Southpaw

Antoine Fuqua is a reliable, if not artful, film director. He smartly chooses material with a strong, centering presence -- Denzel Washington in Training Day and The Equalizer, for example. In his latest film, Southpaw, Fuqua directs Jake Gyllenhaal, who is both reliable and artful, in the starring role of New York boxing champion Billy Hope, who knows how to take a licking and keep on ticking, if a bit more slowly of late. Gyllenhaal, famously immersive in his preparation for roles, is ripped and rocking as Hope, whose wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams), wants him to step away from the ring so that there will be something left for her and their daughter, Leila (child actress Oona Laurence). After Maureen is shot in an incident that's far too street for this picture, IMO, Billy descends into drug addiction and self-destruction. His manager (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson) dumps him for a bankable pugilist, his daughter is taken away by child protective services, he's tossed out of his mansion, his automobiles are repossessed and the poor orphan from Hell's Kitchen is out on the street. A judge orders him to clean up or risk the permanent loss of his child, and Billy goes to a boxing gym run by Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker), the personification of all that Hope (no heavy symbolism there, huh?) lacks in his life -- discipline, focus, integrity. Wills takes Hope on, helps him learn how to defend himself in the ring (and out) and dispenses valuable wisdom. All of this, of course, leads to a Las Vegas showdown between Hope and his nemesis Magic Escobar (Miguel Gomez). A predictable tale, no question, but Fuqua is such a masterful storyteller -- and Gyllenhaal and Whitaker are so good -- that you won't mind you've seen this a hundred times before. Recommended.

Ant-Man

I don't know if the actual universe is expanding but the Marvel Cinema Universe is growing unabated. The latest Marvel star is Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, cat burglar turned super hero Scott Lang. Rudd is a beguilingly self-deprecating comic actor, whose character is enlisted by aging genius inventor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and, reluctantly, his daughter (Evangeline Lilly) to don a miniaturizing suit and lead an army of ants against former student and present nemesis Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), who wants to militarize Pym's research and score a big payday. Veteran TV director Peyton Reed crafted this film with an eye toward the natural incongruities -- hardscrabble con artist and thief working with former S.H.I.E.L.D. operative -- to impressively comedic effect. Speaking of effects, the opening set piece that introduces our hero to the wonders and dangers of an insect-size existence are, er, Marvelous, which is to say this often uproarious movie is best enjoyed in 3D.

Trainwreck

Judd Apatow's latest addition to his stable of vulgar artists is that filly named Amy Schumer, a comedian of some repute in certain quarters. I will admit to not knowing much firsthand about Ms. Schumer before seeing Trainwreck, which, as is true for most Apatow films, has its moments, despite being about half as nasty as any of his other films that had male leads -- for example, Knocked Up and 40 Year Old Virgin. That's not to say Trainwreck -- the story of a New York magazine writer with daddy issues and a fear of intimacy -- isn't filthy. It is. Wonderfully so. But it also has genuine moments of tenderness -- which kind of means we get to care about this foul-mouthed, miserable sexpot and the sports doctor she's fallen for (Bill Hader). It's a good show. Apatow's movies always score major points with supporting players, in this case with Tilda Swinton as a wickedly unfeeling magazine publisher and a surprisingly entertaining LeBron James as himself. Recommended.

Amy

British documentarian Asif Kapadia's film on singer Amy Winehouse's tragic and precipitous drug- and alcohol-induced fall from stardom is riveting and nearly unbearably depressing. Comprising mostly the personal video shot by Winehouse herself and her friends and concert footage, the film traces in unblinking detail the Grammy-winner's steady rise from obscurity as a club act to international superstardom and every false move and bad decision she made, most of which involved the parasitic men in her life. Winehouse's death in 2011 at age 27 was sudden but not entirely unexpected as much of her notoriety was rooted in her seemingly self-destructive addictions. Though she was working through a recovery at the time of her death, the damage had been done and her heart gave out. Kapadia makes it clear in his fine picture that Winehouse was genuinely loved by most people in her life but she could not manage to love herself.  Recommended but terribly grim.

