Ash Is Purest White (2019)

Ash Is Purest White (2019)

Cast

• Liao Fan
• Zhao Tao
• Feng Xiaogang
• Xu Zheng
• Zhang Yibai
• Yi'nan Diao
• Zhang Yi
• Dong Zijian
• Ding Jiali

Director

• Jia Zhangke

Screenplay

• Jia Zhangke

Director of Photography

• Eric Gautier

Editor

• Matthieu Laclau

Music

• Lim Giong

Crime, Drama, Romance

141 minutes

 

 

The English subtitles for this superb film from China leave one word untranslated: “jianghu.” It refers to outlaw sects or societies and is literally untranslatable, but for the main character of this movie it means not just “gangster” or something like it; it connotes a particular code of ethics.

The character for whom this meaning is most sacrosanct happens to be a woman. In the movie’s opening scenes, set around the turn of the 20^th century, Qiao, played in a spectacular performance by Tao Zhao, swaggers into an underground mahjong parlor like it ain’t no thing, taking her seat next to gang big shot Bin and taking a few drags from his cigarette. When Bin mediates a conflict between his subjects, talking one of them into putting aside a pistol he’s just rashly brandished, Qiao picks up the gun and examines it with no small fascination.

Bin and Qiao are soon revealed to be rather more serious people than these first impressions indicate. Qiao has an ailing dad whose loss of a profession—he worked in a mine that’s soon closing—isn’t helping his disposition. Bin likes a peaceable rule, even as he offers to help out an elder operator who’s delving into real estate. “Some assholes are saying my villas are haunted,” the older guy complains. Before Bin can look into it, that guy is knifed in a parking lot.

Bin is caught up in an unspecified turf war that culminates when he’s attacked by about a dozen youths who brutally beat him. It’s Qiao who takes definitive action to save him—and winds up doing five years in prison for her trouble.

Like his prior film, 2015’s “Mountains May Depart,” this new picture from master Jia Zhangke is a three-part drama spanning decades. To this critic “Ash is Purest White” is a much more successful attempt at depicting a changing China through the lives of not-quite-tragic characters and their sufferings.

Once Qiao is sprung from prison, it’s 2006, and the monumental Three Gorges project, which was to transform permanently the Yangtze River, is underway. She takes a boat in search of Bin, is ripped off by a pretend-pious woman sharing her cabin, and has to chase her old boyfriend down to get him to fess up about his new life, which isn’t much to speak of. After a time is becomes clear that Qiao’s heartache isn’t merely over the loss of a boyfriend, but of the loss of a way of life. This compels her to embrace the jianghu code, or at least her interpretation of it, with even more ferocity. By the time we hit 2018, she’s completely transformed herself, much like the railway she took to get away from Bin after their unsatisfactory reunion.

Because Jia sets the final section of the film in the present day, as opposed to a rather sketchy not-too-distant-future he traveled to in “Mountains,” “Ash” resolves with a genuine immediacy. And his living-outside-the-law characters here are simply more compelling than the betraying strivers of the prior film. The movie represents both the director and his lead actress at the peak of their powers. Tao Zhao presents Qiao first as a tough kitten of sorts; during her prison stint, she looks drawn and wan, and stays seemingly timid upon release. Gradually, though, the actress shows that Qiao has indeed grown into a lioness. Albeit one that’s not just fearsome, but reflective and wise.

The movie is always a pleasure to behold, but be warned: The sound mix is so acute that every time one of the characters’ iPhones went off in the present-day scenes I was almost annoyed, thinking that someone in the screening room had left their device on. So wait a second in your local arthouse before yelling “turn it off!”

 

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Long Shot (2019)

Long Shot (2019)

Cast

• Seth Rogen as Fred Flarsky
• Charlize Theron as Charlotte Field
• Gabrielle Graham as Franci
• Boyz II Men as Themselves

Director

• Jonathan Levine

Writer

• Liz Hannah
• Dan Sterling

Cinematographer

• Yves Bélanger

Editor

• Melissa Bretherton
• Evan Henke

Composer

• Marco Beltrami
• Miles Hankins

Comedy

Rated NR

120 minutes

 

 

With its commentary on how much a female candidate has to alter her personality to win over the electorate while a TV star sits in the White House, it’s impossible to miss the allusions to the election of 2016. But any sort of political statement—or even a particularly insightful one on gender dynamics, to  the film's detriment—ends up taking a backseat to one of the oldest stories in the cinematic book: two wildly likable stars putting a movie on their shoulders and carrying it in every way. For a century, people have been falling in love with romantic comedies and it’s usually not because of their embedded social commentary. It’s because they like the stars and want to see them find happiness. It’s been a long time since there’s been a rom-com with two stars as straight-up likable and easy to root for as Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron are here.

Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) is a journalist at an alt-weekly, the kind of guy who likes to drop f-bombs in his headlines and gets off on ruffling feathers and taking risks. The film opens with Fred infiltrating a White Power group and being willing to go as far as to get a Swastika tattoo to get the story. His journalistic pride is key to his identity, and so he can’t believe it when a conservative media mogul (played by a heavily made-up Andy Serkis) buys out the publication for which he writes. Fred packs up his bags and leaves the job he loves, going out for a day of drowning his misery in drugs and beer with his best buddy Lance (a fantastic O’Shea Jackson Jr.). His rich pal takes him to a fundraiser, where he crosses paths with his old babysitter, Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron), who just so happens to be Secretary of State.

