Tis the Season:HOT FROSTY, THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER, RED ONE, and CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER'S POINT

How has it been two decades since we’ve collectively added an entry to the Christmas movie canon? By common agreement that last addition has to be 2003’s Elf, which has long since passed into beloved family comedy status. You could also make arguments for its fellow 2003 adult-skewing ensemble rom-com Love Actually and 2004’s motion-capture Polar Express, if only for their perennial appearance in squabbles over their qualities or lack thereof. Since then, though there are small gems of one sort (Kasi Lemmons’ Black Nativity’s blend of musical fantasy and social issues drama) or another (the Kristen Stewart-starring playful closeted-lesbian farce Happiest Season), there’s nothing approaching the New Consensus Favorite. This, despite the past twenty years being a period with more Christmas movies per capita than ever before, thanks to Hallmark Channel’s flood-the-zone approach to made-for-TV holiday fare and streaming services’ attempts to keep up. We get what feels like hundreds of new formulaic Christmas movies every year, and the studios have more or less ceded the territory to the small screen. It’s a genre that’s been oversaturated, and it prevents good—or even memorable—ideas to surface for wide consumption and acceptance.

It says a lot about the state of cheap Christmas movies that the buzziest one of those so far this year is Netflix’s Hot Frosty. It stars Hallmark staple Lacey Chabert as a busy single woman who puts a scarf on a sexy snowman. Unbeknownst to her, it’s a magic scarf, and the snowman comes to life as a flesh-and-blood man (Dustin Milligan). There’s something unnatural and eerie about that whole thing, but an attempt at warmth and cheer follows. The holly jolly Golem proceeds to guilelessly stumble into her life and somehow cause her to fall in love. It’s a little Splash, and a little unhinged, but it’s all so sweetly, smoothly handled that you believe the characters believe it, even if you might never get convinced. It’s perched on the precipice of playing out like a parody of the TV movies it suggests passing resemblance to in its blandly digital sitcom staging. (The director is most recently a Schitt’s Creek veteran.) The supporting cast—Craig Robinson, Joe Lo Truglio, Katy Mixon, Lauren Holly—have certainly been called upon to do arch comic work in the past. But the surprise here is that the movie is resolutely not a parody. It just is an inexpensive unambitious Christmas rom-com. The screenplay by Russell Hainline is earnestly oddball at heart, but in the execution gets its wild premise to run the most routine paces. It picks up some easy, pre-fab would-be heartwarming stuff about small towns and grief and the warmth of the season—even as it doesn’t really have anything to say about that except to have it around like so many multicolored lights and snow machines. It’s not good, exactly, but it sure is what it is. That’s par for the course on the small screen these days, when that’s just one of dozens upon dozens of seasonal time-fillers.

At least the big screen has its fair share of Christmas movies this year, too. Multiplexes are currently screening The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, a pretty low-key indie family comedy based on a popular kids’ book from the 70s. It tells the story of preparations for a church Christmas pageant thrown into uncertainty by the town’s troublemakers. A family of poor, neglected children of which everyone assumes the worst show up hoping for free food from the rehearsal snack table, but soon learn the Real Meaning of Christmas. In the process, the so-called Christians involved in judging these poor children reluctantly remember that Jesus asks them to care for such as these. The adaptation is a 70s period piece done on a budget, which means sparse production design and cramped soft-focus establishing shots. It’s not helped by director Dallas Jenkins having no real vision behind the camera, leaving lots of unmotivated camera movement and stilted blocking haphazardly cut together. The thing simply doesn’t flow, and an oddly hollow sound design has a cheap echoing emptiness that does nothing to smooth over the arhythmic editing. It made me appreciate the baseline craft competency of even the most empty-headed homogeneous Hollywood product. Jenkins, best known as creator of the New Testament TV show adaptation The Chosen, clearly has an earnestness, though, and that carries across the movie’s best moments when its obviousness and simplicity strike something sentimental. It’s all a little sweet, if over-determined. But it is so thoroughly undone by its plodding, textureless craft—badly directed down to even the smallest performances, which leaves several cute child actors stranded—that what fleeting moving moments it finds are almost accidental. Not even casting Judy Greer and Pete Holmes as the kind-hearted parents of a family that wants to help the outcasts can lift the overall amateurishness.

And yet, for all that’s awkwardly small and incomplete about that picture, Red One is there to remind us big, galumphing Hollywood competence has its own irritations. Unlike director Jake Kasdan’s better action comedies—the recent Jumanji pictures, which are good crowd-pleasers built with some charm and personality behind the digital noise—this production is an entirely soulless and heartless product from beginning to end. That’s an especially tough sit for a movie ostensibly about Christmas magic. That’s literally the plot, as it follows Santa’s top security elf (Dwayne Johnson) teaming up with a smarmy bounty hunter (Chris Evans) to rescue an abducted Saint Nick (J.K. Simmons) from the clutches of a wintry witch (Kiernan Shipka). She wants to steal his Christmas powers to spread punishments to the bad instead of presents to the good. (Early on, Johnson solemnly informs Santa that this is the first year that more people are on the Naughty List than the Good List. Hmm.) What follows is lots of boring zipping around as we careen from one mirthless action-comedy sequence to the next, before ending in the same endless phony computer-generated fisticuffs in which these things always end up. It’s an enormous production with a fine foundation built entirely out of dependable cliche and then whittled away and sanded down until nothing even that complicated or funny or interesting could possibly survive. It has good makeup effects and bad green screen compositing and shimmering CG backdrops. It cuts together smoothly and always sounds loud. It has a few twinkling sparks of personality from its best actors—Simmons is good on a mall meet-and-greet, and his wife is Bonnie Hunt—and zero from its leads. (Johnson is entirely vacant in a nothing role; Evans is playing his like he’s Ryan Reynolds’ understudy.) And then it swiftly moves to stamp all of the above out, starve them of oxygen, and charge ahead into empty expressions of hollow holiday cheer. It’s a fight to save Christmas, but it can’t even save itself, let alone articulate what the holiday might actually mean.

Leave it to writer-director Tyler Thomas Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point to give us the closest we’ve got to a new great Christmas movie this year. It does so by doing something so simple that it’s really difficult to pull off: it feels like Christmas. This experiential indie is a warm, bustling, amusingly detailed and beautifully busy little picture set almost entirely within one family’s gathering on December 24th. We follow one nuclear family into a cozy house in small town Long Island where a few generations of aunts, uncles, and cousins have squeezed in for food, drink, music, presents, and traditions. Filmed with a grainy warmth by cinematographer Carson Lund, here’s a movie that captures a mood and a place and then lets its eyes and ears wander from room to room and happening to happening. There’s a generosity of spirit and casualness of approach that lets an audience gather an understanding of the characters, their histories, and their interpersonal dynamics through observation and eavesdropping, as if we’re a guest in a stranger’s home trying to figure out how they do things here. It’s a movie that paints in subtleties, attentive to small expressions, fleeting gestures, the unspoken or half said. It gathers up a group picture of this family in this moment, surrounded by a soft-glowing blur of multicolored lights, and with a wall-to-wall wall-of-sound song score (an instant plucking of nostalgia for anyone whose secular Christmas soundtracks are even partially intertwined with Phil Spector, for better or worse). It skips across this holiday night chronologically from sundown to sunup, narrowing to the early-morning experiences of a few youngsters who sneak out to spend hours wandering with other teens underneath flurries fluttering in the glow of street-lamps and strip malls. As we grow aware of various character’s conflicts, foibles, and thwarted ambitions—it’s grandma’s last year in this house, for instance—the movie grows melancholic. It becomes a moving, and quintessentially Christmassy, picture about how tradition and togetherness just barely keeps sadness and loneliness at bay. And that’s what makes it all the more special to find.

