Ira Sachs' delightful new film "Little Men" understands how friendships are shaped (and altered) by outside circumstances.

When adults talk about how “complicated” life is, they’re almost always talking about money, whether or not they realize it. And while it seems obvious that money has a powerful influence on our lives, Little Men, the latest film from director Ira Sachs, gives a face to the otherwise impersonal specter of economics. (He did the same thing, under different circumstances, in 2014's Love is Strange.) This delightful, sad, yet somehow hopeful film explores the budding friendship between Jake (Theo Taplitz) and Tony (Michael Barbieri), two middle-school boys growing up in Brooklyn, and how the money troubles of Jake’s parents drive a wedge between their two families. The boys meet because Jake’s parents have inherited an apartment above Tony’s mother’s dress shop. Both the apartment and the shop belonged to Jake’s grandfather, and Jake’s parents, Brian (Greg Kinnear) and Kathy (Jennifer Ehle), are forced to triple the rent to help them stay afloat financially. (Brian is an actor, and he makes very little money, so Kathy, a therapist, provides most of the family’s income.)

I’m not an expert on the cost of living in New York, but it’s easy to imagine that when it comes to raising a family in the city, two incomes are better than one. And while Kathy is supportive of Brian’s acting career, Brian feels guilty about not contributing financially. Upping the rent on the shop will help him appease a certain amount of unaddressed inferiority he feels. Leonor (Pauline Garcia), Tony’s mother, takes an angry jab at Brian late in the film: “Your father was embarrassed that everything in your house was paid for by your wife.” Leonor cannot afford the rent increase, and will not only have to close her shop, but suffer financially, because Jake’s grandfather kept the rent low as a token of friendship to her. 

Afraid afraid of becoming destitute, Leonor tries repeatedly to remind Brian of how much she meant to his father, that she visited him daily, and spent more time with him than his own children. Kathy tries to reassure Leonor: “We’re not the rich people moving into the neighborhood; we’re struggling too.” But a lesser form of greed, one forged out of the desire for contentment and security, does motivate them, even if they aren’t willing to admit it. 

The problems of the adults, while complicated, seem solvable, even petty, in light of their boys’ friendship. Friendship, when you’re 12 or 13, is often both elusive and ephemeral. Kids in middle school are still kids, just on the cusp of adolescence, and they haven’t totally been funneled into the groups they will identify with in high school. The friendship between Jake and Tony is delightful to behold: Tony encourages Jake in his artistic ambitions, and Jake encourages Tony’s wishes to become an actor. Both of them talk about going to an arts-centered public school next year, and Tony even takes some acting classes. (There’s a wonderful scene between Tony and an acting teacher in his 50s, both of them repeating various lines with increased emotional intensity, and it’s clear that acting thrills Tony: he comes alive as he shouts at his instructor, who is himself buoyed by Tony's enthusiasm.)

If Hollywood during the Golden Age of the 40s and 50s nurtured unrealistic ideals, and hocked silver linings like a used car salesman, then surely we’ve entered a new age of cynical honesty about “following your dreams.” Brian warns Jake about the pitfalls of the artistic life. You don’t always find success, and not every talented person is made to be a real artist. But Brian’s advice to Jake rings true, and feels like advice you could actually give someone: Don’t practice too hard; trust your natural abilities; know when to relax and when to work hard. It’s the balance of the two that determines who can succeed and who cannot. Brian himself is living proof that our dreams often elude; and yet he seems okay with it. His life hasn't ended because he's not a famous movie star.

Little Men also maintains that New York isn’t just a mecca for idealistic painters and actors and writers to come and find success. That’s not the reality for everyone. New York may be the city where those aspirations can be realized, but it is also a halfway house full of broken dreams, unfulfilled wishes, altered plans, and reality checks. And yet, in the midst of all the struggles to succeed and to find happiness, and the concerns about money, and the possibility that your plans might not work out the way you want them to, there are friendships, however fleeting, that sustain us, that enable us to dance in the minefields of life. For what seems like a mere moment, Jake and Tony get to share in each other’s wonderful, goofy, starry-eyed boyhood. And that is what makes Little Men not just a realistic look at growing up and finding yourself, but a celebration of the mixed bag that is life: It's a surprising movie, one that doesn't provide easy answers or convenient resolutions, and I loved every minute of it. 