Magic Mike XXL

Channing Tatum is eminently watchable even when he's acting badly, which he does often (White House Down) but not always (Foxcatcher). But Tatum is most watchable when he's dancing. He's leonine grace wrapped in B-boy swagger. He's always been pretty fly for a white guy, and he marshals his XXL amiability and athleticism as he returns to the role of Mike Lane, a former Tampa "male entertainer" named Magic Mike who reunites with his unique band of brothers (Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, Matt Bomer and Adam Rodriguez) for one last hurrah at the annual stripper convention in Myrtle Beach. Lane has been out of the game for a few years building a custom-made furniture business when he gets a call the boys' former leader (played by Matthew McConaughey in the first Magic Mike [2012]) has died. The call is a ruse to lure Lane back into the game. It works and off the merry band go for a July Fourth weekend of bonding, teasing and tantalizing -- with one another and assorted women along the way. As they make their way from Tampa to Jacksonville to Savannah to Charleston and finally the Grand Strand, the Kings of Tampa visit two powerful women played by Jada Pinkett Smith and Andie MacDowell, who lend the film a refreshing air of feminine affirmation that isn't rooted in motherhood or martyrdom. Smith and MacDowell are both terrific. The dancers, who seem to revel in their sexual objectification, try to heal broken women while embracing their own fractured and fragmented natures. Reid Carolin's script has its moments of zen and it's pretty gay-friendly but the final act is a little, well, limp after a pretty scorching buildup. Still, it's worth a few bucks.

Ted 2

Despite the plush cuddliness of its eponymous star, Seth MacFarlane's Ted 2 is not warm and fuzzy, though occasionally it seems to want to be. Once again MacFarlane (creator of Family Guy and American Dad and perpetrator of an epic fail of a hosting job at the 2013 Oscars) visits Beantown bad boy John (Mark Wahlberg) and his boorish buddy, the animated teddy bear, Ted. Ted, unaccountably, has fallen in love and married a trash-talking bombshell named Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth) and gotten a a job as a cashier at a local supermarket -- all despite having no penis or fingers. Soon Ted finds his marital bliss derailed by, er, married life, and John recommends Ted and Tami-Lynn have a baby to give them something to love while they work through their disdain. Because of the missing appendage mentioned before, Ted and Tami-Lynn must get a sperm donor or adopt. All of this leads to the discovery that Ted is not human and so he is stripped of everything that ties him to the human race -- marriage, jobs, parenthood. Outrage at the injustice of it all, John and Ted seek the services of newby lawyer Samantha Jackson (Amanda Seyfried) and they're off. Depending on your taste, the movie is either weighted down or buoyed by the flood of pop culture references, profanity and vulgarity, endless pot smoking and beer drinking and general mayhem and juvenile misbehavior. Enough of it is hilarious, though, to recommend it.

Jaws

Steven Spielberg's Jaws was released 40 years ago, back when I read books before they became movies -- Jaws, The Exorcist, The Godfather, among them. Peter Benchley wrote a bestseller about a stone-cold killer that  keeps moving and eating because if it stops it will die. Into his film, Spielberg, a television director turned to motion pictures, poured what would become staple ingredients for his movies -- threatened families, kids in peril, an amoral bureaucrat, a flawed hero who guts it out in the last reel, and, on occasion, some gore. Jaws has its share of blood but is amazingly restrained as compared to the descriptions in the book. And, of course, John Williams' ominous score crawls up and down the spine. It is not a perfect film -- though it was nominated for Best Picture. The townspeople are a tinge more cartoonish than they need to be, even for the Gerald Ford Years. And yet, the movie features three terrific performances  -- Roy Scheider as the frustrated, newly hired resort town police chief Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as cocky oceanographer Hooper and, especially, Robert Shaw as a modern day Ahab Quint, who Brody hires to deliver the man-eating Great White on a plate. The best part of the film, as one might expect, is the chase, which takes up more than half of its running time. Watching these three disparate individuals get fused by heat and danger into a semi-fuctioning unit is much of the joy in watching this picture. Recommended.