Reused and Recycled: CHIP 'N DALE: RESCUE RANGERS, DOWNTON ABBEY: A NEW ERA, and THE VALET

I prefer movies that plainly recycle old ideas to ones that pretend they’re smarter than that impulse while doing it all the same. Take Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, a noisy, flashy, smirking experience that’s ostensibly satirical about the reboot cycle in which we’ve been caught, but is ultimately far emptier than if it just did a remake of the 90s cartoon. The premise is that, in modern day Hollywood, Disney’s animated chipmunks, Chip and Dale, are washed up actors whose glory days in the afternoon sitcom of the title are long behind them. Though they squeaked with the chirping voices of their ilk at the time, now we learn they have the wisecracking tenors of John Mulaney and Andy Samberg. Lo and behold, they get pulled into a detective story when one of their old co-stars is the latest cartoon mysteriously kidnapped. The police on the case, a claymation chief (J.K. Simmons) and his human woman partner (KiKi Layne), imply the animated rodents could help them ferret out some clues. And so the pair dust off their show’s skills for sneaking and rescuing, putting them to the test in their real world. They spelunk through a broad showbiz world, and end up bumping elbows with a handful of winking cameos from brands past and present. Jabs are made, mostly at Disney’s competition, from the weird off-brand dollar-store knockoff cartoons to some particularly nasty remarks directed toward the Paw Patrol. Alas, the mystery itself remains pretty stupid, goosed with creepy sight gags involving erasing beloved characters, is solved quickly, and then just leaves us with a bunch of hurrying around that wears out its welcome before the characters can get to the next clue.

The obvious unflattering point of comparison is Robert Zemeckis’ classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit. That clever noir revival was chockablock with classic characters in a story that played fair by its genre and its references. It was an actual serious mystery engaged with ideas about the state of studio Hollywood and the history of Los Angeles. It was a toon Chinatown, and every bit as inventive and imaginative and endlessly creative as one would need to be to pull it off, down to the beautifully world-weary Bob Hoskins performance as the live-action man reluctantly pulled into a web of civic and cartoon corruption. That’s better than the only thing on Rescue Rangers’ mind, other than its flat formulaic sleuthing. All it says is, gee, reboots sure are everywhere these days, and sometimes trends in animation are kinda silly. Oh, and friendship is important. It isn’t a modern family film without that. But all the above only gets you so far.

Director Akiva Schaffer, whose previous film with his Lonely Island compatriots was the incisive goof on modern celebrity culture Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, has only a few good gags here. The blending of hand-drawn and CG styles is sometimes appealing, and the parade of winking references is stuffed with surprise appearances by corporate-approved specters from other properties. (The funniest has to be Tim Robinson voicing a rival studio’s infamously poorly-designed character of recent years—so badly received in its first trailer that that film ended up delayed several months to refurbish him.) But the movie is too stupid to even realize that it’d be funnier if it acknowledged Chip and Dale’s 90s show was itself a reboot of the characters from classic Disney shorts. This movie puts them in elementary school together in the 80s, a lazier hit of nostalgia than the deeper, smarter idea so close and yet so far. (It also forgets the movie Return to Neverland happened, which fumbles the villain’s backstory.) That’s what the whole thing’s like, though. It’s a loud, violent, cynical ploy to seem smart, when it’s just a sparkle of borrowed ingenuity that’s cramped and shallow.

After all that mania for naught, the sedate and undemanding Downton Abbey: A New Era is almost welcome. This second feature film extension to the popular soapy British drama is just another jumbo-sized episode stretched out across the big screen. The show’s perspective is still all off—an early-20th-century vision of the idle rich ambling around a palatial estate while their grateful admiring servants busy themselves keeping things running, the two halves joined by mutual appreciation and a penchant for interpersonal dramas that rarely cross the streams. But there’s something seductive to the surface that suggests such a lack of class struggle is possible. This new movie finds the rich folk boating off to the south of France at the behest of a mysterious figure from their matriarch’s past, while a few stay behind to help the help keep track of a film crew that’s paying to use Downton for a month. The two plots toggle back and forth, and the whole thing is done in a bland TV style. A character walks in and makes a pronouncement. Reactions. Establishing shot. More pronouncements. And so on. It’s all a bit tedious.

At least Downton 2 is exceedingly pleasant boredom. One can doze lightly, rousing oneself on occasion to appreciate the comfortable sets, glamorous costumes, and plummy accents. All involved feel quite at home in the proceedings, as they should, especially fan favorite Maggie Smith’s cranky and regal old lady, who gets a truly great final line here. The rest feels cobbled together from borrowed bits, even its own. The characters behave more or less as you’d expect given the circumstances. The French villa is a nice enough postcard landscape. The film crew’s silent movie is suddenly changed to a talkie mid-production, leading to complications that are nothing less than Singin’ in the Rain bits played straighter. Because the whole thing is entirely overfamiliar, there’s nothing much demanding or involving about the watch, which adds to the enjoyable nothing of it all. Maybe people who’ve actually seen the show will feel more satisfaction in it. Weirdly, the closest comparisons to these movies are the original Star Trek films, a TV series continuing in theaters as an excuse to keep a chummy cast and cozy setting rolling along to fans’ delights. If that’s the case, this one’s the Wrath of Kahn to the first’s Motion Picture—now a smaller, more contained picture, concerned mostly with tending the past and explaining its own self-contained plot. It starts mid-stream with new conflicts rising, and ends with a funeral. Bring on Downton Abbey III: The Search for [Spoiler].

A better bit of Hollywood recycling lately is The Valet. It’s a charming-enough high-concept relationship comedy that’s amusing and involving enough on its own that it took me almost twenty minutes to realize it’s loosely based on a fun French farce of the same name from 2006. How’s that for a refurbish? The movie’s about a celebrity (Samara Weaving) having an affair with a married billionaire (Max Greenfield). The couple is photographed by paparazzi, but, lucky for them, a valet (Eugenio Derbez) is in the frame. To deflect suspicion, the glamorous star gets the valet to pretend to be her boyfriend. Easier said than done. The whole thing’s sitcom bright, and, though the antics could be more farcical, the production settles into an easy rhythm. It takes its time characterizing its players, and actually engages with the inherent issues of class and race and Los Angeles’ varied neighborhoods in a low-key perceptive way. And this lets the modest charms rise to the surface. Derbez, especially, is able to play a kind of sturdy decency which allows for a character who we never suspect is doing this for an ulterior motive. Of course he’s confused at first. But soon enough he genuinely wants to help this poor woman, and, when asked how much he’d like to be paid, he offers a sum that’s exactly the amount his ex-wife needs to finish her degree. Nice guy! This decency allows potentially cruel moments—a fancy restaurant full of patrons who assume he’s the waiter—to be pulled off with graceful cleverness. The movie never pushes overmuch on any of its sociological interests—though commentary on discrimination and gentrification are threaded naturally throughout. Instead, it allows the strengths of the performers to guide the scenes to mushy, warm sentiment and a gentle understanding of human fallibility. So it’s less a farce and more a cozy sitcom, but that’s still a perfectly comfortable time at the movies. And that’s not exactly an easy thing to pull off.

