'Spotlight' is an unflinching, urgently needed examination of power and abuse in the church.

“I thought that some day I would come back to my faith. But something cracked,” says Boston Globe reporter Michael Rezendes, played by Mark Ruffalo in the new film Spotlight. For Rezendes, the truth that the Catholic Church covered up untold cases of abuse perpetrated by clergymen is the wrecking ball that decimates his already derelict faith. When you’re raised Catholic, you’re a Catholic for life, whether you believe in God or not. But to see firsthand the Church covering up its own dark sins is to have the very fabric of your soul ripped from you. It’s gut-wrenching and permanent.

Spotlight is a perceptive, unflinching new look at how the Church's power made an entire city complicit in unthinkable crimes. It’s a compulsively watchable, fascinating yarn in the nature of All the President’s Men, and its focus is as shattering as Watergate, perhaps more so, because it hits you on a deeper, more personal level than All the President's Men. We expect our governments to lie to us, to some extent. But, we have naively trusted the Church to be free of deception for far too long. 

The film dramatizes the Boston Globe “Spotlight” team's investigation of the case nearly fifteen years ago. The film is set in 2001, although it opens in 1976, where we see, in hushed voices, somber Church officials begging the mother of an abused child not to say anything against the Church, because the world needs the Church. These "men of God" assure the mother, who's still clinging to this institution as a source of truth, that the pedophile priest will be sent away, that it won’t happen again. But it happened again. And again.

Director Tom McCarthy, who co-wrote the script with Josh Singer, zooms in on the investigation, minimizing the personal lives of the main characters. The “Spotlight” team—Michael Rezendes, Robby Robinson, Sacha Pfeiffer, Ben Bradlee, and Matt Carroll—played by Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, and Brian d’Arcy James—are the heroes of the film, if indeed we can call them heroes. As much as Spotlight ultimately maneuvers itself into a pro-journalism stance, this movie isn’t a shameless plug for journalism. The Globe has to reckon with its own demons: It too is complicit in the cover-up by ignoring the case for years, despite the efforts of victims, now grown up, to contact them.

Michael Keaton, who was admittedly very good in last year’s much flashier Birdman, is exceptionally good here as Robby Robinson, the head of “Spotlight”. The performance isn’t flashy at all, and Keaton’s subtlety has its own kind of dramatic weight and import. What humanizes him, and all the other reporters, is their very personal stake in this investigation. Boston is a Catholic town in many ways; the culture is Catholic just as the culture in the South is Evangelical, and this culture affects you no matter your own personal religious beliefs (or unbeliefs). When Robinson confronts administrators at his alma mater, who don't want to investigate allegations of abuse against a priest-faculty member, he tells them about the man, now in his 40s, who was molested by the priest. He was a hockey player, and the priest was the hockey coach. Robinson glibly observes, "I guess we were just lucky we didn't play hockey." It's the kind of shattering remark that needs to be said.

Even as Spotlight rightly brings down the hammer on the abuses, and gives voice to the abused, the film maintains a refreshing graciousness toward belief. All of the “Spotlight” reporters were raised Catholic, and many of them went to Catholic schools. Spotlight reminds us that belief isn’t necessarily the problem. It is, however, the reason many believers are unable to deal honestly at this institution. It’s the power of moneyed institutions cloaked in religious authority, especially when those moneyed institutions can throw their weight around a city, absconding with evidence that damns them, leaning on people to protect the Church “for the good of the city.” When the Cardinal tells Globe editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), “It’s good for the institutions of the city to work together,” Baron responds, “I think for us to do our job we have to work alone.”

Schreiber, it should be noted, gives a fine performance as the Globe’s editor. Schreiber approaches the Marty Baron character with a kind of laconic humility. Baron is always thinking about the bigger story, and he finds moral purpose in bringing systemic corruption to light. McCarthy establishes Baron, a Jew who had previously worked at papers in Miami and New York, as the necessary outsider who sees through the local politics and the mutual good feelings of Bostonians. It’s his sharp focus that enables him to push the “Spotlight” team further, to root out the heart of the scandal.

