Enough Said

Judging by the charming Enough Said, Nicole Holofcener knows middle age -- it's weariness, ironies and pain. And the director and screenwriter, known mostly for her work on television, also knows actors and gets the coterie of true pros -- Julia Louis-Dreyfus, James Gandolfini, Catherine Keener -- to deliver wonderfully affecting performances in this story about battered and cynical divorced people (Louis-Dreyfus and Gandolfini) who meet at a party and wonder if they might indeed have a second-chance at love. Eva and Albert take small tentative steps toward each other, often retreating back to the comfortable familiarity of their lives as a masseuse and curator of vintage television programs and both with daughters preparing to leave for college. As luck -- or Hollywood -- would have it, Eva discovers after becoming BFF's with a new client who is a morose New Age poet (Keener) that she is Albert's ex-wife. Torn between abandoning her new friend and dumping her new lover, Eva decides to do nothing and therein, if you would pardon the pun, lies the rub. This is the late Gandolfini's last filmed performance, and it is totally endearing. Highly Recommended

Rush (2013)

Ron Howard's better films are character studies of interesting men (A Beautiful Mind, Frost/Nixon, Apollo 13). His latest film, Rush, is about two interesting men -- Formula One racers James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl) -- and their pursuit of the world championship in 1976. Working with a smartly crafted script by Peter Morgan (The Queen), Howard neatly dissects the drivers' heated rivalry, which leaves one of them disfigured after a fiery wreck during the Grand Prix event in Germany. That event is the focus of Howard's real interest: what drives these men? Hunt, a rowdy and rakish Brit, appears to be all about conquest (cars and woman), and Lauda, an austere Austrian, is all about discipline. Both Hemsworth and Bruhl (a Spaniard who I first noticed in a small part in The Bourne Ultimatum and later in Inglourious Basterds) are fine in their roles though their performances are overshadowed by the sensational scenes of the motor races. Marvelous camerawork and editing throughout. Recommended.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints

David Lowery's beautiful Ain't Them Bodies Saints is an atmospheric tone poem of a film consisting of one lovely languorous movement. It's the story of young lovers (Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck),Texas robbers parted by fate and foolishness. Into the gulf is introduced an unprepossessing but kind young sheriff's deputy, drawn to the young woman and her toddler daughter, who was born while the child's father was imprisoned, and both of whom are the wards of an aging criminal (Keith Carradine). Each of these characters is artfully and intimately draw in this elegiac work. Comparisons to Terrence Malick's masterful Badlands (1973) are inevitable.

Prisoners

 

French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve's "Prisoners" is grimly relentless in its presentation of its premise that virtue if properly manipulated quickly morphs into vice. Villeneuve, an Oscar nominee for 2010's Incendies, and writer Aaron Guzikowski (Contraband) cynically explore the panic around the disappearance of two small girls on Thanksgiving Day. The father of one of the girls, played by Hugh Jackman, is a seemingly devout and devoted family man who immediately after the disappearance shifts into alpha dog mode, demanding action from the police detective assigned to the case (Jake Gyllenhaal), his family (Maria Bello and Dylan Minnette)  and the parents of the other missing girl (played by Terrence Howard and Viola Davis). When a simple-minded suspect (the ever-reliable Paul Dano) is questioned and then released, Jackman's character conducts his own bloody interrogation. Guzikowski's script contains a few neat twists and a couple of painfully convenient coincidences but overall it's an engrossing tale, tough to watch at times and, ultimately, sad and embittering. Recommended for the performances by Jackman, Dano and Gyllenhaal.

The Spectacular Now, The Grandmaster, The World's End

Three quick hits from the past couple of weeks.

 



 

The Spectacular Now, directed by James Ponsoldt, is a lovingly tender film about two bruised teenagers in their senior year of high school who help each other to some "sobering" revelations. The two young leads -- Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley -- give wonderfully unaffected performances. Highly Recommended.

Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (the team that delivered Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) are the cinematic descendants of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Their latest film, The World's End, is as brilliantly unhinged as anything Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones put on the big screen but with less visionary artistry and more snark and glibness. This tale of a quintet of aging friends trying to relive an aborted night of pub-crawling frivolity from their youth is chock-full of brews and belly laughs. Highly Recommended.

