Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

In which there be medium-level spoilers.

When Lando Calrissian (played by Billy Dee Williams) triumphantly appears piloting the Millenium Falcon, during a deus ex machina moment in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, you can almost feel J.J. Abrams, who directed this ninth installment in the series, saying with tears in his eyes, “Look what else I’ve got for you!” Abrams assumes the role of a desperate father trying to captivate an impish, bored child. Rise of Skywalker is a weird mixture, in fact, of placation and reverence, in which sacred relics from the Star Wars universe are unsubtly trotted out to gin up the adulation of the fans, or to appease them. (They got so mad at Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, after all.) You can feel the lazy cultishness of the movie: Here’s the original X-wing jet that Luke flew in The Empire Strikes Back, here are some Ewoks, gazing wondrously toward the sky contemplating the end of the Dark Side, here’s Darth Vador’s mask, melted and crumpled like a rotted, fruit fly-infested jack-o-lantern a week after Halloween. 

I could get behind the Star Wars mania if its creators truly began treating it like a religion. (And yes, there apparently are practicing Jedis, but let’s ignore them for now.) Talk about a bold new direction for the Star Wars franchise! 

If only the Pope had allowed LucasFilm to premiere The Rise of Skywalker at the Vatican. And then, LucasFilm could buy up churches and convert them into Jedi sanctuaries, where every day is Star Wars. Come one, come all, and genuflect to the stations of the Star Wars cross. “May the Force be with you. And also with you. We lift up our hearts. We lift them up to the Force.” After you’ve demonstrated your zeal, you can purchase bits of Princess Leia’s chainmail bikini from Return of the Jedi at the gift shop, or debate the canonicity of The Mandalorian in the Skywalker Reading Room. No cash for the offering plates? You’re in luck! There are ATMS in all corners of the lobby.  

But sadly, this “final” entry in the franchise is far too careful for its own good. It yearns for approval. Stripped of its embarrassing need to please, The Rise of Skywalker might have had a chance. But there are still moments that work: Daisy Ridley, as the series’ rising Jedi apprentice, exudes a commanding presence, and when she delivers the line, “I have all the Jedi with me!”, there’s enough conviction to save it from being laughable. There’s a little bit of Rian Johnson’s visual poetry, such as the scene of Leia’s hand dropping as she breathes her last; moments later, as she is covered with a white sheet, the scene assumes a kind of Lazarus-in-the-tomb gothicness. 

Many of the sets possess an entrancing grandeur: the sleek blackness of the newest Death Star (a tired old trope nonetheless), the earth-toned grunginess of Kijimi, Poe’s old stomping grounds, the tempestuous ocean sequences where Finn (John Boyega) meets Jannah (Naomi Ackie), a warrior on horseback, at the edge of a cliff. But it’s Ridley who holds this film together, even as much of it falls apart around her from sheer sloppiness. (The return of the Emperor Palpatine, played by Ian McDiarmid, feels desperately tired.) 

Few of its dramatic moments (and there are many of them, too many it seems) land with any real weight. Adam Driver, returning as Kylo Ren, somehow seems muted, although he also displays a tenderness in this film that deepens his character, as well as the tension between he and Rey. Even the death of Leia feels somehow undernourished, perhaps because we had already experienced the death of Carrie Fisher in real life, before The Last Jedi. 

Sometimes, a Star Wars movie remembers that a character is better off, during an emotionally charged moment, saying nothing. But just as often a Star Wars movie forgets this, and we get such risible moments of overacting as Luke’s “That’s impossible!” (after D.V.’s big reveal in Empire) or even his “But I was going to go to the Toschi station to pick up some power converters!” in A New Hope. Rise of Skywalker hits about 50% of its marks in this category. Much of the worst dialogue feels insidiously didactic: Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) seems to tell every other character in the Rebellion how much he needs their help, as if the movie is trying to teach us how to behave. Be nice, be inclusive, don’t be arrogant. But, to channel Yoda, good life lessons do not good entertainment make. It’s cheap moralizing to match the film’s cheap sentiment, as the resistance fighters seem always poised to embrace in friendship. Cheap sentiment is grating and wasteful because it sabotages any possibility of an earned moment of feeling. 

