There's lots to see in "Captain America: Civil War," but not much stands out.

In Captain America: Civil War, the Avengers are forced to sign a treaty with the United Nations that will prevent them from interfering with bad guys unless specifically conscripted by individual nations. This causes a rift between the Avengers, some of whom (including Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson) consider it a necessary evil, while others (among them Captain America, played by Chris Evans) see the treaty as a form of surrender that will tear the Avengers apart. The latter eventually happens, and we see multiple Avengers fighting each other in a mostly light-hearted sequence. It’s lighthearted because so little is at stake: we know that none of the Avengers is actually going to be killed. Usually in any narrative, low stakes are a reason not to care about what’s happening, but in this case, the low stakes are a relief.

I found myself enjoying this scene all the more because it wasn’t an excuse for rampant destruction of whole city blocks. Instead, the writers and directors punctuate this scene, which takes place at an airplane hangar, with a flurry of mini-conversations between all these characters (Captain America, Iron Man, Falcon, Hawkeye, Black Widow, etc) as they spar with each other. Ant-Man (played by Paul Rudd) cuts every moment down to size with a dumb joke. (He may be the least respected and most undervalued of all superheroes.) And the sequence showcases the amusing, cocksure arrogance of a young Spider-Man (Tom Holland).

Of course, the great heretofore unacknowledged joke of most superhero movies is that the heroes end up destroying the city in an attempt to save it. We see some all-powerful evil agent smashing cars and toppling buildings, and the heroes are forced to add to the destruction, though we assume it’s out of necessity. These movies gleefully stage enormous battle sequences that should kill thousands of human beings, but because the films are targeted at kids, we’re supposed to be okay with it. And, conveniently, nothing too horrible ever happens to a discernable human being. (Don Cheadle does get hurt pretty bad in this one, but he’s one of the heroes, not some innocent bystander.) It’s nice that Captain America: Civil War incorporates this joke/problem into its story.

The rest of the film vacillates between mindless, sped-up action sequences and little dramatic exchanges reminiscent of The Young and the Restless. The Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) is traumatized when she uses her powers and accidentally destroys a whole building. (This is the impetus for the disputed U.N. treaty.) Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is still haunted by the deaths of his parents. Captain America has a little romance brewing with CIA agent Sharon Carter (Emily Van Camp, who has a real screen presence). There are others, but I’ve already forgotten them. These dramatic moments don’t ever really pop, perhaps because they’re cloaked in sameness. The film certainly has a rhythm, and directors Joe and Anthony Russo are smart enough to give the audience little breaks between all the fighting. But they seem to have only two approaches to a scene: make it fast or make it slow. Perhaps we wouldn’t need so many breaks from the action if it were meaningful and not mindless, if it were artful and clever and exciting and not merely overwhelming and predictable.

I tried hard to discern what was going on during those moments of fighting between multiple characters. The action is sped up so much that it’s impossible to sort out what amounts to a jumble of images. Is this supposed to be entertaining? Don’t people find it chaotic and therefore impossible to connect with or enjoy? I realize that these films appeal to viewers as mindless entertainment, but how is it entertaining when you can’t even tell what’s happening? Whenever filmmakers overly rely on shaky cameras and rapid editing, my assumption is that they’re covering up their ineptitude, hoping we’ll give them credit for putting something up there, whether it possesses visual logic or not, whether it’s well-choreographed or not.

Action—whether derived from a comic book or not—doesn’t have to be this way. See John Wick, and you’ll see how to make a mindless action movie with real visual elegance. Of course, John Wick is also R-rated, and it’s likely that the need to make a PG-13 rating prevents movies like Captain America from reaching the glorious heights of violence that John Wick enjoys. But sanitizing the violence in order to make it kid-appropriate is actually worse: it diminishes the shock factor. A movie like John Wick never ceases to shock me, to convey the reality that violence can wreak havoc in people and places and cause real physical pain. What we need are more real, sharp comic book movies and less of this vague, “cleaned-up” drek.

But at least there are lots of familiar faces that unexpectedly pop up. Jeremy Renner appears (as Hawkeye) in the last third of the movie. As irritating as it is to see a character (played by such a great actor as Jeremy Renner) introduced so late in the film, his presence filled me with gratitude. And Tom Holland makes a good impression as Peter Parker. (Even though Andrew Garfield was terrific in the role.) The scene where Tony Stark enlists Spider-Man’s help is the best one in the movie: it’s funny and revealing and has some shape to it. We see Peter Parker coming to grips with the nature and the implications of his power; we see Tony Stark at his most desperate, making a trip to Queens to ask for a high school kid’s help. (But aren’t we all tired of Robert Downey, Jr.’s shtick by now? He’s been playing the smart-ass smart guy for over a decade.)

