The genre-defying film "A Bigger Splash" works an evocative spell on the viewer.

“The heart takes what it wants, like dynamite,” sings Sandra McCracken in her song “Desire Like Dynamite.” That song has been filtering through my mind as I contemplate the film A Bigger Splash, which is fundamentally a film about desire. The title is misleading, though. ‘A Bigger Splash’ conjures up images of a feel-good summer comedy, even though it’s not really comedic. And Wikipedia describes the film as an erotic thriller, which isn’t altogether correct either.

Truthfully, A Bigger Splash isn’t interested in genres but in people, and as such it flouts conventions as it honestly excavates the hearts of its characters — Marianne, Paul, Harry, and Penelope — who have been pushed together (for reasons explained later) on a small Sicilian island. And while [mild spoiler] the film does end with an act of violence and a death, to call it a thriller would be inaccurate. And even though the film is certainly erotic, it doesn’t wear its eroticism on its sleeve. Director Luca Guadagnino fixates on the balancing act of being human, of toggling between goodness and badness, love and hate, friendship and enmity, of being spurred by our own little tragedies and triumphs and insecurities.

Here’s the plot: An English rock star named Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) is recuperating on the Sicilian island of Pantelleria, along with her boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts). Marianne isn’t aloud to speak for several months because her vocal chords have been damaged. But the couple’s idyllic summer alone together is threatened by the unexpected arrival of Harry (Ralph Fiennes), Marianne’s ex, a volatile music producer, who brings along his mopey, bored 22-year-old daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson). Marianne and Harry have maintained a friendship, although it’s obvious from the beginning that Harry is not over her. Quickly we suspect that Harry and Penelope are interlopers with ulterior motives.

Director Luca Guadagnino lets the tension build without revealing too much too soon. He’s also concerned with another priority: feasting our eyes on Pantelleria’s natural beauty. This island is a sun-scorched paradise: it’s dusty and hot but bursting with life, life embroiled in a constant struggle for survival against the heat. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by all the sights, but there is purpose behind this beautiful yet hard setting. We know when humans have been placed in picturesque little corners of paradise, they are going to wreck it for themselves, and half the fun is in watching them bring about their own destruction. (If that’s your idea of a good time; I can think of worse ways to spend the evening.)

Tilda Swinton has admitted in interviews that the gimmick of not being able to talk appealed to her as an actress. In the hands of a lesser performer, such a contrivance might have been limiting. But Swinton has striking features: she’s always interesting to look at. A Bigger Splash concentrates our focus on her expressions and her body movements. She occasionally does speak, when she’s provoked, or in flashbacks, but the performance is full and commanding without words. As Penelope, Dakota Johnson, whom viewers will remember as the ingenue in 50 Shades of Grey, embodies a certain blasé sexiness: her most effective power is that she’s always bored. Matthias Schoenaerts, playing Paul, delivers the most sympathetic performance. We learn that Paul tried to kill himself — by crashing his car — and according to Harry, “it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever done.” Paul is haunted, vaguely, and we’re never quite sure if he will exorcise his demons. Harry has demons too, but he likes to invite his demons in and party with them, which isn’t really Paul’s style. Marianne finds herself torn between these two men: one of them kind and compassionate and nurturing, the other one wild and unpredictable.

The film takes unexpected turns, partly because these four are such mysteries to us. For a long time, it’s not clear if Harry and Penelope are really father and daughter. Penelope has only just met her dad recently; but their relationship feels downright Oedipal at times. (Harry even admits he finds her attractive.) And even as Penelope half-enjoys the attention of her newfound father, she’s obviously unhappy about being pawned off on him, because he’s erratic and drinks too much and riles people up. It’s also clear that both Harry and Penelope want to infiltrate, even destroy, Marianne and Paul’s peaceful relationship.

Guadagnino’s great skills as a filmmaker are his immersive powers and his restraint. We see Marianne and Paul sleeping on the beach, covered in mud; we’re right in the backseat of their jeep as they tear across the seemingly endless winding roads toward the airport. These scenes give the film texture, they attach us to the world of the movie. And the tensions between the characters unfold gradually, as if bewitched by the island and rendered sluggish. There’s a great little scene in which Penelope is pealing and devouring a fruit (I couldn’t tell you what kind of fruit) as though she's defiling it: everything she does, even this, is sensual and fraught with temptation. It’s as though Harry has only brought her with him to tempt Paul so that he can get Marianne back. Later, when Paul leads Marianne to the beach by way of a dusty trail through the brambles, we sense that it’s Penelope who’s leading him, a Siren in his own midst.

