonardo DiCaprio is such a fine actor that little needs to be said about the quality of his performance. He is riveting as tracker and guide Hugh Glass, who is attached to a fur trade operation in the western frontier. Bands of Arikaree Indians rout white settlements in answer for the pillaging done during the westward expansion. DiCaprio's Hugh Glass, who had met and fathered a son with an Indian woman, survived such pillaging with only their son, whom he is devoted to.

During one of the film's most harrowing scenes, Glass is nearly gutted by a mama bear while scouting. He is left in the care of his rival, an angry and murderous trapper from Texas named Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), who quickly grows impatient with the badly wounded Glass and tries to help him shuffle off his mortal coil. Glass's son tries to stop him and is murdered for his trouble in front of his father. The horribly mauled Glass is left for dead in a shallow grave, and Fitzgerald and a conscientious but outmatched young trapper named Bridgers (Will Poulter) head back to the fort through some of the most beautiful and treacherous terrain imaginable.

A combination of willfulness and beneficence from the Great Spirit moves Glass to drag himself out of the tomb and onto the trail to find Fitzgerald and avenge his son ... and himself. The film is a cinematic feast, astounding and overwhelming (as is much of Inarritu's work), but it is unmercifully bleak and bloody. Highly recommended.

The Danish Girl

The beauty and truth in Tom Hooper's The Danish Girl will not be lost on those who can imagine the pain of being absolutely certain about something that no one else can see. The film, based on the novel by David Ebershoff, stars Eddie Redmayne as Einer and Alicia Vikander as Gerda, a young Danish couple, both painters in the 1920s, who discover his peculiar secret after she asks him to pull on a pair of hose and lady's slippers so that she can finish the portrait of an absent model. What at first appears to be just a fetish for women's garments -- a game for the young lovers -- soon blossoms into his awakening as a woman in a man's body. Then begins a journey that ends with his undergoing dangerous surgery to align body and soul. Hooper (The King's Speech, Les Miserables) is far too intelligent to give this story, which is based on the life of an actual transgender pioneer, over to melodrama and anachronistic political pronouncements. It is firmly rooted in the world of the early 20th century with all of its ignorance and inhumanity. In fact, the film has a reverential tone -- set by its sets, music and pacing. It's all lovely but, alas, rather joyless. None of this is the fault of Redmayne or Vikander, who bear Einer's transition to Lili in different but utterly believable ways. Early in the film, Hooper stages a scene with Einer venturing out as Lili to a party with Gerda. At the party, Lili unwittingly draws the attention of a young man (Ben Whishaw) whose proposition to the not quite beautiful and mysterious Danish girl is pitched perfectly, masterful and elegant, which makes the scene -- and the film -- all the more heartbreaking. Highly recommended.

The Hateful Eight

 

Quentin Tarantino is a student of history but certainly not in any conventional sense. His bloody revisionist histories of both Nazi Germany (Inglourioius Basterds) and the Antebellum South (Django Unchained) delighted his many fans who relish the visual and auditory barrage his films offer. The Hateful Eight is a reading of the post-Civil War westward expansion that features his signature verbosity and violence. Eight snowbound travelers -- criminals, bounty hunters, lawmen and some unaccountable others -- huddle together in a remote mercantile in Wyoming and relive the horrors of the War Between the States, racial and ethnic animosities and the wholesale denigration of womanhood when death comes a-calling. The story actually has the structure and perhap the intentions of a classic drawing room murder mystery but is in fact an orgiastic 70 mm visceral feast of revenge and vindication as only Tarantino can stage it. It features several of the auteur's old reliable players -- Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Madsen and Tim Roth -- and a few new faces, most notably Kirk Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Walton Goggins. QT is an acquired taste and his eighth feature, while quite often brilliant, is not for the self-serious or the squeamish.

