'Doctor Strange': In which--SPOILER-- I actually liked a comic book movie.

In Doctor Strange, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Dr. Stephen Strange, an arrogant neurosurgeon who cares more about money and prestige than the hippocratic oath. When we first meet Dr. Strange, he’s in the operating room showcasing his knowledge of music trivia while he cavalierly cuts into a patient. Strange’s arrogance stems from the fact that he’s the best of his kind, and thus, he’s earned the right to be a prick. Later, we see him skillfully remove a bullet from the skull of another patient, and it’s a genuinely breathless moment, yet there’s no humanity behind Strange’s almost miraculous skill as a healer. But Strange’s arrogance gets the better of him when he’s severely injured in a car accident (from reckless driving) that threatens to permanently end his career as a surgeon. Then he goes on a quest for healing, to Nepal, where he meets a group of mystics that believe in the power of the mind to overcome the limits of the body. 

Even though Doctor Strange doesn’t break any new ground as a comic book movie, it does succeed in refreshing the old beats we’ve come to expect from them. What are some of the worst things about comic book movies? A tendency toward expositional dialogue, and consequently a lack of visual storytelling; an indulgent, mindless approach to violence and conflict; a debilitating reliance on heavy-handed themes about good and evil, which have been recycled until they’ve worn thin; and a need to raise the stakes as high as they can be raised (the world will end if “X” doesn’t save it), until the stakes no longer matter. Doctor Strange minimizes most of these flaws, and at times even subverts them. 

The film’s sense of humor goes a long way toward this, even if some of the jokes feel a bit lame. Example of a lame joke: When Mordo (one of the mystics, played with charisma by Chiwetel Ejiofor) hands Dr. Strange a card with the word “shamballa” written on it, and explains to a befuddled Strange that it’s the Wifi password. “We’re not savages,” he quips, with a silly grin on his face. But there are other moments of levity that are charming, that truly do lighten the mood. There’s a magical cape, for instance, that takes on a personality of its own, like something out of Harry Potter; or the banter between Strange and Benedict Wong’s character, the taciturn guardian of the library, who never smiles. For a film that focuses so much on big questions about existence and reality, Dr. Strange seldom feels heavy-handed.

Indeed, Doctor Strange actually evokes a sense of wonder about the world and the universe (and the multiverse), a feat I’d long given up hoping for in comic book movies. Strange often clumsily answers its questions with handy bumper-sticker-adages like, “Death is what gives life meaning,” but the fact that it ponders such questions, and the fact that director Scott Derrickson has the restraint to let even some of those questions linger (handy bromides aside), says a lot about his maturity as a filmmaker. Doctor Strange, with all its depictions of matter being bent and manipulated by mental energy and time being looped, recalls Christopher Nolan’s films Inception and Interstellar, but unlike Nolan, Scott Derrickson is content to marvel at the mysteries, where Nolan delights in creating puzzles we can’t solve. 

Derrickson, who co-scripted with Jon Spaiht and C. Robert Cargill (his collaborator on the Sinister films), has always demonstrated a strong interest in the supernatural and in the workings of the metaphysical. His first feature was 2005’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a combination horror movie-courtroom drama that was part The Exorcist and part Inherit the Wind. Emily Rose is an effective horror movie, even if it masquerades (barely) as propaganda for the Catholic Church. (Laura Linney must defend a priest accused of neglecting an alleged possessed girl, and she bases her closing arguments on the possibility of a supernatural realm: belief in things not seen.) And yet, even Emily Rose at times betrayed a certain lucid thinking (except when it was being sensationalistic). But Derrickson was a little more obvious about his religion then; a decade later, he’s perhaps less sure of himself, or perhaps his own views have simply gotten mixed into a much bigger Marvel-sized soup of beliefs.