One wonders how the death of Carrie Fisher impacted this film. I was curious to see firsthand how the filmmakers repurposed her scenes from The Force Awakens. The Fisher archive footage works surprisingly well considering the sad reality, but the scene in which the Rebellion reacts to news of Princess Leia’s passing, feels hastily executed and falls flat. “She’s gone,” a resistance fighter informs Poe and Finn and Rey when they return to home base. Somehow, the vagueness of the word “gone” doesn’t feel right. I kept wanting one of them to mutter  aloud, “Where did Leia go?” Is saying, “Leia has died” too dark for the viewers of Star Wars?

There are worse Star Wars movies than The Rise of Skywalker and there are better ones. Maybe the pressure alone–to produce a showstopper–dooms this movie from the get-go. But, all things considered, this movie is fine. It works about half the time. Even though much of it runs on autopilot, the film’s lazy pandering is maybe a relief: Would it kill me if The Rise of Skywalker were a masterpiece? No. But, is some part of me a little bit happy that the movie is only mediocre? Probably.

How will the world think about the three newest Star Wars films in ten years? In fifty years? They are not terrible films by any means. And they are lucky in at least one respect, because they followed the prequels, which seem to be universally reviled except by people who saw them as children, before the mythology of the original films could permeate them. The mass audience yearns for the past even as newer, less publicized movies continue to surprise us with their relevance for the present. In this era of nostalgia saturation, at what point will we feel the itch has been scratched, if ever? I wonder. 

Forced: The New Adventures of Old Star Wars

Note: I have made no attempts to conceal spoilers in this review, so read at your own risk.

After the last three films in the Star Wars franchise, The Force Awakens had nowhere to go but up. While all the superfans were still basking in their space opera reverie from opening weekend, I managed to see an afternoon showing of the latest Star Wars. Here’s my history regarding this franchise, in a nutshell: I resisted them until 4th grade because everyone else was so into them; then I really loved them for a few years, until one of my best friends—a Star Wars devotee if ever there was one, who made Star Wars home movies with his brother—scared me straight. I wasn’t going to be that cultish about it. (There were so many other things to be cultish about.) The Force Awakens is a relatively clever and entertaining jaunt into space opera, but it hits all its predictable beats with such self-satisfaction that you know what’s coming before it happens. This is pure nostaglic giddiness on the part of director J.J. Abrams, pure “Look-at-me-getting-to-direct-a-Star-Wars-movie!” 

Nostalgia is the wind in the sails of The Force Awakens. J.J. Abrams has genuine affection for these movies, and he deftly adheres to all their idiosyncrasies. Force mirrors Star Wars (as in A New Hope) in a number of ways: it establishes new, young heroes Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega) and Poe (Oscar Isaac), a new (old) threat in the form of Han and Leia’s corrupted Jedi son Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). And now Luke Skywalker has taken on the Ben Kenobi aura of mystery, having fled civilization in despair. (His attempts to train his nephew backfired, and he feels responsible for Kylo Ren’s conversion to the Dark Side.)

Rey is essentially the new Luke Skywalker, although Finn may sort of share that credit. Rey is a scavenger living on a bleak desert planet called Jakku, where she awaits the return of her family. (It's not quite clear what happened to them.) Her existence is very Mad Max. We see her trading machine parts for food and sitting with watchful yearning (like Luke did in A New Hope) for something better to happen to her. She's pulled into the drama of Star Wars via an adorable droid named BB-8, who's carrying important information regarding Luke Skywalker's whereabouts. (Another mirror-plot checkpoint.)

Let’s remember that the original Star Wars was itself a nostalgia trip, culled by George Lucas from serials he remembered watching on Saturday mornings as a child. That makes The Force Awakens a nostalgia trip within a nostalgia trip; add to that the fact that the kids who grew up on the originals have now lived long enough to spawn their very own Star Wars-loving progeny, and you’ve essentially got third-hand mythology. That was why, about an hour into the movie, I began to pull away from it. The new characters’ stories are compelling, but Abrams cannot fully overcome the ring of familiarity. And he’s too much in love with the series to really want to, try as he might.