Spotlight is also an interesting bit of time travel to the not-so-long ago world before the Internet had totally reshaped journalism, before our current, almost total, transition from print to digital. In this way, we see yet another shard of complexity: The “Spotlight” reporters are tasked with finding stories that will sell. (There’s talk of future job cuts, because even then circulation was diminishing.) McCarthy deftly balances the self-serving nature of journalism (you have to find compelling stories to sell papers) with the moral burden of journalism (people need to hear these stories). It may be the best movie of the year; it nothing else, it's one of the most urgent and perceptive films on religion, the press, and power.

With Stanley Tucci, Gene Amoroso, Jamey Sheridan, Paul Guilfoyle, and Billy Crudup.

Birdman

Michael Keaton has never really gotten his due as an actor. His insanely bizarre (and wonderful) performance in Beetlejuice was followed by a subdued, underwhelming turn in Batman (although it’s my favorite Batman movie to be sure) and then, despite some good performances, he just sort of disappeared into the morass of very good but slightly forgotten character actors. Birdman is sure to grab Keaton an Oscar nom, and Keaton’s performance is strong, but the movie is not the masterpiece people think it is. It’s a pretty good study of an actor’s neurosis, but more than anything it feels like a gimmicky show-piece, tailored for awards season, featuring a sort of greatest hits collection of actor moments. Everybody gets to shout and cry and have a nervous breakdown, which will make things easy come Oscar time when they have to pick a scene to showcase the nominee(s).

The film follows Riggan Thomson, a washed-up actor whose main achievement was playing a superhero in a film series called Birdman. Now Thomson is making his triple-threat Broadway debut, directing and starring in a play he adapted from the Raymond Carver short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Thomson is fraught with self-doubt and plagued by the voice of Birdman, who picks at him relentlessly at times, criticizing his every move and urging him to rekindle the Birdman flames by doing yet another sequel. This constant inner-critic may be quite real, especially for actors, and the movie suggests that every character in Birdman who is an actor is plagued by some sort of constant, nagging, demeaning voice inside. What’s more, Riggan Thomson himself is endowed with actual superpowers. He can move objects with his mind—Carrie-style—and he can even fly. Well, it’s never clear if these are really super-powers or if Thomson is simply hallucinating like Russell Crowe’s character in A Beautiful Mind, but  to the film’s credit, it allows this mystery to stay mysterious.  

The director of Birdman is Alejandro Iñárritu, whose previous credits include the Brad Pitt-everything-is-connected drama Babel (2006) and the awards darling Biutiful (2010). Iñárritu seems to enjoy putting people together who are ready to tear into each other and then stepping back and letting the sparks and wigs fly. (This is theater after all, and everyone is always on one side or the other of hair and make-up.) Iñárritu is fascinated by the inner-workings of the theater, and he obviously thinks we are too. But his fascination begins and ends with the pet neuroses of his characters, the actors. The non-actor characters in Birdman (except for Emma Stone’s character) are basically invisible. Actors acting is the main attraction, put on display like a sideshow attraction at a traveling circus. It’s like watching the autopsy of a play, or more likely, the autopsy of the art of performance. It feels all the more “behind-the-scenes-ish” because of the camera, which treats Birdman like a documentary.

Birdman feels fluid and alive because the director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity), is fond of shooting in long takes and letting the camera move around the set like a person. Most of the film takes place inside an old New York City theater, and the camera travels its narrow halls and invades it little claustrophobic rooms—as well as the main stage—like a nosy bystander recording every scene with a cell phone. Lubezki’s camera-work gives Birdman a certain visual style that has the ability to “wow” audiences because it’s very different from what they’re used to. And the movie bounches with energy as a result, even though that energy isn’t particularly organic. As interesting as the camera-work is, it feels like the movie’s chief gimmick, a hollow, obvious attempt to avoid feeling too stagey, too theatrical.

That’s the real issue I have with Birdman. Its many gimmicks don’t add up to anything substantive. There are lots of scenes of actors playing actors acting. And there are lots of scenes of actors playing actors having meltdowns or panic attacks. Iñárritu has identified all the well-known idiosyncrasies of artists who are terrified of failure and success, and who can never believe in their own talent. Naomi Watts, playing one of the stars of Thomson’s forthcoming play, has a moment when she realizes with utter disillusionment that she’s finally made it to Broadway and that the experience, one which she dreamed about most of her life, isn’t as satisfying as she’d imagined it. Or rather, it’s hugely crushing and ambiguous because it’s a giant success that’s riddled with frustrations and smaller disappointments. She longs to be validated by Riggan, who himself is seeking validation too. Watts is good, but there’s very little in her character beyond “self-obsessed neurotic actress,” which might easily have been written into the stage notes introducing her character if Birdman were an actual play.