We get the feeling that Doctor Strange is promulgating some kind of religious dogma, but its views on all things metaphysical feel more elemental: “Humanity longs for the eternal,” and “time is an insult” says the film’s chief villain, Kaecilius, played by Mads Mikkelsen (the eye-patch-wearing heavy in Casino Royale); Tilda Swinton, playing a powerful mystic referred to as the “Ancient One,” talks of “harnessing energy” and “making magic,” and Doctor Strange goes on a quest for physical healing using metaphysical means. That Doctor Strange is a brilliant neurosurgeon who must unlearn all his reliance on the laws of nature, in order to cultivate mystical powers, is a fairly obvious lesson. It's all sort of lingering in the air, incoherently, and thus the film falls somewhere in the middle, emphasizing a “both-and” approach to the ideas of rationality and belief. Doctor Strange embraces pluralism, perhaps without trying to, and feels far less preachy than even something like Superman, which champions ideas about patriotism and capitalism—not to mention the idea of the ubermensch—far more dogmatically. 

Derrickson also has a feel for actors: Whenever possible, he lets them build the tension in a scene—not special effects, nor clunky expositional dialogue. Benedict Cumberbatch, who has such a commanding presence, has chemistry with Rachel McAdams, playing his colleague, Christine Palmer, who’s in love with him. But when she’s had enough of his self-centeredness, Christine threatens to end the relationship, and Strange retorts with something to the effect of, “you weren’t worth my time anyway.” It’s a jaw-dropping moment, one that elicited jeers from the audience, but McAdams gets a triumphant moment out of it: She walks away having rejected even his callousness, and isn’t about to be defined by what some arrogant jerk says about her. In later scenes, McAdams isn’t reduced to being the drag stock female character. (Although her role does diminish.) She’s forced at one point in the movie to save Strange from the brink of death, even while his soul—having temporarily left its body—battles with the soul of Kaecilius. 

The fight scenes smack of familiarity, just like in every comic book movie, but Doctor Strange overcomes most of them too. (For one thing, they aren't as drawn out, and Doctor clocks in at under two hours because of it. Bless you, Scott Derrickson.) And the big showdown, which pits Strange against some super-evil-dark-force-spirit-thing, has a lovely, funny kick to it: Strange wins by using the concept of “looping,” repeating the same sequence indefinitely, until he irritates the thing into submission. (It's just like in Groundhog Day.) Perhaps this scene serves as a bigger comment on the mindless repetition that comic book movies foist on us, exhausting viewers into submission. It's amazing how grateful we can be when one of these movies actually surprises us.

'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.

Southpaw

It’s hard to imagine that Jake Gyllenhaal could ever play a boxer, although, when you see him standing in the ring in those shiny black shorts and a trickle of blood hanging out of a his mouth, dripping onto his taut stomach, it’s not so difficult to believe. If you’re going to the movies this weekend, you could probably do a lot worse than Southpaw, a family drama about a light-heavyweight champion named Billy Hope whose life and career are reduced to rubble after a series of escalating financial problems and personal tragedies. (Warning: Spoilers ahead in the rest of this paragraph; skip to the next one to avoid.) His wife, Maureen, played by the wonderful, lovely, strong Rachel McAdams (who I believe makes any movie better) is shot and killed at a charity event after a fight between Billy and another fighter turns violent. It’s pretty obvious from the start that Maureen is the glue that holds Billy Hope together. Without her, Billy is virtually alone. He self-destructs, losing his house, his support, and his daughter, who’s taken into the hands of child services.

Southpaw is in a lot of ways a run-of-the-mill boxing drama, bolstered by the performances of its stars. I’m a big fan of Jake Gyllenhaal, who gave one of last year’s most memorable performances in the creepy thriller Nightcrawler. Here, Gyllenhaal transforms himself into a prizefighter, defying the naysayer within all of us that might think of him still as the adorably scrawny, thoughtful teenager in Donnie Darko, or the boy scout cartoonist Robert Graysmith in Zodiac. What’s frustrating—for me at least—is that so many actors seem intent on proving themselves in this genre, as though, because of Robert De Niro’s performance in Raging Bull, the wrestling genre is a gauntlet through which all serious male performers must pass.

I have no idea if Gyllenhaal is trying to cement his reputation as a serious actor with a movie like Southpaw. More likely he’s a serious actor who wants to challenge himself. And Southpaw gives him plenty of opportunities to hit all the emotional beats that a serious actor would kill for. He gets to be on top, a superstar in the boxing world; he gets to (SPOILER) have Rachel McAdams die in his arms; he gets to fall, like a mighty emperor suddenly conquered, reduced to rubble and abandoned by everyone who worshiped him only moments prior. He gets to rise up and conquer his demons. He gets redemption. In short, Southpaw is ready-made for those who want all of the drama of a boxing movie. There’s just not much novelty in it, and for someone who hates watching boxing of any kind, it was a bit of a grind. I did feel increasingly more invested as the move wore on, admittedly.