 

Joy

Even David O. Russell's weaker films are interesting and fairly idiosyncratic in that they challenge viewers to work a little harder than they must for conventional film fare. Such is the case with Russell's Joy, which stars his usual posse of players -- Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro. Russell seems drawn to stories about failed (or failing) people whose lives are truly studies in interpersonal conflict and complication. These characters are mostly sympathetic, like the hardworking divorced mother of two of this film's title, but the lead character's gullibility or greed or lack of healthy boundaries makes them also a bit tarnished and pitiful. Joy (Lawrence) is an imaginative, resourceful but duty-bound young woman, locked into familial commitments but struggling, when she has time, to find a way to make her life less miserable. She gets loving encouragement from her grandmother (Diane Ladd) but little from the other members of her family -- her insensitive father (De NIro), self-involved mother (Virginia Madsen) or envious half-sister (Elizabeth Rohm). Her stargazing, under-employed ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez) offers her moral support and little else that's bankable. Joy's ingenuity leads her to design a product that she fully expects will change the lives of American housekeepers and, ultimately, her own. But, alas, her plans for financial independence are threatened by the world of commerce, which she, frankly, doesn't understand and swindlers eager to take advantage of her ignorance. Russell's Joy is an often entertaining but not entirely satisfying fable about a modern woman who refuses to succumb to circumstances or the limitations of the imaginations around her. Recommended.

Concussion

Journalist and filmmaker Peter Landesman's Concussion will no doubt resonate with those who love tales about waging the good fight on behalf of those who cannot fight for themselves. In this story -- adapted from a GQ article on the rising frequency of suspicious, seemingly self-inflicted deaths among veteran NFL players -- Landesman sets at center stage a meticulous Nigerian immigrant pathologist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who conducts the autopsy on former Steelers center Mike Webster (David Morse). Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) finds anomalous injuries in Webster's brain that were either ignored or hidden by team physicians and which, he is convinced led to Webster's madness and death. He shares his findings with the county coroner (Albert Brooks), who supports Omalu's investigation of other NFL deaths despite the inevitable shitstorm in the league's universe his findings would turn up. Omalu finds a few friends in his quest to be heard, among them, love interest Prema (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and former players physician Dr. Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin) but he also finds himself outmatched by the NFL, which, as Brooks' character says, "owns a day of the week." But Omalu asks, genuinely mystified, why the league commissioner would not want to know the truth and protect the players. The answer is obvious to all who grew up in America, but not so clear to a relatively new arrival, and, further, might make the question even more pressing. Landesman has an ear for story and an eye for the intimate elements contained therein. Scenes between Smith and Mbatha-Raw (Belle, Beyond the Lights) are radiant and in one instance late in the film, heartrending. It would be difficulty for me to overstate how terrific I found Smith to be in this picture. Maybe the real-world celebrity marital / parental drama clouded my memory of just how fine an actor he is when he's got a character to pour himself into (Pursuit of Happyness, Seven Pounds) and he has found another here. Highly recommended.

The Big Short

Adam McKay's name has been attached to Will Farrell's Anchorman series, which McKay wrote and directed. Though the subject of his latest film is high finance, McKay's comedic sensibilities are not entirely benched for The Big Short, which is by turns delicious and disheartening. 

McKay's film is a treatment of Michael Lewis's bestselling chronicle of the chicanery that led to the implosion of the American housing market and the world economy in 2008. Because Lewis's book drilled deep into Wall Street's byzantine money-making mines, McKay stages hilarious and helpful explainers delivered either by one of the picture's primary characters (mainly Ryan Gosling) or guest presenters (among them chef Anthony Bourdain and singer Selena Gomez). 

'This exuberant movie has two settings -- simmering contempt and roiling outrage -- funneled through Christian Bale's Michael Burry and Steve Carell's Mark Baum, both independent financial investors who in 2006 detected the stench of corrupt mortgage lending practices and bet against the continued growth of the subprime housing market, convinced it would implode in a matter of months. 

Though all indications were that this was a certainty, it didn't come when expected, which revealed another layer of corruption -- complicity between Wall Street and "independent" ratings indexers who refused to downgrade the bundled subprime mortgages (as one character describes them "dog shit wrapped in cat shit"). 

As history has shown, the whole affair ended with bank failures and bailouts but no arrests of those who lied and cheated the American public, costing millions of people their livelihoods, homes and retirement funds. 