Kar Wai Wong's The Grandmaster is as lovely a film as I've seen this year. It's balletic battles between Northern and Southern Chinese schools of kung fu pay homage to the masters of martial arts surrealism (Yimou Zhang and Ang Lee) while the quieter scenes of romance and introspection evoke Bergmanesque blousiness. Highly Recommended.

Blue Jasmine

Cate Blanchett's performance in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine is so rarefied that it is nearly impossible for me to imagine another actress (aside from, of course, Meryl Streep) matching it this year. It is remarkable. This photo is from an alchemical scene in which Blanchett's Jasmine reveals the depths of her pain to her sister's 10-year-old boys who have been left in her charge. Jasmine's life as a New York trophy wife and socialite was capsized by the arrest, conviction and suicide of her unscrupulous husband (Alec Baldwin). Impoverished and addled by fistfuls of Xanax, Jasmine goes to San Francisco to live with her sister, Ginger (a tremendous Sally Hawkins), whose cramped day-to-day existence with a coterie of brutish men pushes all of Jasmine's neurotic buttons. This is Woody Allen at his best. Highly recommended.

You're Next

Giving away the plot of Adam Wingard's horror show splatterfest You're Next (2011) would not diminish the bloody goodness of the movie. The sly twists and reveals are delivered matter-of-factly (without musical "stings") which leaves plenty of room for the marvelously zany attacks and counter-attacks by three butchers in sheep masks. The occasion of the bloodletting is the 30th anniversary celebration of parents Paul and Aubrey at the family's wooded estate. All four children and their significant (and insignificant) others are in attendance. It becomes apparent fairly quickly that this is a despicable group of people (10 fat sitting ducks), and, suitably, the "offing" commences posthaste. The gutsiest of the "plus-ones" -- the lovely Erin (Sharni Vinson) is wonderfully resourceful as she marshals her ever-dwindling troops. Of course, when you gather sibs together, it's inevitable that one of them will be a rat. In this case, they're all rats caught in a deliriously demented trap. Recommended but it features barrels of blood flowing from the hackings, stabbings, gougings and garrotings.

Lee Daniels' The Butler

Lee Daniels' The Butler is a melodramatic piece of filmmaking that sidles up to interesting but ultimately plops itself squarely on the lap of mediocrity. I feel this despite good performances by Forest Whitaker as the eponymous character who was butler to seven presidents, Oprah Winfrey as his loving though neglected and boozy spouse and David Oyelowo as their elder son, who rejects his father's seemingly ineffective obsequiousness for a more radical path. The rest of the cast includes some solid Hollywood actors -- Cuba Gooding Jr. as the White House chief butler, John Cusack as Richard Nixon, Liev Schreiber as LBJ -- who don't seem to know what to do with their parts and I wonder if they understood what the movie's ultimate message is. I'm not sure I can tell you.  Maybe it is contained in the scene that features Nelsan Ellis as Martin Luther King Jr., who describes the importance of the American domestic in challenging stereotypes about blacks as lazy and undisciplined. It's a good scene with resonance but does not offset the film's weaknesses.
The script by Emmy-winning scribe Danny Strong relies on ironic juxtapositions of events to piece together the story of the American Civil Rights Movement as seen by Whitaker's Cecil Gaines, a fictionalized version an actual longtime White House butler. It follows Gaines from the cotton fields of Georgia -- where his mother is raped by an overseer and his father shot dead by the same man --  to luxury hotels where he must endure serial assaults from bigots who see him only when they're seeking affirmation from a good Negro. I don't know that this man's story (as worthy as it is)  -- much less the story of revolutionary change in this country -- can be told in 140 minutes without resorting to some unconvincing and annoying tropes. But it would have been interesting to see someone try.