Somehow, Scarlett Johansson gets lost in all this. She’s a terrific actress, and certainly skillful in her many fight scenes, but she—like so many others—gets relegated to the sidelines as the film introduces more and more characters. The end result: it’s forgettable but intermittently amusing. Anthony Mackie, who plays Falcon, is a pleasure to watch. Mackie has charm to spare, and he always seems to be having a good time whenever he’s on screen. With Don Cheadle, Paul Bettany, Chadwick Boseman (as the Black Panther), Sebastian Stan, Frank Grillo, William Hurt, Marissa Tomei, and Daniel Brühl.

'Miles Ahead' Never Quite Captures the Heart and Soul of the Music Behind the Troubled Man

I discovered Miles Davis in college. A group of us were sitting in one of the student buildings at the University of Central Florida talking about music among other things, when a classmate of mine mentioned Miles Davis’s landmark album Kind of Blue. I had never heard of Miles Davis before, nor had I listened to Kind of Blue. A few weeks later, I was back home visiting my parents, and there in my old bedroom was a beat-up copy of Kind of Blue. My dad had found it in the backseat of a repossessed car at his workplace, and thought I might be interested.

It’s not clear in my mind when I first played the record. What is clear, what comes back to me every time I listen to Kind of Blue, are memories of reading novels in the university library (like any good English major) into the wee hours of the morning with the soulful, melancholy, deliriously cool music of Miles Davis providing the soundtrack via headphones. Miles Davis did more to mature my music taste than practically any other musician, and I still love to disappear into his music, which comes alive at night in a dimly lit room with a glass of wine and good conversation. It speaks without words, and that is the most powerful music there is.

In Miles Ahead, director-star Don Cheadle delves into that vortex of madness that so often accompanies artistic genius. Miles Davis was plagued with his share of demons, and the film wants to expose those demons with vivid ferocity. The movie jostles between the Miles Davis of 1980—forlorn, haggard, loopy, reclusive—and the Miles Davis of the 1960s, still eccentric but much more productive and hopeful about his career. 

In one scene circa 1980, Davis is listening to a radio retrospective of his music, and the moment is punctuated by the nagging fear that he no longer resembles the legend being lauded on the airwaves. Plagued with anxieties and suspicions, addicted to drugs, unable to perform, Davis is no longer the person they’re talking about. He’s worse than dead. A Columbia Records flunky even quips, “He’s more profitable dead than alive.” But Miles cannot wrap his brain around all this sound and fury. He’s still riffing in his mind on some endless jazz trip, and feebly trying to figure out the calculating world around him.

Much of the film involves a Rolling Stone interview conducted by a music writer named Dave Braden (played by Ewan McGregor), a particularly sleazy and opportunistic cad who’ll do just about anything to get at Davis. When we meet Braden, he’s sporting a shiner from his ex-wife’s boyfriend only to be clocked again by Davis himself, who resents being hounded by the press. Braden finagles his way inside Miles’s New York apartment anyway, is chased at gunpoint, and finally establishes some trust with Davis by offering to score him some really good coke. (That’s after they make quite a scene at Columbia, with the raspy Davis waving a gun at various music executives while one sly suit tries to pacify him with boxing tickets and money.)

Miles Ahead is well-made. Cheadle fancies little devices to help him switch between present-day (1980) Davis and past (1960s) Davis. We see shards of a romance between Miles and Frances (played with guts by Emayatzy Corinealdi), one of the loves of his life. (The film makes no mention of Davis’s equally long relationship with actress Cicely Tyson, who pulled him into sobriety.) But Cheadle gets caught up in this idea of Miles Davis the mad genius, spouting nonsensical poetry as he’s being swindled and coddled and patronized by various people, including his fair-weather Rolling Stone chum Dave Braden. (I’ve never detested Ewan McGregor before; but everything about this guy, from his stringy hair to his Scottish brogue oozes with calculation and hucksterism.) 

As for Don Cheadle, there’s something labored about his performance (as good as it is) and his movie, as though we’re being forced to suffer through the worst of Miles Davis so we can have a deeper appreciation for the best of him. Sure, I can accept that Miles Davis was crazy at times, and he was apparently abusive to his wife, who finally walked out on him. But Miles Ahead drifts by like a fever dream, never fully grasping the weight of either Davis’s talent or his tortured life. Cheadle works so hard to imitate the raspy whisky voice and the mindless pap about “social music” that he loses something in the process: the fact that when you listen to Kind of Blue (and number of other Davis records), you’re transported, you’re lifted to some kind of other-worldly cocktail party in the sky.