But as a drama, Southpaw is often sloppy. It relies on the easy tears of lost loves and dramatic disappointments, and the equally simple-minded “I’m going to win this one for my daughter” and “family is everything” messages that Hollywood loves to drape around its movies, like the tin-foil candy wrappers that are engraved with syruppy feel-good adages, like "love is what really matters."  

What is perhaps most eye-opening—and tragic—is the truth that Southpaw exposes: These boxers are alone. These are guys who have likely not had the advantage of an education. They have no other career options to fall back on, and they have no real support system in place. Billy’s wife Maureen was the exception. Most of these men are being exploited by their coterie of ass-kissing paid trainers and legal assistants and security staff. Once the fame and the money go, they “disappear like cock roaches,” as Maureen so aptly puts it in the film. I think this is the one thing which makes Southpaw particularly relevant and even important as a contribution to movies. And maybe this truth has been evident all along and I just haven’t noticed it.

Forrest Whitaker co-stars as the wise trainer who takes in the broken and defeated Billy in the second half of the movie and then helps him rise again. Oona Laurence gives a heartfelt and strong performance as Billy’s daughter, Leila. With Naomie Harris, Victor Ortiz, 50 Cent, Miguel Gomez, and Beau Knapp. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. 

Aloha

The controversy surrounding writer-director Cameron Crowe’s latest film, Aloha, is becoming more significant than the movie itself. In case you aren’t aware of the backlash against Crowe, it involves his casting Emma Stone as a character who’s one-fourth native Hawaiian. The argument--which is being raised more and more frequently against Hollywood--hinges on the problem of under-representation in mainstream movies of vital, well-drawn characters who are not white and/or not male. Crowe’s response has been considerably respectful and apologetic, but it may also fall under the old adage, “it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.” Crowe wrote:

Thank you so much for all the impassioned comments regarding the casting of the wonderful Emma Stone in the part of Allison Ng. I have heard your words and your disappointment, and I offer you a heart-felt apology to all who felt this was an odd or misguided casting choice. As far back as 2007, Captain Allison Ng was written to be a super-proud ¼ Hawaiian who was frustrated that, by all outward appearances, she looked nothing like one. A half-Chinese father was meant to show the surprising mix of cultures often prevalent in Hawaii. Extremely proud of her unlikely heritage, she feels personally compelled to over-explain every chance she gets. The character was based on a real-life, red-headed local who did just that.

I must confess, the issue of Stone’s character’s ethnicity did not strike me as I was watching the film. I figured she was an American Hawaiian: someone of European descent whose parents or grandparents moved to Hawaii; only now do I recall Stone’s explanation of her ancestors, as well as her overzealous appreciation for the mythology of Hawaii. (It feels forced.) As I read over Crowe’s statement, I remembered a scene early in the film in which Stone’s character spells her name out loud, pronouncing it for Bradley Cooper’s character. That’s when she goes into a diatribe about her heritage, but it was lost on me. Crowe’s dialogue, particularly in the first third of Aloha, is muddled and even difficult to understand at times. You feel lost in it: it’s like bad old Hollywood writing; and really, the dialogue in old Hollywood movies was never this convoluted or confusing; it was dreamy nonsense. Crowe’s dialogue for Aloha is striving to be dreamy nonsense, and achieving only the latter part of its goal.

Stone plays an Air Force pilot assigned to shadow Cooper’s character while he’s visiting Honolulu. (The why is still a mystery to me, much like many of the film’s wobbly plot elements.) A romance develops between the two of them, only it’s not really credible, and there’s a half-hearted attempt at a love triangle, because Cooper runs into his ex-girlfriend, played by Rachel McAdams, who is now married to pilot John Krasinski. I adore Rachel McAdams, and she’s very good in Aloha, but she’s often forgotten by the movie, and Crowe does a generally terrible job at resolving the conflict between her and her husband, who’s comically incapable of carrying on a conversation. (His taciturn manner serves as the source of one admittedly genius moment later in the movie, which might justify rushing to theaters to see this movie before it’s gone.)