Charlotte has recently been told by President Chambers (Bob Odenkirk) that the former TV star is tired of being leader of the free world and wants to now segue into being a movie star. He won’t be running in 2020, leaving the door open for Fields herself. With a team that includes the tough Maggie Milliken (June Diane Raphael) working to craft an image that will get her elected, Charlotte is also going to do a world tour to garner support for both an environmental initiative in which she truly believes. But she remembers Fred, the wide-eyed kid who supported her decades ago. And he remembers her when she was sixteen and still passionate about the world. She decides to give him a job punching up her speeches, and, well, Fred and Charlotte get closer. He opens her up to new experiences and helps her find her voice again. She teaches him to care about something other than his opinion. And there’s some very R-rated humor along the way.

It's a little sticky politically to make a movie in 2019 that arguably asserts that the best way for a powerful woman to find herself is to let her hair down and dance to Roxette. And yet that moment is a perfect example of what works about “Long Shot,” in that Theron and Rogen sell it in such a genuine and joyful way that it’s easy to dismiss the politics and just give oneself over to the charm of it all. In that sense, despite its very raunchy sense of humor, “Long Shot” is an incredibly old-fashioned rom-com, a genre that has often relied on the charm of its stars more than politics or social commentary. People didn’t fall in love with “Pretty Woman” because of its commentary on sex workers—they fell in love with the stars and their chemistry. This genre is often more about a look, a laugh, a connection than it is a statement, and Levine remembers that enough to keep “Long Shot” clicking for most of its over-long 115 minutes. He knows this movie lives and dies on how much we like his leads and want to see them find happiness, and so he only uses the Trump/Clinton connections as a side dish. The main course is less “The American President” and more “Pretty Woman” (and this really is a gender-reversed version of that story if you think about it).

But if so much of the success of “Long Shot” rests on the backs of its stars, how do they carry that weight? First of all, Seth Rogen hasn’t had this kind of rom-com leading role in a decade and he’s improved as an actor in that time, shedding some of his man-child tics while also keeping just enough of them to make Fred into a version of that self-defeating friend we all have. Rogen is very funny, but the movie belongs to Theron, who proves yet again that she can do literally anything. Very few actors can segue so seamlessly from “Mad Max: Fury Road” to “Tully” to this and not miss a single beat. Her comic timing is perfect, her chemistry with Rogen is believable, and she does something that often sinks political movies in that we buy her as a political leader. It’s a great performance. Returning to the aforementioned Roxette scene again, she has a beat at the end of it that cuts through everything that one could say is wrong with this movie by just being deeply human.

“Long Shot” could have been tightened in several places and the party goes a little too long, but it’s easy to see Levine and his team falling in love with Fred and Charlotte as much as I suspect audiences will when this is released. Whatever side of the political fence you’re on and whoever you voted for in 2016, it will be hard or you not to fall in love with them too. 

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An Elephant Sitting Still (2019)

An Elephant Sitting Still (2019)

Cast

• Yu Zhang as Yu Cheng
• Yuchang Peng as Wei Bu
• Wang Yu Wen as Huang Ling
• Congxi Li as Wang Jin
• Xiang Rong Dong as Dean
• Guo Jing as Dean's Wife
• Zhenghui Ling as Li Kai
• Xiaolong Zhang as Yu Shuai

Director

• Hu Bo

Writer

• Hu Bo

Cinematographer

• Chao Fan

Editor

• Hu Bo

Composer

• Hua Lun

Drama

Rated NR

230 minutes

 

 

With a 54 kilometer border shared with Russia, the city of Manzhouli in China is in the country’s most northern corner. It is the busiest land port of entry in the country. Railways pass through the city, a series of arteries and tributaries, allowing for trade and movement of goods. This economic lifeblood cycles endlessly along the same tracks as trains lumber ahead constantly on their predestined path. In Hu Bo’s epic first and final feature film, “An Elephant Sitting Still,” there is a mythical elephant who lives in Manzhouli, sitting still, indifferent to the cruelty of the world.
Hu Bo attended the Beijing Film Academy and graduated with a B.F.A. in directing. He made a couple of short films and was also a novelist, publishing two books “Huge Crack” and “Bullfrog” in 2017. Shortly after completing his short film “Man in the Well” and “An Elephant Sitting Still,” Hu Bo took his own life. He was just 28 years old.

“An Elephant Sitting Still” runs at 230 minutes and is overwhelmingly grey. The sun rarely peeks out from beyond the clouds and the four central characters are burdened with a deeply seated hopelessness. Long takes are filled with aching silences, as captured by an uncomfortably intimate camera. In a convergence of destinies, the characters are drawn to the city of Manzhouli and the influence of a mythical elephant.
If cinema’s central identity is tied to capturing time, “An Elephant Sitting Still” captures the drudgery of time once its spiritual significance has been lost. Taking place within a single 24-hour period, the character’s lives are filled with incident. There are sexual affairs, violent altercations and tragic deaths, but rather than being the impetus for change, these actions feel part of an unrelenting cycle of violence. The preference of long takes does not translate into peaceful filmmaking, but rather kinetic nervousness, as Hu Bo abandons static set-ups in favor of a mobile and frenetic camera. The mise-en-scene reflects characters and environments caught in a perpetual loop with little hope for escape.