There are little moments of humor that really pop, and the performances of the three young leads are winning. Acting has improved so much over the years that they’re leagues ahead of Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill when they first debuted in 1977. Those three, naturally, return for this new installment, with varying degrees of screen time. (Hamill seemed like a no show for most of the film, but Abrams pays it off smartly at the end.) 

J.J. Abrams has a knack for tweaking pop culture iconography into his own re-packaged product. But I’m not sure that qualifies him as a storyteller. It’s perhaps good enough that Abrams is better than George Lucas. But as a director—of movies, particularly—Abrams is erratic. Some of the action (meaning plot development, not merely fight scenes and explosions) is well-structured, like the climactic lightsaber showdown between Rey and Kylo Ren. At other times, Abrams fails to fully set up a scene. When Rey is attacked by some stormtroopers in a marketplace, we see it from afar through the perspective of Finn. The scene doesn't really work unless we're up close, watching Rey's reaction, watching her fend off the stormtroopers, rooting for her. Of course, the purpose of putting it from Finn's perspective is to have him rush to save her, only to get there after Rey has dispensed with her attackers on her own. She doesn't need his help. It's a cool, enlightened moment for a Star Wars movie, and yet the scene doesn't totally work as structured.

Likewise, the dialogue fluctuates in quality. Abrams wisely goes for silence in two key dramatic scenes: when Rey and Leia embrace after the death of Han Solo, and when Rey hands Luke Skywalker his lightsaber at the end. It’s hard to imagine any dialogue that wouldn’t have sounded cheesy in those moments. But in other scenes, the dialogue is laboriously clunky, like a laughably bad moment when Han Solo and Leia discuss their son’s temptation to the dark side, like they’re expounding on the ingredients of a chicken soup recipe. It’s some of the worst dialogue in the movie: utterly lacking in emotional truth, and utterly functional. (Perhaps it’s an ode to George Lucas’s hackneyed dialogue.)

Pauline Kael once said that Star Wars was like a box of Cracker Jacks that was all prizes. J.J. Abrams has adopted a similar storytelling method. He doesn’t have the patience to let the weighty moments in the story be earned. They’re revealed quickly and haphazardly—like when Kylo Ren removes his mask. (Remember it took us three movies to see Darth Vador’s face.) And when the young man kills his father—the beloved Han Solo—it feels both too late and too soon. (Harrison Ford apparently wanted Lucas to kill his character off in Return of the Jedi, but Lucas balked at shooting such a dark ending.) It’s the right choice, but a misplaced one. Perhaps it should have happened in Part Two, but without Solo’s death, The Force Awakens would have no dramatic weight to it.

But despite all my quibbles, I basically enjoyed The Force Awakens, even if I was expecting more from it. It's certainly better than the previous three installments, although that's not saying much, and Abrams has potentially laid the groundwork for a really first-rate middle section just like the original trilogy did with/for Empire Strikes Back. We'll have to wait and see.

With Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels, Lupita Nyong’o, Domnhall Gleeson, Andy Serkis, Max Von Sydow.

Ex Machina

Alex Garland’s directing debut, Ex Machina, is an immersive experience. It’s set in the sleek, up-to-date-with-a-vengeance compound of an eccentric young tech tycoon named Nathan Bateman. Nathan is the creator of the world’s most popular search engine (Bluebook, or, by very little twist of the imagination, Google); he’s played by Oscar Isaac. Nathan is working on something new and exciting: a sentient robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander), and he has picked one of the grunts from his company, a coder named Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to test Ava's abilities in a series of sessions. 

Ex Machina is incredibly well-crafted. The set design is elegant yet spare, and sinister in its minimalism because it has the air of futurism, like something from a Stanley Kubrick film. When Caleb wanders through the seemingly endless corridors of Nathan's home-cum-research bunker, it’s like he’s been invited into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, where any minute a strange creature may emerge, totally at home with the inner-workings of the facility. The entire place is under surveillance and engineered with sophisticated security devices; and in order to travel from room to room, you need a specialized card that knows which rooms you can and cannot enter.

