Movie Reviews - 2015 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

Here’s my theory about James J. “Whitey” Bulger.

Everyone agrees he was a ruthless South Boston gangster responsible for a dozen murders, probably more. He was involved in drugs, extortion, the IRA. But was he an FBI informant? Or did he use the FBI to further his career? Did he feed the feds information to take down his enemies while he was allowed to operate with federal cover?

That’s not my theory, by the way. Most of that is fairly well-established.

Here’s my theory. I think someone got to director Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”), and maybe screenwriters Jez Butterworth (“Fair Game,” “Get On Up”) and Mark Mallouk (first timer). Someone got to them and said, “Yeah, great cast. Great story. But you know what? This picture’s gonna lie there like a dead fish. Get it? No one’s gonna come out of this thing saying, ‘Hey, great fuckin’ movie.’ None of that. They’re gonna piss all over it. And it’s gonna die. And no one’s gonna see it no more. It’s gonna disa-fucking-pear. You understand? If anyone anywhere likes this fucking picture, someone’s gonna get fucking hurt.”

That’s my theory. It’s the only explanation I could come up with for why “Black Mass,” which should be a fascinating gangster flick, is so hopelessly inert.

Aping Homer, Goodfellas
In the documentary, “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger,” the tension is the above: was Bulger an FBI informant, and if so, was the FBI being played?

The tension in “Black Mass” is ... I’m not sure. That’s the problem. It’s just one thing after another.

Bulger (Johnny Depp) is a local Irish mob guy in South Boston. He’s served 10 years in Alcatraz. He’s got his crew, he’s nice to the old ladies in the neighborhood, and he plays gin rummy with his mother and loses. Maybe on purpose. At the dinner table, he gives Homer Simpson-esque advice to his kid about fights at school. The problem isn’t fighting, it’s where you do it. “If nobody sees it,” he says, moving his hands like a magician, “it didn’t happen.”

Then FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), also from Southie, who looks up to Whitey and his brother Billy, a state senator (Benedict Cumberbatch), suggests that Whitey—or Jimmy, as everyone calls him—turn informant. No go. Then Bulger’s son dies and we’re told he gets meaner. Then he takes the FBI gig. Because? Then his mom dies and we’re told he gets meaner. But he never seemed not mean. A guy almost starts a fight with him in a bar. Dead. A sweet, ditzy girl maybe says a little too much to the cops without realizing it. Dead. Two guys, no, three, get in the way of his Jai alai empire in Florida. Dead dead dead. Meanwhile, Connolly keeps covering for him.

I could never figure out Connolly. Was he protecting Bulger for Bulger or was he protecting his asset, which he felt was furthering his career? At what point did he get in too deep? At what point was he more interested in protecting Bulger than himself? Initially he seems kind of smart, or at least street smart, but by the end he’s the dumbest guy on screen.

Ditto John Morris (David Harbour). Initially he seems thoughtful, weighing consequences, making a deal with the lesser evil to get the greater one (the mafia). Then he’s buying Connolly’s ridiculous excuses that protect Bulger. Then he’s actually at Connolly’s for a barbecue with Bulger. Then he’s being threatened by Bulger. No wait, he’s just getting his balls busted—in a scene that so wants to be the “Am I a clown to you?” scene from “Goodfellas,” but isn’t. After that, Bulger threatens Connolly’s wife (Julianne Nicholson) in a creepy psychosexual scene that furthers nothing.

The longer the movie, in fact, the more incomprehensible Bulger becomes. Bulger gets away from the feds, but he gets away from the filmmakers even more.

Like Luca
It’s not all bad. I liked Corey Stoll as the no-nonsense prosecutor Fred Wyshak, Peter Sarsgaard as the sweaty hitman/addict Brian Halloran, and—in particular—Juno Temple as the heartbreakingly forthright prostitute who lets too much slip. They’re all small roles. Depp? He’s serviceable but one-note. And the Husky eyes are distracting.

The film has no point of view. Initially, the conceit is flashback confessions from Bulger’s men, but this is abandoned for Cooper’s “this, then that” approach. Could you have made it a legal procedural from Wyshak’s perspective? Or a journalistic procedural from The Boston Globe’s? Channel it all through Bulger? Or Connolly? Or Robert Fitzpatrick (Adam Scott), an FBI agent who, in the doc, questioned everything and got canned, but here is mostly a background figure? 

Cooper doesn’t do any of that. Instead he made a gangster movie that just lies there. “Black Mass” sleeps with the fishes.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Far from the Madding Crowd” is considered a proto-feminist tale since it concerns a headstrong young woman in 19th-century Britain who ruins the lives of three men.

Look, I love me some Carey Mulligan, but her character, Bathsheba Everdene (yes, the inspiration for Katniss), is a bit of a pain. She turns down a kind, prosperous sheep farmer, Gabriel Oak (Mathhias Schoenaerts of “Rust and Bone” and “The Drop”), because she likes her in-de-pendence. Then they switch fortunes: she inherits her uncle’s estate while his dog, Young George, also headstrong, drives his sheep off a cliff and him into poverty. So he winds up working for her. He still has feelings for her, and she for him (maybe), but ... Please, we’re British.

The even more British William Boldwood (Michael Sheen)—whose name surely was chosen with an ironic laugh by Thomas Hardy—becomes enamored of Bathsheba as well, but only acts when, as a joke, she sends him a valentine embossed with the words “Marry me.” He thinks she means it and offers his hand. She doesn’t and turns him down. But he stays on the fringes, acting apologetically British and proposing now and again just for the humiliation of it.

Which leaves the third man, who finally gets some. Sgt. Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge) sees Bathsheba late at night, tells her she’s beautiful, then sets up a rendezvous where, before she can speak, he grabs her and kisses her. That does it—she’s his. So much for in-de-pendence. It’s classic bad boy stuff. He’s a dolt and a gambler, but they marry. During the wedding celebration, storms approach, Mr. Oak warns that precautions must be taken, but Troy drunkenly and truculently dismisses him. Oak still goes to the rescue and saves the farm. For her. Then she sleeps with Troy. 

Guess which man she winds up with?

There’s a lot of 19th-century melodrama here and Troy gets the worst of it. Earlier, we see him in the church, resplendent in uniform, about to marry the woman he loves, Fanny Robbin (Juno Temple), who is walking to the church with flowers in hand. Except it’s the wrong church. And that's that. He finds out the true story, and the fact that she’s pregnant with his child, later a county fair, where she’s begging for alms. Again, he agrees to meet up with her later, and again there's disaster. She dies, and her child with her. Heartbroken, he performs that classic scene out of of British melodrama—parodied in “The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin”—by swimming out to sea to kill himself.

Which leaves Bathsheba free to marry ... Boldwood. Really? Yes, really.

So first she goes for the bad boy. Then she goes for the money. “Feminist.”

But at a party at Boldwood’s estate, guess who shows up? Troy. I’m not dead yet. He’s back, bitter and petulant, and demands Bathsheba’s money and person. Boldwood denies him both and shoots him. Dead. And there goes Boldwood, too, taken into custody.

Which leaves Mr. Oak, the man she should’ve been with at the beginning. But first she had to ruin the lives of two other men.

“Madding” is well-acted, beautifully art directed (by Julia Castle), capably directed (by Thomas Vingterberg, “The Hunt”), but the story is this.

Patricia loved it. Should I be worried? 

WARNING: SPOILERS

I would’ve gone with Paul Giamatti, too. Then you could cast Thomas Hayden Church as Stephen Katz, have him put on weight, get yourself a good “Sideways” reunion.

With Redford, I assumed the biggest problem would be his age. He’s owned the rights to Bill Bryson’s book since its publication in 1998, and originally considered it a vehicle for a reunion with Paul Newman. That might’ve worked. But even back then Redford was 62 (and fit), and Newman 74 (and fit), so not exactly the out-of-shape fortysomethings Bryson and Katz were when they hiked the Appalachian Trail.

Now Redford is 79, and Nick Nolte, the new Katz, is 74, and not exactly a spry 74, either. That turns out to be a problem. Middle age is funny, old age isn’t. Midlife crises are funny, funerals aren’t. Given Redford, Nolte isn’t bad casting, since Katz is supposed to be a fuck-up—the guy bringing candy bars on the trail, abandoning his gear when it gets too heavy, etc.—and Nolte can do fucked up. But his face and body are so wrecked now that his donut-sprinkled mouth doesn’t make us laugh the way it should. We cringe.

But Redford’s the bigger problem. He’s just not funny enough to play Bryson.