Dope

Nigerian-American writer-director Rick Famuyiwa's Dope is a fresh coming of age tale that stars a young black computer geek / garage musician Malcolm (Shameik Moore), who with his posse, 1/14th-black bassist Jib (Tony Revolori) and no-nonsense lesbian drummer Diggy (Kiersey Clemons), navigate the rocky shoals of senior year in high school while avoiding beat downs from hallway bullies, neighborhood drug dealers and warring gangs, studying for SAT's and making spiky, bouncy music (supplied by Happy hitmaker Pharrell Williams). And, yes, this is a comedy, narrated by Hollywood A-lister Forest Whitaker. After narrowly escaping a schoolyard thug, the trio peddle their bikes past the operation of drug slinger Dom (rap artist A$AP Rocky), who enlists Malcolm as message-bearer to fabulous b-girl Nakia (Zoe Kravitz). As luck or fate or Hollywood plotlines would have it, Nakia is drawn to Malcolm's handsome, unassuming charms and invites him to a nightspot where the dope (several bricks of MDMA) comes into play. Famuyiwa's cagey tale of crosses and double-crosses also explores thorny issues of race and class and their intersection with youthful aspirations. A hilarious treatment of the proper use of the n-word by non-blacks is for the ages. Like Famuyiwa's earlier films The Wood (1999) and Brown Sugar (2002), Dope probably contains more than a few autobiographical references, and if his selection of featured actresses is any indication, Famuyiwa definitely has a type. Highly Recommended.

Inside Out

Animated feature Inside Out, directed by Pete Docter and Ronaldo del Carmen, is beautiful -- actually and conceptually -- and the smartest film I've seen so far this year. The film stars the voices of Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith and Lewis Black, among others, and tells the story of the emotional upheaval a high-energy 12-year-old girl (Kaitlyn Dias) goes through after she and her parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) move from Minnesota to San Francisco. Most of the storyline focuses of the girl's feelings -- joy (Poehler), sadness (Smith), anger (Black), disgust (Mindy Kaling), fear (Bill Hader) -- as she negotiates her new world and her relationship with her parents. Docter and del Carmen have done something pretty amazing in putting on the screen a story that is rooted solidly in the intangible and successfully anthropomorphizing emotions (light years beyond emoticons, I must say) so brilliantly that both children and adults are captivated. While the entire film is marvelous, a trip through the world of abstract thoughts with the young girl's imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind) and joy's escape from the land of forgotten memories are truly superb as visual representations of sophisticated notions. They will have you laughing and crying. Highly recommended.

Jurassic World

Colin Trevorrow's Jurassic World is amazingly unimaginative and frustratingly trite. It has producer Steven Spielberg's requisite family in crisis, children in peril, perfidious quasi-governmental baddies, a ballsy great white hunter / good guy and an ice princess in dire need of defrosting in the leads. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard star in the latter two roles. It all feels so done.

Love & Mercy

 

Bill Pohlad's Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy, is unsettling and uneven but not because of Paul Dano (a keen, protean actor) and John Cusack (an often inscrutable performer). Dano owns this dark and fairly humorless recounting of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds period and a later time when Wilson (Cusack) was under the care and control of a shrink named Landy (a villainous Paul Giamatti). Elizabeth Banks also stars.

Heaven Adores You

Nicholas Dylan Rossi's indie doc about indie darling the late Elliott Smith is a loving, mysterious and not wholly satisfying film about the singer / songwriter who died from "apparently" self-inflicted stab wounds to the chest in 2003 after rocketing to fame as a prolific and insightful poet and musician. Docs about artists, particularly those who die young and tragically, frequently try to piece together the subject's past and pain by talking to family, friends and fans and examining the subject's work. Rossi tags each of these bases but the spaces between the recollections and Smith's own musings (often captured during the media interviews he deplored) do not contain answers to Smith's deep and inconsolable disconnection from life. Questions rise, are acknowledged but not always addressed. If Smith did in fact leave his Dallas home for Portland, Oregon, as a teenage what was it about his home that was so toxic? If his relationship with his father was a lingering painful part of his childhood, what made it so. Why such a rapid decline after his celebrated Oscar night appearance in 1998 when he played his nominated song Miss Misery from Good Will Hunting and after two subsequent, well-crafted and moody releases and moves first to New York and then to Los Angeles. What demon was chasing him? It's never clear. No, documentaries are not journalism and they're not history (strictly speaking). The world presented to the film goer has been filtered through the camera's lens and through the memories, passions and prejudices of those who agree to be interviewed. And these make this film wonderfully intimate. But I left it feeling that the decidedly enigmatic Smith was less so but still so. Much of this by turns joyful and disconcerting film is quite lovely and, of course, Smith's music is evocative and beautiful. Recommended.