The conversations between Caleb and Ava are also well-dramatized. Garland has figured out how to make us gradually accept the humanity of an automaton, and even as you can hear the film’s frightening warning—that the actualization and immersion of AI into our culture is an inevitability with potentially startling consequences—you can find yourself bowled over, mesmerized, by the sheer achievement, the amazing simulation of humanity that Ava represents.

Garland also keeps the true intentions of his characters ambiguous. We never know if Nathan is pulling one over on Caleb or not, and as the film develops (and this is pretty evident in the film’s trailer), the proceedings become increasingly tense and dark. The film is predictably suspicious of young techie millionaires. Nathan's isolationism seems like a pretty good sign that he’s gone off the deep end: an arrogant, dangerous concoction of his own power, wealth, and genius. Caleb gushes at the beginning of the film that Nathan's achievement is the sign of gods at work, and Nathan later twists these words: “You said I was a god.” This is a luxury that the very wealthy can afford.

Unfortunately, Ex Machina beats to a rhythm of dread which never quite crescendos the way you want it to. The final revelations of the plot are satisfying thematically but cruel and in some sense deeply unsatisfying. Even though everything that happens feels well-thought-out and credible (I’m trying very hard to dance around spoilers for those of you who have not seen it yet), I was mad at the movie when it was all over. And yet, I believe Garland has hit on something very unnervingly honest about our obsession with machines and how easily we trust them to do what we tell them to do, how vulnerable we are to their corruption or malfunction. Even something as slight as a power failure becomes a serious problem at Nathan’s compound, because when the power fails, all the doors are sealed, trapping a person inside. 

But Ex Machina succeeds overall because it is an elegant, deliberately paced thriller and we so seldom get movies like this anymore. Perhaps it could have been a little more exciting, but I think viewers with patience will enjoy the totally immersive experience that Alex Garland has crafted. The actors of course help shape the drama, and Oscar Isaac is the most magnetic of the three. He has a terrific knack for balancing the playful and the devious, keeping us always on alert, but never sure, about what he may or may not being up to. As Ava, Alicia Vikander is quiet, graceful, pensive. I'm not sure what I would expect from a performance for this type of character, but Vikander's certainly works and adds its own level of depth--and ambiguity--to the dramatics. Gleeson, as Caleb, works too. He's got the right blend of nerdy tech kid in hoodie and competent, resourceful hero/romantic, one who may be falling in love with a robot.  

Ex Machina actually feels just a little connected to, of all things, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the one that wasn’t about Michael Myers, but instead showed us a mad Irish toymaker who had murderous robots running his factory. And here, we may as well throw Westworld and The Stepford Wives into the conversation. There's a scene later in the film of a robot stabbing a human, and my mind immediately returned to Stacey Nelkin--whose character has been turned into a robot, or maybe was a robot all along--attacking Tom Atkins in the car at the end of Halloween III. As sophisticated as Ex Machina is on the surface, it espouses the same fundamental distrust of technology which all of these previous films dramatized and turned into extremely literal horror pieces. Ex Machina manages more subtlety, more panache, and yet it's not really any more sophisticated essentially. It ultimately resorts to the admonition, “The robots will kill us all.” 

A Most Violent Year

In writer-director J.C. Chandor’s film A Most Violent Year, Oscar Isaac plays Abel Morales, an Hispanic immigrant living in New York City in 1981. Morales wants to build his business empire without resorting to the illegal acts of so many of his counterparts, but finds this increasingly difficult when he becomes the target of an ambitious district attorney (David Oyelowo) as well as an unknown thief, who has apparently hired men to steal the gasoline from Abel’s trucks, to the tune of 200,000 dollars-worth of fuel. Abel is about to make a massive real estate purchase—of a shipyard right on the Hudson River—that will ensure the growth of his company, but when his banker reneges on the loan, his wife (played by Jessica Chastain), herself the daughter of a mobster, encourages him to do whatever is necessary—whether legal or not—to obtain the shipyard. This movie is about Abel’s personal struggle to remain legitimate and how such an aspiration seems almost impossible in Abel’s chosen field.