Zero Dark Thirty

The long, long hunt for Osama bin Laden. If you saw The Hurt Locker, which is the previous collaborative effort from director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, you'll begin to notice a common theme, besides all the obvious commonalities: personal obsession. In The Hurt Locker, Jeremy Renner got off on the thrill of debugging bombs. In Zero Dark Thirty, Jessica Chastain plays Maya, a CIA officer, obsessively dedicated to tracking down and killing the man responsible for 9/11. There's an exchange between her and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta (played by James Gandolfini), where he asks her what else she's done in her career besides search for a ghost of a man. She replies, "nothing." She's driven by the conviction--with monomaniacal devotion and purpose--that bin Laden alone is worth the entirety of her ambitions and focus.

The slow-paced Zero Dark Thirty is a thriller for those of us who are exhausted by thrillers that can't cause enough destruction fast enough. The real world is a frightening place, with or without myriad explosions. In a movie like Zero Dark Thirty, those explosiony scenes are not fodder for thrills, but points of turbulence boiling over, punctuated by the time spent before and after them--not so much leading up to them and responding to them, as making sense of them, and turning the mirror on our own inabilities to truly make sense out of anything in the clash of two incredibly different cultures, both hostile toward each other.

As politically "now" as Zero Dark Thirty is, it doesn't have much of an axe to grind. I heard Bigelow say in an interview with NPR that she wanted the past to be portrayed as accurately as possible, not whitewashed. That said, her latest film doesn't seem to be gunning for anyone. It's not an expose of military practices, or a particular political party, or the country, or any belief system. Rather, it's an attempt to dramatize what has been arguably the most compelling--and drawn-out--historical moment of our time. Of course, viewing a movie like Zero is difficult. We're at both an advantage and a disadvantage when we're staring so close to these events, these very real events. From Here To Eternity, which dramatized the Pearl Harbor attack, was released 12 years after the fact. Zero Dark Thirty comes only a year-and-a-half since the discovery of bin Laden. One wonders how this movie will hold up, factually, as history reveals more information, commuting the present into the past, and shedding new light on the complex agendas waging war with each other.

This is a movie that compellingly gins up our emotions. We're rooting for the military, still stinging from a horrifying event. And yet one cannot help but wonder at the deep divides between the West and other parts of the world. Despite the "happy ending," there's not really a happy ending. And Zero Dark Thirty succeeds in pressing this idea into the mind. It's a hollow victory, if anything.

The performances are exceedingly good: Jessica Chastain carries the film impressively. She has good support from Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, Chris Pratt, Taylor Kinney, Edgar Ramirez, and Mark Duplass. It's a subtle, frightening, riveting, maddening vision of contemporary American and global politics and conflict. ★★★½

The Ides of March

The Ides of March is, at its most obvious, about how corruption is unavoidable in politics. It can be inadvertently bumped into, but regardless, it sticks like glue, leaving an indelible impression. The impression is either on the public, when they are made aware of the corruption, or on the corrupt person who chooses to keep one improper act a secret by committing more improper acts: corruption begets corruption.

Beneath the moralistic, cynical representation of the inherent corruptibility of politics and politicians, George Clooney's latest picture is an attempt to burst the balloon of the Idealist, the one who believes that it's possible for a politician to change the world for the better. It's done with a kind of effortless, winsome skill, because Clooney plays the kind of politician, at the surface level, that you know Clooney wishes could really exist; the kind of politician (again, only at the surface) that Clooney wishes he could be, were he to ever step into the political realm himself. As the hip young(ish) presidential candidate, Clooney's Governor Mike Morris is progressive, answers the questions he's asked, and isn't afraid to say what he really thinks, regardless of how it will be received by the media or the public. He plays the ultimate white liberal--stylish, sophisticated, and dedicated to principle. (Of course, we find out pretty soon what his true colors are.)

Ryan Gosling plays Morris's junior campaign adviser, a rising hot shot who seems to be incapable of making a wrong move or a bad judgment. He believes fully in the cause of his boss, who is trying to win the Democratic primary election against a more traditional, less viable candidate who still has a shot of winning because he's willing to play dirty. Morris refuses do get into the mud. This ultimately becomes a test of wills: how long can a politician afford not to play dirty?