The camera often comes close to the characters, suggesting a lack of bodily autonomy and freedom, acting like an invasive surveillance. It feels like a detective searching for answers to an impossible puzzle. Who are these people? What are their dreams and aspirations? How do they find the reason to keep on living? As the camera usually adopts a low-angle perspective, there is a strange reverence attached to these images as well. Even with a sometimes aloof and cold performance style, the characters are imbued with love and adoration by a camera that feels invested in shedding light on their struggle and endurance.

The constant movement of trains serves as a crucial backdrop within the film. The railways rather than being a path of freedom become bogged down with bureaucratic limitations, unreliable schedules and frequent scams. The promise that Manzhouli offers as an important port of entry does not translate to real change or transformation even if it remains largely inaccessible to the film’s desperate characters. The crackling uncertainty of economic instability results in broken families, homes and bodies. All the characters seem to live lives they would never have chosen if given any options. Just like a train’s path is pre-written and inescapable, straying from pre-destiny feels cataclysmic rather than liberating.

But the film is not completely hopeless. While circumstances are claustrophobic and stifling, Bo's movie seems to balance that with strange and surreal impulses of the heart. The characters are beaten down by life but they are still capable of love and connection. As "An Elephant Sitting Still" runs towards its epic confrontational climax, a sense of doom is measured against the growing influence of love.

Love becomes a bit of a double-edged sword, however, as it is often presented as a sacrifice above all. Love is one-sided, as is the case with a young student having an affair with her teacher. For a small time gangster, love means giving yourself over to people and systems that will almost inevitably betray you. Love means obligation, which often means tethering yourself to people who have long been broken by mistreatment and inequality and who no longer have the capacity to return it. Love does not overcome all within a broken social system: love leads to shame, betrayal and unhappiness.

Yet, love and beauty remain a constant source of minute, if not fleeting, pleasure.

 It is not a cure-all in the way it would be in a Disney princess fantasy, but it is enough to sustain existence in spite of its high risk and low reward ratio. The film is not down on love as much as it is realistic in its portrayal of it within a system of inequality and oppression. It is impossible to watch its final act and not feel the warming sensation that maybe tomorrow will be different, bringing change and offering beauty, love or hope.
By the movie’s last shot, the camera has stepped outside of the intimate closeness of its characters. They can finally breathe, allowing for a spiritually transcendent ending, one of the greatest in contemporary film history. Suddenly there is scope, perspective, and spiritual silence. The pace remains slack but time has regained meaning outside of suffering, at least for a few hours along an unfamiliar path.
 

 

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Us (2019)

Us (2019)

Cast

• Lupita Nyong'o as Adelaide Wilson
• Winston Duke as Gabriel "Gabe" Wilson
• Evan Alex as Jason Wilson
• Shahadi Wright Joseph as Zora Wilson
• Elisabeth Moss as Mrs. Tyler
• Tim Heidecker as Mr. Tyler
• Kara Hayward as Nancy

Director

• Jordan Peele

Screenplay

• Jordan Peele

Director of Photography

• Mike Gioulakis

Production Design

• Ruth de Jong

Editor

• Nicholas Monsour

Original Music Composer

• Michael Abels

Horror, Thriller

120 minutes

“Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.” - Jeremiah 11:11

In Rodney Ascher’s  documentary “Room 237,” four theorists attempt to explain the hidden messages in Stanley Kubrick’s movie “The Shining.” The ideas about what the movie is about range from the possible to the downright bizarre. One theory fixates on the possibility that “The Shining” was Kubrick’s way of confessing he faked the landing on the moon footage, and another obsesses over the details of the hedge maze. The other two see evidence that the 1980 film indirectly references either the genocide of Native Americans or the Holocaust.

Like “The Shining,” there are a number of different ways to interpret Jordan Peele’s excellent new horror movie, “Us.” Every image seems to be a clue for what’s about to happen or a stand-in for something outside the main story of a family in danger. Peele’s film, which he directed, wrote and produced, will likely reward audiences on multiple viewings, each visit revealing a new secret, showing you something you missed before in a new light.

“Us” begins back in 1986 with a young girl and her parents wandering through the Santa Cruz boardwalk at night. She separates from them to walk out on the empty beach, watching a foreboding flock of thunderclouds roll in. Her eyes find an attraction just off the main pier, and she walks into what looks like an abandoned hall of mirrors, discovering something deeply terrifying—her doppelgänger. The movie shifts to the present day, with Janelle Monae on the radio as the Wilson family is heading towards their vacation home. The little girl has now grown up to be a woman, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), nervous about returning to that spot on the Santa Cruz beach. Her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), thinks her reaction is overblown, but he tries to make her feel at ease so they can take their kids Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex) to the beach and meet up with old friends, the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker) and their twin daughters. After one small scare and a few strange coincidences on the beach, the family returns home for a quiet night in, only to have their peace broken by a most unlikely set of trespassers lined up across their driveway: doppelgängers of their family.

Part of the appeal of “Us” is how you interpret what all of this information and images mean. No doubt the movie will give audiences plenty to mull over long after the credits. In the film, the Jeremiah 11:11 Bible verse appears twice before pivotal moments, and there are plenty of other Biblical references to dig into, including an analogy to heaven and hell. Perhaps Jason’s “Jaws” shirt is a reference to the rocket sweater the little boy wears in “The Shining” or it could be a warning about the film’s oceanside dangers. In the ‘80s scene, when young Adelaide walks into the mysterious attraction, the sign welcoming her is that of a Native American in a headdress above the name “Shaman Vision Quest.” When the family returns to the beach, the sign has been replaced with a more PC-friendly sign bearing a wizard advertising it as “Merlin’s Enchanted Forest,” a bandaid solution to hiding the racist exterior and the horror inside its halls.  

