Recommended with reservations

Completeness compels me to take note of a large number of new films released in the past year that I’ve seen but do not urgently recommend that you see.  Even the first, which I liked best of all, requires a willing receptivity by the viewer.  Still, there’s a good chance that you will find something in this bunch that you might like, if you can triangulate from my taste to yours.  (As usual, I include links to Metacritic for more info and Netflix for availability.)

One has to give Patrick Wang credit for the courage of his convictions with In the Family (MC-82, NFX).  Not only writing, directing, and starring, he undertook, after many festival rejections, his own distribution.  He definitely put himself out there, and didn’t compromise with the audience either, at a length of nearly three hours.   The film plays out with a whispery intimacy in prolonged scenes from fixed Ozu-like angles.  But if you give it your attention, this anti-polemic ultimately packs a punch.  We open very matter-of-factly on a gay couple with Tennessee accents and a young son, and we quietly share some of their daily rituals.  It’s an ordinary yet idyllic family, until the unthinkable happens, a death and a custody battle, which ultimately plays out like a Buddhist parable.  This film may put you to sleep, or it may wake you up, but for me it’s definitely the pick of this litter. 

I could almost recommend Mud (MC-76, NFX) except for the literal overkill of its ending.  Up till then, I liked Jeff Nichols’ latest better than his previous Take Shelter, or the highly-praised Beasts of the Southern Wild, with which it shares a lower Mississippi setting amongst an eccentric riverside community.  The Huck and Tom of this tale are called Ellis (a wonderful Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone, who go in search of a boat up a tree on a deserted island in the middle of the river, where it was tossed by a recent flood.  That magical occurrence heralds others, including first love for the 14-year-old Ellis, but mostly the meeting with the title character, marvelously embodied by Matthew McConaughey in another of the flavorful performances that allow one to forgive him for his “sexiest man alive” days.  Mud claims to be a lover, and a killer on the run, and enlists the boys in his quest to retrieve his darling Juniper (Reese Witherspoon, with not a lot to do) and escape down the river.  There are a number of other well-known faces in Nichols’ good-looking indie-turned-Hollywood, Michael Shannon and Sam Shepard for two, and it’s enjoyable to watch, until a few formulaic implausibilities intrude on a thoughtful and attentive portrait of an exotic subculture, and the immemorial pleasure of a boy’s own adventure.

I’d like to recommend To the Wonder (MC-58, NFX), but in truth it’s for Terence Malick fans only, an obsessive sketchbook of his favorite images.  If you want to a see beautiful young women dancing away from you through tall waving grasses while the music soars, then this is the film for you.  No one can deny the pictorial delight wrought by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki from Paris or Mont Saint-Michel, or most remarkably, from a suburban housing development in Oklahoma.  Malick has his own visual syntax, which you get or you don’t, but here he’s mainly repeating himself, beautifully and eloquently, but not to every taste.  You’ve got to give Ben Affleck credit for balancing the ego-trip of Argo with his submission to Malick here; he barely gets to utter a line of dialogue and is more likely to be caught making an inadvertent gesture than “acting.”  Same for Rachel MacAdam as an old rancher girl friend with whom he reconnects.  Javier Bardem gets a good deal of portentous narration, but not much chance to build his character, a priest having a crisis of disbelief but retaining his sorrowful sympathy with humanity and the mysteries of love.  But Olga Kurylenko is the darling of Malick’s eye, dancing before our eyes as she bewitches, then bewilders Affleck, and us too, with her high-flown voiceovers.  I could tell you the story, but the story is not the point.  The point is the celebration of the numinous qualities of nature and light.  If you’re yawning already, pass this by.  If your eyes and your heart are open, then watch it for its wonder and forgive its pondering ponderousness.

I have to give a “maybe yes” to No (MC-81, NFX), which is the opposite of ponderous, taking a surprisingly light-hearted and light-footed approach to the endgame of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.  Always a pleasure to watch, Gael Garcia Bernal is a mostly apolitical ad man commissioned by the opposition in a plebiscite, which Pinochet offered as thumbs up or down on his tenure in office.  Shot on 1988-vintage video equipment that meshes seamlessly with news footage from that time, Pablo Larrain’s film mixes Mad Men antics with serious political commentary, as the protagonists try to sell revolutionary change like a new brand of soda.  Can you overthrow a dictator with ad jingles featuring rainbows and sexy girls singing and romping?  According to this droll film, you can – a pyrrhic victory for freedom and market values.  I might have preferred a good documentary on the subject, but this Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film was worthy, and in its own way informative.

Since it was also shot on vintage video, this a good spot to mention Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess (MC-74, NFX) a film on which I have to recuse myself as reviewer, because my daughter’s boyfriend is the producer.  This film is set a decade earlier than No, so the video image is even scuzzier, but if like me you used to cart around a Sony PortaPak, you will get a huge kick out of watching the flaring and ghosting of grainy black & white pictures, while within the frame we see some poor suckers lugging around those cumbersome machines.  Sometime around 1980, a convention of big-time geeks, from Caltech to MIT, is gathering at a nowheresville motel to pit their refrigerator-sized computers against each other in a chess tournament.  Meanwhile at the same motel, an encounter group weekend is touching and feeling its way to release, while the nerds remain attached to their machines.  In its witty, low-key manner, this film offers a neat retrospective prophecy of Facebook, Internet hook-ups, and a host of other human interactions with technology.  Don’t take my word for it, take that of A.O. Scott in the New YorkTimes.

