Downsizing

Alexander Payne’s cautionary tale Downsizing shares much with Payne’s better earlier films — Election, Sideways, About Schmidt — which are stories of aging men having varying degrees of success contending with “life” — which is to say “other people.” Downsizing initially makes human extinction the matter at hand but craftily turns the sci-fi narrative about human miniaturization something much more immediate and intimate. It is, perhaps, the film’s subtlety that will leave some viewers perplexed. My advice would be to follow Matt Damon’s Paul through all of his large and small crises of identity and conscience because it is there you’ll find Payne’s very human and relatable message. The wonderful Asian actress Hong Chau is a delightful surprise.

The Shape of Water

Guillermo del Toro's films are always memorable, unique cinematic visions. Crimson Peak, Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy and Pacific Rim were all extravagant and beautiful, in their way, often filled with unsettling images and certainly not the rosiest of outlooks. Del Toro's take on Beauty and the Beast, The Shape of Water, uses a smaller, more intimate canvas than those films to tell the story of a mute custodial worker (Sally Hawkins) in the late '50s who falls for an amphibious ... man-creature (Doug Jones) that was captured in the Brazilian jungle and confined to a military installation to be studied for possible weaponization. She plots a daring rescue with the help of friends and, for a time, has an affair with the creature. This fantastic story is, of course, not actually a fairy tale romance at all but an indictment of our frightful incapacity to care for others. The ubiquitous Octavia Spencer, Richard Jenkins, Michael Shannon and Michael Stuhlbarg offer their usual fine support but, for me, the exquisite art direction and lovely, balletic scenes between Hawkins and Jones elevate the film from superior motion picture to art.

All the Money in the World

Ridley Scott’s fact-based morality tale about the spoiling effects of great riches is uneven and occasionally preachy but sustained by the performances of both Michelle Williams as Abigail Getty and Christopher Plummer as her father-in-law, monster mogul J. Paul Getty, who at the time of the story was the richest man in the world. The two square off after her son J. Paul III (a wan and effete Charlie Plummer) is kidnapped in Rome by Italian opportunists or anti-capitalists, depending on whose version of events you’re citing. The senior Getty — as sour a character as I’ve seen — is not interested in paying ransom though he claims to love his grandson. He enlists the assistance of fixer Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg) to negotiate a deal and neutralize the boy’s mother, who Getty considers too eager to spend his money. Little goes as planned, culminating in the boy’s transferral to even more brutal handlers and his eventual mutilation. The film’s dynamic pull is in Getty Senior’s chilly remove from these events and Mrs. Getty’s brittle panic as a mother who loves her children but is estranged from a family into which she married but has found unsuited for much else than accumulating wealth.

Godless

My final assessment of Godless is its effect is greater than its parts, which are uneven and too often rely on obvious tropes. I liked the questions it raised about kinship, survival, faith and madness — any one of which might have carried the series. But add to that gender roles, race, predatory capitalism and fake news and you have quite a stew.


Though I really liked the way the characters talked, the series did not serve its audience well by not translating the German and Paiute. It seemed lazy.

I was saddened more than ticked off by the side story of the Buffalo Soldiers. Their fateful encounter with Griffin and his marauders felt more like a device than anything. It was truly puzzling why the show's creators handled their story so peripherally. The “barely there” love story between the white deputy and the mulatto daughter of a Buffalo Soldier was clunky and peculiar. Why was she biracial when every other member of her family was dark-skinned. And why was the mixed white/Paiute boy so clearly full-blooded native? Setting aside these matters I do embrace Godless’ message of determination and sacrifice.

Dark

The coolness of Dark is not just in its Germanic dreariness but in the story’s deliberate time-bending trippiness that feels more sophisticated than much of what I’ve seen on American television and avoids being as manifestly geeked out as Dr. Who. At its core, Dark is the story of disintegrating kinships in a small town that is also home to a nuclear plant. Children are disappearing, just as they had 30 years prior, and sadness and madness have taken residence in the remaining spaces. This fairly miserable storyline is given greater spark by the mysterious cave just outside of town that yawns and growls and transports unwitting townspeople into the past and future and generally menaces and confounds. Like I say, cool stuff.