Guadagnino gets a lot of poetry out of Pantelleria, but it’s muted poetry, faded in the blistering sun. Yet under the surface A Bigger Splash is a movie as dramatic as something out of Tennessee Williams, without the hyperbole. This movie works an evocative spell on us, like a purple, dreamy myth. But I could do without that title.

'Hail Caesar' lets a dull plot get in the way of a good time.

Hail, Caesar! takes us back to Old Hollywood, where the movie stars were cattle and the studio executives were kings, where those same executives traded the secret sins of lesser celebrities to protect their more lucrative properties from the scandal-mongering gossip rags. It’s the latest movie by the Coen Brothers, one that many people have been looking forward to because of the trailer, which is terrifically appealing. Sadly, the movie falters for most of its hour-and-forty-five minutes. The film’s biggest problem is its banal film noir-esque plot, which frequently gets in the way of all the interesting things going on around it.

Plots are wonderful things when they work and when they’re arresting. I found the lack of plot-adherence in Inherent Vice maddening, but I think Hail, Caesar! could have profited from that movie’s casual, who-cares attitude. The Coen Brothers never seem to be sure which attitude they want. Most of the time, the movie slavishly grinds through its own plot with little to show for it, and poor Josh Brolin suffers through with as much pluck as he can. But sometimes the movie does let loose enough to simply entertain us, as in a terrific scene recreating a Hollywood musical, in which a bunch of sailors, led by Channing Tatum, tap dance in a bar. The number they sing playfully laments the fact that they’re going off to sea and there won’t be any ladies to keep them company. 

Like so many great musicals from the period Hail, Caesar imitates, this scene is purely entertaining on multiple levels: the skillful dancing and singing is fun to watch, the humor is both clever and sharp, and the choreography is in sync with the jokes, as when Channing Tatum glides across the bar much to the chagrin of the rotund bartender, who frantically grabs beer bottles about to be stepped on. Watching that scene, we’re reminded of the pleasures to be found in the best old movie, movies that work as delightful entertainment (there’s a kind of magic at work here) and as innuendo: it’s pretty clear the sailors have agreed to make do with each other by the end of the number, and we see it in their dance moves. This sexual suggestiveness is funny and a slightly sharper and more pronounced version of the innuendo we see in great musicals of the period like Singin’ in the Rain. It's the best scene in the film.

But then the plot returns. The plot involves Eddie Mannix, an executive for the fictional Capital Studios (played by Josh Brolin), who’s trying to figure out who kidnapped one of his stars, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) off the set of a movie about the Roman Empire and the coming of Christ. Mannix is a harried man, constantly juggling the demands of the talent, the technicians, the press, and his own conscience, because he feels neglectful of his wife and kids. (He frequently goes to confession, where he bemoans his secret smoking habit much to the annoyance of the priest, who’s underwhelmed by Mannix’s “sins.”) Now he's trying to keep this kidnapping a secret, until he can figure out how to get his star back. But this story never carries much weight: it's something to pad the running time and give the movie a sense of singular direction, when what it really needs is more extravagant recklessness. 

The Coen Brothers have created a sort of menagerie of all the types of people we remember from the period: the gruff studio exec, the dutiful secretary, the big star (Clooney), the new star, the sexy ingénue, the trashy journalist, even a terrifying editor (played by Frances McDormand), who sits in her dark room smoking over film prints, and whose scarf gets caught in the editing equipment in a disturbing scene.

Alden Ehrenreich plays Hobie Doyle, the kid who’s made his name in cheap Westerns and whom the studio is grooming for stardom. (He’s earnest and charming as hell and he lassos everything from a rope to a spaghetti noodle, but when Mannix plucks him out of a horse movie and thrusts him into a 19th-century English period piece, he’s all thumbs.) Ehrenreich is terrific in this, and in one scene--another movie recreation--he strums on a guitar and purs out a song about moonlight, like the scene in Rio Bravo where Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing together.

Scarlet Johansson plays DeeAnna Moran, the sexy ingénue, who in her opening scene, in which she’s playing a mermaid leading a bunch of other mermaids in an elaborate aquatic show, looms elegant, almost as bewitching as Grace Kelly was in that first shot of her in Rear Window. But when the cameras aren’t rolling, DeeAnna sheds her elegance, talking like a harried New York waitress and trying to avoid putting her illegitimate child up for adoption.