Beginning Bryson, becoming Redford
Have you read “A Walk in the Woods”? I don’t know if I’ve laughed harder at a book. It was so funny that the next book I read, “Me Talk So Pretty” by David Sedaris—considered humorous by most people—seemed like shit to me. I didn’t even finish it.

Redford turns this book into his own vehicle. Instead of open and engaged, his Bryson is closed and suspicious. He’s a successful American writer, returned from England, tired of going to funerals, tired of seeing his grandkids waste their lives with video games. Early on, he gets off some good dry line-readings; then he becomes pedantic and the line-readings fall flat. Environmentalism is Redford’s cause, and bless him for it, but he makes it Bryson’s cause, too. Or he turns his Bryson from a guy who never hikes to one who knows everything in the woods. The further they go, the preachier he gets.

The dilemma of making “Woods” into a movie is similar to the dilemma of making “Moneyball” into a movie: the real story doesn’t have a Hollywood ending. In “Moneyball,” the A’s don’t win the pennant and in “A Walk in the Woods” Bryson and Katz don’t finish the Appalachian Trail. They hike and hike and hike, and when it seems like they’ve been hiking forever they find a map and realize they’ve barely gone anywhere: two states out of a dozen. So they cut their losses. They skip a huge chunk and then leave it. Bryson hikes the last bit alone in the fall in New England.

In the movie, we get the map scene, and yes, Katz talks about driving the Appalachian Trail; then Bryson convinces him to keep going. Then they have a near-death experience and Bryson lets Katz go. He lets them leave the trail and return home: Katz to Iowa, Bryson to New Hampshire and his wife Catherine (Emma Thompson, 23 years younger than Redford, and underutilized).

So where’s the poignancy? What’s the lesson?

Guys like us
In “Moneyball,” Aaron Sorkin and Bennett Miller make it less about the clarity of winning than the murkiness of everything else: being first through the wall and getting bloody; hitting a homerun and not realizing it; being a little bit caught in the middle. Billy Beane wins by losing, but he can’t shake the loss. It sticks to him.

In “A Walk in the Woods,” director Ken Kwapis (“The Office”), and first-time screenwriters Rick Kerb and Bill Holderman, create false drama. This Bill Bryson hasn’t written anything in four years; and during the hike, several times, he says he’s not going to write about the hike. Then he gets home and writes about the hike. He opens his laptop and types: “A Walk in the Woods.” That’s cute, but: 1) I saw it coming, 2) I don’t buy the conceit, and 3) it’s not exactly poignant.

But the main problem with the movie is still the casting.

At one point, Bryson and Katz talk up their early, rapscallion days. A pretty girl is mentioned, and they say she was the kind of girl who didn’t wind up “with guys like us.” Guys like us. Redford? It made me flash back to a scene from William Goldman’s great book about Hollywood, “Adventures in the Screen Trade.” Goldman, the screenwriter, is on a 1972 location shoot just outside a prison for Redford’s new movie, “The Hot Rock.” He’s chatting with a nearby prison guard. And, unbidden, and without heat, the prison guard offers the following comments about Redford:

“My wife would like to fuck him.”

“I mean, you don’t know what she would give just to fuck him.”

“She said to me today, my wife, that she would get down on her hands and knees and crawl just for the chance to fuck him one time.”

Guys like us.

Seriously, Giamatti would’ve been perfect.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“’71,” from first-time feature-film director Yann Demange and first-time feature film writer Gregory Burke, is intense and unrelenting. Twenty minutes in, our main character, British soldier Gary Hook of Derbyshire (Jack O’Connell), whom we’ve seen: 1) survive basic training, 2) pal around with his kid brother, and 3) share a cigarette with a corporal, gets lost behind enemy lines. Meaning he gets left behind in the western, Irish Catholic part of Belfast during “the Troubles.” He’s already seen his mate, Thommo (Jack Lowden), get his head blown off by the IRA, and in the shock afterwards, and it’s a shock for everybody, he’s on the run. Literally at first: dashing through alleys and over walls. It’s all that basic training paying off, and he finally finds sanctuary in a crummy outdoor toilet where he sweats and gasps and rests until nightfall, then steals some clothes and tries to make his way back to safety.

But his long night is just beginning.

Hook depends upon the kindness of strangers. A tough Protestant kid takes him to a friendly, Loyalist pub; but while he’s waiting to get picked up by members of the MRF, the British army’s counter-insurgency unit, Loyalists in the backroom, with a bomb for the IRA, screw up and blow themselves up along with the pub. There goes the tough kid. Hook, dazed, wounded, and distraught over the death of his young helper, wanders the streets before collapsing against a wall. There, he’s found by Eamon (Richard Dormer) and his daughter Brigid (Charlie Murphy), who have this exchange:

Brigid: Leave him be.
Eamon: Can’t.

That’s nice. Although it’s not until they get back home, in the Catholic section, that they realize Hook is a British soldier.

Burke and Demange create a complex, morally ambiguous world. You root against the IRA hotheads, who are trying to kill Hook, and for a more senior, diplomatic man, Boyle (David Wilmot), who orders them to stand down. Except Boyle is in collusion with the bastards of the MRF (including Sean Harris, the villain of “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation”), who also want Hook dead, since he may have seen them at the Loyalist pub and don’t want that fiasco traced back to them. It’s a world where good deeds go punished.

The movie is refreshingly anti-Army but pro-soldier. At one point, Eamon, who did his own stint, calls the Army, “Posh cunts telling thick cunts to kill poor cunts,” which will remind American viewers of the Vietnam-era line “the white man sending the black man to kill the yellow man.” Eamon also says, in words that Sean Penn’s great soliloquy at the end of “The Thin Red Line,” “It’s all a lie. They don’t care about you. You’re just a piece of meat to them.” As the movie will prove. The Army is just another corporation, with middle managers protecting their territory.

“’71” is a simple, straightforward story about a complex situation. It’s also about a simple situation that is sadly universal: we fight, we fight, we fight. The Army is simply the modern corporation that channels this human tendency. When Hook is recovering, and in conversation with Brigid, he tells her he’s from Derbyshire and she says she has cousins in Nottingham. He pauses, then this exchange:

Hook: It’s just that Derby and Nottingham don’t get along.
Brigid: Why not?
Hook: I don’t know really.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I don’t get it.

Not the movie but the critical/public reception to the movie. It’s at 8% on Rotten Tomatoes with an audience score of 22%. It’s at 3.9 on IMDb, which is worse than some of the worst superhero movies ever made: “Supergirl” (4.3), “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” (4.3), “Elektra” (4.8). It’s dying at the box office.

But for a superhero movie, it’s not bad. It updates the story in smart ways. The tone of the ending is at odds with the tone for most of the movie, but that doesn’t make it a bad movie any more than “The Magnificent Ambersons” is a bad movie. It just means the studio stuck its clumsy hand in. As studios do.

One of the movie’s themes, in fact, is how individuals attempt to do good without being exploited by corporations or governments. The irony is that the ending of the movie, in which our heroes throw off the shackles of the corporation/government, is the result of the real-life corporation, Fox Studios, imposing its will on the individual filmmaker. 

Roll that one around for a while.

Beating the commies
The problem with making a decent Fantastic Four movie has always been the idiocy of its origin, and, to a lesser extent, the idiocy of its characters’ powers.

In the first issue, Nov. 1961, the four hijack a rocket so “the commies” (Sue’s words) won’t beat us into outer space. There, they are bombarded with “cosmic rays” that turn them into the Fantastic Four. Why four of them? Because Reed is the pipe-smoking scientist who runs the project, Ben is the ace test pilot, Sue is, um, Reed’s fiancée, and Johnny is, uh, Sue’s kid brother. Isn’t that how all astronaut programs work?

From a 21st-century perspective, their powers are kind of lame. They’re certainly derivative. Sue becomes like H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man, Johnny like the WWII-era Human Torch; Reed turns into Plastic Man (debut: 1941) and the Thing is a version of every misunderstood outer-space rock monster from 1950s comic books. Worse, none of these powers, save the Torch’s, are particularly cool in modern cinematic terms.

The movie's much-maligned director, Josh Trank, who co-wrote the script with Jeremy Slater and Simon Kinberg, ignores some of this by using as his starting point the updated “Ultimate Fantastic Four” series that began in 2004. Our heroes are now barely out of their teens rather than salt-and-pepper adults; and the goal is interdimensional travel rather than a Cold War space race. Reed (Miles Teller) is a child prodigy with the dumbest teachers in the world. (He's in grade school in 2007. Ouch.) Forever on the verge of cracking the interdimensional code, he's forever dismissed as a liar or charlatan. He has help, of a kind, from a shrugging friend, Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), whose family runs a junkyard, and whose older brother threatens him with the phrase, “It’s clobberin’ time.” (A little odd: It means the Thing’s catchphrase began as a bully’s taunt.)