Spy

New rules for spy comedies: Leads not only have to know how to take a punch but how to drop kick their egos into next week -- all while laying waste to propriety and skewering their opponents -- and the audience -- with deliciously delirious doses of profanity. Paul Feig's secret weapon in his latest film Spy is the irresistible Melissa McCarthy, who, as the film's poster suggests, is Hollywood gold. Feig directed McCarthy in two solid gold bonanzas -- Bridesmaids and The Heat. Spy is far better than those movies, classier and crasser and another guaranteed pay day for all involved -- Feig, McCarthy, costars Jason Statham, Rose Byrne and Jude Law and 50 Cent, who makes an odd and less-than-inspired cameo appearance near the film's end. In this dense (in all senses of the word), globetrotting movie, McCarthy plays a CIA in-office agent, the full-figured and underappreciated Susan Cooper, who is brains to Law's field agent Bradley Fine's charming brawn. When maniacal fashionista Bulgarian brat Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne of Neighbors) gets her hands on a nuke retrieved from her murdered arms-dealer daddy, Cooper is dispatched to track her because all of the top-tier field agents have been made. Therein lies the core of this grizzled and grisly fish out of water tale -- Cooper tries to break bad and earn the cred she needs to win the respect of her ballsy unit chief (Allison Janney) and avenge Fine's untimely off-camera death. The road leads not only to Rome but to Paris and Budapest and each stop involves a hilarious change in identity and a bloody encounter with another bungling agent. The body count is high but the corpses are overshadowed by the gags and eclipsed by McCarthy's outrageous charm. Recommended.

San Andreas

Yes, Canadian director Brad Peyton's San Andreas is brainless disaster porn but it is also enormous fun when it's not trying to be meaningful. The film stars Dwayne Johnson and Carla Gugino as estranged spouses who find themselves on a perilous trek from Los Angeles to San Francisco to find and rescue their daughter (the nubile beauty Alexandra Daddario) during an unprecedented Pacific Coast earthquake. Johnson's Ray is a hotshot L.A. rescue copter pilot. Wife Emma has just served him divorce papers and announced that she and daughter Blake are moving in with new boyfriend, real estate tycoon Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffudd), whose San Francisco tower will be the tallest on the West Coast (compensate much?). It's then that Ray's world starts to fall apart, literally, as the earth begins to shift and buildings start collapsing. Paul Giamatti has a choice part as a Cal Tech seismologist whose equations and gadgetry have predicted just such an occurrence but his warnings have gone unheeded. The scenes of devastation -- the demolition of the Hoover Dam, the swallowing of L.A. and the drowning of San Francisco -- are so over-the-top that they are funnier than Peyton probably intended. Along for the joy ride are a comely British lad, played by Hugo Johnstone-Burt, and his cheeky younger brother Ollie (young Art Parkinson), who take a shining to the busty Blake and end up hiking the the even crookeder streets of San Francisco with her. If watching Mother Nature kick ass is your cup of tea, San Andreas is for you. Faults and all. Recommended.

Mad Max: Fury Road

George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road is post-apocalyptic poetry and superior to the original Road Warrior series of the early 80s, which was terrific. Miller's dystopian vision of a road-raging, fuel-starved future is familiar to many but the new film ratchets up the intensity to nearly unbearable levels.  Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron star as captives of the despotic, and despicable, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), ruler of a kingdom of fall-out survivors and a band of chalky, shaved warrior boys who guard his rocky fortress, from whence he dispenses wisdom and water, but not in equal measures. When Theron's Imperator Furiosa makes a break for it in an 18-wheeler that is carrying some of Joe's precious breeding cargo, Joe and his boys take off in pursuit with Hardy's Max in tow as "blood bag" to one of Joe's anemic underlings (Nicholas Hoult). The opening 20-minute chase is grindhouse opera -- symphonic, grungy and grand, a sensory assault that is unrelenting and exhausting.  The whole film is. The dusty, world's end vistas (shot in Australia and Namibia), the punk / metal / S&M costuming and makeup, and the Cirque du Soleil grotesque acrobatics in the final chase are all exquisite.  Miller's dark message has not changed since the original Mad Max was released in 1979 -- man's feral nature will undoubtedly survive whatever devastation his greed and shortsightedness bring --but Miller has exceeded -- to marvelous effect -- the delivery of that message. Highly recommended but terrifically violent.