All these characters fail to add up to anything bigger. It’s as though the Coen Brothers were merely making a documentary about what Hollywood was like seventy years ago. The joke at the heart of the film, which is clever even if it, like everything else in this movie, has been done before, invokes Communism and the role Hollywood plays in sating the masses. But it’s hard to take such a pill from the Coen Brothers, who always seem so contemptuous of their audience even as they take our money and Hollywood's accolades. Parts of this movie are terrifically entertaining, just not enough of them, and by the end, the film’s darker and more existential humor wears thin. Viewers are likely to remember with fondness the lighter recreations of the movie past, and wish the Coens had conjured up a whole feature of such “simple” magic.

With Tilda Swinton in a dual role as sisters who write competing gossip columns; Jonah Hill, Ralph Fiennes, and Dolph Lundgren as a Communist submarine commander (because, why not?). The misplaced, stuffy English narration is provided by Michael Gambon. Written by the Coen Brothers with Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner. Music by Carter Burwell.

Spectre

The new James Bond, Spectre, is an enthralling good time, one of the most exciting big movies to come out this year. It has one major flaw: a wrong-headed need to understand and reform its hero; but this I can forgive for a movie as entertaining and well-made as Spectre. Daniel Craig, who has talked recently of exiting the role of 007, has sometimes been criticized for being an overly serious Bond. There is something shell-shocked about Daniel Craig’s appearance: He always looks to me like he’s just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. But he’s a remarkably fit actor, and he’s subtly funny, cautious never to venture into Roger Moore territory. Craig himself exudes a kind of enigmatic persona that works for the character.

Spectre opens with a sweeping shot of Mexico City on El Dia de los Muertos. We watch a man and a woman—both wearing masks—make their way through a crowded street, into a hotel, to their room, where they embrace. Then the man takes off his mask: It’s James Bond. Bond is always ready for a bedroom scene, if only the lady will wait a moment while he shoots someone. “Excuse me for a moment,” he says, and with sniper rifle in hand, climbs out the window of the hotel room. We follow, looking down on him from above as he maneuvers from rooftop to rooftop until he finds his perch and takes aim.

The scene is visually thrilling, in part because director Sam Mendes cares about craftsmanship, and in part because all this precision and attention to Bond’s spatial geography builds the tension: By the time Bond pulls the trigger, we’re totally invested in what he’s doing. The building that subsequently explodes (not because of the gun shot) would otherwise have been another numbing moment of cinematic destruction. When Bond, unable to escape the debris and the enveloping cloud of smoke and gas, falls down, down, down, he plops right onto a couch. This punctuating bit of humor sealed the deal for me. The rest of the film (until the end) is pure delight.

One of the most interesting parts about Spectre is its fascination with/anxiety about surveillance. Surveillance is the chief bogey of this movie, the thing the villains treasure because it begets them unadulterated power. But it’s also a fact of life, especially in Europe, where counter-terrorism measures have increased the number of cameras in public places, and, we assume, the number of phone conversations being listened-in-on. In the film, the 00 program is threatened by a new intelligence division, headed by Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott), who sees data collection as the wave of the future, and agents like Bond as relics of the past. The movie opens with the text, “THE DEAD ARE ALIVE,” and insinuates that indeed James Bond himself is a kind of ghost who visits us in our pop culture fantasies. Perhaps this explains our fascination with him, and why the current iteration of the series so desperately wants to “solve” James Bond, to know the unknowable.

Sam Mendes seems aware of our culture’s current need to psychoanalyze movie heroes to death. He makes light of this in a scene in which Bond is being evaluated by a shrink (Dr. Madeleine Swann). She doesn’t know that he’s actually there to save her from an assassin. But her questions are the questions we may have found ourselves asking—against our better judgment—over time: We want to know what makes James Bond tick, yet to understand the mystery is to take the fun of the mystery away. Unfortunately, the film can’t resist its own urges to investigate and domesticate its hero. It's a symptom of a larger pop cultural urge, this need to know everything, to fix everything, this inability to accept flaws as somehow fundamental and unchangeable and, sometimes, desirably human.

One of my favorite things about these movies is when they turn into a North By Northwest-style world geography tour. Spectre does not disappoint in this arena: We go from Mexico City to London to Austria to Tangier. Sam Mendes, with help from cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, captures the lushness of these disparate venues for the usual James Bond spy-movie hijinks, and lets the camera linger on them enough for us to savor the image. And the chase scenes, which are generally very well-choreographed, have been carefully wrought in conjunction with their locations. Probably the best one is the fight between Bond and Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista), the great, hulking moose of a henchman who is this movie’s Jaws. Their tussle on a train somewhere near Tangier (if memory serves) is tense and exciting, and again, capped with a bit of throwaway humor (that doesn't work quite as well as one would hope). 