She’s Gotta Have It (series)

 Spike Lee has jacked up the empowerment edge for the Netflix version of his 1986 film She's Gotta Have It (his second full-length feature). DeWanda Wise is the eponymous "she", Nola Darling, an artist living la vida loca in Brooklyn, untethered and sexually liberated, juggling three amorous suitors (Anthony Ramos, Lyriq Bent and Cleo Anthony) and a host of Mc-jobs while trying to launch her career as a painter. While Lee's film was mostly about Nola's right to be as casual about intercourse as any man, the series appears to be carrying layers of pro-black and pro-woman messaging for these violent and uncertain times and a soundtrack of soul and R & B that will send many of the program's older viewers hunting for that '90s slow drag mix tape they listened to in college.

Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird and Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri are both rich character studies about unlikable people behaving badly for good reasons. Writer and director Gerwig, who starred so affectingly in 2015's Maggie's Plan, pours an abundance of wit and wisdom into her story of dyspeptic 17-year-old Catholic schoolgirl Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) who aches for more than her hypercritical mother (Laurie Metcalf) and kind but overwhelmed father (Tracy Letts) can give her. To assume that Lady Bird's unhappiness stems from parental dynamics, religious strictures or the "Midwesterly" sameness of Sacramento might be to overlook the more obvious answer -- Lady Bird is young, enormously self-involved, talented but under-motivated and cursed with bad judgment. In short, she's a teenager but rarely has the angst of those years been captured so vividly. To me, this is less about coming of age milestones (first crush, first sexual experience, getting the driver's license, prom) than it is about more nuanced experiences -- learning one's true value and that of other people.

British writer / director Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards is a bloody uncompromising tale of grief and recompense. The dynamic Frances McDormand stars as Mildred Hayes, a local shopkeeper whose daughter was raped and murdered by unknown parties months before we meet her. Anger and frustration lead Mildred to rent the billboards of the title and post messages to local law enforcement (and the world) that she's not happy. Named on the billboard is the chief of police of Ebbing (played by Woody Harrelson) who tries to reason with Mildred while keeping tabs on a loose-cannon police officer (Sam Rockwell) who has a reputation for brutalizing townspeople, especially blacks. Aside from these three superb performances, the film's narrative intricacy (the law of unintended consequences is almost a character in the film) is what makes the story so compelling. Both films feature a fine performance by the young actor Lucas Hedges, whose role as Patrick in last year's Manchester by the Sea won him an Oscar nomination.

The Post

Steven Spielberg’s The Post has its moments of intrigue (delivered primarily by Meryl Streep as Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham) but is, in the end, a pretty prosaic treatment of the 1971 Pentagon Papers case and the birth of the animus between The Post and the Nixon administration. The Post and the New York Times were co-defendants pitted against the Defense Department, which claimed the papers exposed the nation to enemy threat by reporting on U.S. military operations in Vietnam, operations that were mischaracterized and misrepresented by senior officials. Tom Hanks delivers a solidly controlled performance as Post editor Ben Bradlee, who along with Graham would usher the formerly cuddly paper into an era of aggressive watchdogging that culminated with the Watergate investigation. What makes the film really compelling — beyond these heavy matters — is watching the evolution of Graham from society doyenne into a principled newspaper woman who dared to believe in a free and unencumbered press.

Thor: Ragnarok

Thor: Ragnarok will (re)introduce fanboy-metal heads to Led Zeppelin's screeching opus Immigrant Song (1970) in a new but not necessarily unrelated context. Kiwi director Taika Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) takes the sword 'n' sandal aesthetic that's always been part of Thor's Marvel mythology (and Zeppelin's more fantastical compositions) and blended it with time and space travel, netherworld apocalypse and sibling rivalry -- all to a headbanger score and a laugh track.... (More on that in a minute) In this film, Chris Hemsworth's Thor is reunited with two of his favorite sparring partners -- Tom Hiddleston's Loki (Thor's adopted brother and eternal foil) and Mark Ruffalo's Hulk on a planet that stages gladiatorial contests between prisoners. The meetings, like much of this film, are played for laughs -- and the broader the better. Jeff Goldblum, a veteran actor with Swiss watch comedic timing, is a scream as the Grandmaster of the games. The villain(ess) for this edition is a scene-chewing Cate Blanchett as Hela, sister to Thor and Loki and goddess of death, a title she takes most seriously. The siblings reunion is brought about by the passing of Asgardian king Odin (Anthony Hopkins), who had imprisoned Hela for showing too much gusto in her work. Now she's back and ready to claim what's hers, i.e., all life in all realms of existence. Joining Thor, Loki and Hulk is a besotted Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), who adds a fresh level of spice to the heroic concoction. Much has been written about the comic tone of this film, and it's undeniable, but I think film promoters and early reviewers may have primed the pump a bit much. Most of the laughs are honestly earned, a good many are forced and there are a few that, to me, were too shticky for the proceedings. Still, audience members at the screening I attended were laughing from credits to credits. Fans will love Thor: Ragnarok and it will make everyone involved with it even richer than they already are.