At a high school science exhibition, Reed is discovered by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey of “The Wire” and “House of Cards”), who runs the Baxter Institute, devoted to interdimensional travel, and who has two children of his own: the adopted Sue (Kate Mara, also of “House of Cards”), who’s also a prodigy and is big on pattern recognition, and the Fast-and-Furious hot-rodder Johnny (Michael B. Jordan, also of “The Wire” as well as Trank’s previous movie “Chronicle”), who’s really good at building things ... and is also a prodigy. 

Together, with malcontent Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), they complete the project while Ben minds the junkyard back home. But after they send a chimpanzee to the other dimension and back, Baxter’s directors, in the person of Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson), take control. The kids all assume they’ll make the trip. Nope. It goes to NASA and the Army. So they do what kids do: They get drunk and hijack the thing. Not Sue, just the boys. Reed taps the forgotten Ben to go along, too. He brings an American flag to do the Neil Armstrong thing.

In this other dimension, which is like Earth a billion years ago, they encounter a conscious green energy just below the rocky surface, with veins like lava flowing everywhere. Are they wary at all? Scientific? All in all, even from our heroes, there’s not enough amazement that this other dimension exists, or concern that they might eff it up. Instead, Ben just sticks the U.S. flag in and everything shudders. That should’ve been warning enough, but Reed presses them on toward a vast pool of energy, where Victor sticks his hand in. And things go crazy. The ground shakes, pools of energy erupt, and Victor gets left behind. In trying to escape, Johnny catches fire, rocks cling to Ben, and Reed reaches out to save Ben. Back in the lab, the green energy spills on the forgotten Sue.

So that’s our new origin. That’s why the powers.

The horror, the horror
These powers aren’t cool, by the way. They’re horrifying. All four wind up in a lab in “Area 57,” and are drugged, poked, and prodded by government scientists, while the ineffectual Dr. Storm tries to secure their release. This is the best part of the movie. You understand the horror not only of your body stretching impossibly, or being perpetually aflame, but of being a lab rat. The best moment, really, is when Reed crawls in an air vent toward Ben’s voice and is horrified by what he sees. “Reed, what happened to me?” Ben cries. “Reed, don’t leave me!”

There’s always been betrayal and guilt in the FF, and this is that. Reed abandons Ben and the others in order to try to save Ben and the others. Was this the part Josh Trank originally focused on? The four slowly coming to terms with the horror of their transformation? Even as they begin to control and revel in the power inherent in that transformation? That would’ve been interesting. I was bummed when I saw “One Year Later” on the screen.

Yet even this leap is interesting, since our heroes still aren’t heroes. The three in government custody are stooges—Ben goes where the Army points, and the Torch, or “Subject #2,” is raring to be next—while the fourth has simply abandoned his friends. Right, “temporarily.” A year is a long time, bro.

The villain isn’t really a villain, either. When Reed is captured and forced to help rebuild the portal to the other dimension, they discover that Doom didn’t die; he became a crackling living embodiment of the other dimension's conscious green energy. And that energy isn’t particularly interested in being exploited, in being, you know, 1492. Meaning even as Doom is popping people like zits—including his old nemesis, Dr. Allen, and his old mentor Dr. Storm—he’s not exactly wrong.

Then he goes too far. He tries to destroy our world to save his. So our team suits up to stop him. Cue rest of movie.

The tone of the ending is all wrong, of course. It’s like it leapfrogs 50 issues to get to the established, joshier vibe of the later comic books—with Torch and Ben suddenly at cartoonish odds, and Reed talking about what their name should be: Something Four. Blah blah Four. The studio obviously wanted to send us out on a high note. They didn’t trust us to like the new and the somber.

But that's what I liked. The horror, the horror. That's fantastic.

WARNING: SPOILERS

IMDb.com has the plot wrong:

When Alice Klieg wins the Mega-Millions lottery, she immediately quits her psychiatric meds and buys her own talk show.

Actually, Alice (Kristen Wiig) begins the movie off her meds. We see her waking up in the middle of the day in her sad one-room apartment, where she’s sleeping in a sleeping bag on the bed, the shelves are overflowing with ceramic swans and old VCR recordings of “Oprah,” and infomercials drone away on the TV, which is perpetually on. Outside, holding a parasol in the sun, she attempts to right one of those crazy-arm-wiggling balloon men outside a car dealership, before picking up her groceries and lottery ticket outside a Korean grocery. Then it’s back for more “Oprah.” Then she wins the California lottery of $86 million.

There are a few laugh-out loud moments but “Welcome to Me” isn’t a funny movie. It’s spooky. You cringe, watching it. It's scrotum-shrinking.

Alice is both dreamy and purposeful, both determined and “not there,” and Wiig plays her without the wink that might allow us to laugh. And that’s before she becomes rich. After she becomes rich, of course, she gets what she wants, which is, sadly, her own two-hour-long vanity TV show on a dying cable channel. There’s a good scene in a conference room where the embattled producers attempt to suss out what the show will be. Current events? No. Interviews with guests? No. So what does Alice want to talk about?

“Me,” she says blankly. Hence the title. 

For the show, Alice arrives in a swan boat waving her hand in feeble imitation of the Queen; she makes recipes for high-protein foods then spends five minutes eating silently on camera; then she recreates traumatic (or “traumatic”) moments from her life, with beautiful actresses playing herself and ugly actresses playing her nemeses. She shouts out the lines from the sidelines. She shouts out her betrayal. She breaks down on camera. She uses her nemeses’ real names.

What did it remind me of? A bit like SNL’s Gilda Radner playing the little girl pretending to host a TV show in her bedroom: “The Judy Miller Show.” Except Judy had energy and personality, and was a child. Alice is just nuts. The show, and the movie, is like spelunking into the dark heart of fucked-up women everywhere. It’s not a date movie.

Where does it go? What's it all about? You wonder, for example, if Alice will become perversely popular in the way of Rupert Pupkin, and she does, but on a minor scale. You wonder how she can use real names without lawsuits and suddenly there are 31 eleventh-hour lawsuits. She insults her friends and isolates herself. She walks naked through the Vegas casino where she lives. That’s when she’s hospitalized again and receives medical attention. But by then she’s gone through most of her money.

Lesson to all of this? Point? Is it about our solipsistic selfie culture? Kinda sorta. Except everything about Alice is old school: VCRs and answering machines. It ends with her back in her one-room apartment, but with a dog now, and able to sleep on the bed rather than in the sleeping bag on the bed. She’s able to have a man over without having sex with him. She’s able to turn off the TV.

In a way the movie is like Alice: Instead of saying something big about our culture it says something small about her. Its lessons are obvious lessons. Be nice to those who are nice to you. Stay on your meds. Turn off the TV.

But there’s some value in the spelunking.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Ex Machina” dramatizes a question that has plagued mankind for decades: What should we fear more—artificial intelligence or women?

Alex Garland’s film is actually smart and moody. It pulses and throbs. It’s a mystery. The biggest mystery is less about A.I., or women, than what the Great Man is doing with the kid.

Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a young, mid-level programmer for the search engine Blue Book, which dominates the near-future market the way Google does the present. As the movie opens, he’s informed, via text, that he won first prize in a contest to meet the Great Man, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), who founded the company after writing the Blue Book code at the age of 13. “When do we get to his estate?” Caleb shouts at the helicopter pilot as they fly over what looks like Greenland. The pilot chuckles. “We’ve been flying over his estate for the past two hours!” the pilot shouts back. Eventually they land in what looks like primordial green with no building in sight. But that’s as far as the pilot is allowed. No further. The Great Man is Howard Hughes for the digital set.  

Nathan’s an odd one but shouldn’t he be odder? Say, more spooked by another human presence? He lives alone in this vastness yet comes across as just another asshole CEO. He’s dismissive in greeting (pounding the heavy bag when Caleb first arrives), then regular-guy in conversation (beer talk and “man” endearments).

But we know he’s got a game. Even after he says his game, we know he’s got a different game.

Nathan’s game
He says he brought Caleb there for a Turing test. He’s created a robot in the form of a beautiful woman—named, Biblically, Ava (Alicia Vikander)—and he wants to see if Caleb can tell if she’s a machine. Except, since she’s unfinished, Caleb can see she’s a machine. Initially Caleb is confused by this. Then he’s confused by Ava. Then he begins to fall in love with her. Her big-eyed vulnerability helps. During their talks, the power generator goes out, meaning Nathan can’t monitor the two of them—or so Ava says—and she uses this alone time to tell Caleb not to trust Nathan. So is Ava causing the power to go out to steal these moments with Caleb? To what end? Or is Nathan responsible for the outages so he can better spy on them? Are Ava and Nathan enemies (with Caleb caught in the middle), or are they in cahoots (with Caleb being used)?