The Ides of March has a conspiracy thriller-esque aura about it, but it's just an aura. The film is deliberately paced, which is fine, but after a while you realize it's not really moving toward anything. There aren't any really pulse-pounding moments, the kind of tingling excitement you expect from a political thriller. Even though the title suggests something dramatic on a Shakespearean scale, The Ides of March is tame. You begin to realize that the lack of pulse-pounding is symptomatic of the lack of a pulse. It's a characterological analysis, not a thriller, which would be fine if it added up to more at the end. It's only intermittently compelling, and ultimately forgettable.

The actors make up for the movie. Ryan Gosling's performance is strong: he demonstrates his capability as a leading man. His character undergoes a major moral and idealistic shift in the film, and he adapts to this shift with masterful control of himself. That's the whole point of the movie, that the real political players will make dramatic, character-changing shifts in the blink of an eye without blinking an eye. But The Ides of March leaves you feeling unaffected by its story and its sobering message, probably because it's telling you something you already knew. It's a moderately entertaining reminder of why we are so disenchanted with politics on both sides of the aisle.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, Jennifer Ehle, and Max Minghella co-star.

The King's Speech

My expectations going into The King's Speech were low. It looked like Oscar-bait. It looked like a lot of scenes of Colin Firth making animalistic stammering noises to show us how painfully he struggled to improve his speech. While the movie had moments where it seemed to be aiming for an Oscar, the story it told was fascinating, and didn't need to be elevated into awards material. It's about British royalty, particularly British royalty in the 1930s, and so what it needed was to be taken down a few notches. Geoffrey Rush gives the movie this necessary derailing. He plays Lionel Logue, a speech therapist to whom the Duke of York (soon to be King George VI) goes for help with his impediment. Lionel is not impressed with the pomp of George's royal status and doesn't afford the future king any extraneous privileges.

Firth is somber looking in another tasteful performance (he was very somber and tasteful in 2009's A Single Man, as an English professor), but he manages to break through the clinched veneer of his character to let a little humor and a lot of vulnerability into his performance. As his wife, a young Queen Mother, Helena Bonham Carter has such a high amount of potential within her as an actress. You can sense the wit she carries inside herself as it comes through in little movements, facial expressions, and in the way she carries herself. It's quite fun watching her leading her husband around like a shepherd with one of his sheep, and yet never overtaking his station. She's quite lovely, and quite an intelligent, fiery actress. Watching her keep that fieriness in check is fascinating because she seems to be in such command of her performance.

The movie cannot resist giving us a bit of the World War II treatment, tapping into the tension that was stirring in Europe in the 1930s. Of course it's obvious that England needed a king who could get his way through a sentence without stammering incoherently, especially during a time of war, so WW2 gives the story weight and significance. After all, why are we to care about a privileged royal son's speech problems? Surely the sympathy belongs to the underlings of the empire who cannot afford the luxury of a speech therapist. Surely we are better off caring for Rush's middle class dwelling and his middle class family. And yet the Logues are never portrayed as greedy, pining opportunists trying to glom onto the king's prestige. They are content with who they are much more so than the king himself. There's a scene when the radio carries the news of impending war, and you get a sense of the fear in their faces that one or both of their sons may be summoned to fight for the Crown.

Colin Firth may get the bulk of the award recognition for this picture (and he is good here), but I believe it is Geoffrey Rush who carries The King's Speech, and Helena Bonham Carter as well. Their performances were among the highlights of the movie. The cinematography of Danny Cohen was another. At first I groaned because I was afraid the murkiness of the exteriors--London is known for its rainy, foggy days--would make the movie a dull, depressing drag. But Cohen manages to make it visually interesting and gives the material a fluidity that it desperately needs. You can't squeeze much juice out of crusty upper-class British drama without a little help, and it's partly to the cinematographer's credit that The King's Speech is so watchable. It's not only watchable, it's quite funny, with a particularly amusing scene of the king shouting profanities at the top of his lungs as a vocal exercise.

Also starring Guy Pearce as David, the eldest son of George V and briefly his successor (his philandering ways force him out of the throne), Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill, Claire Bloom as their mother, Michael Gambon as George V, Eve Best as David's American lover, and Jennifer Ehle as Lionel's wife. Written by David Seidler. Directed by Tom Hooper. 111 minutes.