American Made

Director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) is a master of finding the humor in even the most dire situations. When he teamed with the eternally affable Tom Cruise for the sci-fi "Groundhog Day" feature Edge of Tomorrow, the result was a major scre. Liman's American Made adds to that mix the nearly unbelievable story from the '70s and '80s of hot shot commercial pilot Barry Seal, who is hired away from TWA by the CIA (Domhnall Gleeson) to conduct secret airborne surveillance o...f rebels south of the border. He is later coerced by the Colombian Medellin drug cartel to smuggle cocaine into the U.S., and then blackmailed by the CIA to transport rebel fighters to the U.S. for training and then, later, to smuggle arms to Contras in Nicaragua. The backdrop, of course, is the American-backed, Latin America-based "anti-communist" crusade of the Reagan era that evolved into the Iran-Contra conspiracy. By that time, Seal had already amassed millions of dollars in cash, while building a family with his lovely and fertile wife Lucy (Sarah Wright) in a small Arkansas town known for nothing before the Seals moved in, bringing a smuggling operation and mountains of money with them. It's a tale well told and Cruise is as breezy and winning as ever.

Marshall

In "Marshall," television director Reginald Hudlin (known to many black-film audiences as the director of House Party and Boomerang) delivers an entertaining though at times frustrating bio pic on the Civil Rights lawyer and later Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a film that will be a welcome palliative in these "take-a-knee" times. South Carolina's own Chadwick Boseman plays Marshall with a bluster not often seen in portrayals of African American historical figures. ...It's a refreshing take but in some scenes gives the great man a brutishness that belies the delicate work he was engaged in as the NAACP's only attorney in the 1940s. I suspect that for some, Marshall, the man, will come across as pretty unlikable. In his dealings with Jewish attorney Sam Friedman (a terrific Josh Gad), Marshall is portrayed bullying the diffident Friedman into being co-counsel for a black man in Bridgeport, Connecticut, (another great performance by Sterling K. Brown), accused of raping his white employer (Kate Hudson) and tossing her into a reservoir. Marshall and the NAACP (represented by Roger Guenveur Smith as Walter White) needs to win the case to demonstrate to donors the organization is still vital. Though the film is about the trial, of which I was not familiar, it is mostly about the dynamic between Marshall and Friedman, who would go on to become an important civil rights attorney in his own right. True to Hollywood tropes, racist whites are portrayed as menacing specters that emerge out of the mist to terrorize. This characterization, of course, plays well for motion pictures but ignores the true perniciousness of systemic racism and turns it into simple villainy.

Brawl in Cell Block 99

That S. Craig Zahler's Brawl in Cell Block 99 ended up in a cineplex with little fanfare belies its grindhouse sensibilities -- there is nothing subtle or understated about the film. This story of a decent bad man who takes a wrong turn while trying to do better by his wife is as artful as a crowbar but its bluntness is what makes it so entertaining. Vince Vaughn plays Bradley Thomas, a stoic bruiser-bagman who winds up on the wrong side of a botched drug deal and is sentence...d to prison. His humorless partner in the deal (Dion Mucciacito) wants restitution and kidnaps Bradley's pregnant wife (Jennifer Carpenter) to get him to do a favor behind the wall. It's a given the favor is wetwork but Bradley will do what he must -- facedown the sadistic warden (Don Johnson), snap bones, pummel and mutilate. Vaughn as the Bradley beast is fun to watch but the brawling might be excruciating for some.