There’s little dimension to most of these characters. Most of them are emotional wrecks, and the two characters who are supposedly the most dysfunctional are actually the most stable. One, played by Edward Norton, is a notoriously unpredictable theater actor named Mike Shiner, and the other, played by Emma Stone, is Riggan’s daughter, Sam, a recovering junkie. I could never quite buy her as a wreck because she seemed so much more together than the rest of the group. And Norton’s character, who shocks his co-stars by taking big risks on the stage, turns out to be the film’s voice of reason. He shouldn’t be, because he’s a jerk, but Iñárritu always allows him to make more sense than anyone else right after he’s done something to justifiably enrage them. He too is a kind of gimmick in this movie. The first time we see him, he strips down naked without a hint of shyness so the costume designer can fit him. He’s not afraid of being naked on the stage, you see. He’s a real actor who’s already done the work of feeling comfortable within himself and with his body. Fear of nakedness—physical or emotional—is for naïfs. Later, during a bed scene in the play, he tries to get Naomi Watts’s character to actually sleep with him, to make it more real. 

There is too much shouty, dramatic acting in Birdman and too much excessive neurosis. The movie is self-important, and maybe too aware of the fact that it has so much “going for it” in a sense. It does have a fine cast and parts that any actor would covet. Plus, it gets to play the literary game by referencing Raymond Carver, darling of the creative writing circuit, in almost every scene. But the Carver obsession feels self-indulgent. (Although that might just be my aversion to his writing.) The Raymond Carver we get in Birdman feels like straight Tennessee Williams: spare, ultra-male middle-class dysfunction, a less-bewitching, more economic version of A Streetcar Named Desire.

But, there are worse things than Birdman. It’s fascinating at times, and the drum score by Antonio Sanchez is pretty fantastic. It’s the most energizing thing about this movie. With Zach Galifianakis, who’s quite good as a prissy, anxious producer; Amy Ryan, as Thomson’s ex-wife and the calmest figure in the movie, Andrea Riseboroguh, Merritt Wever, and Lindsay Duncan.

Batman Returns

Director Tim Burton takes us back to the comic book city of Gotham, now ensconced in winter and looking pretty gloomy, just in time for a new villain: the Penguin (Danny De Vito). After being abandoned by his rich parents because he was "different," the Penguin lived life in the Gotham sewers. Somehow he also managed to become a crime boss and maintain control over a whole cadre of actual penguins who were living down in the sewer. (Is this normal? Are there penguins living in every urban sewer?) DeVito is dreadful as the Penguin: he's too nasty, too sinister, too corrupt, to be entertaining, and he chews up every line before spitting it out at us. I missed Jack Nicholson's gleeful madness as the Joker.

There are other villains: the Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), and a greedy corporate executive (Christopher Walken) with a frightening shock of poofy grey hair. I was hoping that Pfeiffer would save the movie: she plays a flighty secretary who keeps getting ignored or taken advantage of by men and then finally creates the Catwoman persona. Donning a sexy, skin-tight outfit (all black) and a whip, as well as an endless supply of bad double entendres, she goes out to make her newfound power known. The first thing she does is rescue a woman from a would-be rapist, but quickly we learn that she's much more interested in getting her own name to the public than in protecting women who were once like her. This is perhaps more interesting, but the Catwoman comes off as rather shrill and thoughtless. She would have been a more compelling character otherwise.

And then finally Batman (Michael Keaton) comes back into the movie, but he's even less compelling than he was in the 1989 film. This is because in Batman Returns he seems so reactionary, so loosely connected to the other characters that his involvement feels superficial. Batman is a difficult character to act out: he's always brooding, and that doesn't leave an actor much room for any humor (except the bad puns that the series became famous for in this and other sequels). It's especially hard to take with Michael Keaton, whom we know is capable of boiling water with the intensity and sheer zaniness of his Beetle Juice performance.

Keaton doesn't get to be comically endearing in the Batman movies, and thus his character is lost in the shuffle of Batman Returns, which is truly a mess of a movie. The script is by Daniel Waters (who wrote Heathers), and it might have looked good on paper, but on film's it's like a circus that never ends. And the set design doesn't resemble the first Batman, further distancing the two films. Director Tim Burton's style is evident here too: this may be the movie that officially pushed him in that uber-Burton direction which would eventually be a road to careericide with pictures like Dark Shadows.