2 Guns

Baltasar Kormakur's 2 Guns stars Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg as bantering, double-crossing buddies on the hunt for 3 million dollars of ill-gotten gains deposited in a border town bank by a Mexican drug lord played by Edward James Olmos. Little is as it seems in this story based on a graphic novel, and that's most of the fun. In addition to a smart story line (and repartee between the two leads taken from the David Mamet school) there are more than a handful of sweet action / adventure cinematic touches (stuff blowing up real good). But the bottom line is it's a cynical and brawny summer action bromance that fetishizes guns and money and testicles. If that's your cup of tea you'll have a ball. Or maybe two. Also stars Paula Patton, Bill Paxton and James Marsden.

Elysium

South African director Neill Blomkamp has a distinctive cinematic eye, which is not to say his vision is wholly original but it IS arresting, I think. His film District 9 (2009) merged science fiction and the sociopolitical. This is not a first, I grant you. Nearly every important work of science fiction film I know is actually a treatise on some social or political structure. But District 9 was a bold and refreshing comment on apartheid (actually any systemic disenfranchisement and corralling of indigenous peoples). Set in the squalid wards of Johannesburg (Blomkamp's hometown), the film starred fellow South African Sharlto Copley as a field agent whose job was to be an intermediary between the government and members of an alien race that had settled in J-burg and been ghettoized in a crowded and polluted reserve. Through the course of events, the agent is exposed to alien DNA and begins to mutate, form bonds with aliens and become radicalized against the government. It was a meticulously crafted and intriguing film.
Blomkamp's latest, Elysium, plows similar ground but lacks the freshness of the earlier film. In this movie, the Earth has been overrun and gutted and the richest 1 percent of the planet's inhabitants have escaped to an orbiting Skylab monstrosity called Elysium, where all is lush luxury for its Francophone residents. This Eden is ruled ineffectually by an Armani clad and coiffed council of Benetton wannabes but protected by the ballsy defense secretary Delacourt (an imperious Jodie Foster). The biggest fear of Elysium leaders is the illegal immigration of the earthly unwashed and they take particularly decisive and punitive actions to halt the smuggling of immigrants.

Most of the film is set in a bombed out Los Angeles, where our hero Max (I don't know if the name is an homage to Mad Max but the film's design and texture certainly are) labors in a factory that builds robots used by the elevated 1 percent to police the masses on terra firma. After an industrial accident exposes Max (a paroled car thief played with typical assurance by Matt Damon) to a lethal dose of radiation, he is recruited by his former comrades in the radical underground to undergo the surgical grafting of a fighting exoskeleton to his body so he can lead a team on a mission to steal valuable data that will ultimately heal the planet. In short order, the team is decimated by a brutal earthbound Elysium agent(Copley).  The final battle between the two men is terrifically, grungily gladiatorial. This entertainer movie contains a patchwork of swatches from 1984, Blade Runner, Robocop and the aforementioned Mad Max. Recommended but features scenes of bloody viscera and gore.

The Way Way Back

Oscar-winning screenwriters and first-time directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (The Descendants) have crafted a sparkling gem of a movie in The Way Way Back, a charming and hilarious film that follows a morose 14-year old named Duncan (a wonderful Liam James) who is suffering through the indignity of watching his divorced mother (Toni Collette) be courted by a raging asshole (Steve Carell) during a stay at his home in a dingy summer vacation town. While there, Duncan, a Cinderfella who has been labeled by his mother's boyfriend as a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, meets a kindred spirit in the form of the doe-eyed older girl next door (AnnaSophia Robb), her oversexed and over-tanned mother (the brilliant Allison Janney) and, most fortunately for the boy, a rambling, marauder of sardonic wit named Owen (the ever-reliable Sam Rockwell), who runs the area water park. Sensing the kid's pain, Owen hires Duncan to do odd jobs and for a few weeks one hot summer changes his life. The movie is brimming with sharp observations and tender resonant moments that offer lessons about our responsibility for our own happiness. Marvelous and highly recommended.