Brad's Status

Mike White writes keenly observed film stories about people struggling with those small but indelible moments in life when they feel emotionally exposed (Chuck and Buck, The Good Girl, Year of the Dog). White's latest, Brad's Status, which he also directed, stars Ben Stiller as Brad, the neurotic father of a high school senior (Austin Abrams) on a college visit weekend to Cambridge so son can interview at Harvard and Tufts, Dad's alma mater. Brad's neurosis, which is deeply ...rooted in an entitlement that he's blind to, leads him to question the rightness of nearly every person, thing or event in his life. His insufferableness, which is mostly interior throughout the film, does boil over on occasion, leading to some wonderfully uncomfortable exchanges. Brad is by most measures a successful man, living in Sacramento with his dutiful wife (Jenna Fischer) and his son, a talented musician whose emotional makeup bears little resemblance to his flinty and judgmental father. Brief encounters with Brad's estranged posse of college buddies (all of whom are wealthy and living the life) leads Brad to some realizations but not those the audience might hope. Stiller's performance as this insecure and selfish man is one of the best I've seen this year.

Blade Runner 2049

Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Sicario) is an undisputed visionary whose best pictures feature stunning camerawork and breathtaking tableaux in service of complex narratives that never lose sight of the human element. Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 is a near-epic sequel to Ridley Scott's masterpiece from 1982 that is as thoroughgoing an exposition on humanness as I've seen in a while. It stars Ryan Gosling as an LAPD detective in 2049 who, like Harrison Ford's character 30 years earlier, is commissioned to track down replicants (artificial humans) originally created to slave for real humans but now deemed defective and when found are to be destroyed. Gosling's "K" is himself a replicant, an obedient model, who answers to a severe police lieutenant he calls "Madam" (Robin Wright) and lives alone in a teeming and desolate post-apocalyptic La La Land with a holographic companion named Joi (Ana de Armas). While "deactivating" a rogue replicant (Dave Bautista) on a remote farm, K discovers bones buried beneath a tree and this discovery opens the door to a trail that leads to replicant manufacturer Wallace (Jared Leto), his deadly enforcer Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) and eventually Ford's Deckard. Villeneuve uses 35 years of cinematic advancement to expand Scott's original vision and explore with greater effectiveness, IMO, central questions about truth and authenticity, human connectivity and memory. Blade Runner 2049 is both visually and intellectually arresting but it might be too long and deliberately paced for some tastes. Highly Recommended.

Mother!

The degree to which viewers will be horrified by Darren Aronofsky's boffo, bloody cringefest fable, Mother!, will correspond directly to how much the viewer fears uncertainty and losing control -- which is to say a pretty good number of us. Few will be able to resist sympathizing with the befuddled and manic "Mother" of the title (Jennifer Lawrence), though her pregnancy isn't introduced until the second act. Before that, she's just manic and frustrated because her poet husband (Javier Bardem) is blocked -- both on paper and, apparently, in bed. One afternoon, a mysterious man (Ed Harris) and his fantastically inappropriate wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) show up at the couple's spacious Victorian-era country home that she's restoring herself, bringing with them all manner of horrors. Again, depending on your level of OCD, you will either find Man and Woman (as they're called in Aronofsky's screenplay) a nightmare or just weird. But shortly after them come their feuding sons (real-life brothers Domhnall and Brian Gleeson) whose bloody battle ends the first act. The film's second half is what some critics are extolling as visionary filmmaking and, to me, it is indeed extraordinary. The mother's descent into hell (actual or psychological) is chaotic and unnerving and mesmerizing and provokes all manner of conjecture about the meaning of her miserable trip. For one, I think Mother! is another of Aronofsky's musings on love and obsession and how easily they are mistaken for each other. But interpretations will surely vary from person to person. Highly recommended.