I think this is the first time I’ve ever felt critical of an Emma Stone performance. She’s uneven in a lot of the movie, but this is really the fault of Crowe’s writing. In the first half of the film, Stone talks too fast, like one of those madcap comic actresses from the 1940s, the way that Mary Astor did in the zizzy Preston Sturges comedy The Palm Beach Story. And Stone kind of looks like she’s doing a Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday) impersonation. She’s a go-getter and a busybody and she’s as crazily devoted to the integrity of her job and her state as Leslie Knope, the indefatigable parks department director of Pawnee, Indiana. But something about the Stone character’s reference to old Hollywood actresses and old Hollywood comedy doesn’t work, and it certainly doesn’t pay off, because by the time we’ve gotten used to it, she changes back into a modern-day girl, just in time to criticize Bradley Cooper’s character for letting a crazy billionaire send an armed satellite into space.

Aloha is an incredibly problematic film structurally and morally. Crowe introduces a lot of big moral dilemmas for his characters, and somehow manages to bungle them all. Bill Murray plays the mad billionaire who has essentially taken the place of NASA; he and Cooper are the only ones who know of his plans to put weapons in space; but in the end, Cooper walks away with impunity because he sabotages the satellite, and Murray is arrested. Somehow that feels too easy, and moreover, too complicated, for what should have been a simple, enjoyable romantic comedy.

There are other moral issues at stake here. Aloha is trying to do some kind of Hawaiian heritage public relations, but it fails pretty miserably. Go back and watch John Sayles’s wonderful Sunshine State (2002) if you want to see it done right. Sayles tapped into the psyche of Floridians, as well as the pulse of the developers trying to make money off of them; Crowe is trying to do the same thing in Aloha. I knew it was a bad sign when the movie’s opening credits showed us vintage Hawaii imagery in a vacant cultural collage as the names materialized on screen. Crowe is only scratching the surface, and George Clooney’s The Descendants did more to tap into the culture of Hawaii than this movie does. And worse yet, Crowe's attempts to address American imperialism in Hawaii have no depth to them: the Americans are the center of this film, and Hawaii and its people are basically in the way. Cooper is, after all, sent to Hawaii to try and sweet-talk them into letting Bill Murray launch his space program there without any objections from them.

Alas, here’s my problem: I walked away liking this movie a little more than my review indicates. It pushed enough of my buttons (especially that sentimental ending, which I won’t reveal, involving a character and his daughter) to give me a decent time. I loved Rachel McAdams and John Krasinski’s characters. I wanted the movie to spend more time with them, fleshing out their personalities and conflicts. I quite enjoyed the brief onscreen moments of Alec Baldwin as an Air Force commander. I appreciated Crowe’s attempts to understand the implications of a world without NASA. All of these ingredients worked to some degree or another, even if the movie as a whole wasn’t successful. It's one of the strangest movie experiences I've had in a long time. But it has charm and vitality, and amidst its many problems, there is a good movie, hiding, needing to be plucked out.

A Most Wanted Man

Somebody from The Village Voice once said--it might have been Alan Scherstuhl--that there wasn't a single movie that wasn't improved by featuring a Philip Seymour Hoffman performance. As I sat in the theater watching A Most Wanted Man, I felt like a scout, looking for those moments in Hoffman's performance when something distinctly him emerged. For a while, I was worried, because the film is so subdued and so deliberately paced, I felt it might unintentionally blanch the normally colorful acting of this great, sadly now deceased performer. But, Hoffman "showed up" as it were, injecting little pieces of his big, unpredictable, yet somehow always structured, acting persona into a character that is mostly calm, organized, quiet, cautious.

Hoffman plays Gunther Bachman, a German intelligence agent relegated to a super-secret and decidedly small sub-organization that was created to bypass German laws in searching for terrorist operatives. Bachman lives with the grim guilt of failing to prevent 9/11 from happening (it was planned partly in his city, Hamburg). So now he's more focused than ever on nabbing potential terrorists. When a man (a suspected terrorist) named Isa Karpov flees Chechnya seeking asylum in Hamburg, it becomes a race between Bachman's group and the mainstream German intelligence to catch him: At first, their mission appears to be in sync, but soon Karpov's guilt is called into question. He seeks aid from a compassionate German lawyer named Annabelle Richter (Rachel McAdams) who works for a non-profit organization that aids people like him. She believes in his innocence, but Bachman isn't so sure, and both German and American intelligence agents are sharpening their knives and waiting to go in for the kill.