20 Feet From Stardom

Documentarian Morgan Neville's entertaining film 20 Feet From Stardom artfully describes the lives and loves, successes and failures of about a dozen women, mostly women of color, whose voices as background singers have enhanced (in some in...stances immeasurably) hundreds of pop, rock and soul recordings since the early '60s. Among them Merry Clayton, Darlene Love, Claudia Lennear, Judith Hill and Lisa Fischer. All of these women are gifted vocalists whose stories and backgrounds differ quite a bit, but whose musical heritage can be traced to black churches. Many of the performers and music historians tell Neville that the spirited interactions among choir members and soloists was the key to the background singers' success on the stage and in the studio. And yet, these women's dreams of individual stardom have nearly to a person been deferred -- some by circumstances and some by chicanery. The story of Phil Spector's treatment of Darlene Love is especially infuriating. The film is blessedly free of rancor; it's actually more of a celebration. Though the stories of these women's lives is inspiring, it's the music that makes this wonderful film such a resounding treat. Highly Recommended.

 

The Wolverine

James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma was a cinematic highlight of 2007, and his 1999 character study Girl, Interrupted, was a strong film, for which Angelina Jolie won the Oscar for best supporting actress. Mangold is probably not gifted, but he is talented, as is evidenced by earlier works (including the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line) and the latest in the Marvel comics film franchise, The Wolverine, which stars  the estimable Hugh Jackman. In this outing, Wolverine has disappeared into the wild after killing his true love, fellow X-man Jean Grey / Phoenix, after her mutant telekinetic powers went berserk and threatened to destroy the planet (or at least a sizable portion of it) in X-men: The Last Stand. Blessed / cursed with exceptionally long life because of his ability to heal from mortal wounds, Wolverine is summoned out of seclusion to the bedside of a dying friend, whom he saved during the bombing of Nagasaki in World War II.  The friend, the head of a power Japanese family and biomedical concern, hopes to persuade Wolverine, who has occasional dreams of joining his beloved Jean in the after life, to pass along his healing abilities and restore vigor and vitality to the dying man. Layered on throughout the narrative are threads involving corporate intrigue, kidnapping, family jealousy, social status prejudice, and a secret society of Ninja warriors in league with a poison spitting dominatrix named Viper. It's a real goulash and not an entirely satisfying one but I would wager for fans of the X-men series it will be entertaining enough.

Fruitvale Station

Michael B. Jordan is the heart and soul of Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station, an engrossing and distressing recounting of the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, a Bay Area  man aching for redemption after doing prison time for drug dealing who is killed by a police office in the early morning of New Year's Day 2004. As Coogler presents it, Grant was not entirely mended but was determined to create a life for himself, his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz) and their daughter, Tatiana, (Ariana Neal), when random elements converged on a BART train while Grant, Sophina and a group of their friends were returning from a New Year's Day celebration in San Francisco. One of the more devastating scenes in the film (aside from the fatal shooting on the BART station platform) is the recreation of a prison visit between Grant and his mother (a masterful Octavia Spencer). The truth pealing throughout the scene, the crystallization of a mother's uncompromising love for her damaged and damaging child, is deafening. Jordan will most assuredly get an Oscar-nod for his passionate portrayal of the doomed Grant, who was felled by fate and fear but whose end resonates through the Bay Area (and now the world) to this day. Highly recommended.

The Conjuring

James Wan's The Conjuring, a mostly refreshing take on an old ghost story, is not the slam dunk its able cast could have delivered. It has a good number of jolts and more than a handful of supremely creepy set pieces but also more than its share of "don't-look-in-the-basement" moments that, even if true to the actual events upon which the film is based, are exasperating. The film features Patrick Wilson and Vera Famiga as Vatican-approved real life demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren (they of the Amityville Horror) and Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor as the Perrons, the proud owners of a big and battered farm house into which they and their five daughters move. In no time at all, the family dog is dead, birds are crash diving into the side of the house and Mama Perron (Taylor) is waking up with mysterious bruises. All of this, of course, is because of some heinous events in the house's past that has trapped an especially malevolent spirit. She's out for blood. The Warrens, renowned for their ability to record spectral events and rid haunted premises of cranky phantoms, move in with the Perrons, which only makes things worse. The Conjuring is a pretty solid scarefest but not recommended for little ones.