Word Crimes:THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 and BEING THE RICARDOS

An Aaron Sorkin screenplay comes in one of two modes: too much, and way too much. I love the former, but the latter can clang and grate and scrape across my patience. He’s such a wordy, witty writer, capable of soaring rhetoric and juicy monologues. His ear for embedding characterization in the pithiest of comebacks and most garrulous walk-and-talks is a good match for his interest in high-wire halls-of-power and behind-the-scenes tensions. His characters are often people with inflated egos or self-important positions of influence. He must understand them so well because he’s one of them. When he’s on, he’s one of our best. The too-muchness of his writing makes a perfect match for material. His The Social Network, so sharply perceptive about Facebook’s founding conflicts, balanced with beautifully clinical David Fincher direction, remains one of the finest scripts in recent memory. But when he’s off—taking his tendencies to overwrite his subtext until it spills out as just plain text like in howlingly clunky tone-deaf attempts like media-matters dramas The Newsroom or Studio 60—it curdles fast. When you’re an artist who thrives when high on your own supply, it’s easy to get way too much out of each moment.

Take last year’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. It’s based on the real circus of a court case following protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention that were violently broken up by a bludgeoning police presence. A group of leading leftist activists were targeted by the newly elected Nixon administration to make an example of them. The judge ended up a loony attention seeker who made all kinds of questionable decisions—like ordering Bobby Seale, a leader in the Black Panthers, bound and gagged—while the defendants, many previously unknown to each other, often used the massive press interest in their plight as a soapbox on which to make important points about the state of the country. (They also used it as an excuse to poke prankish fun at the authorities who were in the process of overreaching.) Sorkin sees in this case good reason to comment on our present right-wing lunacies and various social movements protesting them. But he puts too much spin on the ball in each sequence. Characters are practically explaining this connection to us as monologues and jostling debates are carried out with musty pseudo-historical perspective.

Not helping matters, the flat staging from Sorkin as director tends to undercut the few good moments he’s written.With Trial he somehow can’t pull off the courtroom sparring he crafted so well as screenwriter for A Few Good Men's "you can't handle the truth," or the Social Network depositions. Here it’s self-consciously, and badly, theatrical, with a host of fine actors in full showy character mode (Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Redmayne, Michael Keaton, Frank Langella, John Carroll Lynch, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) chewing over flashy phrasing as the camera pushes plainly and shafts of light falls simply and dramatically. One wonders what a better visual sense would’ve shaped out of these lumpy scenes. But then I recall how Sorkin’s shaping of the pages pushes the real events toward big fake movie climaxes that are somehow flatter and less surprising than the actual events. Just when he builds up a head of self-righteous steam and winds up a character to let them go, it rings the falsest. The best scenes are the smallest, and the simplest, where an old pro like Keaton can underplay the overwritten and end up, on balance, just fine. Strangely, for a writer prized for his verbal pyrotechnics, the court sequences are somehow less outrageous and dramatic and hilarious and suspenseful than the actual court transcripts. Those have been used as the basis for a fine animated documentary from a dozen years back—Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10—and are available for free online. Those are the better way to experience the trial.

With that in mind, one might think the new Sorkin picture, a behind-the-scenes of I Love Lucy in a moment of high-stakes drama, would pale in comparison to simply watching the still-brilliant original episodes of the classic sitcom. Of course it does. But that’s where I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong that it wouldn’t be fun enough on its own terms. I was quite taken with Being the Ricardos for playing up the ways in which it stacks up historical conflicts into one stuffed week. Lucille Ball is accused of being a communist (which she was, once) at the heights of the Red Scare. Desi Arnaz is tagged as a philanderer (which he was) at one of many periods of peak tabloid power. And, if the sponsors or the network don’t pull the plug for either or both of those scandals, the power couple behind the program are determined to use Lucy’s real life pregnancy for her character, too. (One suit bristles at the idea that it’ll make viewers think about…you know…how that happened. They sleep in twin beds, he reminds.) That Sorkin’s invention places these tricky moments all in the same short period of time—the structure is all showbiz hustle, as the movie starts with a table read and ends with a taping—gives the movie a pressure cooker of competing interests. His script weaves in and out of the various conflicts and keeps the ensemble a plate-spinning act of worries and wants. It successfully cross-breeds the let’s-put-on-a-show zippiness with an earnest grappling with the people behind-the-scenes and What It All Meant.

Sorkin’s brand of pushy cleverness fits a great cast of actors playing performers and other creative types. Here Nicole Kidman becomes a Lucy who’s ambitious, steely, hugely talented, and knows what she wants. She is clearly in charge of the show, and really won’t back down from insisting being a Communist used to be considered a valid option for supporting the workers of the country. Javier Bardem plays Desi as a chipper man constantly tending to his ego, but with real love for Lucy. (He also doesn’t suffer fools, such as one well-meaning producer who tries to convince him he’s the “I” who “Loves Lucy” and therefore the top-billed title character.) His Cuban roots make him a bit more uncomfortable with her politics. (There Sorkin tries a smidge too much for phony both-sides balance.) The main couple is, as on the show, surrounded by a sharp-tongued supporting cast. Nina Arianda’s Ethel and J.K. Simmons’ Fred are great inhabitations with sly side-eyed commentary on, challenges to, and support for the main pair. And the show’s crew features Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, Jake Lacy, Clark Gregg and more hustle through the stages, wardrobe department, and writing rooms. It’s a fine feat that mixes the sort of clever darting dialogue and blunt force messaging that a great cast can sell if Sorkin serves it up well.

There’s a kind of gleaming soft-focus romanticism to its approach, a weren’t-the-olden-days-grand? gloss to the sometimes-reductive smushing of so much social upheaval and conflict into one heavy week. (It spackles it over, somewhat, by having fake documentary talking heads from actors playing older versions of the writers’ room act as a Greek chorus of sorts.) And the writing sometimes tries too hard to make the ideas fit our modern context. Would Lucy really have accused someone of “Gaslighting” her? Nonetheless, it’s has the kind of fizz and pop that’s pleasing to the ear and flies by in a flash. Sorkin’s direction stays out of his writing’s way, and has a fine eye for the difference between on- and off-stage antics. I found it a satisfying and entertaining look at making a show in a time with an actual blacklist bouncing entertainers out of the business for their politics, when sexual mores were tamped down and repressed and not to be discussed, and when women and people of color weren’t to be treated as equals on or behind the screens. And yet, through making one of the greatest television comedies (who doesn’t know the chocolate factory sequence?), here’s a couple that manages to push on the edges of those societal constraints at a time when it could’ve resulted in a show going off the air. Now that’s cancel culture.

In the Loop: PALM SPRINGS

We’ve basically been here before, but, then again, so have they. “It’s one of those infinite time loop situations you might’ve heard about,” he (Andy Samberg) tells her (Cristin Milioti) the first time she joins him. Like Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, or a few of the best Star Trek episodes, though not quite in that league, Palm Springs is a story about a character reliving a day over and over and over. He’s used to it by now. (What a time for a movie about every day’s routine being exactly like the last.) We join him who-knows-how-long into this loop, on the day she eventually accidentally follows him into this temporal trap. Why are they there? It’s hand-waved immediately. Something about an earthquake, a weird orange light shining up through cracks in the desert, and a magic cave. We’ve seen other time-loop stories. We know what’s up. The two of them are lost souls careening recklessly through life, adrift on a sea of endless abyss. They meet at this wedding. It’s her sister’s (Camila Mendes). His girlfriend (Meredith Hagner) is the maid of honor. Neither lead really fits in at this party. They’d rather drink and mope, zone out and smirk sarcastically at the proceedings. They get along just fine. In fact, both performers bring big best friend energy to the film, simpatico before they know it, that rom-com fizz that feels like when you hear two acquaintances started seeing each other and you think, yeah, that seems about right. They fit right into each other's flaws, and with the trial-and-error allowances of their plight. They get up to trying new things, and taking a few big risks, each time waking up the next morning like it never happened. People in these types of stories often go wild for a while, with suicidal hedonism taking over now that they’re free of lasting consequences. I dunno, I’d be too scared that’d be the day the loop would end as suddenly as it started.