With Michael Gough, Michael Murphy, Pat Hingle, Andrew Bryniarski, and Jan Hooks. ★½

Batman

Like Superman, Batman (1989) suffers a little because its villain is more dynamic than its hero. But director Tim Burton masterfully builds up the atmosphere in this imaginative and smashing piece of entertainment. Burton's Batman represents a sort of happy medium for me: it's not as campy as the 1966 Adam West film, and it's not as humorless as Christopher Nolan's Batman films. It's got both the camp and the seriousness in proportion.

Michael Keaton plays Bruce Wayne/Batman, and it's interesting to see such reserve from the actor who played Beetle Juice in Burton's previous film. Keaton seems to represent both ends of the spectrum with these two performances. As Beetle Juice, he was zany and utterly off-kilter (yet controlled). As Batman, he's perhaps a bit underwhelming. But he gives Bruce Wayne a certain amused quality when he interacts with journalists and police, as if he's having a good joke--not so much at their expense as without their knowing about it.

Jack Nicholson might be too easily praised for his work in Batman. We all know he's good at playing a psychopath, and in particular he plays characters who go insane but were never believably sane to begin with (e.g. The Shining). Still, it's hard not to be pleased with his performance as the gleefully maniacal Joker. He gets almost all of the funny lines in the script (by Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren), and he gets the flashiest clothes. He's at his best when he's doing a clownish little dance as he shoots crime boss Jack Palance (for revenge), or when he makes some ridiculous joke and you can see his own face register the fun he's having.

Kim Basinger plays Vicki Vale. She's not a particularly strong actress, but viewing the film this time around, I was struck by the fact that her weakest moments occur when she has a crummy piece of dialogue to deliver, such as "I just have to know if we're gonna try to love each other." I don't think anyone shy of Bette Davis could make much out of that kind of writing, so it's not fair to blame Basinger entirely. With Michael Gough as Alfred, Tracey Walter, Robert Wuhl, Pat Hingle, Billy Dee Williams, and Jerry Hall. The vibrant, memorable score was composed by Danny Elfman. 126 min. ★★★

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.

Beetle Juice

The creators of Beetle Juice (1988)--it was conceived by Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson, scripted by McDowell and Warren Skaaren, and directed by Tim Burton--must have grown up on a healthy dose of EC Comics, The Addams Family, and B horror films. This was Burton's second film (following 1985's Pee-wee's Big Adventure), and it remains his most imaginative comedy, a dazzling display of creativity and ghoulish humor that could have been concocted by the likes of children's author Roald Dahl if he and Stephen King were both writing a book together, on acid.

The plot, for those who haven't seen this, involves a self-employed married couple (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) who are trying to enjoy their vacation in their large Connecticut house, until a tragic accident leaves them dead, newly inducted in the afterlife, and confined to their house as prisoners. This wouldn't be so bad, except an obnoxious New York couple (Catherine O'Hara and Jeffrey Jones) buys the house, and the wife proceeds to remodel it according to her decidedly abstract artistic tastes, with the help of an eccentric interior decorator named Otho (Glen Shadix), who's also interested in all things paranormal. The ghosts find a friend in the NYC couple's depressed teenage daughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder), whose natural attraction to dark things allows her to see them when almost no one else can.

While Beetle Juice is obviously the product of minds that were immersed in all things macabre and darkly funny, it doesn't feel derivative. Its unusual story continues to develop in unexpected directions, and the cast creates amusing, eccentric performances that make this purely fun, not weird or off-putting. Baldwin rarely played likable guys until his wonderful performance on the television show 30 Rock, but in Beetle Juice he's sort of an easy-going guy who's not trying to snow anybody in. Geena Davis, with her puckered face and her dark, curly hair, looks very maternal. O'Hara generates an almost kinetic weirdness with her performance as the fruity stepmom, who's devoted to her "art" (tacky-looking abstract sculptures that look like enlarged, black insects).

And Michael Keaton, as the bio exorcist hired to scare the new family out of the dead couple's beloved home, gives new meaning to the term "loose cannon." In Batman, Keaton was completely overshadowed by the performance of Jack Nicholson as the Joker. If it weren't for Beetle Juice, we wouldn't have known how insane Keaton can be. It adds such a delightful comic side to his acting abilities that almost every performance afterward is tainted, imbued with a tacit reminder that "this is the guy who played Beetle Juice."