As the chief villain, Blofeld, Christoph Waltz is appropriately creepy. Waltz, like Javier Bardem before him, seems made for these kinds of megalomaniacal characters. He reminds me of that great, sinister character actor Henry Gibson. But there’s something too easy about Waltz as a villain. It’s as expected as having Paul Giamatti play a weasel. And though I don’t mean to damn him with faint praise (because Waltz is really great at what he does), there’s so much else to look at and love about Spectre that the villain pales in comparison. 

Perhaps the one truly lackluster note in characterization is the Bond girl, played by Léa Seydoux, Dr. Madeleine Swann. Her father was part of the ignominious SPECTRE ring, and now she’s a walking target, whom Bond has vowed to protect. Seydoux is a lovely mousy thing, and even gets to partake in the action during the extensive train fight scene. But James Bond is always more interesting when he’s being sexually one-upped by his female counterpart. Madeleine Swann is too mopey and soft, and in the end, she’s little more than a pawn (in the film’s needless final act). This is where the movie’s project to reform James Bond—by domesticating him—seems particularly idiotic. I’m not necessarily in favor of the more disposable Bond women; I just prefer Bond girls who hold their own. When Bond looks at the disarmed Blofeld at the very end and says, “I have something more important to do [than killing you],” I laughed at what until now would have been a bad sexual pun in a Bond movie. Now it’s a thesis defending Bond’s new stance on marriage as he walks off into the night with his uncharismatic lover. (He and Seydoux do generate some heat, however brief: When they engage in a passionate kiss, earlier in the film, Daniel Craig’s lips take on a life of their own.)

With Naomie Harris, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Wishaw, Rory Kinnear, and, briefly, Dame Judi Dench. 

Quiz Show

Robert Redford's Quiz Show (1994) covers a scandal involving game show contestants who were given answers ahead of time. It's set in the late 1950s, with Rob Morrow as a hotshot Congressional lawyer who begins to suspect that the producers of a show called Twenty-One have been rigging the game for years. Then one of the contestants starts speaking up about being forced into giving a wrong answer to make way for the next big contestant, Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), a promising young intellectual with an impressive literary pedigree: His father is the writer and distinguished Columbia professor Mark Van Doren.

The trouble with Quiz Show is that it never captures your interest. Redford's direction is so carefully calculated in every single second that the film seems blandly important, as though we ought to be riled up by the film's subject matter--the encroaching power that advertisers have over us through television, and the ways that they maneuver supposedly authentic "reality" television shows to keep the audience glued to the screen. These are fascinating ideas in real life, and they're truly infuriating, but this movie fails to ignite them. That's also partly because the characters are so dull. Fiennes doesn't exactly impress as the young literary type: his character has had everything handed to him, so it's hard to feel much sympathy for him.

There is an admittedly powerful scene near the end when Charles Van Doren reads an apology before the Congress, and a politician tells him he shouldn't expect praise for simply telling the truth for once: the crowd erupts in applause, and Charles looks like he's been squashed. It's an effective moment.

Rob Morrow is a charming actor, but his Boston accent is a bit muddy here, and he's not given enough real drive. Everything about his motivation to initiate the investigation into the quiz show scandals seems  too banal: he's just trying to avoid working on Wall Street, so he digs around and looks for trouble, and when he's lucky, he finds it. The film doesn't allow him to show off his naturally funny personality: he looks like an amiable frat boy, and that playful side is squelched by such a serious role. (Although even here he's always smiling; it just comes off as arrogance.)

There is one good idea in all of this: that in the end, television is too powerful, and already too deeply ingrained in our culture, to be defeated by the government or any other entity. The real bad guys--the advertisers who prey on our gullability and our needs--can't be stopped. Middle men take the fall and the scandals are forgotten to be repeated again other day. And maybe then nobody will even mind. That's a cynical outlook, but it rings true, and it's the most authentic and believable idea in Quiz Show.