Pacific Rim

This poster is taken from a scene in the prologue to Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim,  the summer's undisputed blockbuster to beat. The poster depicts a crippled gargantuan robot pulling itself out of the surf, its electronic innards dangling, bits falling onto the beach. It's bent but not destroyed. Two small figures at the lower left-hand side of the poster are diminished by the goliath. Those folks are us. The moviegoers. And the robot is, well, the film. Audiences will be awed and overwhelmed by this picture because of its size and, well, elegance. Del Toro, a true cinematic visionary (witness Pan's Labyrinth), has crafted an enormous and enormously engrossing multi-culti adventure tale of the human race's refusal to give in to what appears, based on the numbers, to be certain annihilation. Leading the intrepid battle is Stacker Pentecost, played by the redoubtable Idris Elba. Pentecost is one of the veteran "pilots" of the gigantic robots, called Jaegers (as in -meister) that have been battling a species of really nasty amphibious beasts (kaijus) from the center of the earth. These malevolent creatures use a portal that leads them to us and because they are aquatic they've wreaked most of their havoc on coastal cities. The suits have about had enough and want to build a wall too big for the kaijus to scale rather than continue to fund the jaeger program. Pentecost isn't hearing it and goes to ace pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam of Sons of Anarchy) to coax him out of retirement (he and his brother were at the helm of the damaged Jaeger on the poster) to wage one last attack on the kaiju's portal and save humankind. It's Class A story craft with an abundance of grace notes provided by a world class assortment of featured characters played by Charlie Day, Burn Gorman and Ron Perlman. The heart of this greatly affecting film is in the relationship between Elba's Pentecost and junior pilot Mako Mori (the lovely Rinko Kukichi). Loud, cartoonish violence, but little blood. Highly Recommended.

Despicable Me 2

Despicable Me's cute and cuddly Minions are the shape and color of sinus capsules -- tubular and yellow.  Not the most obvious choices for phenomenally infectious animated characters but a winning formula nonetheless (with a major assist by Steve Carrell as diabolical mastermind turned single parent Gru). Directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud made another brilliant move by putting at the center of sequel's narrative a sinister plot to turn all things cute and cuddly (a/k/a Minions) into ravenous, fright-wigged beasties. D M 2 picks up where the original film left off, with Gru and his three adopted daughters (Margo, Agnes and Edith) settled in "suburbia." Now the former moon thief is trying to launch a line of jellies and jams but things aren't going well. Introduced into the mix is a hyper-kinetic secret agent  and potential love-interest named Lucy (Kristen Wiig), who recruits Gru for an assignment to uncover the identity of the mad monster who wants to de-cute-ify the world. It's delightful, screwy and frantic fun and highly recommended.

World War Z

Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace, Monster's Ball) directs Brad Pitt in the curious zombie plague film World War Z, in which Pitt plays a former United Nation's investigator, Gerry Lane, who is drafted by  a desperate U.N. undersecretary (Fana Mokoena) to find the source of a global infection that is turning the world's population into the raging, ravenous undead. Little time is spent on back story (no reason is given for the outbreak), and the little we know about Pitt and his devotion to his wife (Mierielle Enos) and two daughters (Sterling Jerins and Abigail Hargrove) is relayed in the first five minutes of the film. It's this devotion that leads him to sign onto what appears to be a suicide mission because the zombies swarm like ants and the gestation period for "turning" after being bitten is about 12 seconds. Lane leaves his family in the care of the U.N. on a battle ship that has been re-purposed as a refuge for unbitten essential  personnel and heads to Korea then Israel chasing leads. Each stop introduces new perils, and Forster stages several mesmerizing scenes that are much tamer than the standard zombie attack fare on The Walking Dead or any other recent zombie flick. For me, the film's most horrifying visual elements are the scenes of the armies of the undead clawing and crawling over one another to get to fresh flesh. Unfortunately, the movie's solemn and polemical final reel was strangely pessimistic and generally disappointing. Recommended for fans of the genre and though not overly bloody or graphic it's way too intense for young children.