All you need to see is one of the movie trailers for A Most Violent Year to tell that the film has been christened as an important work. It oozes prestige like sap from a massive oak tree. The National Board of Review hailed it as the best film of 2014, and it has garnered a host of other accolades (although Oscar ignored it completely). What’s unfortunate is that A Most Violent Year has some truly fascinating elements that fail to come together, and these elements are further pushed down by the movie’s own heaviness. Chandor, so grimly obsessed with emulating a great 70s movie, has captured none of the vitality of a film like The Godfather or Dog Day Afternoon. He has some wonderful assets, chiefly his star Oscar Isaac, who’s a terrific performer and who can carry a picture like this with ease. Chandor makes him up like a Ken Doll version of a 1970s Al Pacino. Isaac sports a thick wisp of black hair sprinkled with grey, and he strides around in nice-looking suits and a beige trench coat. The look is flawless, almost too flawless; and the movie itself is too perfect, too slick to be what Chandor wants it to be, but also too lifeless.

For one thing, the title A Most Violent Year is misleading. It suggests a catalog of the crimes of 1981, which was apparently a very active year for crime in New York. With such a title and such a time period, we expect the movie to be about the district attorney, but he has relatively little screen time. It’s a clunky, constricting title that again raises our expectations for something grand and definitive. The intriguing element at the heart of J.C. Chandor’s film—the attempted rise of the anti-gangster—cannot stay afloat.

In fact, the 1981-ness of the film feels so tacked onto the story that one wonders why this movie had to be set 35 years ago, or why even the movie has been made in the first place. We can only assume that J.C. Chandor, whose debut film, 2011’s Margin Call, was a first-rate exploration of the 2008 financial meltdown, is convinced that looking into the past will certify him as a great filmmaker. As fantastic as the 1970s were, we need filmmakers who can speak to what’s happening now, who can push movies forward rather than backward. (Chandor did that so well with Margin Call). Learning from cinema of the past is incredibly important, but wallowing in it just feels like cheap imitation, not real art. Margin Call is a compelling, surprisingly complex film, while A Most Violent Year lacks depth.   

As Abel’s wife Anna, Jessica Chastain looks like a homicidal, ferocious Barbie doll. She keeps her nails long and sharp and her breasts featured prominently in her clothes, maintaining a weird mixture of sex-kitten femininity and aggressiveness. It doesn’t always work, chiefly because her character never gets to do much. In an early scene, we see Anna taking charge of a situation: While driving one evening, Abel hits a deer, and Anna insists that he put the deer out of its misery. He extracts a tire iron from the trunk of the car and hesitantly approaches the dying deer (the only heartbreaking moment in the film), and pauses, waiting, hesitating more. Then we hear two shots, and we see Anna holding a gun. That’s when it becomes clear why Chandor included this scene in the first place: Anna will do what’s necessary when Abel will not. Chandor does make use of Anna near the end of the movie when Abel is unable to make his payment on the shipyard. But other than that, her character seems dramatically untapped. She’s a grenade waiting to go off, but she never goes off.

There are more problems. One of Abel’s truck drivers, Julian (Elyes Gabel) is accosted by two thieves and put into the hospital with a broken jaw and some other severe wounds. When he finally gets back on his feet, he’s obviously unhinged, partly because he’s afraid of another robbery and partly because he feels powerless to improve his economic circumstances. When Julian is attacked again, he brandishes a handgun and gets involved in a shootout with the attempted robbers. The police arrive, but Julian runs from the scene like one of the criminals instead of telling the police that he was being attacked. Julian’s emotional breakdown never worked for me because it seemed so illogical for him to run. (Perhaps if Chandor had shown us that the police were corrupt or unwilling to believe his story, Julian’s decision to flee the scene might be more credible.)   

A Most Violent Year isn’t even as violent as you might expect, although it does have a surprising number of jolting moments, as though Chandor were jumping out at us from behind a door and yelling, “Boo!” He does this multiple times, and it’s never clear why we’re meant to be on edge, unless the director mistakenly thinks that this is how you build tension. This film is yet another example of a movie having a variety of excellent parts (strong actors, an interesting subject, good technicians working on it) and amounting to a disappointing result. It may be the only Oscar decision I can really get behind. (Although, I do think people should see this movie. It’s certainly interesting even when it fails to work.)