Like 2011's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, this latest adaptation of a John Le Carré spy novel is slowly paced but in a way that thoroughly pulls you in. The world of this film is quite fascinating, and the movie lets us savor it, think inside it. Even though there are many entertaining James Bond-esque movies (most recently, Skyfall), you don't always get a sense of the environment or of the characters and how they are affected by their work. (Although Skyfall is certainly an exception.) Both kinds of films have their place. However, the second kind, the deliberately slower kind, is in decidedly shorter supply. But perhaps this makes those of us who like these slower spy movies more grateful, possibly even less demanding of the films when they do appear. And yet, I was prepared to pronounce A Most Wanted Man boring and confusing for about the first 20 minutes. But soon after, I was hooked, and felt invested in everything that was going on. And there's nary an explosion to be seen in the entire film. What a refreshing thing it is to have another adult movie about spies. The ending is shattering, the characters all too human, and the film highly worth watching. 

With Willem Defoe, Daniel Bruhl, Robin Wright, and Grigoriy Dobrygin. Written by Andrew Bovell. Directed by Anton Corbijn.

Passion

It's a shame that nobody has seen Brian De Palma's latest exercise in mania, Passion (2012), because it's a pretty entertaining piece of trash, in line with all those ultra-stylish thrillers De Palma made in the 70s and 80s. He got sidetracked doing more "important" work in the late 80s and into the 21st century. Passion suggests that maybe we're getting our old De Palma back.

Now don't misunderstand me. Passion isn't a great film, not even a great De Palma film. But I think it's been unfairly panned by critics. Its score on Rotten Tomatoes is a dismal 16% among the top critics. Richard Brody in the New Yorker called it "a collection of mechanisms that decorate mechanisms." And Rene Rodriguez in the Miami Herald asserts that De Palma has "run out of ideas." And I would have to agree with these and other critics up to a point. There's nothing particularly new about Passion. (And in fact, the film often feels calculating and subdued: it lacks the frenzy of Sisters and the delightful, lascivious twistedness of Dressed to Kill.) But as an exercise in mindless semi-stylish cheap thrills, Passion works pretty well, and De Palma still knows how to create a lush thriller replete with sexy, dangerous weirdness.

The plot involves the catty chicanery of two women working at an ad agency in Berlin. Rachel McAdams plays Christine, the bitchy, controlling go-getter who takes credit for a video that Isabelle (Noomi Rapace) shoots. The one-ups-woman-ship then escalates, and until somebody gets murdered. But first we're asked to believe that perhaps every attractive woman on the planet is willing and able to be a lesbian on command. (Brian De Palma was never able to shy away from his fantasies.) But to De Palma's credit, he doesn't exploit this fantasy as much as he may have wanted to. (The film is nowhere near as steamy as Dressed to Kill, for example.)

Again, I don't mean to suggest that Passion is a work of genius. It's a work of amusement by a director who has in his prime made some pretty ingenious movies. And it's fun to see Rachel McAdams playing a bad girl again. Noomi Rapace is a mildly convincing tragic figure in this, but she already looks so forlorn and nymph-like, that I wish De Palma had cast someone against type.

With Paul Anderson, Karoline Herfurth, and Rainer Bock. Written by De Palma and Natalie Carter, from the 2010 French film Love Crime. ★★½

Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen has always approached the fantastic without feeling a need to explain it or unravel its mystery. He's dealt with the collision course of the real and the unreal in such films as The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), where a movie character leaves the screen and enters the life of a Depression-era waitress played by Mia Farrow; and, more recently, in Sleuth (2006), which was a wonderfully witty mystery yarn where we witnessed the murdered victim's journey down the river Styx, where she expresses her frustration over the events that lead to her death.