McKay's The Big Shot is smart, layered and, hopefully, instructive. But don't bet on that. 

Highly Recommended.

Room

Irish director Lenny Abrahamson puts a lot of devastation on the screen in his remarkable film Room. But, for me, the picture's resonating power lies in what is not told and the deep sadness that comes from trying to assemble the pieces. Abrahamson has filmed fellow Irelander Emma Donoghue's screenplay of her bestselling novel of the same name. She tells the story of a young mother (Brie Larson), known only as Ma, and her 5-year-old son (Jacob Tremblay) who are captives of a terrifying man called Old Nick (Sean Bridgers). Ma has been locked in Old Nick's garden shed for seven years; her son, all of his life. The circumstances of the boy's birth, how he and his mother have been sustained, how they came to create the worlds that keep them sane are weighty imponderables.  Abrahamson has crafted the first half of the film so carefully that these claustrophobic confines never feel oppressive, primarily because Jack's innocent wonder about life, as stiflingly artificial as it is, is so genuine and marvelous -- and, yes, tragic. When Ma finally decides they have to escape, the viewer is torn because in doing so she must dismantle Jack's world. The scene of his tearful rejection of her talk of "the world" is nearly more than one can stand. But escape they must and do and that sequence is wrenching and terrifying. The two are finally reunited with family (Joan Allen, William H. Macy and Tom McCamus) but this new chapter feels as perilous for Jack and Ma as their imprisonment had been. Such a beautiful, heartbreaking story.

Chi-Raq

Spike Lee's films are often honest and artful, but rarely at the same time. This usually results in movies that have colliding tones and atmospheres -- the serious and the comic, the theatrical and the dogmatic. In that regard, his films are more like Kevin Smith's than Quentin Tarantino, with whom he has been compared. All three are auteurs, though Smith's work tends to be more purely satiric, not as political, than the others.Tarantino's more violent and less intimate.

Lee's best ideas and images are inspired by the lunacy he finds in governmental corruption and political perfidy and in the conflicts that arise among the races and between the sexes. Confict is at the core of his latest film, Chi-Raq, the name given to inner city Chicago where gang wars have torn communities apart and have been especially deadly for children, innocent bystanders killed by stray bullets fired by bangers who, frankly, couldn't care less. Warring chief bangers, Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) and Cyclops (Wesley Snipes), spew bullets and rhyming invectives as those around them scurry for cover and the unlucky are laid to waste. When the daughter of a young mother (Jennifer Hudson) is killed, the community, led by a firy Catholic priest (John Cusack) will not be stilled and the molls of the beefing thugs borrow an idea from Greek playwright Aristophenes and agree to withhold sex until guns are surrendered and peace is declared.

The head of the women's movement, Lysistrata (the captivating Teyonah Parris) orders a take-no-prisoners posture, commandeers the National Guard Armory with nothing more than a winsome smile and a thong, and faces down every male opponent from horny husbands to befuddled city police. Her "No Peace / No Pussy" campaign sparks an international "withholding" movement and, in pretty short order, shit gets real.

When Lee is not painting scenes and characters with the broadest of strokes or staging rousing dance numbers, he's preaching, not altogether effectively but certainly fervently, to stop the violence. He and co-screenwriter Kevin Willmott (CSA:Confederate States of America) merge their polemics with poetics, in keeping with the classics model, and cast Samuel L. Jackson as big pimping narrator Dolmedes. (South Cackalackey makes it into the film, quite explicitly, with reference to the Emanuel 9 and Dylann Roof.)

Chi-Raq is a generally entertaining mishmash of ideas but, frankly, most of Lee's films are. If one understands that, and knows, further, that the film will both delight and frustrate then the moviegoer will not be disappointed. Recommended.