When we hear the music, it’s no longer about the man and his demons. The movie makes it clear that in the middle of recording sessions Davis was probably drinking or getting high or beating up on his devoted wife. He’s no saint. But we don’t necessarily need to know this. What matters about jazz, about Miles Davis, is the mood the music creates, and that mood runs deep and eternal, like moonlight or like a long-remembered dream. Miles Ahead feels almost airily insignificant in its texture: It mistakes its own obsession with the musician’s tortured existence for an appreciation of the depth and beauty of the music itself. But Cheadle doesn’t revel in this music, or he doesn’t appear to anyway. He appears to be conducting an acting experiment, a test of his own skills, rather than an exploration of that magical concoction being created in-between flights of madness and self-destruction. 

Like Tennessee Williams, who extinguished himself as fast as he could with booze and pills and bad relationships, Miles Davis was too much to last for too long: but what he gave us is alive and pulsating and vervy and thrilling. This is a decent biopic, but I don’t think it’s the one Miles Davis deserves. Movies are like jazz in their own way, and there’s something self-defeating about a biopic applied to someone like Miles Davis, like trying to write down the notes of a song and memorize them, so you can play them the same way every time. That was never the point with Miles Davis, or with jazz.

Out of Sight

Out of Sight (1998) is a crime comedy that's intermittently clever and dumb. It's got George Clooney, though, as a bank robber who's tired of prison and ready to retire, if he can make a final score that's large enough to sustain him. Director Steven Soderbergh demonstrates his ability to make fun movies here: it's sort of a breezier, less show-offy version of a Tarantino movie, with an interest in developing a relatively straightforward --but layered-- story, rather than twisting it like a pretzel. I'm not so much criticizing Tarantino's movies as noting the difference between this film and say, Jackie Brown (both movies, incidentally, come from novels by Elmore Leonard). Out of Sight is content to be entertaining without being overly clever. Soderbergh is a more conventional director than Tarantino, you might say. He knows how to transcend conventional movies and turn them into something fun and unique, and that's largely what he does with Out of Sight. It has so many funny, quirky moments that are fresh and interesting, and yet it never feels like something so disdainfully self-aware as a Tarantino film.

There are moments when you wonder if the screenwriter, Scott Frank, wasn't paying attention to his material closely enough. He lets characters do things that seem illogical, even stupid, for the sake of advancing the plot in a certain direction. The movie is almost gleefully disinterested in being realistic. You admire its casualness. Clooney has that sort of casual charm to him, and he's perfect for this movie. Jennifer Lopez, as the marshal who falls in love with him, isn't a great actress, but she does have a sense of comic timing, and she's a great beauty too. Her character downplays her obsession with "bad guys," even though she must know she's lying to herself the way the movie is lying to itself, playfully. This heist-farce was made purely for entertainment. But it has enough smarts not to be totally mindless, too.

The supporting cast is a dream: Ving Rhames as Clooney's partner in crime, a tough, weathered criminal who nevertheless confesses his crimes--sometimes prior to committing them--to his ultra-religious sister, a bookkeeper for a televangelist; Don Cheadle as a fellow criminal, who agrees to join forces with Clooney and Rhames to break into the safe of a Detroit millionaire, played by Albert Brooks, who did time with them in Florida (presumably for embezzlement); Dennis Farina as Lopez's father, also in the business; Catherine Keener as one of Clooney's friends in the outside world: a former magician's assistant. She figures in a very amusing scene in which an escaped criminal, played by Luis Guzman, comes to her door to kill her, unaware that Lopez is already there questioning her about Clooney's whereabouts. Keener is another actress with a remarkable comic sensibility: she's subtle, too, never forcing herself on the camera or the audience. She lets her character's intelligence sink in gradually; Steve Zahn plays a moronic stoner who comes to Clooney's assistance (sort of), half-heartedly, and gives away more than he realizes whenever he encounters Lopez, who knows how to work him; Viola Davis as Cheadle's girlfriend; Michael Keaton as Lopez's married lover, an FBI agent who has a great scene with Farina in which he sneakily calls him out on his behavior; Nancy Allen, as Brooks' girlfriend; and, in a cameo appearance at the end, Samuel L. Jackson, as another convict.