There are few movies as original as Beetle Juice, and out of all the comedies to come out of the 80s, this one ranks as one of the most enduring and enjoyable. Also starring Robert Goulet and Dick Cavett. Music by Danny Elfman, the lead singer of the 80s rock band Oingo Boingo, who has composed the scores of every Tim Burton film.

Jackie Brown

Pam Grier's belated tour de force. The tall, ravishingly beautiful Grier was the Queen of Blaxploitation in the 70s, appearing in such films as Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1975), the latter of which I recently reviewed. Grier's acting has only gotten better over the years. She seemed wasted in Foxy Brown. Her acting wasn't forceful enough to grab the movie and take charge, but by 1997, and perhaps with the help of a director who respected her as an actress (Quentin Tarantino), she was ready to make her career performance.

As the title character in Jackie Brown, Grier is confident, strong, vulnerable, and always in control. Her character, Jackie, is an airline stewardess who works on the side for an illegal arms dealer named Ordell Robbie (played with relish by Samuel L. Jackson). Once she's pressed by the police to rat on Ordell, he decides it's time to silence her for good. But Jackie manages to take control of the police and Ordell with a "sting" operation she masterminds, somehow convincing both sides that she's working for them.

Jackie Brown is usually not the first movie people mention when citing their favorite Quentin Tarantino film. It's not as flashy as Pulp Fiction or as offbeat as Kill Bill. But in its controlled, sustained mission to tell a good story, Jackie Brown is a success. The characters who populate this movie's world are delightfully good at being bad. Jackie may be the least guilty, but her calculated mastery of circumstances seemingly designed to squash her, indicates a strong will and a genius for working situations to her advantage--it's something she's bottled up inside all her life, waiting to be let loose. The director sets all this into motion--these unstable characters and their greedy motivations--and we get to watch it unravel.

The reason people enjoy Tarantino's movies is that he enjoys ripping off the gritty, low-budget crime and action flicks that he grew up on. But because Tarantino seemingly started off as a filmmaking rock star, he's been able to get big money productions made (or at least, modestly big productions compared to the slapped-together-with-spit B-movies of the 1970s), with popular actors. Hollywood likes to think of him as their part of the effort to acknowledge low culture. But Tarantino improves on much of the material he seems to have canonized in his own mind. If you go back and watch Foxy Brown, you'll see a movie that's not very exciting for all its action: the fight scenes are staged ineptly, the acting is unimaginative (even Grier seemed like she couldn't find her footing), and it all boils down to a strangely unappealing revenge fantasy. Jackie Brown isn't really out to get even. She's just sick of being kicked around by a system that has nothing for her but condescension. (One of the cops implies that she ought to be grateful for her measly 16,000 dollar-a-year job).

Somehow, Tarantino takes the material he fell in love with and transcends it. His movies are a glossy imitation of something cheap and poorly done and generally available only in bootlegged form. There were movies like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. and the blaxploitation movies like Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones and Shaft, and car-chase movies like the energetic Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (which we see on a television in Jackie). All of this has been internalized by filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, and the tropes of those genres have resurfaced in his movies and the movies of directors like him (such as Robert Rodriguez), and audiences are either re-experiencing something to which they attach a great deal of nostalgic value, or are simply getting a kick out of these "low" movies. (Jackie Brown cost 12 million dollars but made 72 million at the box office).

Jackie Brown emerges as Quentin Tarantino's best movie, I think, because of Pam Grier and what she brings to the film. Her performance is controlled but not robotic, and she knows how to be funny, and how to lubricate her sentences with profanity (and Tarantino the writer knows how to write juicy dialogue). Grier and Jackson make for a wonderful anti-duo. Jackson slips into his role with such ease. He's dangerous but appealing at the same time.

The supporting cast of Jackie Brown includes Robert De Niro, as a junkie who becomes Ordell's right-hand-man; Michael Keaton and Michael Bowen as two cops who are trying to nail Ordell; Robert Forster as a bail bondsman who becomes Jackie's partner and possible love interest, and Bridget Fonda, as Ordell's blonde live-in junky girlfriend, who revels in challenging his self-proclaimed authority.