Unfriended

The cleverness of Levan Gabriadze's little creeper for the chat-room set, Unfriended, will probably be lost on those whose primary means of interaction is NOT social media. The film assumes the viewer understands the dynamic and appeal of Facebook, instant messaging and webcams and builds on that foundation an intermittently entertaining teen revenge flick that outside of social media's cyber-bubble would make no sense at all -- not that there is much sense even for cyber pros. A group of five high school friends (Shelley Hennig, Matthew Bohrer, Renee Olstead, Wil Peltz, and Jacob Wysocki) convene one evening and are joined by a mysterious, avatar-less lurker using the web address of a dead friend (Heather Sossamon). The lurker has targeted our charmingly jaded and multitasking quintet because they were responsible for posting a shaming video of their drunk, butt-hurt friend. The video was so much the talk of Fresno that the unlucky girl ended up shooting herself in the head -- on camera, of course. That too was posted online. The film delivers a bit of a primer on debugging and blocking pesky trolls -- even if these measures come to naught -- and the little nimrods are picked off one by one.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

The artistry in Joss Whedon's Avengers: Age of Ultron is truly impressive even as the franchise's evolving story of interplanetary / interdimensional alien invasion gets compressed into chaotic, muscular battles joined by the ligaments of running gags and witty banter. The superior first installment (The Avengers, 2012) introduced the ragtag band of heroic misfits -- Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), David Banner / The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) -- led by the one-eyed chief of S.H.I.E.L.D. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). That story merged science and magic in the person of rogue Norse god Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who was hellbent on world domination. Age of Ultron grounds its story squarely in the digital world and introduces a new nemesis, a quipping artificial intelligence (voiced by James Spader) hellbent on creating peace on earth by exterminating human life. Ultron is joined, for a while, by a curious set of Slavic mutant twins (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olson) and a horde of flying cyborgs. Yes, it's a loud, crowded party with a multitude of your closest friends and is best enjoyed as such. If you want depth and reflection go see Ex Machina.

While We're Young

Noah Baumbach writes and directs smart and smartly observed small but meaningful films (Margot at the Wedding, The Squid and the Whale). His latest, While We're Young, is the story of a stagnating middle-aged New York couple, Josh and Cornelia (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts), who meet a vivacious younger couple, Jamie and Darby, (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried) whose lives seem to be embodiments of the older couple's fears and regrets. Alienated from their birthing peers, Josh and Cornelia gravitate toward the younger, childless pair and find themselves in hip-hop aerobics, bicycling and exploring abandoned subway lines -- and loving every exhausting moment. Josh and Jamie are both documentary filmmakers, though Josh appears blocked while Jamie has no off switch or internal edit. They seem to speak a common language and draw energy from one another. The early symbiotic relationship between them eventually, as they tend to do in film, takes on parasitic properties that reveal much about Josh and Cornelia's  relationship with one another and the world they thought they knew. Stiller, a spotty actor at best, gives a winning performance here and is matched by Driver's truly disconcerting affability. The film is funny and insightful, especially for those of us on the other side of youthfulness.

Furious Seven

The Fast and Furious franchise has always driven right up to the edge of sappy sentimentality -- amidst all of the trash talk and body slamming -- without going over the cliff. This time? Over the cliff it goes but it's understandable. When franchise co-star Paul Walker died in a car wreck near the end of the 2013, the future of Furious Seven (much less the film series) was cast in doubt. Director James Wan has crafted an enjoyable and reliably frantic edition piecing together what remained of Walker's scenes with post-production magic but leaving, one senses, a vacuum among the cast members. Co-star Vin Diesel (a close friend of Walker's) offers a genuinely touching moment at the film's ending, reflecting on the men's friendship and adventures. It's a nice coda to all of the usual jetsetting, high-speed, ballistic action that consumes most of the movie's 2-plus hours. The story, as negligible as they generally are, has occasional outlaws Dom (Diesel) and Brian (Walker) enlisted by federal agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to hunt down the murderously vengeful Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), a mission that has the guys' road crew (Michelle Rodriguez, Chris Bridges and Tyrese Gibson) tearing up asphalt and throwing fists first in Azerbaijan then the UAE then back in Los Angeles. It's all wildly ludicrous (pun intended), brainless and enormously entertaining. Recommended.