As he did with “Get Out,” Peele pays significant tribute to the films that have influenced him in “Us.” Though this time, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus, as I spoke with others who saw the movie, we focused on different titles that stood out to us. For me, “The Shining” looked to be the film that received the most nods in “Us,” including an overhead shot of the Wilson family driving through hilly forests to their vacation home, much like the Torrance family does on the way to the Overlook Hotel. There’s also a reference to “The Shining” twins, a few architectural and cinematography similarities and in one shot, Nyong’o charges the camera with a weapon much like Jack Nicholson menacingly drags along an ax in a chase. However, “Us” is not just a love letter to one horror movie. Peele also pays tribute to Brian De Palma with a split diopter shot that places both Adelaide and her doppelgänger in equal focus for the first time in the movie. There’s also a tip of the hat to Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” in terms of dueling balletic styles and a gorgeously choreographed fight scene that looks like a combative pas de deux.

This delightfully deranged home invasion-family horror film works because Peele not only knows how to tell his story, he assembled an incredible cast to play two roles. The Wilsons are a picture of an all-American family: a family of four that looks to be middle class, with college-educated (Gabe is wearing a Howard University sweater) parents doting on their two children. Their doppelgängers may look like them and be tied to them in some way, but their lives are inverses of each other, and their existence has been one of limits and misery. It’s one of the most poignant analogies of class in America to come out in a studio film in recent memory. For the actors, it’s a chance to play two extremes, one of intense normality and the other of wretched evil. In “Us,” Duke shows off his comedic strengths as the dorky father who often embarrasses his kids, and his doppelgänger is a frighting wall of violence with little to say other than grunts and fighting his adversary. If Nyong’o doesn’t get some professional recognition for her performances here, I will be very disappointed. As Adelaide, she’s fearful, trying to keep some traumatic memories at bay but putting on a brave face for her family. To play her character’s opposite, Nyong’o adopts a graceful, confident movement for her doppelgänger, sliding into the family’s home with scissors at the ready. The doppelgänger looks wide-eyed and maliciously curious as if she’s looking for new ways terrorize this family. She whispers in a raspy but sinister voice that would make many people jump and run away.

A suspenseful story and marvelous cast need a great crew to make the film a home run, and “Us” is not short on talent. “It Follows” cinematographer Mike Gioulakis creates unsettling images in mundane spaces, like how a strange family standing at a driveway isn’t necessarily scary, but when it’s eerily dark out, they’re backlit so that their faces go unseen and the four bodies are standing at a higher elevation from our heroes, it looks like evil is swooping in from above. Kym Barrett’s costume designs not only supply the doppelgängers’ nefarious looking red jumpsuits but also the normal, comfy clothes the Wilsons and Tylers wear on vacation. Michael Abels, who also composed the score for “Get Out,” and the ominous notes from the sound design team lay the groundwork for nerve-wracking sequences.

Jordan Peele isn’t the next Kubrick, M. Night Shyamalan, Alfred Hitchcock or Steven Spielberg. He’s his own director, with a vision that melds comedy, horror and social commentary. And he has a visual style that’s luminous, playful and delightfully unnerving. Peele uses an alternate cinematic language to Kubrick, seems more comfortable at teasing his story’s twists throughout the narrative unlike Shyamalan, uses suspense differently than Hitchcock, and possesses the comedic timing Spielberg never had. “Us” is another thrilling exploration of the past and oppression this country is still too afraid to bring up. Peele wants us to talk, and he’s given audiences the material to think, to feel our way through some of the darker sides of the human condition and the American experience.

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Captain Marvel (2019)

Captain Marvel (2019)

Cast

• Brie Larson as Carol Danvers / Captain Marvel
• Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury
• Ben Mendelsohn as Talos
• Jude Law as Yon-Rogg
• Annette Bening as Supreme Intelligence
• Gemma Chan as Minn-Erva
• Lee Pace as Ronan
• Mckenna Grace as Young Carol Danvers
• Djimon Hounsou as Korath
• Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson

Director

• Ryan Fleck
• Anna Boden

Writer (story by)

• Nicole Perlman
• Meg LeFauve
• Anna Boden
• Ryan Fleck
• Geneva Robertson-Dworet

Writer

• Anna Boden
• Ryan Fleck
• Geneva Robertson-Dworet

Cinematographer

• Ben Davis

Editor

• Elliot Graham
• Debbie Berman

Composer

• Pinar Toprak

Action, Adventure, Mystery, Science Fiction

Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief suggestive language.

128 minutes

It’s finally here: the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a female superhero at its center and a woman serving as a co-director and writer. These are unprecedented, exciting and long overdue achievements all around within a pop-culture powerhouse that’s long been dominated by male stories and storytellers.

So why does “Captain Marvel” feel like a bit of a disappointment? It’s fine and often quite funny. It fits securely within the MCU but also functions sufficiently as a stand-alone entity. But the character, and the tremendous actress playing her in Oscar-winner Brie Larson, deserved more than fine. They—and the girls and women everywhere looking to “Captain Marvel” with wide eyes and high hopes for seeing themselves on screen—deserved a game-changer along the lines of “Black Panther” or even “Guardians of the Galaxy” or “Doctor Strange.”

“Captain Marvel” mostly takes place in the mid-1990s, and feels like it was made then, too, in terms of its technical prowess and emotional depth. This is not a compliment. As for the former, perhaps that was intentional—yet another example of wallowing in period nostalgia alongside the grunge chic and girl-power anthems. The prolonged intro in space and the big action sequences have a cheesy, retro feel to them that can be amusing but also inscrutable.