It

The Stephen King I've enjoyed most showcases the horrors we do to one another rather than the horrors of the undead -- though those are duly represented. In Andy Muschietti's It, a rag-tag band of pre-pubescent outcasts must contend with their hellish homelives while running from Bill Skarsgard's toothy and voracious sewer rat clown, Pennywise. As the manifestation of many a moppet's nightmares, Pennywise is a fine fiend who finds the group of youngsters, led by the fairly intrepid but mopey Bill (Jaden Lieberher) and the mouthy and vulgar Richie (Stranger Things' Finn Wolfhard), in the last reel, formidable foes -- made so by the coldness, abuse, neglect and manipulation they've suffered at the hands of their parents and schoolhouse bullies. And that's really what this delightfully twisted scarefest is about -- facing your fears and kicking their asses. It's not child's play. Recommended.

Wind River

Taylor Sheridan wrote the gristly screenplay for last year's Hell or High Water, an outstanding Texas cops and robbers flick that was terrifically scripted and scorchingly intense. He also wrote the equally masterful Sicario (2015). Sheridan wrote and directed the bitter but brilliant Wind River, a worrying mystery set in the snow of the eponymous Wyoming reservation. The reliable Jeremy Renner stars as a federal wildlife hunter who is recruited by a young and overwhelmed FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) to track down a suspect in the sexual assault of a young woman found dead in the snow. The wintry landscape is both beautiful and unforgiving, and the native people on the reservation are depicted as decimated in number and spirit. Wind River is an engrossing and troubling study of arrested lives and suspended hopes. Highly recommended.

Detroit

Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit is an important film that dares you not to like it. Although I appreciate Bigelow's craftswomanship, the film plays with form more than her most celebrated works -- The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty -- and I found that disconcerting. The opening sequence that features artistic renderings of the Great Migration and the subsequent deterioration of Detroit sets a different tone from the newsreel excerpts that document the urban uprisings and the murky set piece that depicts the Detroit police in 1967 shutting down an unlicensed night spot and parading patrons out of the front door and into police vans in front of agitated bystanders. Each is individually interesting but together seem disjointed. These are followed by the shooting of an unarmed looter by the film's villain, the satanic Officer Krauss (a remarkable Will Poulter)and the fateful confrontation between Krauss and his murderous cohorts and the patrons of a downtown motel. Three young black men were killed during the encounter; two were shot in the back. The officers were tried but not convicted. To alleviate the pressure built up by lengthy passages of violence and chaos with musical scenes feels forced, uneven and distracting and detracts from the power of a fairly uncompromising film. Bigelow pulls fine performances from the young actors John Boyega, Algee Smith and Jacob Latimore and veteran Anthony Mackie. Recommended but unspeakably grim.

Dunkirk

Director Christopher Nolan's penchant for the unorthodox ensures that his films will be challenging, if not always totally satisfying viewing. In Dunkirk, Nolan, who is best known for the Batman trilogy that starred Christian Bale, explores the fluidity of time and perspective in his telling of the valor that went into the Dunkirk beach evacuation during World War II. To me, the genius of this surprisingly compelling battle tale is the crafty way Nolan telescopes time and ratchets up the intensity while blending and overlapping viewpoints and locales. Some might argue that the möbius narrative is too clever and a bit distracting. I loved the approach and found each of the primary performances -- especially the young, gritty soldier played by Fionn Whitehead, with whom we spend most of the film -- perfectly pitched, intense without being grating, and sympathetic without being cloying.  Highly recommended.

The Big Sick

Judd Apatow's motion picture production company specializes in high calorie, goodhearted comic fare that's heavy on the cringe (see for example Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Trainwreck).  The Big Sick -- a wonderfully tender and outrageous film -- is not as preoccupied with sex and excretions as one's typical Apatow feature and has a pretty serious Second Act, when one of the two romantic leads becomes gravely ill. Written by the film's star Pakistani comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, Emily Gordon, the film, based on the writers' own courtship, blends the angst of classic "mismatched" lovers with Apatow's signature masculine arrested emotional development and familial dysfunction to explore human connections and love in all of its manifestations. Nanjiani and co-star Zoe Kazan make a sweetly neurotic couple but Holly Hunter as Emily's mother is remarkable and sure to get a supporting actress nomination come awards season. Highly recommended.