Like for Bill Murray’s cranky weatherman in Groundhog Day, there’s a clear sense Andy Siara’s screenplay is setting up this couple’s time loop as a form of moral instruction, having these characters make all kinds of mistakes until they finally figure out how to live right. Unlike that superior film’s philosophical picture of loneliness and self-improvement, this one is a cracked form of dating, as the two of them test out ways of being together, see new sides of each other, drift apart, and reunite under the umbrella of the high concept. It doesn’t exactly pile on the details like better stories of this ilk, taking little pleasure in the small repetitive details, to the point where side characters are mostly one-note toss-offs, no matter how nice it is to see Peter Gallagher. And, ignoring most farcical potential, there’s much more that could be wrung out of its complications. Though it does zig into some surprisingly open-minded and relaxed ideas about what they might experiment with, the movie's never as clever as its premise demands. But director Max Barbakow, in his feature debut, gives it such brightly-lit Instagram-filtered shine and low-key mood, a chill vibe even when escalating into comic sex and violence or spiraling into some dark implications of what it means to live trapped in this situation. It draws humor out of how casual Samberg can be about this—his own first reactions to his repetition having happened long ago. And it gets a tad serious as it allows Milioti to question her options. Does she really care about him, or is he the only other person who can understand their main problem? The movie is somehow light on its feet about bleak sci-fi concerns, a quirky rom-com arc polishing a Black Mirror loop-de-loop nightmare. If you see it, consider how tricky an initially-antagonistic role for J.K. Simmons is, burdened with its biggest swings and smallest emotional turns, and how he balances between over-the-top cartoony actions and sensitive despair. That’s pretty much the key to the movie right there, humble little character surprises in pleasantly predictable genre packagings.

Bad Math: THE ACCOUNTANT

The Accountant is a stupid movie dressed up like a smart one. At its core the picture is pure preposterous pulp. Ben Affleck plays a brilliant autistic accountant whose globetrotting financial consulting for black market crime lords and other shady types makes him a man who knew too much. The film follows him into a cat-and-mouse game with hitmen hired to eliminate him and the federal agents hot on his trail. That’s absurd, but the filmmakers have taken it very seriously. Director Gavin O’Connor (Miracle) and screenwriter Bill Dubuque (The Judge) layer in tragic backstory, piling up childhood bullying, stern fathers, absent mothers, jail stints, and more building a picture of the accountant as a sad figure. His autism is treated as both a superpower and an embellishment of his sadness derived from an inability to connect. He lives a lonely lifestyle, moving from identity to identity, dragging his laundered life savings in a pristine Airstream trailer. We’re supposed to see the dim, pale Seamus McGarvey cinematography and the ridiculously overqualified supporting cast and find the whole thing profound. And yet, for whatever glimmers of insight and import it has, the only developments it can think of are loud, tedious exchanges of gunfire.

At least the cast tries its hardest to pull off the silliness with the actors providing their best grave expressions and deadpan exposition tones. Anna Kendrick plays a plucky junior accountant who discovers a problem in the books of a wealthy robotics CEO (John Lithgow). Jon Bernthal leads a team of mercenaries who travel the world looking to take out loose ends for anyone who can afford to pay the bills for what’s clearly a well-funded mini-army. J.K. Simmons and Cynthia Addai-Robinson are agents who sit in offices explaining their research to each other before finally getting out in the field, where Simmons promptly sits down and talks us through a lengthy info-dump. (At least they’ve found a new setting.) These are all talented performers, and sometimes it’s worth admiring how much the greats can do when given so little on the page to play. They – and Jean Smart, and Jeffrey Tambor, and Robert C. Treveiler, and Alison Wright, and the rest – spend their screen time here acting like the premise is believable. Because they’re invested in the reality of a story that begins with an accountant-turned-criminal mastermind and ends with a few wild twists and a shoot-‘em-up like something out of Jack Reacher or John Wick, it almost works.

There are sequences where the movie wears its grim self-importance lightly, allowing little quips and small acknowledgement of its exaggerated qualities – like Affleck’s long-range target practice observed by a shocked farmer – to show it’s in on the joke. A movie about a super-accountant has to know it’s attempting something a little off the beaten path, even if it’s trying to shove it into the usual mid-budget Warner Brothers’ crime picture mold. But the trouble comes when the movie presents its very earnest, hugely clumsy, ideas about autism. It’d be free to be sillier, pulpier, and drastically more satisfying if it weren’t for incongruous message movie aspirations. Its opening scene is a tearful one with concerned parents trying to get help in the wake of a diagnosis. Its final moments are of would-be inspirational autism acceptance sentiment. But, in between, Affleck’s accountant is a collection of ticks and cutesy affectations meant to signify his challenges at every turn. This is all well and good in theory, but it’s sloppily integrated, used for comedy of the haha-he’s-unusual kind and to drive the plot as convenient explanation for his superpowers of cognition.

Part of the problem is the difficulty in believing Affleck as an accountant capable of, say, comprehending and analyzing fifteen years worth of corporate ledgers over night. If he was the type of performer who projected deep reservoirs of unspoken intelligence, maybe the film wouldn’t have to hit his ticks so hard. That wouldn’t solve the fundamental miscalculation of wedging a well-intentioned message into a totally frivolous affair, but would at least make it fit a smidge better. Affleck, despite clear hardworking smarts in interviews and behind the camera, simply isn’t good at looking like the smartest guy in the room on screen. He’s always at his best playing average guys bumping up against the limits of their wits – Gone Girl, To the Wonder, Extract, Shakespeare in Love, Armageddon. Here he’s playing at virtuoso skills, trying hard to make sense of a character written symptoms out instead of inside in attempt to write a person who happens to have a particular perspective. It’s just not playing to his strengths. In that way it’s a mirror of the movie as a whole. It wants to be something it’s not, resisting its most appealing goofiest impulses every step of the way.

Animal Control: ZOOTOPIA

The most stirring, imaginative, tightly plotted, and politically engaged cop movie in years is also Disney’s newest animated film. Zootopia is among their best work: a spirited and emotional cartoon driven by charm and style, with lovely design and impressive technology put to use for an entirely satisfying story doing double duty as a winning allegory. It’s a most pleasant surprise, single-handedly recovering two tired genres: the anthropomorphic animal comedy and the police thriller. For the former it takes the snark and laziness out of a tired CG family film formula, and for the latter it retrieves the humanity from a collection of clichés. It’s everything family entertainment should be, a widely appealing all-ages crowd-pleaser, inventive and delightful, but unafraid to confront important issues and impart virtuous lessons without becoming condescending or cloying. This is a wonderful movie.

It takes place in a world exactly like ours transmogrified into a society of anthropomorphized animals living in a post-predator/prey utopia. Or so they think. Carnivores and herbivores live side-by-side in relative peace, going about their days like we do, wearing clothes, going to work, staring at smart phones, browsing shops, driving cars, eating out, listening to pop music, and so on. (I assume they’re all vegan.) We meet Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin, chipper and loveably bubbly) a brave, energetic, and optimistic young bunny who moves to the big city with dreams of becoming a police officer, despite prejudice against her meek and agrarian species. She’d be the first rabbit officer in Zootopia’s history. She’s excited to dream big and try hard no matter what, kissing her sweet farmer folks (Bonnie Hunt and Don Lake) goodbye and heading to a bustling metropolis like something out of a Richard Scarry tableau. Once there, she’s disappointed to be stuck patrolling parking meters while the bigger, scarier animals – elephants, bears, rhinos – get to do the important work. It’s a world full of bias and discrimination, and it’s allowed to hurt, and frustrate.