Ex Machina

Ex Machina is screenwriter Alex Garland's directorial debut, and it is quite a film to ruminate over. Judging from his movies, Garland is not the cheeriest cuss on the planet. He wrote two annihilation films -- zombie feast 28 Days Later and the end of days saga Sunshine -- and his next movie is actually titled Annihilation. Ex Machina (as in Deus Ex Machina with God removed from the machine) is as gloomy as the others but leaves the viewer more to chew on. This is the story of a loner, billionaire programming genius dude (a terrific Oscar Isaac) who invites young Caleb, one of his company's underlings (Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson), to his remote subterranean lair to drink beer and test his newest invention -- a semi-transparent (literally and figuratively) robotic woman named Ava (Swedish beauty Alicia Vikander) -- for true artificial intelligence. Signs of sentience, we're told through a series of interviews between Caleb and Ava, are self-awareness, self-interest and intent. And therein lies the movie's mystery. It's a cat and mouse game but we're never entirely sure who is the cat. Garland's framing, pacing and lighting are Kubrickian, and the final quarter of the film is as shocking and pessimistic as the best of the great master's work. What to make of this film. Maybe Garland regards human explorations in the cyberworld as hubristic and dangerous as the film purports or the movie might just be a reflection of the views of skeptics and paranoiacs. I suppose it doesn't matter because the three leads are superb, and the curious and provocative ending is fresh and not a little bit chilling. Highly recommended.

Intolerance (1916)

The Birth of a Nation (1915) will stand as both D.W. Griffith's greatest cinematic achievement and greatest contribution to the nascent film industry, despite its incendiary depiction of blacks and the Reconstruction. Griffith's next film, Intolerance: Love's Struggle Through the Ages (1916), is a fascinating, poetical conceit of a motion picture that weaves together four separate stories, all of which relate in some fashion to persecution and, well, intolerance. The four tales -- the fall of Babylon, the crucifixion of Jesus, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and a contemporary story of class warfare and social injustice in America -- exist on that hoary and impressionistic plane that is silent film but are not lacking in dramatic pull or emotional currency. The film is compelling and cunningly crafted. Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Josephine Crowell and Lillian Gish star but Griffith paints on a large canvas, with enormous, elaborate sets and casts of thousands. The sweep of this film is indeed epic, with battling helmeted hordes and chariotted marauders. It is quite the spectacle. Still, I'm not entirely sold on the elegiac tone of much of the film; it seems too grandly earnest and it clashes with the elysian vision at the end.  Also, if this was indeed Griffith's response to charges he stoked the flames of oppression with Birth of a Nation, it strikes me as a little heavy-handed to use Jesus Christ as cover.

On the Waterfront

Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) is a near perfect picture in tone and tenor, whose melodrama does not detract from its substantial artistry. Marlon Brando is Terry Malloy, a former prizefighter who is now a New York dockworker and errand boy for the mob boss who runs the local stevedore union (Lee J. Cobb). Terry's brother Charley (Rod Steiger) is the boss's right-hand and so the unskilled and dim Terry gets to count coffee bags and nap and tend to his racing pigeons. Terry, though a bum, starts to wise up after becoming a part of a hit the boss arranges against a longshoreman who plans to testify against the mob. The informant's sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint) is intent on finding out who tossed her brother off the roof of his apartment building and suspects that Terry knows. Terry, who takes an immediate liking to the spunky schoolgirl, urges Edie not to pry but after more attacks decides to do what he can to set things right. The script by Budd Schulberg crackles with "wise guy speak" as it lays out a morality tale of conscience and corruption in the watery world of longshoremen. Brando and Cobb are beyond superb as flinty antagonists in this tale -- beautifully filmed in overcast grays -- that asks viewers to reflect on the price of one's soul.