But co-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have made their names writing and directing indie dramas featuring richly drawn characters facing real stakes. “Half Nelson” (2006), about a drug-addicted middle school teacher, is the movie that put Ryan Gosling on the map and earned him his first Oscar nomination. “Sugar” (2008) is one of the most intimate and insightful movies ever made about baseball. You’d rightly expect that their depiction of the title character—real name Carol Danvers—would be complex, compelling and abidingly human, despite her otherworldly superpowers. But while Larson is tough, plucky and skilled with a well-timed quip, her chief character trait seems to be rebelliousness. That’s a little limiting. (Boden and Fleck co-wrote the script with Geneva Robertson-Dworet, and all three share story-by credit with Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve.) Additionally, she has forgotten who she really is, so her interior life is as much of a blank to her as it is to us.

Despite her fighting spirit, Carol often finds herself as a pawn trapped between various worlds where she feels as if she doesn’t belong. At the film’s start, she’s living and training as a warrior on the Kree planet of Hala. Her mentor, Jude Law’s Yon-Rogg, is constantly reminding her not to let her emotions get the best of her—a pointed commentary on the sexist notion that women are too emotional to handle tough jobs. And “Captain Marvel” is full of such less-than-subtle messaging. But after the shapeshifting enemy Skrulls, led by the swaggering Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), take her prisoner during a battle, she escapes and lands on a different planet: our own. Specifically, she finds herself a fish out of water within the urban sprawl of Los Angeles.

It’s here that “Captain Marvel” leans hard on the humorous kitsch of its decade-specific detail: Blockbuster Video! Two-way pagers! Dial-up Internet! We were so lame. It’s the cinema of empty recognition—a ‘90s version of the way “Ready Player One” relies heavily on ‘80s pop culture to provoke a warm, knowing response. “Hey, Captain Marvel ties her plaid flannel button-down around her waist the way I used to in college! Cool.” These moments and images are good for a chuckle and not much more.

But as Carol begins to piece together her history as an Air Force test pilot, “Captain Marvel” begins to feel like a female version of “Top Gun.” This actually is a compliment; the sections on Earth in which Carol grasps at her memories of the past and discovers her strength and bravery in the present (and in the cockpit) are the film’s highlights. The always formidable Annette Bening is a tantalizingly fleeting presence as a mysterious mentor figure in Carol’s previous life. And Lashana Lynch helps flesh out Carol’s personality as her best friend: a fellow pilot who similarly never got the shot she deserved because she was a woman and a young mother.

Carol’s most rewarding and consistently entertaining relationship, though, is with young S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury, played by a magically de-aged Samuel L. Jackson in a bit of visual effects wizardry. Truly, the result is seamless. You will forget that you are looking at a 70-year-old man. (Clark Gregg, reprising his revered role as Agent Coulson, isn’t quite so believable, but it’s always good to see him.) Larson and Jackson play off each other beautifully, trading snappy banter and affectionate zingers with ease. Their mission is to find a glowy space cube thingy—you know what it is and why it matters if you’ve been following these movies—and keep it out of the wrong hands, but that’s the least intriguing component of “Captain Marvel.”  

But her camaraderie with Jackson—and later with a quick-witted Mendelsohn and a fantastically scene-stealing orange kitty named Goose—ultimately serves as a reminder of just how little there is to Larson’s character. Not unlike Captain America’s role within the Avengers, Captain Marvel functions here as the straight woman, the steady anchor in a sea of big, swirling personalities. Sure, she eventually comes into her powers in full and is literally the kind of girl on fire that Alicia Keys sings about. But if we’re not invested in who she is at her core, how are we supposed to care about what she’s burning down?

Speaking of music, the folks behind “Captain Marvel” spared no expense on the film’s soundtrack, including songs from such female-driven '90s acts as TLC, Garbage, Elastica, Salt-n-Pepa and a painfully on-the-nose use of No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” during a particularly elaborate fight scene. The girl power (and grrl power) ring out loud and clear, if a bit hollow.

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Cold Pursuit (2019)

Cold Pursuit (2019)

Cast

• Liam Neeson as Nels Coxman
• Laura Dern as Grace Coxman
• Emmy Rossum as Kim Dash
• Tom Bateman as Trevor 'Viking' Calcote
• Micheal Richardson as Kyle Coxman
• Michael Eklund as Speedo
• Bradley Stryker as Limbo

Director

• Hans Petter Moland

Writer (based on the movie 'Kraftidioten' wtitten by)

• Kim Fupz Aakeson

Writer

• Frank Baldwin

Cinematographer

• Philip Øgaard

Editor

• Nicolaj Monberg

Composer

• George Fenton

Action, Drama, Thriller

Rated R

118 minutes

"Cold Pursuit" is the 2019 version of a recently minted tradition, the late winter Liam Neeson revenge flick. It's one of the strangest, least predictable movies he's made in years, which isn't the same thing as saying it's consistently good. Based on the Norwegian movie "In Order of Disappearance," and directed by the same filmmaker, Hans Petter Moland, it's a fragmented, meandering tale in which Neeson's character, a Kehoe, Colorado snowplow driver named Nels Coxman, gets a taste of vengeance and becomes a glutton. At times it plays less like a self-contained movie than a couple of episodes of a TV series that don't quite add up the way you wanted them to. It's a shame that it isn't better. At its best, it plays like a wry critique of this unexpectedly lucrative period of Neeson's career, and a borderline-spoof of the genre as a whole.