Actually, we know Caleb is being used. The question is: In what way is Caleb being used? And is he smart enough to figure it out?

He thinks he’s smart anyway. He’s told he won the contest because his coding is so good, and for a time he believes this. He even deigns to school Nathan. At one point, he says, “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds,” then adds, pedantically: J. Robert Oppenheimer/atom bomb. Nathan in effect shushes him. It also takes Caleb a while to figure out what is obvious to us: that the fourth presence in the house, a silent servant named Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), is also A.I.

Garland’s game
It’s a smart movie, referencing Turing, Wittgenstein, Jackson Pollock. Ava’s A.I. turns out to be a compendium of the world’s online searches—both what we search and how we search—which is also pretty smart. Unfortunately, there’s only so many answers to the main mystery. What is Nathan’s goal? For most of the movie, I assumed Caleb won the contest (which wasn’t a contest) to see if a man could fall in love with a machine. Nope. Nathan wants to see whether the machine can manipulate the man. Which it does. Better than Nathan anticipates.

I like how easily the knife goes into Nathan’s body—like he’s made of butter. I like how indomitable Ava is in spirit yet how vulnerable in form. (Nathan smashes her arm like it’s an old PC; the Terminator she’s not.) I also like the irony of the ending. Nathan tries to kill Ava but she kills him instead. Caleb tries to free Ava and she traps him instead. There’s no morality to it, just survival. She leaves Caleb behind and goes out into the world—Big Data as a small woman. It’s that rare movie that actually calls for a sequel.

It’s also that rare movie that is open to many interpretations. Is it about Big Data, and how our search results will kill us in the end? Is the metaphor Frankenstein? God? Ava, after all, removes her creator, Nathan, from the equation, as Garland removed “Deus” from the title. Me, I kept thinking of old movie moguls. These guys had vast power, and lived on vast estates, where they created beautiful women with which to manipulate the rest of us. “Ex Machina” is steeped in near-future techi-ness, but you could argue it’s really a movie about old Hollywood.

WARNING: SPOILERS

If the subtext of the first three “Mission: Impossible” movie is that we need IMF agents like Ethan Hunt to protect us from IMF agents like Jim Phelps, Sean Ambrose and John Musgrave, traitors all (the fourth movie went in a different direction, thankfully), the subtext of the fifth installment, “Rogue Nation,” is that we need IMF agents like Ethan to protect us from MI6 agents. So ... different.

There’s another related subtext, too, with which almost everyone in the movie audience—all the slovenly, popcorn-crunching and cellphone-checking doofuses—can identify: Don’t trust the boss; he’s a major asshole.

But it’s the first subtext that’s most important. Spy agencies in the “M:I” movies have become self-fulfilling prophecies. We need spies to protect us from spies. So we better get more spies.

Talk about job security.

He’s been going in and out of style
It’s been almost 20 years since Tom Cruise first played Ethan Hunt. Back then, Cruise was 34, married to Nicole Kidman, and beginning to stretch as an actor: “Eyes Wide Shut,” “Magnolia,” “Vanilla Sky,” “The Last Samurai,” “Collateral.” Now he’s 53 and thrice-divorced, the creepy Scientologist and former couch-jumper who’s maintaining his place in the Hollywood power structure by doing nothing but action sequels. Back then we were in a post-Cold War world (whee!) and now we’re post-9/11 (oh). Digital tech was so new in ’96 that Ethan used the nonsensical “Job@Book of Job” as an email address. Now Ethan and his IMF crew use the latest Hollywood tech shortcut: facial recognition technology. (No one can hide anymore! Anywhere!) Back then, the big stunt was Ethan hanging from a zipline in Langley, Va.; now he hangs from the doors of airplanes in flight. Even Jackie Chan looks at that stunt and goes, “Dude, that’s just crazy.”

The team, such as it is, is back. There’s the big black tech dude named Luther (Ving Rhames), who’s been with Ethan since the first movie. There’s the comic-relief Brit named Benji (Simon Pegg), who’s been with him since the third. Then there’s William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), the Ethan doppelganger who didn’t betray him, who’s been around since the fourth.

Almost all the other actors get promotions of a sort. Tom Hollander, best known to me as the comically inept Minister for International Development in “In the Loop,” winds up as Britain’s Prime Minister here, while Simon McBurney, the undersecretary in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” is promoted to the head of MI6. Sean Harris is usually the underling creep (“Red Riding”) but now he gets to be the head creep. Nice work! Alec Baldwin? CIA director! Jeremy Renner? A step below CIA director! Rebecca Ferguson? Instead of kinda betraying Hercules but still being on his side in “Hercules,” she kinda betrays Ethan Hunt but is still on his side here. She’s Ilsa Faust, the Love Interest, replacing, I think, Emmanuelle Béart, Thandie Newton, Michelle Monaghan and Paula Patton. Nice work if you can get it.

The movie is getting positive reviews (93% on RT), but we’ve seen it before. Here’s the IMDb description of the first movie:

An American agent, under false suspicion of disloyalty, must discover and expose the real spy without the help of his organization.

And the fourth:

The IMF is shut down when it’s implicated in the bombing of the Kremlin, causing Ethan Hunt and his new team to go rogue to clear their organization’s name.

Mix and match. As the movie opens, IMF is subsumed by the CIA and Hunt is discredited and forced to go rogue to discover the rogue nation of the title, called, somewhat unimaginatively, “The Syndicate.” His team is loyal to him. But is Ilsa? (Yes.) But will his boss back him in the end? (Yes.) But will hers? (No.) Effin’ Brits.

The act you’ve known for all these years
There’s a big missed opportunity here. The Syndicate, an MI6 plan gone awry, is made up of former agents from all over the world (Mossad, BND), and instead of killing to maintain the status quo they now kill to disrupt things. To what end? Not sure. I don’t even know if they know. But it’s fuel for paranoids everywhere. That plane that disappeared over that ocean? That just didn’t happen, dude. The message of the movie is that there are no accidents. Thanks for that, Chris McQuarrie. Just what we need. 

But this is the missed opportunity. At one point, the lines between right and wrong become so blurred that I couldn’t tell for whom Ethan should be fighting, or whether he was actually the good guy. That was pretty cool. Are MI6 and the CIA too corrupt to fight for? Was Ethan risking too much—as he always does—and would Brandt betray him as a result? But then the roller coaster arrives back at the station with everything as it was at the start: Ethan vindicated, IMF restored, sequel set up. Cue theme music.

“Rogue Nation” is a movie with great stunts, great legs (Ferguson, ouch), exotic locales and a nice rendition of “Turandot.” But there’s got to be a more interesting plot somewhere.

WARNING: SPOILERS

In Noah Baumbach’s “While We’re Young,” Josh, a struggling, 40-something documentarian and his wife Cornelia (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) become friends with Jamie, a 20-something film student and his wife Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried), and anxious humor and personal revelations result. Except the humor isn’t that humorous and the revelations aren’t that revelatory. Plus Baumbach confuses the generational (illegal downloads, et al.) with the universal (assholes get ahead).

At the start, Josh is in a rut. He’s been working on his next big documentary, “about America” and its class system, for nearly 10 years. He has 100 hours of footage, a six-hour doc, and hasn’t paid his assistant in years. His father-in-law, the great documentary filmmaker Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin), actually watches the six-hour version and makes helpful comments, which Josh rejects violently. He’s 44 but remains as sensitive to criticism as a 22-year-old.

Then after one of his sparsely attended film lectures, an attendee, Jamie, compliments him, and talks up Josh’s first and painfully obscure documentary, which he says he found on eBay. He’s a true fan and Josh is enthralled. “I wanted to be admired,” he says near the end. “I wanted a protégé.”

The couples become friends, and tend to do what the younger couple does. They go to a street party, foodie restaurants (Josh always picks up the check), and an Ayahuasca ceremony (don’t ask). The older couple struggles to keep up. Josh wears a hipster fedora (w/o having read his George W.S. Trow), and rides a bike in the city (then discovers he has arthritis), while Cornelia is always a step behind in hip-hop dance class. They lose their older friends who don’t get what’s become of them. Neither do we, really. We suspect early that Josh is being played, that Jamie is an opportunist who is using any connection to get ahead, and that early sense is corroborated to the tenth degree. Jamie is a massive douche. But Josh is enamored. “I loved you,” he says to Jamie at the end. Meaning the story is a love story that makes no sense. Love stories that make no sense may feel true—we’ve all wondered over the bad partners of good friends—but they’re rarely interesting as stories.