Creed

Gifted young writer / director Ryan Coogler scored big two years ago with his first picture, Fruitvale Station, and scores again with Creed, his homage to the spirit the Rocky film franchise embued, if not the movies themselves. Coogler has cast Fruitvale leading man Michael B. Jordan to tell the story of the illegitimate son of Rocky fixture world heavyweight boxing champ Apollo Creed. Creed was Balboa's early opponent and later friend who died in the ring during a fight that Rocky wishes he had stopped as Creed's trainer. Jordan's character goes by Adonis Johnson, at once rejecting his father and desiring to embrace him by abandoning a respectable nine-to-five in a bank to train for the professional boxing ring. Johnson leaves the Los Angeles home of his adoptive mother, Mary Anne Creed, Apollo's wife (played by Phylicia Rashad), and moves to Philadelphia to learn from Rocky (Sylvester Stallone). Johnson keeps his parentage secret from everyone for a while, even the braided beauty (Tessa Thompson) in the apartment below his, whose brass turns him on. The two meet cute and their courtship is sweet and provides the film with some nice grace notes to offset the battering bluster in the bulk of the picture. The scenes between the craggy and inimitable Stallone and the truly adonic and chiseled Jordan drill deep into the heart of what this often savage sport means to those who are drawn to it and suffer from it. In that regard, the real beauty in this impressive movie is in the ring -- in the unsually intimate training sequences and, of course, the last reel bout between Adonis and the mouthy Liverpudlian boxing champ, "Pretty" Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew). All of it's brutal and bloody and boffo. Highly Recommended.

The Night Before

The holiday music playing in my favorite hummus and tabbouleh restaurant this morning put me in the spirit so I went to a screening of Jonathan Levine's The Night Before to get out of it. Levine's movie of three best friends facing their last semi-raucous Christmas Eve outing before one of them becomes, albeit reluctantly, a father stars Seth Rogen as the dad-to-be, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a stunted, lovelorn musician of sorts and Anthony Mackie as a late-blooming professional football player with a social media addiction and mommy issues. For this last go-round, Gordon-Levitt's character scores tickets to New York's most exclusive and secretive Xmas Eve party, but God and his angels (metaphorically speaking, sort of) seem determined to keep the boys from attending. What starts out as an "innocent" adventure turns into a fiasco, a Red Bull stretch-limo charging through Brooklyn. Still, if it's a Seth Rogen bromance a couple of things are sure bets: (2) there will be pot, and (1) James Franco will make an appearance. In fact, not since Pineapple Express (2008), which costarred Rogen and Franco, have I witnessed such seemingly endless, blissful reefer toking in a movie. The contact high created a giddiness in the audience at the screening I attended that might not have been wholly deserved but the film is such brainless fun that you hardly notice how ridiculous it all is. The scene that features Rogen's Isaac, who is Jewish, attending, disastrously, midnight Mass with his Baby Mama (Jillian Bell) is brilliant. Recommended for those who like their comedy broad and vulgar and don't mind sexting images of, supposedly, James Franco's junk.

Spotlight

Actor / writer Tom McCarthy doesn't direct a lot but when he does the product is usually pretty terrific (The Station Agent, The Visitor). McCarthy's is a familiar face and voice, and his films are becoming just as recognizable -- smart ensemble pieces that combine the public and the personal. His latest film, Spotlight, is the story of The Boston Globe's Pulitzer-winning investigation into reports of children being molested by Catholic priests in Boston and the church's efforts to cover up the assaults. Though the Globe had spottily covered one case of a pedophilic priest who was reassigned in the '90s, no follow up reporting was conducted and information forwarded to the paper by survivors and other interested parties was ignored or lost. In 2001, the Globe's investigative team, named Spotlight, was charged with revisiting the matter after the paper's new executive editor arrives from The Miami Herald, reads a column about another predatory priest and asks the question voiced during the Watergate probe: Who knew what and when did they know it? The ensemble of performers is worthy of McCarthy's methodical and engrossing screenplay (written with Josh Singer)  -- Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci, John Slattery and Brian D'Arcy James. His direction is crisp and the design will be familiar to former journos -- and there are many of us -- who know how its feels to get a great story, tell it well, and, hopefully, make the world a better place. Highly Recommended.