In Midnight in Paris, Allen takes us to the City of Light and layers it with the mysterious undercurrents of time travel. Owen Wilson plays Gil, a would-be novelist who's bored and dissatisfied with the success he's had as a self-proclaimed hack screenwriter. He's lost his sense of enchantment with movies, turning instead toward literary pursuits. He dreams of living in Paris in the 20s, when all the expatriates were there on seemingly never-ending holidays, drinking and dancing and having deep, sophisticated conversations into the night; and falling in and out love; and realizing the vision of their art.

Instead, Gil is visiting Paris with his fiance, Inez (Rachel McAdams), who's not very enchanted by Paris, at least, not at first. Gil's hoping for stormy weather so he can stroll through the city in the rain. She's perplexed by this, views it as eccentric. Her parents are with them (they're played by Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), and they don't connect with their future son-in-law at all. It's as if the city exposes all the differences between Gil's and Inez's personalities for the first time, or perhaps it just illuminates them on a grander scale, and suddenly her lack of romanticism is driving him up the wall. Plus, they unexpectedly meet an old friend of Inez (Michael Sheen) and his wife (Nina Arianda). He's a professor of art, and his knowledge impresses Inez, who admits that she had a crush on him in college.

The stage is set for reality to take an unexpected backseat in Gil's life. He is transported back to 1920's Paris. He meets F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and his loopy wife Zelda (Alison Pill), and Cole Porter Yves Heck), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Pablo Picasso (Marcial De Fonzo Bo), and Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), to name a handful. It's the most delightful moment if you go into this movie with absolutely no knowledge of what's going to take place. And especially if you have any interest in the artists and writers of the 1920s, it's like a wonderful dream. Gil finds himself being drawn into this other-worldly encounter every night at midnight, and he begins to develop a romantic interest with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a muse/lover of Hemingway and Picasso.

Allen's movies of the last few years have had a strangely ineffectual slightness to them when you get beneath their witty, refreshing premises. Midnight in Paris isn't any different in that sense. Beyond the surprisingly fun idea, is a movie that sort of meanders along without anything much to say. Gil learns that you have to live in the moment, rather than dreaming about the past, idolizing it to the point where an era becomes a fantasyland that never really existed. There are moments, however, that make Midnight in Paris a joy. It's the movie's wonderfully intoxicating love of the past that plays with your head even when the "message" is trying to tell you not to worship the past too much. It can be dangerous, after all.  Plus, you'll find that in every era there were people who felt they were missing out for being born in the wrong moment of history.

Allen, who has done quite a few nostalgia pieces, might very well be writing a cautionary tale to himself. Indeed, Gil's character seemed perfect for Allen if this were 1975. Diane Keaton could have been Inez. In 2011, Wilson and McAdams make an acceptable pairing, but I've always found Owen Wilson to be slightly uninteresting. He seems to be totally lacking in intrigue. McAdams has a wonderfully likeable quality, but that is squelched here by a character who's a complete drag. And she's off having a wonderful time with the snooty college professor while her husband is having bizarre experiences that might have been the result of a bad LSD trip.

Morning Glory

I'm sure that in retrospect the studio executives behind Morning Glory regret releasing it so close to the premiere of the latest Harry Potter installment. Morning Glory is slight and episodic, light and fluffy entertainment that doesn't have much umph to it: Rachel McAdams plays Becky Fuller, an endlessly energetic but naive young producer who is handed the task of salvaging Daybreak, a morning talk show that no one watches.

It's sort of about how McAdams's character grows from being a career-obsessed single woman to a more well-rounded, on top of the game, mature woman who's willing to let a little romance (provided by Patrick Wilson) into her life. It's also sort of about her struggle with a grizzled, iconic anchorman (Harrison Ford, looking as lively as a corpse) who is forced to co-host Daybreak much to his chagrin. Ford's character, named Mike Pomeroy, feels that such trivial subject matter is beneath him, while his co-host (played by a marvelously funny Diane Keaton, who's given less than she deserves but does wonders with it) revels in seeing the beloved newsman taken down a notch.