She gets a lucky break when her literally and figuratively bullheaded boss (Idris Elba), eager to get rid of what he sees as an annoying diversity hire, gives her 48 hours to solve a missing mammal case that’s baffled his veteran officers for weeks. Her only lead: a sly con man fox (Jason Bateman, brash sarcasm barely covering core decency) who may be able to help her navigate the city’s shadier corners. The movie becomes a terrific detective story as the reluctant mismatched partners, with a delightfully prickly rapport, attempt to unravel the mystery plaguing Zootopia. Along the way they pick up clues and informants and encounter a wide range of characters across all social groups, like a zen naturist yak (Tommy Chong), a weaselly criminal (Alan Tudyk), a rodent gangster (Maurice LaMarche), a meek sheep (Jenny Slate), and the commanding lion mayor (J.K. Simmons). The engaging mystery is full of genuine danger, suspense, and surprises. No cartoon violence here; when, say, a panther leaps in rage at our protagonists, slipping on the edge of a cliff, it’s as exciting and involving as any live action thriller.

Part of its thrill comes from the totally convincing sense of fantastical place. Zootopia is a fully developed city, so much so that watching the film hurtle through its neighborhoods feels like visiting a completely thought-through world. Disney’s animators bring it to brilliantly realized life, having figured out a way to make a metropolis convincingly populated by both giraffes and hamsters, hippos and mice. There are tiny neighborhoods for rats and massive structures for elephants, ice-cold mountains for polar bears and sweltering valleys for camels. Structures have tiny doors for teeny critters and massive entrances for lumbering beasts. It’s a vibrant, colorful, warm place dense with creative energy and detailed design, with puns and winks referencing our world without going overboard. There’s a sense you could turn a corner away from the scene at hand and stumble into another fully functioning aspect of animal society elsewhere. And the characters involved are expertly animated expressive creatures covered in dazzling textures (the fuzziest luxurious fur!) and imbued with nuanced vocal performances, humane even, with inner lives and their own points of view.

It’s not a movie that dawdles through its worldbuilding, though. It uses this bounty of imagination to bolster a genre narrative that’s zippy and appealing. It’s cute, bright, and exciting, an involving story happening to characters whose feelings are rich and vividly drawn. We follow the bunny and the fox (squint a little and it’s Thumper and Robin Hood) through chases and close calls, dramatic twists, and sweetly developing friendship. They’re adorable and relatable, quick witted and great company. And the script is nicely structured with payoffs to every setup. The movie finds great fun and emotion even as it pushes further into its implications. Lots of Disney’s best behind the scenes talent, responsible for many of their best recent efforts – directors Byron Howard (Tangled) and Rich Moore (Wreck-It Ralph), co-writing with Phil Johnston (also Ralph), Jennifer Lee (Frozen), and Jared Bush – find nuance in approaching the characters from compassionate angles, allowing our initial assumptions about them to be overturned in smart, natural ways.

It’s a fine allegory for identity politics, teased out in surprisingly nuanced, thoughtful scenes in which characters deal with bullying and confusion that stings. Each in the duo is given a childhood memory – an origin for confronting prejudice that’s seared with pain on their developing minds, and becomes a fulcrum deciding their future. The solution to their conflict sits with their ability to slowly recognize this and strive for a productive balance between naivety and cynicism. Of course, you can’t make species and race a 1:1 comparison. The first is classification, the second is a construct, and these evolved animals have long-buried predator/prey instincts we don’t within the human race. But as a safe funhouse mirror through which to view the impact of discrimination, it’s potent. And yet none of this design or messaging gets in the way of a whip-smart and endlessly entertaining romp. It’s light on its feet, but weighty where it matters. The movie forcefully and comfortably celebrates leaving space to allow every creature to surprise you, and has a steadfast faith in your species not determining your character.

Village of Pandas: KUNG FU PANDA 3

A fine conclusion to its trilogy, Kung Fu Panda 3 is as energetic and visually dazzling as you’d hope and expect from one of DreamWorks Animation’s very best franchises. What’s so continually satisfying about this series is its tradition of making what are effectively animated kung fu movies. Sure, they feature anthropomorphic cartoon animals living in a cartoony simulacrum of ancient China. But these are films with interfamily conflict, wizards and warlords, masters and students, training montages, action balanced between clever slapstick and dangerous dance, and heaps of mystical spirituality where inner peace and self-knowledge are the most effective skills and power the most awesome moves. I like imagining that somewhere there’s a kid who gets into vintage Jackie Chan or Shaw Brothers films because they’re so over the moon about this fun string of movies about a panda who learns to be a kung fu master.

These movies are plenty fun on their own terms, too. 3 picks up with Po the panda (Jack Black) and his kung fu teammates (tiger Angelina Jolie, mantis Seth Rogen, viper Lucy Liu, crane David Cross, and monkey Jackie Chan) enjoying down time in the peaceful valley they’ve saved twice over. Having become The Dragon Warrior and coming to peace with his tragic past, what’s left for Po to do? Well, Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) tells Po he needs to complete his training by finding inner strength. To do so, he must truly know who he is. Luckily enough, his long-lost biological father (Bryan Cranston) shows up in the village, eager to reconnect with the son he had to abandon all those years ago, and teach him the panda way. This gets Po excited, even though his adopted goose father (James Hong) fears his little panda cub will leave him forever. There’s a moving and special adoption story told with care through these silly figures.

But what would a kung fu movie be without external conflict? This one has a growling bull (J.K. Simmons), a villain defeated five centuries ago, escape from the spirit realm with an army of solid jade henchmen in tow. He’s on the rampage, out to capture the souls of all kung fu practitioners who stand in his way, and turn their lifeless bodies into more zombie soldiers to do his bidding. To learn how to defeat them, Po must travel to a secret panda village where maybe, just maybe, he can connect with ancient, long-forgotten panda magic. Screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger neatly – maybe too neatly – tie together his inner struggles with the needs of the action plot, leaving plenty of time to deliver heaping helpings of cute roly-poly panda antics. They’re adorable, and love to eat, hug, roll, dance, and sleep. What’s not to like? And then, when it’s time to get serious about defeating evil, they spring into action with the best of them.

Returning director Jennifer Yuh, who last time around broke the record for highest-grossing feature directed by a woman, works with co-director Alessandro Carloni (a longtime DreamWorks artist) to stage the film in bright, beautiful colors. It’s an extravagant explosion of fast-paced visual delights, swirling primary hues filling out lush exteriors and intricate architecture, snapping into high-contrast action when the adventure gets going. Where plot and character are concerned, this is a repetition, a riff on previous conflicts with character arcs consisting of reworked aspects of the first two films. But in motion, the movie moves and sings with contagious energy, each image colorful and intricately designed, bursting with zippy and clever choreography. Best are a mêlée that finds unexpectedly productive kung fu uses for pandas’ inherently cute lazy habits and bookending vibrant zero-g clashes in the spirit realm smashing swirls of glowing magic light through floating boulders.