Here. I’m 52, eight years older than Josh and much less successful, but the only thing of Jamie’s I covet is Amanda Seyfried, which is the one thing that Josh doesn’t covet. He likes Jamie’s energy, even if Jamie is all ironic energy. He wants to help him with his documentary, even though he thinks the concept is stupid.

Actually, let’s talk about that documentary for a second.

Jamie tells Josh, whom he keeps calling “Joshy” and “Yosh,” that he’s never been on Facebook, but he’s going to create an account and then visit in person whoever friends him. The first one to do so is a guy named Kent (Brady Corbet), a high school friend who had everything going for him. They all show up at his front door in Poughkeepsie, camera rolling, but Kent’s sister tells them he’s not there; he’s in a hospital because he tried to kill himself. Turns out he’d been a soldier in Afghanistan. He’d both fought there and fought against the U.S. being there. He’s a true hero who won a Purple Heart. Josh finds all of this information online. And suddenly the stupid documentary has life. More than life. There’s a poignant scene where Jamie tells Kent about his own mother dying of ovarian cancer, and, as Josh films him, Jamie, with a remote, zooms in on himself. Leslie even agrees to help out with the doc. Everything is falling into place and Joshy is getting passed by.

But it’s all a lie. Jamie knew about Kent’s Afghanistan service from the get-go; the Facebook thing was just a front. In fact, Kent was Darby’s friend, not his, and it was Darby’s mom who died of ovarian cancer. And Jamie finding Josh’s first documentary via eBay? Bullshit. Josh was just Jamie’s excuse to get to Leslie. Josh finds out all of this at the 11th hour and then rushes to a black-tie honorarium for Leslie, which Jamie is attending, with the evidence. Except, at Leslie’s table, no one gives a shit. Jamie fesses up, but in a way that minimizes the damage, while Josh is bursting at the seams with the indignity of it all, the lack of integrity. No one else cares. “I think he’s an asshole,” Cornelia says, “but the movie’s pretty good.”

Which is fine. Assholes get ahead. Way of the world.

Except later, outside, she parses it further:

It doesn’t matter if it was rigged. Because the movie isn’t about Afghanistan or Kent. It’s about Jamie.

This is backwards. If the doc is about Kent’s service in Afghanistan, which is real, then how Jamie found him is irrelevant. But if the doc is ultimately about Jamie, then Jamie’s lies do matter. He’s on film talking about his mother dying of ovarian cancer, yet his mother is still alive? He’ll be the James Frey of documentarians; he’ll take Leslie down with him.

“While We’re Young” has some good lines. “It’s like their apartment is full of everything we once threw out, but it looks so good the way they have it.” I like a lot of the issues raised, particularly how cutthroat and opportunistic you have to be to succeed. Charles Grodin is wonderful, as is Naomi Watts in a small, thankless part. But Josh’s angst isn’t interesting angst. It’s obvious what’s wrong with him in the beginning, and it’s obvious his solution to what’s wrong with him (Jamie, youth) is the wrong solution, and the resolution to all of this is both muddied and untrue. I think Noah Baumbach’s a pretty good guy, but his movie’s an asshole.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Everyone is calling “Trainwreck” an Amy Schumer film since she’s the hot new thing, but it really is a Judd Apatow film. It feels like a Judd Apatow film. It’s funny, avoids many of the obvious grooves and pitfalls of the genre, and gives us moments of genuine interaction between people. Not bad. Then it’ll push the envelope for comic effect. Characters will riff too long, and the movie itself will go on too long. This thing is 125 minutes, about a half hour longer than it should be, but not bad for Apatow. Cf., 134 minutes for “This is 40” and 146 minutes for “Funny People.”

Does Apatow even have an editor? Couldn’t you, for example, have cut the intervention scene with LeBron, Chris Evert, Matthew Broderick and Marv Alpert and lost nothing? Couldn’t you have cut a lot of LeBron’s scenes? LeBron, playing himself, is good, startlingly so, and the line about watching “Downton Abbey” that night because “I’m not going to practice tomorrow and all the guys are talking about it and I’m left out,” well, that made me laugh out loud. But his character is two-note and the two notes are kind of contradictory: 1) He’s super-sensitive that his friend will be hurt—in the way of women looking after their friends—and, 2) his advice to his friend is always from LeBron’s rarefied realm. Meaning for multimillionaire celebrity-athletes who fend off groupies.

At the same time, “Trainwreck” is different from other Apatow films in two related ways. It’s the first movie he directed that he didn’t write (Schumer did), and its lead is a woman behaving badly rather than a man behaving badly. In this way it’s considered transgressive.

Woman behaving badly
Schumer plays Amy, a girl who sleeps around like a guy. She hates to cuddle, never stays over, and receives more than she gives.

She’s also a journalist at a lad mag called S’Nuff and a favorite of the Tina Browne-ish editor there, Dianna (Tilda Swinton, inspired and awful), even though she’s a lousy journalist. At an edit meeting, she comes up with no new ideas but is handed somebody else’s: a feature profile on a sports surgeon, Aaron Conners (Bill Hader). When she finally visits him in his office, she’s done zero research. She doesn’t know that his client list includes the biggest names in the game, and when one of those names, LeBron James, steps in for a quick chat (about, among other things, “Downton Abbey”), she doesn’t know who he is.

Then she sleeps with her subject before she’s written the piece.

But journalistic ethics aren’t the point of the movie. The point is she changes. She likes Aaron. He makes her want to be a better woman. Wait, scratch that. She actually keeps trying to break it off. Plus there are subplots:

• She and her sister, Kim (Brie Larson), talk about moving their curmudgeon father (Colin Quinn), into a cheaper assisted living facility.
• Kim is more staid and goody-two-shoes, and the two sisters generally clash.
• Her editor doesn’t like the piece on Aaron because he’s boring.

Per the rom-com formula, Amy and Aaron have to break it off to set up the final act. So Amy leaves a ceremony where Aaron is receiving a “Doctors Without Borders” award for a phone call from Dianna; then she argues with Aaron all night even though he has to operate on Amar’e Stoudemire the next day. When Aaron asks for a temporary break in their relationship, she uses it as an excuse to exit the building completely. Cue: montage of each in their separate world.

Why does she get fired from S’Nuff again? Oh, right. She sleeps with an intern (Ezra Miller), who turns out to be 16. Mostly, though, it’s because it’s the formula. She has to leave the soul-destroying job in order to get back her soul. Then she rewrites the piece on Aaron and sells it to Vanity Fair. She fails up as a journalist in the digital age. Done and done. With the drinking, too. She cleans out bottles, and that’s that. Finally, she wins Aaron back by dancing with Aaron’s clients, the Knicks City dancers. Yes, she becomes a cheerleader, but an Amy version of a cheerleader.

That’s our happy ending. Because no one does “Annie Hall” anymore.

Slightly outside Amy Schumer
What works?

• Bill Hader, who might be the best actor to ever come off of “Saturday Night Live.” Yes. He was completely believable as the younger, gay brother in “The Skeleton Twins,” and he’s completely believable here as a staid, well-meaning celebrity surgeon. He feels like a doctor. I would go to him if I had pain in my knee. I don’t know how Hader does that.
• Tilda Swinton, who is virtually unrecognizable as Dianna.
• Amy’s eulogy for her father, which is more honest and heartfelt than 99 percent of anything you will see in the movies this year.
• Amy’s relationship with her sister, which seems real. Plus she and Brie actually look like sisters.
• Most of the familial relationships. Apatow does family well.

I saw “Trainwreck” with two women, both of whom loved it. For me it was mixed, for the reasons stated above, and because simply switching genders on the douche-guy role isn’t that interesting. It’s not as transgressive as Schumer’s own comedy, for example. Maybe eventually.

WARNING: SPOILERS

On the way to the theater, I wondered if Paul Rudd was the first person to ever play Ant-Man on screen. For the record, he’s about the 10th, but almost everyone else on IMDb’s list is animated and from the past decade.

On the way home from the theater, I realized that one of the movie’s cameos—which I’d mentally noted but hadn’t connected—was the actor who’d first played Ant-Man on screen, even if IMDb.com doesn’t list him. In March 1979, Margot Kidder, fresh off her “Superman” triumph, was the guest host on “Saturday Night Live,” and they did a skit in which Superman (Bill Murray) and Lois Lane (Kidder) throw a superhero party. It was kind of a revelation for me as a teenaged comic-book nerd. Other people knew about this stuff? Adults? The best gag, besides the Hulk bathroom bit, was watching Garrett Morris as Ant-Man being ridiculed for his less-than-super powers:

Flash: You can talk to the ants, is that it?
Ant-Man (childlike, trusting): Well, partly. But mainly I shrink myself down to the size of an ant while retaining my full human strength.