Truth

James Vanderbilt’s debut as a director, Truth, is a stiffly earnest film that features a fine performance by Cate Blanchett but surprisingly inert turns by the rest of the cast. Blanchett stars as Mary Mapes, a producer for 60 Minutes who spearheaded the program’s 2004 investigation into President George W. Bush’s military record and reported that he had received favorable treatment as a member of the Texas National Guard. The news story was based on documents passed along to Mapes by a former military officer (Stacy Keach) who vouches for their authenticity. Though Dan Rather (Robert Redford) has concerns about the story, his confidence in Mapes leads him to green light the piece even while CBS fact checkers raise red flags. In the end, the story is discredited, the officer who leaked the memos recants some of his remarks to Mapes and the reporting team and anyone associated with the piece is canned. The film is based on Mapes’ account of the affair and attributes the debacle that led to Rather’s resignation from CBS to a convergence of haste, hubris and corporate cowardice. Sections of the film reflect a preachy self-satisfaction that rings dully because the aftermath was so devastating.

Steve Jobs

Director Danny Boyle’s latest motion picture, Steve Jobs, includes the Apple pioneer's infamous boast that while his engineering cohorts – Steve Wozniak and Andy Hertzfeld – were skilled “musicians” in the computer world symphony – he, himself, was the conductor who played the orchestra. A claim of startling arrogance but delivered with such brio that it is tough to deny. The musical analogies do not stop there in Boyle’s terrifically enjoyable film based on the biography by Walter Isaacson. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has written a set of beautiful chamber duets that showcase his sparkling, incisive and bristling dialogue. Boyle and Sorkin have constructed this baroque film in three movements, each corresponding to the premiere of a new Jobs’ product – 1984’s Macintosh, 1988’s NeXT cube and 1998’s iMac. Most of the film’s action is set in the wings of the hall where the product is being introduced and where Jobs (a masterful Michael Fassbender) demeans technicians (Michael Stuhlbarg), spars with corporate handlers (Jeff Daniels), cajoles and dismisses allies (Seth Rogen), but lovingly waltzes with his tireless marketing manager (a marvelous Kate Winslet). A leitmotif regarding Jobs' paternity is woven nicely through the three movements and moves to center stage in the film's exuberant and touching finale. Audience members may not like Jobs much after the film but they will certainly love the picture. Highly Recommended.

Bridge of Spies

Steven Spielberg's best movies are generally about decent men doing extraordinary things. They're rarely about women although women are vitally important to the decent men. In Spielberg's latest film, Bridge of Spies, Tom Hanks, a trusted Spielberg collaborator, stars as New York insurance attorney James Donovan, whose firm is asked to represent a Soviet spy (Mark Rylance) who is caught by American G-men in Brooklyn. Donovan is reluctant to take the case at first but after meeting the enigmatic, taciturn Rudolf Abel commits to offering top drawer representation. Because it is the late 1950s and the U.S. is mired in paranoia and fear of the Reds, Donovan finds himself alone in providing what the Constitution guarantees even enemies of the state -- a fair hearing. Still, the jury finds Abel guilty of all charges but the judge, rather than ordering him executed, sentences Abel to 30 years in prison in hopes, as Donovan pointed out ex parte, that such mercy might be viewed favorably if an American was ever captured by the Soviets doing just what Abel was doing. From his mouth to God's ear for shortly after Abel's sentencing, an American pilot (Austin Stowell) is blasted out of the sky high over Russia while shooting film of the terrain (a thrilling set piece BTW). The pilot is taken into custody, tried and imprisoned. Simultaneously, an American economics student (Will Rogers) studying in a disintegrating Berlin is detained and accused of spying by East Germany. Donovan is approached by the CIA and agrees to go to the Soviet Embassy in Berlin to negotiate an exchange of Abel for the American pilot. He agrees but insists on adding the student to the trade, a condition everyone around him believes will kill the proposition. Donovan won't be dissuaded and the second half of the film -- the Cold War showdown -- is riveting. This is a rich and fascinating tale, based on actual events and written for the screen by the Coen Brothers, masters of taut, complex narrative. Hanks appears comfortable in the role of this highly principled and selfless man -- he's no stranger to such parts, after all -- and delivers a performance that is assured and captivating.