The story boils down to the same be-yourself platitudes so many family films do, but at least it has the decency to be woo-woo mysto about it, and use it to hold up exciting, amusing, trippy, and striking imagery. The animators bring an elaborate fantasy look of the kind DreamWorks has been trying out these days (with this series, as well as their How to Train Your Dragons, Rise of the Guardians, and The Croods), even throwing split screens, hand-drawn interludes, and extreme color gradients into the mix of lush and buoyant imagery. As a combination reiteration and finale of the trilogy, it may not have the novelty of the first, or the weight of the second, but it is fun. If this is the last we see of Kung Fu Panda, it is a worthy conclusion and a perfect place to stop: with Po learning to love his two dads and be his best self, and with confetti, transcendence, warm and fuzzy reunions, and an angelic choir singing Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting” in Chinese translation.

Bots Against the Current: TERMINATOR GENISYS

Yet again the timeline turns loop-de-loops through the meddling of future warfare between robots and humans in Terminator Genisys, the fifth in the thirty-year-old franchise. We return to a distant future where the machines of the world have risen up and nearly exterminated us. John Connor, the leader of human resistance, sends soldier Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother, Sarah Connor, from an unstoppable robot Terminator tasked with killing her before she can give birth. The robots want the Connors dead before they can lead the human armies. Meanwhile, the future people would very much like to stop the tech company Cyberdyne from inventing the evil robo-consciousness Skynet program in the first place. What started as a way for writer-director James Cameron to stage an epic sci-fi conflict in a small actioner on the streets of 1984 has now ballooned into a complicated story of crisscrossing time travelers forever circling the same key events, attempting to stave off the future Judgment Day.

Once time travel is involved, the series has so many alternate possible futures and pasts that there’s a lot of freedom in recasting the roles and shifting the plot variables each time. But in this series, we’re invariably doomed to face the future conflict. The best the characters can do is push back the day the robots take over. Each film makes the path there increasingly complicated. No one ever prevents future doom in the way they’d hope. It is infinite repetition, an ouroboros of franchise storytelling. In Genisys, screenwriters Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier make use of temporal flexibility to repeat, remake, remix, retcon, and recombine elements of every previous Terminator movie. It’s fun, but predigested, like watching the other four all at once.

We start in a dire apocalyptic future much like the one from fourth entry Terminator Salvation, which is otherwise mostly ignored here. John Connor (Jason Clarke this time) leads an army into the robot’s secret time travel bunker, where he sends Kyle Reese (now Jai Courtney) on the mission we saw in the first Terminator. Upon arrival, Reese quickly learns the 1984 that greets him is not the one he’s been prepped for. This Sarah Connor (a wonderful Emilia Clarke) is already the tough battle-ready woman of Terminator 2, having been rescued from certain death as a child by yet another time-hopping Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), this one programmed to protect her. They’re ready to fight back. In a satisfying stretch of clever franchise reflexivity, Genisys posits changes made by all the timeline tomfoolery in amusing and sometimes exciting sequences, including a clash between this new Terminator and the younger model with digitally modified footage from the original.

But other Terminators are on the hunt, including a T2-style liquid metal shape-shifter (Byung-hun Lee). So our trio is on the run, with Reese the one told to come along if he wants to live. What follows is functional big explosion-heavy summer entertainment with several car chases (a series staple), headache-inducing sci-fi paradox pondering (ditto), and, after another zap through a time portal, a scrambling fight to stop the nefarious Genysis program from going online. It’s a cloud-based program that’ll allow our cell phone addictions to awaken Skynet and hasten mankind’s destruction. It certainly sounds bad. It all ends in a gleaming tech factory showdown similar to Terminator 3’s, bringing our tour through the franchise’s greatest hits to a slam-bang sparks-and-booms conclusion.

Between loud clashes, blandly dour performances from the main men mix with the welcome sight of Schwarzenegger returning to his most iconic role. It’s fun to watch him as an aging battlebot – “Old, but not obsolete,” he says – even if his behavior is only riffing on what we’ve seen The Terminator do before. A more interesting twist is Clarke’s Sarah Connor. She carries youthful vitality and believable authority as the movie allows her an interesting new way to shoulder destiny’s burden. What if she doesn’t want to have a baby? If she can stop Skynet, she might not have to. Meanwhile, the best new character is played by J.K. Simmons, bringing a blast of real comic energy to a harried detective who pieces together the gist of the conflict and is given the best line, muttered with exasperation upon seeing a trail of destruction, “Goddamn time-travelin' robots!” That seems like a reasonable response.

Director Alan Taylor (of Thor: The Dark World) and crew do industrial-strength Hollywood spectacle brightly and briskly, finding moments for some nifty imagery. A robot melts into a gooey mess in a shower of acid. Another gets pulled apart by an electromagnet. That’s cool. Familiar action sequences (a police station siege, a hospital escape, a helicopter attack) reappear in new contexts, allowing fans recognition and surprise. There are some nice twists here and there (most spoiled by the ad campaign, another series tradition), but there’s a sense we’ve been here before. It’s blockbuster déjà vu. Genisys gains interest beyond the diverting surface only through ripples of Terminators past. The series narrative is impossibly knotted, but I bet if you had a lot of time on your hands you could get out some graph paper and figure it out.

The approach here leads to playful rearrangement of the basic puzzle pieces, but they don’t add back up. For a series about actions and their consequences, the connection between past and present is fuzzy here. Who sent our main Terminator? And why’s the new liquid one there? And what happens in the future to cause the Big Twists here? Maybe it had something to do with former Doctor Who star Matt Smith, who is in so little of the movie he’s presumably mostly on the cutting room floor. These questions leave the movie feeling like just another knot in the timeline when it plays like what should be an essential addition. But I enjoyed the setpieces for their slick thrills and empty echoes. It fits into the same pessimistic loop as the others, with the same characters fighting the same battles, hoping to push back inevitable war. Your enjoyment depends on how much you enjoy futility.

Beat! Beat! Drums! WHIPLASH

Whiplash is set in the academic music world, following a 19-year-old who has a goal of being a famous jazz drummer. He’s studying at a prestigious New York City music school where he’s friendless and depressed, spending most of his free time holed up in a practice room, drumming his heart out. In order to move towards his ultimate idea of success – work in a jazz band that’ll win him the accolades and respect he desires – he must first go through a bullying tyrant of a teacher, a noted conductor responsible for the college’s premiere jazz ensemble. And so, though the film is set in the world of jazz, the film is not about jazz. It’s about an emotionally abusive relationship, as the student eager to please is drawn into a world of overwhelming anxiety by an overbearing, impossible to please teacher.

As Mr. Fletcher, the teacher in question, beloved character actor J.K. Simmons, most recently known to audiences as the loving father in Juno and the scene-stealing J. Jonah Jameson in Raimi’s Spider-Mans, is a domineering, hectoring, frightening schoolroom authority figure. He’s scary. It’s also the kind of supporting performance that bends the rest of the film into its orbit. He has forceful, explosive anger and intensely steady confidence, intimidating in its immovable presence. He stalks the room in tight black shirts that accentuate his powerful arms and gleaming bald head. He demands nothing short of perfection, as a prestigious music expert would, but goes about it by running cruel practice sessions. He puts students on the spot, brusquely dismissing their worth. He can be warm one minute, cutting and bruising the next. He’s quick with a homophobic slur, a belittling comment, ready to use personal information about a student as a knife to stick in and twist, all in the name of making better musicians.

Simmons’ Fletcher towers over every scene. Characters respect and fear him in equal measure. When he turns his stare towards the camera, I couldn’t help but get a little nervous myself. Writer-director Damien Chazelle, in only his second feature, shows great sense of blocking by keeping the man tall and looming in the frame. Our lead, the driven student (Miles Teller), sits behind a drum kit, low in the frame, separated from the others. On the first day of practice, he cries. Later, he exerts so much intense effort his hands split open, blood pooling on the sticks and drums, sweat falling on the cymbals as he plays through the pain, his teacher demanding more and more. Late in the film, Fletcher is asked if it’s possible to go too far. His answer is simple. “No.”