Man of Steel

Zack Snyder's Man of Steel has the grunge-gladiator feel of his earlier film 300 (2006) but with the disorienting visual distortion of that movie and that of his later graphic novel adaptation Watchmen (2009) amped up to a mind-numbing degree. This bombastic and unrelenting picture is both exhausting and too often uninteresting, mainly because the characters are one-dimensional and the battles are unending. Snyder fills the screen of this retelling of the Superman story with cold reptilian images (from the delivery room to space ships to body armor), erupting terrain, and crumbling massive structures of stone and steel. Every time you look up something is coming down. Snyder recounts the story of Clark Kent / Kal-El (The Immortal's Henry Cavill) unconventionally (no doubt the contribution of co-writer Christopher Nolan), weaving together flashbacks from the boy Clark's school days with the implosion of his home planet Krypton and the battle of his heroic father, Jor-El, (Russell Crowe) to save his son and, perhaps, the Kryptonian people. Jor-El is opposed by rebel General Zod (a scenery gobbling Michael Shannon [who is actually a personal favorite of mine]) and Zod's foxy enforcer Faora-Ul (the Germanic beauty Antje Traue). Once baby Kal-El arrives on Earth he is found and nurtured in the American heartland by Jonathan and Martha Kent  (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). It is when the story returns to Kansas that it becomes much more involving; both Costner and Lane add emotional resonance to a film that sorely needs it. Clark's romance with the daring though shockingly unprincipled Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane was D.O.A. for me, however. Recommended.

This Is The End

Evan Golderg and Seth Rogen tag-teamed their directorial debut, This Is The End, a film that could charitably be described as a comic morality tale of celebrity set against the biblical apocalypse. However, it is more accurately described as a self-referential and vulgar bromantic project that stars Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Chris Robinson, Danny McBride, all of whom appear as themselves, and a dozen tag-alongs who have appeared in the films of chief merry prankster Judd Apatow. It's self-referential and profane and hilarious. It's Goldberg's and Rogen's private party that we've been invited to attend (preferably sans panties) and at which Satan makes a few full-frontal appearances. Recommended but decidedly not for children or sensitive (sensible?) adults, for that matter.

Fast and Furious 6

Justin Lin's Fast & Furious 6 has an engineer's sensibility about it,  that is to say, it's technically precise and highly functional but is not necessarily arftul -- which will no doubt be fine with the franchises's fan boys and girls.. Lin, who directed the lethargic Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift (2009) and the infinitely more entertaining Fast Five (2011) has assembled more than a dozen brilliantly choreographed battles, auto v. auto and human v. human, that are a film editors dream (or nightmare).  Lin -- like the film's team of souped-up racing car vigilantes led by Vin Diesel's Dom and Paul Walker's Brian -- has a need for speed but little patience, apparently, for coherent narrative and emotional weight. In this outing, Dom and Brian and their motley but colorful crew of speed demons are recruited by federal agent Hobbs (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) to help capture a high-performance auto freak (Luke Evans) who wants to nab a military computer chip that could wreak havoc on us decent folk. The chase takes the team from Russia to England and then to Spain;  the speed and material destruction (though, apparently, relatively little loss of life) increases exponentially with each new location. The film is capped with a vehicle v. aircraft chase on a NATO airbase that has a runway that must be 30 miles long. It's all deafening nonsense but is enormously entertaining and, in the end, delivers a fairly conventional message: keep your word, don't abandon your family (broadly defined) and drink Corona. Recommended.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Star Trek is about space but not just in the galactic sense. The adventures of that intrepid septet of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhuru, Sulu and Chekov have spawned intimate connections among fans over the years. But as the franchise moved from television to motion pictures and back to television, the personalities became ever larger and soon they were more myth than human(oid). When J. J. Abrams took over the film franchise in 2009, he injected a refreshing amount of rip and roar to the venerable series and reaped enormous benefits from casting Chris Pine as a callow, spit and vinegar Kirk, Heroes's Zachary Quinto as Spock and Zoe Saldana as Spock's love interest communications officer Uhuru. It was thrilling fun, self-referential enough to titillate the millions of knowing Trekkies scattered around the globe and ballsy enough to push the mayhem up a notch. Abrams applies the same formula in the latest entry -- Star Trek: Into Darkness -- and reintroduces one of the original series' most infamous villains [he who shall not be name] (played by the BBC's Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch). The action is still gigantic and the background is still cosmic and the film delivers and delivers. Highly recommended though its intensity would probably be too much for little ones.