The Bourne Legacy

It's a bad movie with good moments. Jeremy Renner is a much more believable action hero than the academic-looking Matt Damon, who appeared in the first three Bourne movies. Renner looks like he could be the leader of a militia (I'm having flashbacks of The Hurt Locker, which I loved), and he's got a subdued temperament that provides occasional relief from this big, brutal, mechanical thriller.

The movie opens with Jeremy Renner wandering through snow-capped mountains somewhere in the Rockies. He's "gone rogue" and is on the run from his own government. Director Tony Gilroy cuts between scenes of Renner the Wilderness Man and scenes of high-security CIA wonks who are searching for him with their fancy computers, simultaneously conjuring up ways to combat a forthcoming newspaper story that will threaten them. Edward Norton heads these scenes, and he's perhaps as unappealing in this role as he was in Moonrise Kingdom. There's something utterly pathetic about his character: the runty, pencil-necked technophile who's pulling the strings from the safety of a computer desk and a cell phone. He's much more interesting in movies where he's portrayed as strong and threatening and vital, as in American History X. Here he seems like a younger version of the always slimy David Strathairn, who has a small role as another government guru.

There is one particularly disturbing scene of a gunman mowing through some scientists in a lab (where the heroine, played by Rachel Weisz, works as a researcher.) It's probably all the more frightening because these kinds of seemingly random outbursts of workplace violence have become so commonplace in real-life. There are several smashingly directed sequences, such as one scene where Weisz is accosted by agents in her own home, who are ostensibly there to question her, but who we later find out have far more insidious intentions.

The chase scene at the end is a good example of where The Bourne Legacy goes all wrong. It's the cinema of exhaustion. Motorcycles weaving through bumper to bumper traffic in downtown Minela, Phillipines, and somehow nobody important is seriously injured by the onscreen chaos. These are the moments in movies when you withdraw your emotional investment from the plot and the characters, partly because you can't really tell what's going on because of the editing, which cuts fast on purpose, probably to hide mistakes (either in logic or in execution).

Stacy Keach livens things up in Washington, briefly, with his particular brand of blowhard tough-guyness. He looks like a more macho version of Dick Cheney: the Dick Cheney who wouldn't accidentally shoot someone on a hunting trip. But Keach doesn't have enough screen time to save those scenes, which are virtually half the movie for the first hour, from their abject mediocrity. The banter between government officials is blandly written, badly worked out by the director and the actors, and shimmers with the falseness of self-importance.

It's only Renner and Rachel Weisz, who herself becomes a target of the government via her involvement in Renner's Outcome program (she was the one who, somewhat unwittingly, injected the spies with drugs that caused strange neurological and chemical changes inside them), who give this movie any appeal. Their scenes together are interesting enough to keep you from wanting to leave the theater. It's the Renner and Rachel Show by the end, at least until the chase scene, when the movie reverts to all the reliably dull cliches in the genre playbook.

Oscar Isaac shows up at the beginning of the film, when Renner is still on the lam in the Rockies, and he turns out to be a fellow "Outcome agent," holed up in an isolated cabin. Isaac is an actor who continues to deliver good performances in small roles, and it would be nice to see him land bigger parts. With Joan Allen, Scott Glenn, and Albert Finney (briefly). Written by Tony and Dan Gilroy.

Drive

First-rate. It exists in some kind of alternate universe that's a mishmash of now and the 80s. Drive (2011) has a lusciously compelling pull to it--a sort of poetically violent dream set against Los Angeles, which never ceases to be a place of intrigue on the screen. Ryan Gosling plays a stunt man who makes money on the side as a getaway driver. He gets involved with his neighbor and then, when her husband is released from prison, agrees to help him get some mobsters off his back by knocking off a pawn shop. Things go awry.

What struck me most about Drive was its dreamlike quality. It envelopes you under a lulling canopy of cinematic comfort--fast-paced car chase, romantic suggestion, a subdued tension between the main character and everyone else, as though he doesn't really belong--and this almost soothing layer yields to dappled rays of violent energy riveting throughout. Gosling's character--he's known only as The Driver-- seems completely dulled over by the things he's done and seen, and yet he has heart. He's not in it for the money, but out of an almost antiquated sense of heroism. He's trying to protect a woman and her young son from heartless thugs. But he brutalizes himself in the process of trying to protect Innocence.