Chazelle effectively narrows the film’s focus to this core student/mentor relationship, charting the perfect storm that arises between Teller’s desire to the be the best at all cost, and Simmons’ readiness to push students as far as he can at all cost. That’s a lot of costs. Teller, in a less showy but no less nuanced role that gains most of its power from the determination in his eyes and in the silent strain growing there, throws himself into his drumming. He’s feeling pressure from all sides, like a cartoonishly dismissive extended family who think his music’s nice, but his cousins’ football is impressive. He shuts out good elements of his life – a wonderfully supportive and loving father (Paul Resier) and a cute potential love interest (Melissa Benoist) – to focus on pounding out paradiddle after paradiddle until he’s perfect.

The film becomes a series of anxiety attacks as a student who feels he can’t catch a break gets pushed to the breaking point by a teacher unwilling to waver from his intensity. The young man, earnest and serious about his musical ambitions, comparing himself to Buddy Rich and Charlie Parker, arrives at a point where he knows his teacher is an unfair, manipulative, and psychologically assaultive bully, almost impossible to please. Even if he did, the approval won’t last long. And yet he wants to please the authority figure still. He’s told it’s the path to success, and is determined to get there. These performances sell the relationship’s tricky nature, as the actors find the humanity and the danger in their methods and madness.

Chazelle places this core emotionally abusive power dynamic over a formula setup, transposing a music school drama onto a sports movie structure as the ensemble prepares to perform for higher and higher stakes competitions. Practices and performances alike are filmed in whip pans and cut together with percussive editing, driving the skill and suspense of the drumming to greater heights. But what starts as formula ends up with psychologically weighted drum solos somewhere unexpected and gripping. Whiplash is so committed to following its characters’ drives that it arrives at a perfectly logical but wholly surprising conclusion. We watch two driven and uncompromising men pushing themselves for control over the situation, over a relationship that’s unhealthy and yet potentially might bring about beautiful music.

Dumb Love: LABOR DAY

A romance is at the center of Labor Day. The plot hinges on it. The characters are motivated by it. The emotional resolution for all involved depends upon it. And I didn’t buy it, not even for a second. 

The movie is about a depressed single mother (Kate Winslet) who only leaves the house once a month, taking her 12-year-old son (Gattlin Griffith) with her to load up on four weeks of groceries and supplies. That’s what they’re doing at the start of the movie, heading out on their monthly shopping trip on the Thursday before Labor Day, 1987. There they are confronted by a man (Josh Brolin) with a small circle of blood on the side of his white shirt. He calmly and quietly intimidates them into giving him a ride. He stalks with them out to the car, gets in the back seat, and tells her to drive. Where to? “Your house,” he says. Once there, he agrees to not hurt them in exchange for allowing him to hide out. You see, he’s a prisoner who escaped mere hours before. He would much rather wait out the manhunt and skip off through the woods and onto a train than have to return and serve out the rest of his 18-year stay behind bars.

Where’s the romance in this, you ask? Why, it develops between Winslet and Brolin. She, trembling and morose, and he, quiet charisma, are drawn into each other’s emotional orbits as a hurt and depressed woman finds her neediness and loneliness complimented and matched by a criminal with neediness and loneliness that’s something like hers. Eventually, artful flashbacks tucked into the corners of scenes in our present day narrative reveal that these characters have gone through some infant-related traumas and significant others who have long since left one way or another. They’re both damaged, but together they feel like life might be okay now that someone understands them. But that’s all sitting under the narrative like sap about to be tapped until it drains out in great globs of sentimentality. At first the situation is simply menacing – a bloody escaped prisoner quickly and calmly muscles his way into the home of a child and defenseless parent! But the movie watches him make chili, teach them his recipe for peach pie, and set about fixing loose steps and changing the furnace filter. What a guy.

The only people who can truly understand a relationship are the ones living it. This one’s all about longing and deprivation, two people who have been alone for so long, trapped (in prison, in her thoughts), but ready to let desire to connect set off sparks. It’s an adult attraction that goes over the son’s head, but not the film’s. It’s a physical, sticky film, the muggy late-August small-town setting closing in. The characters are sweaty all the time, clothes sticking, hair slick and matted. Everyone seems uncomfortable and overheated. No wonder it’s such a perfect setting for passions to come to a boil, and then boil over. I’m all for good, honest melodrama, and Labor Day is nothing but earnest. But it never finds a convincing way of moving the pieces of the puzzle into a believable place. I just never bought that Winslet’s character, so hesitant and cautious, would let that caution slip for a character like Brolin’s, a clear and immediate threat. I understand getting caught in the dangerous situation, but not the way he so quickly erodes her suspicion.

The story is told from the son’s point of view. Nostalgia-soaked narration provided by Tobey Maguire as the now-grown son strings events along, filling in some psychological shading without cracking open the central attraction. He’s suspicious for sure, tentatively accepting some father-figure bonding (praise, a nickname, baseball tips), while worrying about his mother’s well-being. To a certain extent, the point of view excuses some of the romance’s inherent unknowability, but not its unbelievability. It’s a shame the film’s core falls flat while there is this wonderful characterization of the boy on the cusp of a big change. Griffith is far and away more believable than the adults anchoring the drama.

The young actor has a boyish face cut with faint adolescent angles, softly innocent with a faint awareness of adult matters creeping underneath. The film is best when focused on his mental state, on this liminal space between childhood playfulness and teenage roiling. There’s an early throwaway detail in front of a magazine rack as he has a moment of hesitant embarrassed curiosity, reaching for a glamour magazine with an alluring cover model before pulling away towards a rack of comic books when he sees someone nearby. Another scene in which he has an abstractly sensual dream – a rapid-fire montage of winking cover models, a half-remembered bra strap’s outline as seen through a classmate’s t-shirt, and an imagined embrace – is potent. The experience of being a 7th-grade boy is so nicely observed, I found myself wishing the film would become less relentlessly focused on its increasingly strained plot.

But it does have a plot, adapted from a novel by Joyce Maynard by Jason Reitman. He’s swerving hard away from the genre on which he’s made his name, largely convincing character-study comedies of various flavors: satiric (Thank You For Smoking), workplace/romantic (Up in the Air), dark (Young Adult), and teen-centric (Juno). It’s too early to tell if this is a minor experiment or a change in direction for his career, but it’s nice to see a promising director willing to try something new, even if it doesn’t work. Labor Day, though attractively shot with lovely cinematography by Eric Steelberg and having a great sense of place and a well-cast ensemble, never comes together. Quivering with import on details of its drama, characters are moved around under the assumption that we’re with them, while I cringed, hoping someone would eventually make the right decision. Turns out, the movie and I were rooting for different outcomes.

Labor Day has thriller mechanics ticking under the sentimentality. It should and sometimes does play as a rooting interest in the boy or one of the townspeople (neighbors Brooke Smith and J.K. Simmons, police officer James Van Der Beek) finding the right moment to let the world know the fugitive is here, swooping in and saving Winslet from falling for him. This consensual kidnapping is in severe need of deflation before the sentimental music twinkles and the sun-dappled cinematography sells us on a romance that’s The Desperate Hours by way of Nicholas Sparks. But, no, love it is, maybe even True Love. And it never feels right to me, especially as the son shifts his eyes, and the score scrapes out suspense whenever Brolin gets close to caught. I wanted him to go back to jail, and the movie just plain won’t work if that’s the case. 