The Great Gatsby

I'm pretty sure I was in the minority of serious film watchers who enjoyed Baz Luhrmann's Australia (2008). I didn't mind its outrageous implausibility because it was so visually arresting and overwrought. I actually enjoyed it more than the director's first "big-boned" work, Moulin Rouge (2001), a stagy phantasmagoria with music, which has much more in common with Luhrmann's latest, The Great Gatsby, than it does with Australia, I feel. Luhrmann has raised the bar for his already storied cinematic showmanship with the stunningly beautiful and busy Gatsby, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the enigmatic bazillionaire Jay Gatsby, Tobey MaGuire as Gatsby acolyte / neighbor and the film's narrator Nick Carraway, and Carrie Mulligan (Shame) as Carraway's fickle and spoiled cousin Daisy Buchanan. Working with such familiar material as Fitzgerald best-loved work would pose challenges for the most seasoned and imaginative of film-makers but Luhrmann gives the work his usual wildly impressionistic treatment, leaving the story (such as it is) intact and spinning dazzling set pieces of 1920's Long Island and Manhattan bacchanalia that feature players in numbers rivaling those of a DeMille epic. Executive Producer Jay-Z's hip-hoppy fingerprints are all over the soundtrack, an anachronism that is signature Luhrmann (witness Moulin Rouge). Just as Spielberg did in Tin-tin, Scorsese did in Hugo, and Ang Lee in The Life of Pi, Luhrmann employs 3-D technology intelligently and meaningfully though certainly not conservatively. Roadsters speed along gravel by-ways kicking up dust and rock, colored confetti drifts down like snow upon the revelers at one of Gatsby's notorious parties and secret dalliances in arbored gardens are obscured by leafy branches.  The film has an abundance of texture layers as bedding for what I feel are too often pedestrian performances. Still, its a visually delightful re-imagining. Recommended..

Iron Man 3

Predictability can be deadly for a major motion picture, but in the case of Shane Black's Iron Man 3, it will be the key to the film's predictably substantial success. Black took over the directing duties from Jon Favreau, who along with star Robert Downey Jr. introduced the world to Marvel comic's glibly egoistic and irreverent Iron Man in 2008 and brought him back for a rousing second act in 2010. The character was the best among equals in last year's Avengers, directed by wunderkind Joss Whedon. This year's Iron Man model has all of the sleekness and polish of its predecessors,  and mountains of demolished steel, and maniacal villains (Sir Ben Kingsley and Guy Pearce) AND a pretty clever twist to boot. What's not to love? Downey Jr. is in complete control of the proceedings (even though some of the film's biggest laughs come from the utter unpredictability of Tony Stark's hardward).  Series regular Gwyneth Paltrow (People's Most Beautiful Woman?) as the ever-imperiled though brainy Pepper Potts as is Don Cheadle as Col. Rhodes, Iron Man's beefy comrade in armor match RDJ intensive measure for measure. Especially refreshing is a segment that features the child actor Ty Simpkins, who plays a latch-key Tennessee boy who stumbles across a beaten but unbowed Stark and his hollow Iron Man suit in the family tool shed.  It's all great, lavishly excessive Marxian fun (Groucho not Karl) and is highly recommended.

Trance

Danny Boyle's Trance is as curvy as its inscrutable star -- Rosario Dawson, who plays a hypnotherapist hired by the leader of a crew of art thieves (Vincent Cassel) to plumb the fractured memory of their inside man Simon, (James McAvoy) who double-crossed the team and hid the purloined Caravaggio but after being clobbered during the caper he can't remember where he put it.  Yes, the story is a mess -- an artfully engrossing mess -- but a mess all the same, which isn't to say it's not entertaining and quite intriguing. Because much of the story takes place in the recesses of a damaged memory,  we can never be sure of the authenticity of what we're seeing. And this, of course, leads us to doubt the authenticity of the players, none more than the entrancing Ms. Dawson, a personal favorite of mine,who bares all for her art. Recommended.