The Apartment

Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) is the bittersweet tale of a New York office schnook who is snookered by company betters into lending his Central Park West apartment to them for extra-marital dalliances. Jack Lemmon plays the lonely, luckless C. C. Baxter, an efficient insurance clerk who wants to climb the corporate ladder and feels he needs an executive boost. All is well until Head of Personnel Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) discovers Baxter's adulterous operation and wants in so that he can reignite an affair with a smart-cookie elevator operator named Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). The thing is Baxter is smitten with the vivacious Miss Kubelik himself; he just knows more about amortization than he does about amore and so is left in the cold.

Wilder's insightful and touching film does so much more than skewer infidelity. It digs deep into how we define ourselves at work and at play and reveals, in funny and painful scenes, how much we rely on others to tell us who we are. Baxter, who is called "Buddy Boy" by the men who are extorting him, is a stifled and stunted man, and an easy mark because he lacks definition. He's a cog in a huge machine but wants desperately not to be. The quintet of randy philanderers know that and exploit it. The biggest individual statement Baxter makes is his purchase of a junior executive bowler hat, but he's not even sure about that. He seeks affirmation from Miss Kubelik but she's as much of an emotional cipher as he is.

She's being tossed about by Sheldrake's deceit but is unwilling to cut him loose. She's clearly a wounded bird seeking shelter, any shelter. And he's ready to offer some respite but no security. One desperate act brings Baxter and Kubelik together in Baxter's apartment, and he tries to win her through gin rummy but lacks the courage to fight for her outright. He does eventually come into his own, shuts down the cheaters club, while she, finally done with being optional, joins him for a hand of gin as the credit roll. She may not have found true love, but what Baxter is offering beats what Sheldrake was dealing.

Both Lemmon and MacLaine are terrific in two deceptively challenging roles. And MacMurray matches them as a cad who is the object of both their admiration and disdain.

It Follows

Were it not for the abundance of full-frontal nudity and references to cheap pornography, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows would be a slamdunk as an abstinence-only propaganda film whose core message is “screw around and malevolent demon spirit WILL track you down and kick your ass.” Mitchell, working from his own screenplay, takes the old movie trope of “death after teen sex” and gives it a fresh, though not totally coherent, spin. Maika Monroe (who reminds me of a slightly less winsome Catherine Deneuve circa Repulsion) stars as Jay, a young Detroit woman who gets bagged by a handsome though sketchy guy named Hugh (Jake Weary) who, post-coitus, ties her up and shows her the naked succubus who has been trailing him to tear him apart. But, now that he and Jay have done the nasty, Jay is “it” as in a game of tag, and the creeping soul sucker, which can change its appearance, will chase her. Peace out. The rest of the film is Jay running from a variety of slow-footed ghoulies with the help of her eager but utterly feckless sister (Lili Sepe) and friends Yara (Olivia Luccardi), who is reading Dostoevsky, and Paul (Keir Gilchrist), who wants to share Jay’s burden in the worst way. Though the movie features some solid shocks, it has a grim griminess about it, an air it comes about honestly, being set in Detroit. I’m not altogether a fan of this new chiller genre I call “the pointless animus of spirit beings.” I generally like my evil with a purpose and “sex is bad” doesn’t do it for me.

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

The poster for John Madden’s film The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel features the slightly retouched images of stars Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Bill Nagy, British cinema royalty, which is fitting because the film itself is a “retouching” of the “first” BEMH, which starred the same. Both pictures are set in the crowded but charming Indian city of Jaipur, and tells the story of aging Brits living in a worn but not unappealing inn run by an excitable, jug-eared kid named Sonny. Sonny (played by the wonderful young actor Dev Patel) wants to expand his popular enterprise and is hoping to make a good impression on a stealth American inspector who he suspects is in the guise of a recently arrived guest (Richard Gere). Sonny is the embodiment of accommodation and self-deprecation. He’s spry angularity to the rest of the cast’s sometimes lugubrious doughiness and is pure joy to watch. The movie, like the inn, has a radiant warmth that embraces but doesn’t overwhelm. Though I’m a fan of most of the movie’s stars, I went to SBEMH with no expectations but was beguiled by its colors and refinements. Recommended.