Computer Stress: JOBS

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computers and the man partially responsible for ushering in the age of the personal computer and introducing the iPod and iPad to the world, was a fascinating and multifaceted man. Those looking to turn his life into a film would have many interesting entry points. Just look at the page count of Walter Isaacson’s great 2011 biography of the man. A film could follow the exploits of the garage-based startup and the decades of business strategy that caused Apple to rise, fall, and rise again. A film could concern itself with the technical revolution itself, spinning a story of improvements and inspirations as well as clashes with competitors. A film could explore the personal struggles and infamously prickly personality of Jobs, digging into what made him tick while striving to illuminate his creative process. And yet in Jobs business strategy is flatly presented, tech specs are vague at best, inspiration is only mystified, and his personal life is perfunctory. The first Steve Jobs biopic to hit theaters is in some ways the worst of all possible Steve Jobs biopics.

There’s a certain amount of irony in a film about a man obsessed with getting small details exactly right getting small details largely wrong. I’m not talking about the details in facts of his life and the history of Apple Computers (which are in both cases certainly bent to form a more movieish telling), but on a fundamental storytelling level. Instead of exhibiting curiosity in the characters in the story as people, director Joshua Michael Stern and screenwriter Matt Whiteley present them as objects in a diorama, made up and dressed up to look as close to the real people as possible, but with little effort put into creating convincing interior lives. It’s all surface to watch Ashton Kutcher play Jobs as an intelligent, mercurial presence. He may change his gait and speaking patterns convincingly, but he’s only the Jobs we know from his press events and public persona. To see Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak (Apple’s co-creator) is to see a convincing impersonation. The two men have fine chemistry – they’re often fun to watch – and are quite good, but bring in their performances emotional truths the movie itself seems uninterested in locating.

It is the worst kind of biopic: bland. Give me a hit piece, an energetic condensed version, or a high-spirited hagiography over cautious and flavorless any day. At least that film would have a point of view. Jobs plays as a series of reenactments, purely expositional and transactional. Events seem inevitable and preordained as characters – even ones played by welcome character actors like Dermot Mulroney, Matthew Modine, J.K. Simmons, and Lesley Ann Warren – speak to each other as if writing themselves into the history books. As Jobs moves from the garage to the boardroom – the main narrative thrust being what got him there, what lost him the position, and what got him back there – the film is singularly uninterested in figuring out anything beyond the broad facts of his life. Oblique references to his parents, both biological and adopted, are dropped, as well as vague nods towards his relationships and children. But at least the business throughline gives some kind of reason to downplay his personal life. That the ball is dropped there as well, with so much screen time saying so little, is strange. The ins and outs of Apple Computers remain fuzzy, as if the filmmakers were afraid too much technical detail would lose the audience.

No movie can sum up a man’s life, but it’s a waste of time for a biopic to not even try to sum up part of it. Jobs is content to simply say, “Here is Steve Jobs and some things that happened in his life.” It knows he’s important and assumes we think so, too. But no work has gone into making this a dramatically or cinematically interesting representation. Jobs coasts on the context the audience brings along, unwilling to provide any insight or interest of its own. I knew we were in trouble from the opening scene, a reenactment of the reveal of the iPod. In Jobs’s trademarks black shirt and blue jeans, Kutcher looks and sounds the part, sometimes uncannily so, as he paces back and forth, delivering the actual words of the event. When he reveals the device, the camera practically trembles as it moves in for a close-up of the logo, the onlookers applauding and the orchestra swelling. It’s a moment of ecstatic fervor whipped up to say nothing more than that the iPod is cool. The technique in this scene is repeated with the unveiling of the Apple II and the Macintosh. Aren’t they cool? Yes, they are. But couldn’t, and shouldn’t, the film say more than that?

Quick Looks: ARBITRAGE, THE GOOD DOCTOR, and SLEEPWALK WITH ME

In Arbitrage, Richard Gere plays a hugely wealthy banker in some serious trouble. He’s become embroiled in a complicated financial deal that’s threatening to sink his company if the funds don’t get moved around quickly enough to cover his assets. And that’s not even the worst of it. He sneaks away from his wife (Susan Sarandon) to drive upstate with his mistress (Laetitia Casta) and ends up flipping the car. When he comes to, he sees that his mistress is dead in the passenger seat so he flees the scene of the accident. (The pointed intent couldn’t be clearer: the rich flee catastrophe on instinct.) So he’s dealing with financial trouble and legal trouble, skulking around large boardrooms, spacious offices, and fancy apartments, trying to avoid the consequences of his actions.

Writer-director Nicholas Jarecki has created a phony fantasy of a character study that feels altogether too calculated a guesstimate of how the one-percent lives. (Not that I have any experience with that income bracket, but it can’t be as simple as it’s made to seem here.) To put such material in a standard thriller (the kind with dramatic turns that make it play like an episode of Law & Order from the suspect’s point-of-view) only cheapens what was sparsely drawn to begin with. It should be juicier and with more of a bite; it’s all strangely toothless. That said, Gere gives a persuasive performance of a man crumbling under the burden of keeping up appearances. I also appreciated the work of Nate Parker, as a working-class man Gere debates scapegoating, and Tim Roth, as the investigator who is frustrated that the legal system seems rigged in favor the rich. Would that these performances were in a movie that would be able to better show them off.

Director Lance Daly’s The Good Doctor is a squirmy thriller about a lonely young doctor (Orlando Bloom) who falls in love (no, obsession) with a pretty patient (Riley Keough). He decides to tweak her medication in order to keep her in the hospital under his care. The script by John Enborn follows this situation to its predictable conclusion and the talented supporting cast (including Taraji P. Henson, Michael Peña, and J.K. Simmons) fills out the plot convincingly enough. It’s a shame, then, that the whole experience is just a sad, slow circle down the drain, completely without tension and devoid of emotional interest. This is a thinly imagined thriller that manages nothing more than a queasy feeling once or twice. It’s most unfulfilling in its flat visual style and ploddingly obvious script. As someone who sort of enjoyed Daly’s similarly slight first feature, the kids-in-puppy-love romance Kisses, I’m especially disappointed to see that this is where he’s gone next. He’s a director of potential and maybe someday he’ll live up to it.

Stand-up comedian Mike Birbiglia has told the same – very funny – story in several mediums now. If you’re anything like me, you may have managed to hear several times over (in his stand-up, on This American Life, in his memoir) about his intense sleepwalking problem that caused him to, say, dream about a jackal intruding in his bedroom, which would result in him fast asleep shouting at a hamper, fully convinced he was confronting a wild animal. This is obviously a problem, but his career seemed to be taking off and his relationship with his girlfriend was growing complicated and one thing leads to another and he’s in a deep sleep while jumping out a second-story hotel window.

This story’s latest telling takes movie form in Sleepwalk with Me and it’s perfectly fine, though I did wonder if it would have worked better on me if the novelty was still there. Birbiglia, here the writer, director and star, has a loose, casual style that pumps up dream sequences with off-hand discombobulation that is undercut with silly shifts to reality. To fill out the rest of the semi-autobiographical movie, it follows Birbiglia’s relationship with his girlfriend (played by Lauren Ambrose) as well as his growing stand-up career that takes him from hotel to hotel, crummy gig to crummy gig. Altogether it plays like Woody Allen lite, warm and sweetly small. This is a minor, but often charming movie, mostly because Birbiglia is so likable. But the thing of it is, you’d have just as good a time listening to the original monologue, so I have a hard time recommending this movie outright.