"Cold Pursuit" kicks off with Nels accepting an award as Kehoe Citizen of the Year, then jumps ahead to the murder of his only son Kyle (Michael Richardson, Neeson's real-life son with the late Natasha Richardson), an airport baggage handler kidnapped and killed by members of a local drug cartel over a mishandled cocaine shipment. The killers made Kyle's death look like a heroin overdose even though the young man didn't do drugs, a touch that adds insult to injury. Nels swiftly dispatches the men directly responsible for his boy's murder, wraps their corpses in chicken wire, and dumps them off a waterfall so that they'll settle on the bottom of the Colorado River and be stripped clean by fish, an evidence-disposal technique that he later says that he learned by reading crime fiction. Unsatisfied by the deaths that he metes out early on, Nels resolves to work his way up the underworld's ladder until he slays the boss of bosses, Trevor "Viking" Calcote (Tom Bateman).  

Complications ensue, and not necessarily the ones you'd expect from having watched other Liam Neeson revenge movies. Moland and his American screenwriter, Frank Baldwin, play around with Western movie motifs, photographing the snow-packed mountains, valleys and roads like panoramas in a John Ford cavalry picture, and envisioning a Cowboys-and-Indians-type rivalry between the white-run drug cartel that's responsible for Kyle's murder and a Southern Ute Indian gang that mistakenly gets blamed for Nels' retaliatory spree. There's also commentary on how outlaws lust after cliched signifiers of respectability. This is conveyed mostly through Viking, a divorced yuppie clotheshorse and preening psychopath who treats his own young son, Ryan (Nicholas Holmes), like a pet, or some kind of experiment in conditioning, micromanaging his diet and recommending "Lord of the Flies" as a self-help manual.

Like its source, this American remake is comparatively light on graphic violence (the beatings tend to be uglier than the shootings), and it has the confidence to handle quite a bit of that business offscreen, staging significant killings behind drawn curtains, or in the cut between one scene from the next. It also detours from the main story to spend quality time with Viking's drug gang, his henchmen (including Domenick Lombardozzi as the aforementioned fantasy football sentimentalist, who refers to Mozart as "Moe-zart"); Nels' ex-criminal brother Brock "Wingman" Coxman (William Forsyth), who got his nickname from "Top Gun"; a couple of Kehoe cops (Emily Rossum and John Doman) trying to make sense of the mayhem, and assorted mates and exes. Laura Dern has a few scenes as Nels' grieving wife Grace, who leaves Nels almost instantly, perhaps sensing that her presence would be wasted in a movie filled with sad, violent, self-involved men. 

"Cold Pursuit" is at least four-fifths a dark comedy, filled with eccentric, often introverted and sad American archetypes. Most would be mesmerizing and/or hilarious if they had been fully fleshed out as characters, and if the film surrounding them were more elegantly structured and paced. The project suffers from a certain flatness in the characterizations, as well as from an inability to introduce new faces, or arrange meetings between established characters, right when the plot needs them, as opposed to much later, when the audience is ready for the story to end and tends to view such moments as narrative speed bumps. But even at its most navel-gazing and disorganized, "Cold Pursuit" still showcases elements you haven't seen before, like the tight-lipped hero asking how many words he's required to speak at an awards dinner, the henchman who keeps losing at fantasy football because he's too loyal to his favorite childhood teams and players, and the Ute crime boss who's saddened by the appropriation of his people's clothes and jewelry by white designers, more so when he turns over a label and sees the words "Made in China."

The film might have been doomed to historical footnote status regardless, because it opened mere days after its star made one of the weirdest, most clueless unforced errors in the history of movie promotion. In an interview, Neeson tried to connect this film, and the futility of revenge in general, to an anecdote drawn from his twenties, when he responded to a white female friend's rape by a black assailant by wandering town around with a crowbar, hoping to get in a fight with another "black bastard" and kill him. Although Neeson didn't kill anyone back then, or even fight them, he flunked the present-day personal disclosure-as-advertising test by failing to realize that the racism part of his story—which he did not apologize for, or even note and explain—was as disturbing as the revenge part, which he condemned on the spot.

Ironically, it's precisely this kind of person who might've ended up as a supporting player in "Cold Pursuit," had the filmmakers been able to justify clearing space in an already-crowded ensemble. Throughout, revenge is treated not just as a disturbing and self-negating activity but sad and bleakly comical as well. The movie starts with a printed quote from Oscar Wilde ("Some cause happiness wherever they go, others whenever they go") that sounds like a condemnation of people you haven't met yet. Several of the main characters are obsessed with vengeance. Even more are casually, even murderously racist. It's clear not only that revenge can never satisfy them but that they are incapable of seeing their own flaws, and that their tribal myopia and obsessions with honor and vengeance are ways of distracting themselves from the bone-deep knowledge that they failed the same people whose bodies, or memories, they're hell-bent on defending.

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Boy Erased (2018)

Boy Erased (2018)

Cast

• Lucas Hedges as Jared Eamons
• Nicole Kidman as Nancy Eamons
• Russell Crowe as Marshall Eamons
• Joel Edgerton as Victor Sykes
• Xavier Dolan as Jon
• Troye Sivan as Gary
• Joy Jacobson as Brandy Vidler

Director

• Joel Edgerton

Writer (based on the memoir by)

• Garrard Conley

Writer

• Joel Edgerton

Cinematographer

• Eduard Grau

Editor

• Jay Rabinowitz

Composer

• Danny Bensi
• Saunder Jurriaans

Drama

Rated R for sexual content including an assault, some language and brief drug use.