At which point the Flash (Dan Aykroyd) calls over the Hulk (John Belushi) and they proceed to give Ant-Man shit:

Flash: Hey Hulk, check this guy out. He’s got the strength of a human.
Hulk: Hey, Ant-Man! Where’s your ants? [Laughs]
Ant-Man: They’re at home in the ant farm.
[Hulk and Flash stifle laughs.]
Ant-Man: I don’t see what’s so funny. Is there something wrong with being Ant-Man?

So it’s a brave cameo for the film. Morris’ turn as Ant-Man revealed exactly what was wrong with the character. He’s just not cool.

Now he is. Score another one for Marvel.

Wanted: SWM (Again)
It’s a fun movie, I’ll say that. It also demonstrates how kick-ass Ant-Man can be. (He fights Falcon to a standstill outside of Avengers HQ.) I mostly enjoyed it.

But first ...

OK, I know it’s wrong to talk plot holes in a movie in which a man can shrink down to the size of an ant, but here I go.

Rudd plays Scott Lang, a likeable guy (go figure) who just got out of San Quentin for hacking into some awful global financial meltdown corporation and redistributing its wealth. He’s basically Robin Hood as burglar/hacker. As he’s leaving prison with his friend Luis (Michael Peña, overacting for comic effect), he assumes he’ll be able to get a job with his engineering degree. Cut to: Scott working at Baskin Robbins. From which he then gets fired when his past is discovered.

The movie almost becomes a light version of the serious 1978 Dustin Hoffman movie “Straight Time.” Since Scott is unable to get a job, he is forced back into a life of crime—robbing an old rich dude who turns out to be Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), the first Ant-Man, and who, of course, wanted him to break into his home, as a test, since he sees Scott as the new Ant-Man.

All of which is fine. The plot hole? That Scott wouldn’t be able to get a job once he got out of prison. That he wouldn’t be a celebrity. C’mon! He’s the one guy in the whole fucking world who made Wall Street pay. He’d be on every talk show in the country! He’d have book deals, opportunities. He wouldn’t be working at no Baskin Robbins.

The movie begins in 1989. Apparently Ant-Man was an under-the-radar superhero of the Cold War/Reagan era, and S.H.I.E.L.D.—represented by the good (Howard Stark and Peggy Carter) and the douchey (Martin Donovan as Mitchell Carson)—wants his shrinking tech; but Pym is too worried it’ll upset the balance of power. He’s worried it’ll destroy the world, so he keeps it to himself.

(Sidenote: The best CGI in the movie isn’t the shrinking and enlarging; it’s in this scene, where Michael Douglas looks 25 years younger than his 70-year-old self. And not in a fake or creepy way. He looks legitimately 25 years younger.)

Today, Pym Technologies, or whatever it’s called, is run by Pym’s former protégé Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), as well as Pym’s daughter, Hope (Evangeline Lilly, encased in a vampy black bob), both of whom never got enough affection/attention from the old man, and get back at him by booting him from his own company. Then Cross becomes obsessed with recreating the shrinking tech. He is to “Ant-Man” as Jeff Bridges’ Obadiah Stone was to the original “Iron Man”: the greedy CEO who recreates the hero’s powers in villainous form. He becomes Yellow Jacket.

Which is why Hope joins her father in helping train Scott, who will become the new Ant-Man.

The movie’s not particularly kind to women and minorities, is it? Peña and his cohorts, including T.I., are there for comic relief, while smart, cool-headed white men run things. Hope is smart, too, and a better athlete than Scott, and she keeps begging her father to let her become Ant-Man. Or the Wasp. But no go. Pym lost his wife that way—flashback to 1987 when she saved the world but went subatomic to do so—and he’s not going to lose his daughter as well. That’s sweet, but it means Hope is passed over for the less-qualified man. Given the discussion of the lack of female superheroes in the Marvel Age of Movies, it’s all a bit awkward.

Merry Marvel Marching Society
Scott has daughter issues as well, in that he’s prevented by his ex (Jude Greer, wasted), and her cop-fiancé (Bobby Cannavale, meatier), from even seeing his daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson, adorable). The final battle takes place in Cassie’s bedroom, where we get some humorous bits. We see the clash between Yellow Jacket and Ant-Man from their perspective (monumental, pitched) and then from Cassie’s perspective (a toy train falls over). At one point, a Thomas the Train is enlarged, bursts through the roof, and lands on the front lawn, its smiling eyes continuing to shift back and forth.

“Ant-Man” is directed by Peyton Reed, whose previous movies don’t exactly blown us away (“Yes Man,” “The Break-Up,” “Down with Love”), and written by a ton of comedic talent whose CVs are a little better: Edgar Wright (the Cornetto trilogy), Joe Cornish (“The Adventures of Tin Tin”), Adam McKay (“Anchorman”) and Rudd himself. Apparently the whole thing began with Wright, but he soon left the project because of the usual creative differences with Marvel Studios. Marvel has a history in this area, but at the least it isn’t making a shit product. (Cf. Fox.) Maybe the juice is in the clash? Marvel’s goal is to be clever within the feel-good formula; I’m sure its more artistic types want to break away a bit from the formula.

So do I. Example: In the end, when Scott goes subatomic to destroy Yellow Jacket and save his daughter, I wanted him to disappear forever in the void—like Leo’s face disappearing into the void in “Titanic”: a shot, I would argue, that made the movie an extra half a billion bucks worldwide. I wanted the sacrifice to have meaning. Yeah. Lotsa luck, Charlie. Rudd’s already signed up for next year’s “Captain America: Civil War”—one of 10 “Marvel Universe” movies we’re supposed to get before 2020. It’s the new Merry Marvel Marching Society. Try not to get stomped.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The last great mystery in the great career of Sherlock Holmes results from his own senescence—his inability to remember his last great mystery. That's both smart and sad. In moments when Holmes (Ian McKellen) looks slack-jawed and dumbfounded, I kept thinking of Ophelia’s line in “Hamlet”: Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!

Even smarter is the casting. You know how people used to say they’d pay to hear John Houseman read the phone book? I think I’d pay to hear Ian McKellen say one word. In “Mr. Holmes” that word is “Portsmouth,” the coastal village to which his housekeeper, Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney, doing Bri’ish), is thinking of moving with her son, Roger. Holmes doesn’t want them to go, so he dismisses it out of hand. McKellen can convey so much with a glance or a tone, and he says “Portsmouth” as if it were a small, sad place that’s fine enough for, you know, them, but not really for people like you and me. I got such joy from his reading of that one word. 

Good casting as well for Roger, a whipsmart boy from working-class parents who idolizes Holmes and his smarts. “Are you going to do the thing?” he says early on, and we know immediately what he means: how Holmes can extract a person’s story from seemingly inconsequential details. It’s Holmes’ superpower. In this story, Roger is essentially Holmes’ Watson, and Milo Parker, who looks like a dark-haired cousin to Thomas Brodie-Sangster (“Love, Actually,” “Game of Thrones”), is perfect for the role: curious with Holmes but not above being bratty with his mum.

It’s 1947, and Holmes, 93 and living on the coast of England, is trying to recall and write about the case that ended his career 35 years earlier. He’s trying to set the record straight—a record that his companion, the long-departed Dr. John Watson, bent out of shape with heroics and deerstalker caps. Except Holmes doesn’t remember how that case ended. He doesn’t remember a lot of things, so he’s forever writing notes to himself on his French cuffs.

The movie is split into three parts:

1. A recent trip to post-war Japan to purchase “prickly ash,” which is supposed to help him with his fading memory.
2. Present day, 1947, in which Roger helps Holmes with his apiary, while Holmes tries to write the story of his last case.
3. That last case.

The present-day story is the best, Japan the weakest. Holmes’ reason for going to Japan is far-fetched, and the mystery behind his host there, Mr. Umezaki (Hiroyuki Sanada), doesn’t make much sense once it’s revealed. If Umezaki has ulterior motives, why is it up to Holmes to reveal those ulterior motives? The resolution to the pre-WWI case is also weak—hinging, as it does, upon sentiment, and a heretofore unrevealed talent of Holmes to understand absolutely nothing about human nature.

The whole movie, in fact, turns on this notion. It suggests that while Holmes was good at “doing the thing,” he didn’t know people. It further suggests that at the age of 93, he finally kinda gets it. And he uses what he’d forgotten about his last case to make things right in the present day—both in England and in Japan. Essentially he realizes that a soft lie is better than the hard truth.