Sleight

J.D. Dillard’s Sleight shares more than a passing similarity to 2015’s Dope but veers away from the story of a rising mind using the drug trade to even out his chances of success into the land of science fiction and beyond. Both films star winning, fresh faces: Shameik Moore (Malcolm in Dope) and Jacob Latimore as Bo, a street magician whose secret owes as much to STEM education as it does to his own ingenuity and mother wit. When we meet Bo, he and his sister (Storm Reid) have recently been orphaned by the death of their mother. Bo has taken over his sister’s care. He does mindbending, David Blaine-type illusions during the day and sells Molly to annoying hipsters at night. He’s also taken up with a ruthless though sartorially challenged kingpin named Angelo (a convincingly menacing Dule Hill). Bo gets a hand from a kind neighbor named Georgi (Sasheer Zamata) and finds an eager companion in a battered young waitress named Holly (Seychelle Gabriel). As he tells Georgi, he’s dealing drugs to save up enough money to get his sister out of the neighborhoood and into a better school. His plans go sideways when his involvement with Angelo takes a brutal turn and desperation leads him to make a few (more) bad decisions. Dillard has a real star in young Mr. Latimore, and his performance as Bo holds what is at its core a sincere but pretty ridiculous story together.

The Dinner

Congressman Stan Lohman (Richard Gere) and his boorish, seemingly bipolar brother, Paul (Steve Coogan), are having a five-course meal in an impossibly posh restaurant with their wives (Rebecca Hall and Laura Linney, respectively) to talk about a pressing matter just hours before a piece of legislation the congressman is promoting comes up for a vote. Stan Lohman is also running for governor and needs the legislative win and the resolution of an incident involving the couples’ sons if he’s to move forward. Though the food being served in Oren Moverman’s dyspeptic filmThe Dinner looks divine, the bilious bickering between the brothers and the horrific doings of their sons make for especially difficult viewing. The film has layers of sickness and dysfunction and a startlingly abrupt ending.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Young British actor Tom Holland (The City of Z) has such a sure command of the role of Peter Parker / Spider-Man that Marvel fans will undoubtedly feel safe with him. Set in that precarious world of high school rivalries and crushes, Jon Watts’ Spider-Man: Homecoming merges the drama of those uncertainties with larger threats and shows the young hero – whose drive might outstrip his nascent abilities – struggling with doing the right thing for the right reason in the wrong way (perhaps). Holland is joined by high wattage co-stars Michael Keaton as the villainous Vulture, Robert Downey Jr. as Parker’s “mentor” Tony Stark / Iron Man, Marisa Tomei as Aunt May and a host of colorful younger actors that keep this clever and kinetic story about alien-arms dealers grounded in what’s important – Academic Decathlon and School Dances.

Baby Driver

British director Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) commits boatloads of exuberance, wit and musical savvy to the ridiculously entertaining Baby Driver, a film fueled by the adrenalin of its oh-so-winning cast, led by the brilliantly nimble (and preternaturally adorable) Ansel Elgort (The Fault in our Stars) and featuring Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm and Kevin Spacey. Elgort stars as the oddly monikered Baby of the title, who is the iPod-addicted getaway driver for a crew run by Spacey’s Doc. Baby is working off a debt with hopes of going straight after one last job – then he meets diner waitress Debora (a wonderful Lily James) and things get, as they say, complicated. Wright’s direction matches the precision and daring of Baby’s driving, which is breathless and thrilling. But on top of some award-worthy camera work and editing is a seamless musical storyline the likes of which I’ve not heard used in such a way in a film. If you love a good cops and robbers story and sharp, creative moviemaking, you’ll no doubt find Baby Driver quite a ride. And you’ll want the soundtrack, without question.

Wonder Woman

Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman is a bombastic estrogen rush of an origins pic that, frustratingly, must have its demi-goddess heroine (Gal Gadot) succumb to the charms of a man. Sure, the man is uber-stud Chris Pine, but still. Must feminine empowerment in film always come with deflowering? Was there fear that coming from an island of women that she was not into men and had to prove otherwise? The picture scores a few points for its ragtag, multi-culti band of World War I henchmen -- an Arab, a Scotsman and an American Indian -- but loses a couple for a pretty startling -- and perhaps Freudian -- WW skewering of the movie's high-wattage but unarmed baddie played by Danny Huston. The last big battle of the gods is an electrifying display of the power of love -- a message that's reiterated in the film's epilogue and treacly voiceover.