McAdams has a very likable quality that sustains an uninteresting character. She's Mary Richards without the gutsy spunk that made her character grow from timid to tough. She's not sassy enough to be Murphy Brown, and she doesn't have the nerdy humanness of a Liz Lemon. (Notice that all these characters come from television.) I don't think we'd care a wit about Becky Fuller if someone less charming and sympathetic and likably idealistic were playing her. But McAdams pulls it off at least to a point, and we're willing to root for her, but the movie doesn't really give us much to root for. Becky's dream of being offered a job at NBC on The Today Show will clearly have to be sacrificed so that she can preserve the familial quality she facilitates when she takes over Daybreak, but there's so much squabbling and chaos between the crew and the personalities on the set that we never really see that growth: it's all bombastic lunacy fueled by angry jibes at each other until suddenly they're this big, warm, oozing family that needs each other and can't bear to part with each other, but the movie doesn't really bridge the gap between these two points. Call it laziness or a lack of focus on the part of the writers.

This is the kind of movie we go to to see good actors climb into juicy characters and take pot shots at each other. We get that to some degree, but Morning Glory never makes up its mind: is it a cute, romantic working comedy or something leaner and smarter or something preachier? It dabbles on all sides, and so the result, while passably entertaining and at times laugh-out-loud funny, is mixed, if not uneven. Jeff Goldblum does some wonderfully funny work as Becky's boss--he's got such a good deadpan delivery that you enjoy his character ragging on Becky -- it gives her something to fight against. Keaton and Ford have some enjoyable tension but it's like a less intense version of Walter Mathau and Jack Lemon squabbling and hurling insults at each other in Grumpy Old Men. ★★½

Sherlock Holmes

"'My dear fellow,' said Sherlock Holmes, as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, 'life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.'"

-from "A Case of Identity," The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

As the saying goes: "Don't kill the messenger." The latest incarnation of Doyle's immortal British sleuth (Robert Downey Jr. here, upon whose performance and casting choice I remain undecided) is big and booming and loud...and a bit limp amidst all the frenzy of action, explosions, and the like. Perhaps Guy Ritchie was the wrong choice to direct this film. I found its scale disappointingly large, with all the more room to fall given its self-conceived grandeur. The mystery was less than mesmerizing in its attempt to cash in on the magic motif that has served other blockbusters so well of late. I have read some Sherlock Holmes, including the volume of short stories from which the above citation comes, as well as the classic novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I could never have imagined the behemoth that took place on screen coming from the pages of Doyle's work.

That said, the movie isn't terrible, just average. Good performances, particularly a well cast Jude Law as Holmes's amiable chum Dr. Watson and Rachel McAdams as a scheming American with whom Sherlock feels a slight romantic affection, made the film less irritating. However, there are just so many ridiculously unbelievable brawls and chase scenes and explosions one can manage. At just over two hours, the film should have been a lot more fun without trying so hard, and the mystery should have been more spine-tingling and less a pastiche of magical villains, superhero movies, and doses of the occult (which could have been explored with more historical perspective and curiosity given Victorian England's fascination with the subject).

The script was laced with humor, eliciting fairly frequent laughs; unfortunately the film was either too gimmicky and cartoonish or too reminiscent of something from Marvel comics. I was waiting for Dr. Watson to caution Holmes that old adage, "with great power comes great responsibility." Indeed. ★★

State of Play

State of Play didn't seem to get much notice back in April, but it ought to have. It's an absorbing political thriller in the vein of director Alan J. Pakula's films (All the President's Men, Klute, and The Pelican Brief), based on a 2003 British TV mini-series. Russell Crowe heads an impressive cast as a reporter for the Washington Globe whose old buddy, a U.S. Congressman (Ben Affleck) becomes the center of a scandal when his aide and mistress dies suspiciously in a subway station.
The congressman's investigation of a large and insidious corporation which has its financial fingers in the cookie jar of the War on Terror seems unrelated to this apparent accident, at first. Crowe and a newbie reporter (Rachel McAdams) whose job as a blogger for the Globe he resents, must band together in their search for the truth, fighting reticent political figures, creepy mercenaries, and the ticking of the media clock.
Well-timed and appropriately suspenseful fun with more than a few pertinent plot points (such as political scandals, the War, and the current transitory nature of newspaper media and its relationship to the blogosphere). Helen Mirren gives a wonderfully bitchy performance as Crowe's editor, and also starring Robin Wright Penn as Affleck's disgraced wife, also a long-time friend with Crowe.

So far, I would certainly add this to my favorites of the year. ★★★