The plot thins.

The movie is directed by Bill Condon, who directed McKellen in “Gods and Monsters” nearly 20 years ago, and who has since directed other reasonably good movies: “Kinsey,” “Dreamgirls,” “The Fifth Estate.” This one, too, is reasonably good. But just that.

But we’ll always have Portsmouth.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Two early reaction shots sum up my feelings about “Blackhat,” the cyber/hacking thriller by Michael Mann that was released (and bombed) in January. The first one gave me hope for the film; the second gave me the opposite of hope.

Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) is a hero in the Michael Mann mold: working class background, taciturn, expert at what he does—which, in his case, is coding and hacking. In an interconnected world, he pretty much gets into and out of anywhere he wants. Well, sort of. As the movie opens, he’s in prison: USP Canaan in Waymart, Pa. (The details of the details are a hallmark of Mann.) There, he’s visited by an DOJ agent. A blackhat hacker has caused 1) a nuke meltdown in China, and 2) a run on soy futures in the stock market, and the FBI, in the person of Carol Barrett (Viola Davis, brilliant), is working with the Chinese army, in the person of Capt. Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom), to find him and neutralize him. The U.S., in other words, has to work with its rival, and a country that hacks us, to bring down the bad guy. Tough enough. But then Chen insists on working with Hathaway, his former college roommate, since the blackhat used code he and Hathaway wrote in college. Barrett reluctantly agrees. Hathaway unreluctantly doesn’t. He’s offered a contract, a temporary furlough, and returns it unsigned:

Hathway: Both you and the Assistant U.S. Attorney can take that document and stick it up your ass.
Agent: I'm sorry?
Hathaway: Why are you sorry? I insulted you. What are you sorry for? I'm not sorry.

That’s a nice line and Hemsworth says it well. Apparently Mann steeped him in his character for months before shooting began. He took him to prison, to midwest steel mills, he told him the voluminous background of his character. They hung with coders and hackers and learned the lingo until it was second nature. All of that work is onscreen.

Eventually, Barrett agrees to Hathaway’s terms—a pardon, basically, if they catch the guy—but there’s initial tension between the two. Hathway calls her “chica,” she dresses him down, he stays amused. Tracking the stock market hack, they find the mole on surveillance cameras cleaning up in the company washroom, and Barrett immediately identifies one of his tattoos belonging to a West Texas prison gang. She calls up the NCIC database and finds their man. It’s a dead-end, since he’s now dead, but in that moment, as Barrett is working, we get Hathaway’s reaction shot. He’s impressed. He knows he’s working with a professional here. He sees a kindred spirit.

The second reaction shot
The team that’s assembled is in fact a professional team: not just Barrett, Hathaway and Chen, but U.S. Marshall Mark Jessup (Holt McCallany), who, yes, gets played by Hathaway, but he’s still another classic Mann character: taciturn, brave, expert at what he does.

The reaction shot that bummed me out belongs to the fifth member of the team, Chen’s sister, Lien (Wei Tang, yowsah), who is also a computer expert. At one point, she and Hathaway are in a Koreatown restaurant hoping for a meeting with the blackhat. They sit, wait, talk. I like the moment where, on a backroom computer, Hathaway opens a line of communication with the hacker, telling him, “I am onto you.” “Who are you?” the hacker types back. Hathaway pauses. He’s a name, after all, in the hacking world. He’s been in prison for what he’s done. So he thinks for a moment before revealing the goods: “ghostman,” he types. Does he think it still means something? Because it doesn’t. “Piss off and die, ghostman,” his rival types dismissively. Ghostman has been away too long. He’s now a ghost.

Great bit. But then the fight. In the same restaurant, the blackhat sends three big Koreans to mess up Hathaway. Except in prison, Hathaway not only worked on his mind but his body. I mean, look at him: He’s Thor. And he takes down all three in what seems like realistic fashion. And from Lien? A look of admiration. That’s when I went, “Uh oh.”

Of the five core members of the team, Lien is the most unnecessary. They say her talent is computer networks but her real talent is beauty. Wei Tang has a simple unadorned beauty that’s stunning to behold, and Mann lets us behold it. Of course she and Hathaway fall in love, or something similar, but I could’ve cared less. With that reaction shot from Lien, I felt the movie shifting in a much less interesting direction.

The tension in a Michael Mann movie is between the professional and anything that gets in the way of his independence. Sometimes it’s women and love. More often it’s suspect groups: Leo’s gang in “Thief,” Brown & Williamson and CBS in “The Insider,” the U.S. Army in “Ali.” But small, professional teams can be assembled. You lose the Waingros of the world, the emotional and talkative ones, you can work within a group. That’s what happens in “Blackhat.” We get our team. But then we lose them.

Two things happen. In China, to pick up the blackhat’s trail, our team needs access to a piece of NSA software called Black Widow; but there’s no way the NSA is going to let Hathaway, let alone China, get access to it. So, with Barrett’s tacit approval, Hathaway hacks the access. Of course he’s immediately discovered and Barrett is ordered to bring him back to USP Canaan. But she knows it’s more important to bring in the blackhat, so she looks the other way as Hathaway plans his escape.

At the same time, the bad guys they’ve been trailing, led by professional mercenary Elias Kassar (Ritchie Coster), are now trailing them. And at the moment by the side of the road when Hathaway is saying goodbye to Lien, who has gotten emotional, and has blamed both Hathaway and her brother for all that she’s feeling; at that moment when she decides to forgive her brother, and waves to him in the car, that’s when the car blows up and Kassar and his men attack.

Question: Is it a good thing I knew the car would blow up before it did? Is that foreshadowing or predictability? It feels predictable. It doesn't feel right. Worse, every member of the team dies except Hathaway and Lien, who carry on alone for the last 45 minutes of the movie. But I already felt done with it. I wanted the team not the couple.

Pushing tin
I do like how pedestrian the blackhat’s plot turns out to be. All of this work? It’s set-up for the real hack: flooding tin mines in Malaysia, and getting rich when tin prices soar. It isn’t “taking over the world.” It isn’t even gold or silver. It's tin. Good in-joke. 

But then it’s back to bang bang. In Jakarta, there’s a cat-and-mouse final battle with guns and knives amid a big, celebratory crowd. It’s back to one guy, our hero, and we’re supposed to give him the look Lien gave him earlier. But we’ve seen this movie before.

“Blackhat” is more moody poetry from Mann, meaning it’s better than most movies out there; but it’s lesser than most of his movies. If I could I would take Mann’s guns away from him. Force him to play with something else for a change. Look at “The Insider.” The pressures there are corporate pressures. They’re about how to stay honest in the world, which is run by corporations, and still support your family. In what ways does a man compromise to live in the world? What value is a code in a world that seems to have none?

WARNING: SPOILERS

In the end, it’s about the dangers of micromanagement.

Eleven-year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) moves with her family from Minnesota to San Francisco, where the house is a fixer-upper, the furniture hasn’t arrived yet, and the pizza has broccoli on it. Where are her friends? How does she fit in? She feels sad. She needs to feel sad. But Joy (voice: Amy Poehler) is her controlling emotion, and doesn’t let Sadness (Phyllis Smith of “The Office”) do her job, which, in this instance, is turning certain core memories—represented by transluscent balls—blue with the blues. In the ensuing tussle over the balls, Joy and Sadness disappear up a pneumatic tube and wind up in long-term memory, from which they begin the epic journey back, through the subconscious, the imagination, and abstract thought—even attempting, like Depression-era hobos, to hop onto the train of thought—while the remaining emoticons, Anger, Disgust and Fear (Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling and Bill Hader), take turns gumming up the works and the pillars of Riley’s existence (friends, hockey, honesty) crumble and fall away. Without Joy and Sadness, Riley’s blocked, and retreats into sarcasm and temper tantrums. Eventually she decides to run away. It’s only when Joy and Sadness return to the control room, and Joy lets Sadness do her job, that Riley breaks down into tears, the family reconciles, and life, in all of its complexity, can move forward again.

Essentially it’s the Rosey Grier lesson from “Free to Be You and Me”: It’s alright to cry ... It just might make you feel better!

It’s also a movie that could be shown in a Management 101 class: Beware of micromanaging; let everyone do their job.

Or maybe the lesson is the tongue-in-cheek one posited by my friend Jeff afterwards: Never leave Minnesota.

The journey back
I expected great things going in, since the buzz and the reviews were amazing.

But I wasn’t feeling it. Not at first. The various core memories make Riley who she is, affix her unique personality, but what we see on the screen is hardly unique. Instead it feels universal, purposely designed, so we can all see ourselves or our daughters in Riley.