114 minutes

Released only months ago, Desiree Akhavan’s powerful period drama “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” is about a young woman who survives a Christian “ex-gay” conversion therapy camp she is forced to attend, after getting caught making out with a female classmate on prom night. Adapted from Emily Danforth’s YA novel, the title character of Akhavan’s film (played by Chloë Grace Moretz) has a strong conviction of self: we can detect only a faint amount of uncertainty seeping into her conscience while she grows into her sexual identity and wrestles with the traumatizing rituals of the Evangelical camp she bides her time to get out of.

On the heels of Akhavan’s film comes Joel Edgerton’s poignant, similarly themed “Boy Erased,” adapted by Edgerton from Garrard Conley’s memoir with the same name. Quite different in tone, structure and narrative goals, the two films surely don’t need to be compared just because they share a common topic. But the proximity of their release dates almost begs a side-by-side consideration. In that, it’s worth noting that Jared Eamons, the struggling teen at the heart of Edgerton’s film, doesn’t initially exude the same self-assurance Cameron Post does. In fact, Jared’s coming out journey, as charted in “Boy Erased,” aligns more closely with an LGBTQ person’s inner negotiation that Akhavan, who identifies as bisexual, talked about during a post-screening Q&A of her film earlier this year in New York. Akhavan said many people in the LGBTQ community come to a decisive realization in their own time, that the portion of the world that doesn’t accept them is wrong and they themselves are right.

Jared, portrayed with startling nuance and complexity by Lucas Hedges (“Manchester by the Sea”), finds himself in the thick of the aforementioned reconciliation Akhavan articulated. The son of a Baptist pastor being raised in a small, conservative town, the college-aged Jared is told by almost everyone around him that there is something wrong with him; that he won’t be loved by God unless he beats his homosexual urges. A kindly doctor (in a memorable cameo by veteran actor Cherry Jones) happens to be the only grown-up who privately tells Jared that he is a perfectly healthy and normal teenage boy. And yet, Jared gets denied his true identity by almost everyone else. When a soul-crushing sexual assault, the details of which he can’t bear to share with his parents but we learn as part of the film’s steady supply of flashbacks, forces him to come out to his family, his authoritative father Marshall (Russell Crowe) and initially obedient mother Nancy (Nicole Kidman) register him to a conversion program run by the impassioned, self-appointed therapist Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton). Once under the daily, 9-to-5 control of the villainous Sykes at his Love in Action facility, the young men and women give up their phones and their larger freedoms, not permitted to discuss the details of their “therapy” with their guardians, who dutifully wait at a nearby hotel.

What Cameron Post, a skeptic from the get-go, figures out swiftly with the help of some equally strong-willed allies—that she has to pretend and play along for a while— Jared has a significantly more difficult time with, particularly due to a lack of guiding voices around him. An exception to this is his fellow camp inmate Gary (Troye Sivan, also the co-composer of the film’s gloomy original track “Revelation”), who tells Jared to fake his way through the program until he safely gets out. The alternative is ugly: the undesirable fate of being stuck with Sykes’ program full-time for a whole year is one Jared is determined to avoid. As he works his way through the emotionally manipulative curriculum and builds his family tree to look for the sources of his “sin” (that’s what Sykes calls it), heartbreaking suicides unsurprisingly occur just as they do in “Cameron Post.” To the script’s fault, the secondary members of Love in Action (one played by filmmaker Xavier Dolan), get little time of their own in “Boy Erased.” Still, the later one of the suicides especially leaves the audience heartsick—the episode creeps up after we watch the ill-fated character selflessly lend a helping hand to a vulnerable Jared, when he desperately calls his mother for help in a moment of deep crisis. In this impressively shot, escalating scene, Edgerton captures the panic-inducing entrapment of Jared with startling tension. For a few moments during that sequence, “Boy Erased” almost feels like a thriller.

And yet, the most emotionally arresting moments of “Boy Erased” are delivered through quieter scenes between Jared and his parents. In various over-the-top, true-to-character costumes, the predictably excellent and heavily made-up Nicole Kidman brings forward Nancy’s inner dilemma as a sweet, religious woman, who eventually leans into her motherly love, intuition and common sense with confidence. In an exceptionally measured performance that reminds us the fine actor that he really is (we almost forgot between misfires like “Les Misérables” and “The Mummy”), the scene-stealing Russell Crowe leaves a haunting impression as a conservative but soft-edged father, who is asked to question his bigoted values at last. In navigating the delicate storylines of Jared’s parents, Edgerton mostly does a decent job, conveying that they act out of misguided love and circumstantial concern. While left a bit on the surface and cut brief, the eventually rewarding transformation of Nancy and Marshall is what sets “Boy Erased” apart. However imperfect, Edgerton’s film aims to intimately speak with parents like them and, who knows, perhaps to even change their hearts for the better.