Drive has sparse dialogue. This is refreshing in a world where most movies have nothing to say and confirm this with an incessant barrage of mindless chatter. In Drive, the actors are forced to convey much with few words. Facial expressions, deliberate pauses that turn into drawn-out silences, all become far more telling, and more fascinating, than what could be accomplished by lots of talk. What's said has greater weight because there's less fluff to the dialogue. It's economical.

And the music (by Angelo Badalamenti)--it's deliciously synthesized. This is where Drive feels like it came out of the 80s. But the music isn't corny or over-the-top. It acts like an incubating sheen over the film--and over the audience--imbibing you, massaging you into this movie's unusual balance of calm and chaos.

Directed by Nicholas Winding Refn. With Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Issac, Christina Hendricks, and Ron Perlman. 

Body of Lies

This twaddle about terrorism and the CIA is mixed-up and convoluted. It's the kind of massive, dull, film that makes you think the occasional explosion or torture scene is climactic, when really it's just a minor interruption to the plodding rhythm of a movie that's too high-minded and pseudo-intellectual for its own good. It's proof that two respected actors and a well-known director (Ridley Scott). can pick a bummer.

I've never been completely sold on DiCaprio anyway. He's certainly got talent (and he shines in the right part, such as in Catch Me If You Can), but he often fails to be convincing in the roles in which he's cast. Did anyone really forget it was Leonardo DiCaprio they were watching rather than Howard Hawks in The Aviator? Blame it on the youngish face that has kept him looking 25 even at 35 (and older). You're always aware that he's acting.

On the other hand, Russell Crowe looks and sounds better than he acts in this movie. He becomes immersed in the character at the surface level, but he never gets the delicious breakout scene we're expecting. There's no meltdown. Even when DiCaprio's character pushes him out of his chair (a funny scene that gets underplayed, even dismissed, because this movie is too serious to really care about humor), Crowe's character reacts with phony finesse, and lifts higher our anticipation that he'll blow a gasket sooner or later. It doesn't pay off. Crowe puffed himself up to play DiCaprio's sleazy and slick good-ole-boy boss, a doughy Southern scoundrel who's too much of a coward to do anything but pull the strings and push the buttons. He's placed with the obvious intention of conjuring up the image of any number of politicians in recent history. but his character has nothing likeable.

This is a movie that's bungled by its own high-falutin aspirations, not to mention its relentlessly sluggish pacing. It's trying to be hip and complex, and as a result, its true intentions are too cloudy to be clear. The movie fails to resonate with the viewer. Actress Golshifteh Farahani breathes some life into the muddle for a while, as DiCaprio's Jordanian love interest, and Oscar Isaac registers well as one of DiCaprio's partners. (He played the scummy Prince John in another, better, Ridley Scott-Russell Crowe movie, Robin Hood).

Based on a 2007 novel by David Ignatius.

Robin Hood

Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott reunite for a rousing update of ROBIN HOOD. Your trusty reviewer doesn't usually go for epic movies, but is willing to put a little trust in the hands of the director of ALIEN and the star of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. Cate Blanchett makes for a strong but soft Maid Marian, who agrees to give aid to the illusion that Robin Longstride (Crowe) is her dead husband Robin of Loxley returning from 10 years battle (in order to keep her land and ensure the livelihood of the many subjects who work it). But trouble is afoot, within and without England, as the sleazy King John (Oscar Isaac) sees little value in the liberty of his subjects, but must depend upon their fighting skills to save England from being overtaken by the French, led by his backstabbing chum Godfrey (Mark Strong). William Hurt as a British chancellor and Max von Sydow as Marian's ailing but noble father-in-law lend just the right amount of British upper-custiness to this swirling epic, a tale that proves it is worth retelling, particularly in light of 1991's ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES and its notoriously appalling casting choice of Kevin Costner in the lead. Audiences may determine if a sequel is in order (there's certainly room for more, provided they do as good as this one). With Mark Addy (as Friar Tuck), Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Matthew MacFadyen, Kevin Durand, and Scott Grimes. ★★★½