Then Joy and Sadness get lost and begin the epic journey back. How many of our favorite movies, particularly kids movies, are about epic journeys back? Start with the granddaddy, “The Wizard of Oz,” where the tornado acts as pneumatic tube, lifting our main character from home to someplace far away. A lot of the Pixar movies share this motif: “Toy Story 2,” “Finding Nemo,” “Toy Story 3.” We’re spun out, and we want to return whole, and generally we return damaged but better for the damage.

That’s the narrative structure, the anxious thing that drives the movie, but what really matters, kids (and grups), is the journey. It’s not about Dorothy returning to Kansas; it’s about meeting the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion, and the battle with the Wicked Witch. Here, it’s about meeting Bing Bong (the inimitable Richard Kind), Riley’s long-ago imaginary friend, a pink, portly creature with a bowtie, an elephant trunk and the tail of a cat, found milling about the long-term memories and plotting his return into Riley’s life. Of course, the opposite is happening. Riley is now 11, and the rocket-fueled wagon with which Bing Bong wants to propel Riley to the moon, is being unceremoniously discarded into the Memory Dump, the vast expanse of Riley’s mind, where most things just disappear. Bing Bong, most likely, is next. That’s why he sits down and cries. That’s why Sadness consoles him. And that’s when Joy has her epiphany—and we ours. We realize the movie’s resolution.

More or less. But I didn’t anticipate the sacrifice. Through a series of misadventures, both Bing Bong and Joy wind up in the Memory Dump, where he begins to disappear, and where she may be stuck forever—condemning Riley to a joyless life. But then Bing Bong finds his rocket-powered wagon, and the two attempt to ride it out of the Dump: once, twice, and on the third try, realizing he was weighing them down, realizing that Riley needs Joy more than she needs him, he sacrifices himself: He leaps off at the last second. Joy escapes, he begins to disappear, and with his final words, “Take her to the moon for me,” spoken in Richard Kind’s kind voice, I felt something in my chest shift. I literally stifled a sob. I can’t remember the last time I literally stifled a sob.

Damn Pixar. Damn Richard Kind and his kind voice. (Cf. “Obvious Child.”)

Anyway, that’s the moment I knew everyone was right and Pixar had done it again after a five-year drought. Or “drought.”

Feeling Minnesota
So is it odd that all of the emoticons want Riley to feel joy? Shouldn’t Anger want her to feel angry, and Disgust disgust? Don’t they want to imprint themselves on her?

More, isn’t the movie a kids movie for adults rather than for kids? Are kids bored with it? My nephew Jordy wasn’t, but he’s 14 going on 30.

Regardless, it should provoke interesting discussions. Patricia and I saw “Inside Out” with our friends Jeff and Sullivan, and their kids Reilly, 11, and Beckett, 6, and afterwards these are some of the things we talked about:

• Which of the five is your controlling emotion? (For me, sadly, fear. No offense, Fear.)
• What are your core memories?
• What are your childhood earworms? (First thought: “Me and My RC.” Second thought: “I love my Mounds/Lots of juicy coconut ...”)

I like that there was reconciliation, that everyone admitted missing Minnesota even as they stayed in San Francisco. That’s the adult message from the film’s writer-director, Pete Docter (“Monsters, Inc.” “Up”), who grew up in Minnesota and should know. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

The movie is an attack on itself but itself wins. It mocks what it is even as it gives us that thing, which we love mocking but even more having. We have our dinosaur and get eaten, too.

This is what Claire (Dallas Bryce Howard), an ice-queen corporate VP who doesn’t have time for her visiting nephews, says to a group of potential investors: “Let’s face it, no one’s impressed with a dinosaur anymore. Consumers want them bigger, louder, more teeth.”

(Psst: We’re the consumers.)

And this is what the investors say: “We want to be thrilled.”

(Psst: We’re “we.”)

And this is what the evil scientist, Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong), who creates the Indominus Rex—the bigger, louder, more toothsome dinosaur—says: “If I don’t innovate, someone else will.”

This is the set-up: corporate hacks, interested in profit margins and protecting the asset (i.e., Indominus Rex), shortsightedly create the circumstances that allow disaster to happen. They’re the villains in the piece. Yet in our world they’re right. We came out in droves to see “Jurassic World”: more than $500 million worldwide opening weekend. In the movie, Claire learns her lesson and becomes a better, sweatier person, but her original frigid self actually nailed it. Bigger, louder, more teeth? Yes, please.

It’s Jurassic’s world; we just watch in it.

Everything’s amazing but nobody’s happy
Oddly, I didn’t think it was a bad movie. It has the above meta-message for people like me to chew over even as people get chewed over. It also zips. I found it more bearable than the other 2015 blockbusters: “Furious 7,” “Avengers/Ultron” and “Mad Max,” a critic’s darling which is hardly a blockbuster, domestically or worldwide. In more than a month, it’s grossed half of what “Jurassic” did opening weekend.

They do an incredible job of cloning here, too. Not the dinos in Jurassic World, or even in the plot—swiped from all of the other “Jurassic” movies—but in the kids who play the brothers, Gray and Zach. The actors are named Ty Simpkins (“Iron Man 3”) and Nick Robinson (“Kings of Summer”), but they look like a young Patrick Fugit and a young James Franco. They also cloned a Viewmaster for Gray to use in his bedroom when he’s introduced. Because kids on computers are pains in the ass but kids with Viewmasters are nostalgically sweet. We also think for a moment we might be in the 1970s. We might think we’re about to watch a Steven Spielberg movie.

So Gray is the younger one who loves dinos, Zach is the bored teen who’s girl crazy, and Zach is supposed to look after Gray while they visit Aunt Claire for the weekend at Jurassic World, a kind of Sea World for dinos. Sadly, Aunt Claire is rarely around. She’s too busy with investors, and has sloughed off the boys onto a hot British assistant, Zara (Katie McGrath), who gets eaten when things go awry. Sorry, Zara. You should’ve been warm rather than hot.

There are laugh-out loud moments, some intentional, some not. Jurassic World should be amazing, right? It’s dinosaurs. How fucking cool is that? But we’re bored with it already. We get a scene where a goat is tied to a post and the T-Rex is summoned for the tourists, safe in their plastic tubes, all of them holding smartphones aloft to record the experience; and at that moment, as we hear the T-Rex tear into the goat, Zach gets a call, and answers it in his bored voice: “Hey, mom.” I burst out laughing. It’s basically Louis CK—everything’s amazing but nobody’s happy—and we’re the spoiled idiots, the noncontributing zeroes, that this amazingness is wasted on.

The unintentional laugh-out loud moments mostly relate to Owen (Chris Pratt), a kind of raptor whisperer, but it’s hardly Pratt’s fault. He’s the best thing in the movie, even as he seems trapped within the movie. It’s his job to train the raptors, so he’s supposed to have a special rapport with them, which, in the early going, amounts to holding them at bay for a few seconds to allow a doofus employee to escape being eaten; but once the shit hits the fan, it amounts to riding a motorcycle next to them, and turning them against the Indominus Rex, which, we find out in the third act, is part raptor. By the end, there’s an understanding between man and raptor. You can see it in their eyes. You can see it in the tilt of their head. It’s like “His master’s voice.” That made me laugh out loud, too, but for not-good reasons.

Watching, I began to wish for a more “Games of Thrones” universe, where we wouldn’t be able to tell who dies. Wouldn’t it be nice to suddenly lose Claire, or Owen, or—can you imagine?—Gray? My god, the outcry from parents. But they protect these assets even as the usual suspects buy it: dullwitted hardhat fatties and pompous soldiers of fortune. The Jurassic owner and innovator, Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan, Hollywood’s go-to Indian for the global market), goes down in his stupid helicopter, while Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio), the evil private military contractor who salivates at the idea of trained raptors in this man’s (or his man’s) army, thinks he can talk raptors down as Owen does. Ehhh! Sorry, Charlie. Chomp.

‘We’re safe now’
A trope Hollywood needs to give up on? The sigh of relief. The line “We’re safe now.” It no longer surprises. It’s a clear indication the characters aren’t safe. “Jurassic World” uses this trope over and over again.

But the corporate hacks were right, weren’t they? It all worked. We all came out. And as I watched Gray and Zach being reunited with their sobbing parents in the makeshift hospital at the end, with the terrified and wounded all around them, I had an idea the inevitable sequel: “Jurassic World: The Class-Action Lawsuit.”

Universal, call me. 

Don't exit through the gift shop: the clones of Franco, Fugit and Harrson Ford amid the souvenirs.