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Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

Cast

• Rosa Salazar as Alita
• Christoph Waltz as Dr. Dyson Ido
• Ed Skrein as Zapan
• Mahershala Ali as Vector
• Jennifer Connelly as Chiren
• Keean Johnson as Hugo
• Michelle Rodriguez as Gelda
• Lana Condor as Koyomi
• Jackie Earle Haley as Grewishka
• Eiza González as Nyssiana
• Jorge Lendeborg Jr. as Tanji
• Marko Zaror as Ajakutty
• Casper Van Dien as Amok

Director

• Robert Rodriguez

Screenplay

• James Cameron
• Laeta Kalogridis

Comic Book

• Yukito Kishiro

Cinematography

• Bill Pope

Editor

• Ian Silverstein
• Stephen E. Rivkin

Music

• Junkie XL

Action, Romance, Science Fiction, Thriller

Rated PG-13

122 minutes

With his 1992 debut of “El Mariachi,” Robert Rodriguez announced himself a director with an eye for action. He prefers to keep his camera movement light and energetic, his edits quick and focused. His movies tend to carry an unmistakable playfulness, like in the all-out barroom brawl between humans and vampires in “From Dusk till Dawn” and the bizarre yet stylish “Spy Kids” franchise in which two siblings face off against some truly surreal-looking enemies.  

Rodriguez brings this fun-loving, action-fueled touch to the big-screen adaptation of Yukito Kishiro’s popular manga, Battle Angel Alita, salvaging a project that had languished in development hell since the early aughts. James Cameron, who co-produced the refashioned “Alita: Battle Angel” and co-wrote the screenplay with Rodriguez and Laeta Kalogridis, originally picked up the project around 15 years ago before eventually handing the reins over to Rodriguez. The script is still somewhat unwieldy, chock full of explanations about how robotic bodies work and the history of the decaying setting known as Iron City. Yet, underneath multiple levels of plot and world-building, there’s a weirdo heart keeping the action moving along.

As far as movies about girl robots go, “Alita” isn’t so bad. The movie’s star is a promising Rosa Salazar as the namesake hero, a mysterious yet powerful teen girl bot with oversized anime-style eyes and a good and very powerful heart that could power a city. Alita is the last of her kind, a superior enemy who was somehow were defeated by the humans. After she was found in a scrap heap, Alita is brought back to life with the help of a fatherly doctor, Dr. Ido (Christoph Waltz), a paternal relationship that gives “Alita” some of its more stranger moments. More straightforward is the relationship Alita has with a secret nemesis, Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), Dr. Ido’s former wife, and Vector (Mahershala Ali), a smooth-talking kingpin who promises almost anyone who will listen to him a ticket to Zalem, the city hovering in the sky holding society’s upper class over the heads of the poor below.

Even with so many different creative demands on the story, Rodriguez makes the movie his own. Many of his movies feature Latino actors, like Danny Trejo in the “Machete” movies and Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara in “Spy Kids,” and the trend continues with “Alita” as the Peruvian American Salazar gets the chance to lead a big-budget movie. He includes Spanish and English signs in Iron City, and some of the extras can be heard speaking Spanish in the background. It’s still rare to hear or see Spanish spoken in sci-fi movies about multilingual futures unless the films are from Latin America.

“Alita” draws inspiration from various sci-fi sources, like the physical divide between the rich and the poor in “Metropolis,” the mysterious femme being with incredible powers of “The Fifth Element," and the multilingual, neon-lit grimy future world of “Blade Runner,” to name a few. Iron City is a place similar to what we’ve seen in other movies, but it’s outfitted with enough differences to tell it apart, like making the society corrupt enough for serial killers and robbing cyborgs of their mechanical parts and giving the place its own gladiatorial-like roller derby that gives Iron City hopefuls their only shot at getting into Zalem. Somehow all of these storylines are interconnected, which adds to the clunkiness of the script but it never allows it to get boring. Some kind of action sequence is always just a few minutes away.

Although Alita is built with some feminist empowerment in mind, some of the messaging malfunctions against old world patriarchy. The odd paternalistic doctor is just the start. Because she looks like a teen girl, of course, she develops a heterosexual crush on a human teen boy, Hugo (Keean Johnson). Never mind that she’s actually 300 some years older and very much a cyborg. The two share some cute moments, but others, like when Hugo introduces her to chocolate or when Alita offers Hugo her one-of-a-kind ancient technology heart so he can go up to Zalem, feel so old school. Was this all because she’s an impulsive teen girl? In another scene, after a devastating battle with a big bad cyborg, Alita must trade out the delicate, girlish body the doctor had built for his daughter (not weird – at all!) for a warrior-grade bod that adheres to her, um, vision of herself. That vision includes a corset-sized tiny waist and an athletic set of breasts that defy gravity. It’s been 300 years after the fall and we’re still holding onto Barbie-size proportions.

Thankfully, Salazar smoothes over many of these cumbersome details with her earnest motion-captured performance. She physically leans into the awkwardness of walking around as a teen girl bot, unsure of her new body and discovering its potential and limits. She explores her new surroundings with literal wide-eyed wonder. When she upgrades her body, she stands tall and confident, having sped through puberty in the span of a surgery. Her character’s chutzpah is the reason why it vaguely makes sense to jump from a “hunter killer,” a bounty hunter in futuristic terms, to a Motorball prospect when she’s working her way to becoming a warrior.

With so much background and story to cover, maybe “Alita” would have benefitted from a “less is more” approach. But considering its estimated budget of $200 million, “Alita: Battle Angel” is an awe-inspiring jump for the man who first burst onto the film scene with a movie that cost around $7,000. The visual bonanza cooked up by Rodriguez, cinematographer Bill Pope and editors Stephen E. Rivkin and Ian Silverstein is enough to power through any narrative bumps with quickly paced action and bleak, yet colorful, imagery.

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