Written by Paul Attanasio. Starring John Turturro, who plays the first contestant, and who's mocked for being Jewish but displays all the grating stereotypes about Jewish people, as though the movie wanted to have it both ways: he's condemned for being Jewish, but he's genuinely annoying; with David Paymer, Paul Scofield, Hank Azaria, Christopher McDonald, Elizabeth Wilson, Johann Carlo, and Mira Sorvino. Produced by Redford. 133 minutes. ★★

Skyfall

I groaned inwardly at the beginning of the latest Bond picture, Skyfall: Yet another mindless chase scene where rich people in business suits and fancy cars destroy an entire district of middle and lower class people trying to sell fruits and vegetables. Happily, the rest of the movie eschews that drawn-out bit of chaotic action bosh in favor of a more elegant kind of spy thriller. Surely the James Bond movies have become less-Bond-more-Bourne in the last six years (a disappointing evolution, or devolution, actually). Casino Royale was an exciting debut for Daniel Craig as 007, but the movie was overlong and sloppy at times when it should have been taut. Quantum of Solace was mercifully shorter, and entertaining, but slight, unimpressive and far too Bourne-ish to feel like a real Bond installment. 

Skyfall unites these two warring aspects of the Bond franchise: it's sort of a return, sort of a departure. Some may have found such ambiguity frustrating. (It's understandable.) But I enjoyed myself through to the ridiculous finale, which, as a friend pointed out, was lifted from the Home Alone playbook. It gets a little bit more personal, although one of the things that has made the Bond movies entertaining is their lack of a sense of tangible reality. They were never particularly rooted in time, except when it came to the technology and the villains, who always reflect real-life political anxieties. Here, the threat is terrorism but more specifically cyber-terrorism, and the villain is Javier Bardem, who's good in a cheap sort of way: he's just a tamer version of the psychopath he played in No Country For Old Men, and a more predictable version of the Joker in The Dark Knight. Bardem needs to play a dad in a Disney movie next if he's going to surprise us ever again. But that won't be a very good surprise.

Judi Dench, as M, gets more story time in Skyfall. M's showing her age, and her ability to lead such an important--or at least, established--wing of British intelligence comes into question after some bad judgment calls. It's always fun to see Judi Dench stand firm and icy like the Queen Mother, which she's sort of becoming. At least, the Queen Mother of British movies. (Sorry Maggie, Helen.) Ralph Fiennes steps in as another Bond boss, Mallory, who's going to oversee M's "voluntary" retirement in a few months. Not to be bested, M throws the British PM the finger with regal precision, determined to see her latest job to the end, whatever that may be.

The director, Sam Mendes, does a good job capturing the visual opulence of the various locations, from Shanghai to rural Scotland. Shanghai comes to life in Skyfall, a neon palace full of dancing lights and eye-popping skyscrapers. It's also the scene of a particularly entertaining--because it's relatively subtle and quiet--confrontation between Bond and a hitman, whom he follows up to the top of one of the skyscrapers by grabbing onto the bottom of the elevator. The finale, which takes place at Bond's childhood home in Scotland--and features an enjoyable performance by Albert Finney as the grizzled caretaker of the place--isn't all that smart, but it's enjoyable anyway.

I also really enjoyed the performance of Naomie Harris, an agent who engages in some amusing banter with James. She's game for anything, and invests her scenes with a sense of fun. Daniel Craig is his usual stoic self, but slightly more vulnerable and bruised up. He remains one of the franchise's best incarnations by not giving too much or too little.

With Berenice Marlohe, Ben Whishaw as a Harry Potterish Q, Helen McCrory, Rory Kinnear, and Ola Rapace. Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan. 143 min. ★★★½

In Bruges

Two hit men await orders from their boss about their next job, in Bruges, Belgium. Writer-director Martin McDonagh maintains a droll sense of humor that sustains the movie through its dark subject matter, and turns it into something remarkably like Shakespeare. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson play the hit men. Gleeson is cultured, wise, measured, and careful, and Farrell is cocky, questioning, and bored with the sights of Bruges. In fact, it becomes a running joke that he will be stuck in Bruges forever.

The supporting cast is eclectic and gives the movie a trippy other-worldliness: there's the live-wire of a boss, played by Ralph Fiennes, who turns swearing into art. There's an American dwarf actor (Jordan Prentice) who's filming a movie there, as well as a duo of crooks (Clemence Poesy and Jeremie Renier) who specialize in stealing money from tourists after luring them into their apartment.

Farrell has perhaps never been more appealing than in this role, because his cocky facade is easily shattered to reveal a weak, scared man who isn't really up to the line of work he's chosen. And Gleeson becomes oddly philosophical as events turn toward the fatalistic. But it's the humor that really works for In Bruges. It would have been a maudlin piece of camp otherwise. Instead, we get something really quite stunning; a smashingly twisted crime serio-comedy that refuses to stay within the boundaries of clearly defined genres. ★★★★