[Click through for a score of recent films, not without merit, but for which my reservations exceed my recommendation.]

 

In the realm of mainstream thrillers that turn out a bit better than one might expect, I take note of Side Effects (MC-75, NFX) and Flight (MC-76, NFX).  The former is supposed to be Steven Soderbergh’s final feature, but with his relentless productivity, you know he’ll be back. (Indeed, he has already returned with the Behind the Candelabra, his not-bad HBO biopic of Liberace, well-played by Michael Douglas, with Matt Damon as his long-time lover -- MC-82, NFX.)  Side Effects looks for a while as if it might do for the pharmaceutical industry what Traffic did for the drug trade (or as Erin Brockovitch or Contagion, or other Soderbergh films, have done on other topics )– reveal its inner workings through backing up narrative drive with documentary detail – but ultimately it goes for plot twists instead of truth to the subject.  Jude Law is a psychiatrist in bed with drug companies, and his character ought to have remained the focus.  Catherine Zeta-Jones is a colleague and competitor, and they tangle over a patient, played by Rooney Mara.  I’ll say no more, since the twists of the plot are the point, and glossy genre mechanics in the vein of Oceans 11, but for a while this could have been about a lot more.

Flight too finally lands in formula, but is worth watching for Denzel Washington’s Best Actor-nominated performance.  Robert Zemeckis got his air-crash chops down with Cast Away, but outdoes himself here, with an opening airplane mishap that will jolt you around.  The hero pilot who averts disaster turns out to be drunk and coked up, and the story goes though some standard recovery tropes and winds up in courtroom suspense, but Washington is a compellingly flawed character, with the reliable Don Cheadle as his lawyer and foil.  The whole picture is dark and doomy, but insists on uplift at the end of the runway, without really taking off.

If thrillers are your thing, here are a diverse group of four, all pretty-well reviewed, and with some definite good points, but nothing I would urge you to see.  The Impossible (MC-73, NFX) is notable for its special effects, in believably rendering the South Asian tsunami of 2004, and for the pairing (and subsequent separation) of Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor as the vacationing parents of three boys, but Antonio Bayona belittles the scope of the disaster by settling for generic uplift in the lives of one privileged if challenged family. 

Killing Them Softly (MC-64, NFX) boasts an impressive performance from Brad Pitt as a conscientious hitman, and a quirky turn by James Gandolfini, as well as story and dialogue taken from a George V. Higgins novel, but director Andrew Dominik removes the local Boston color and substitutes ham-handed commentary, through continuous background coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign, trading context for pretext (and pretension).  This, plus an excess of camera tricks, keeps the film from being the lowlife criminal classic it so wants to be.

James Marsh follows his Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire with the fictional Shadow Dancer (MC-71, NFX), a twisty tale of the Troubles in Northern Ireland twenty years ago, with Clive Owen as an MI5 officer trying to turn Andrea Riseborough against her family of IRA bombers.  The effective performances, plus the slow-burning suspense of ever-shifting loyalties, gives the a film a certain intensity, but it seems weirdly apolitical and ends with a final twist that yields more “Hunh?” than “Ahhh!”

The Place Beyond the Pines (MC-68, NFX) translates the Indian name for Schenectady, and part of the appeal of Derek Cianfrance’s visually acute film is the strong feel for local color.  The other appeal lies in the magnetism of Ryan Gosling, a tattooed motorcycle stuntman with the circus, who returns to town and bumps into a fling he had the year before.  He’s transformed by the news that he’s the father of a son, quitting the circus and turning his riding skill to the business of robbing banks for child support.  Unfortunately that is only the first part of a triptych.  The story then turns to Bradley Cooper, quite believable as the policeman who becomes an equivocal hero in pursuit of the Gosling character.  The film remains watchable till the third part, which picks up the story of the men’s sons sixteen years later, two young actors I will do the favor of leaving unnamed, and the air leaks out of the proceedings rather severely.  Though I question some of his choices here, Cianfrance is definitely a young filmmaker to watch.

Another is Sofia Coppola.  Though she lost me with her last film, and a general predilection toward vapid celebrity, I was quite surprised to find The Bling Ring (MC-66, NFX) rather engrossing and witty.  Based on a real case, it follows five teenagers who make a practice of breaking into the houses of absent celebrities like Paris Hilton, and helping themselves to the wretched excess of overstuffed closets.  Four grasping girls (Emma Watson stands out) and a boy who can appreciate a pair of designer pumps, they rob and then they party in turn.  The characters are shallow, of course, but the film is not, qualifying as something like satire on the lives of the rich and famous.  And it stands as final testament for the great cinematographer Harris Savides, who died before the film was finished.  In contrast, I found Harmony Korine’s similarly-themed Spring Breakers (MC-63, NFX) unredeemed and unwatchable.

On the teen theme, I saw two movies predicated on musical nostalgia, which were not as good as I might have hoped, though each had its moments.  Not Fade Away (MC-65, NFX) is the film David Chase wanted to make for decades, while he was forced to slave away in television, on shows like The Sopranos.  Well, this bildungsroman is personal filmmaking for sure, but a comedown from his television work.  John Magaro is Chase’s alter ego, a Jersey teenager dreaming of girls and music – what else? – in the Sixties, and James Gandolfini, busy in the last year of his life, is his father.  The music is great, the sense of period strong, passing from 1963 to ’68, but the material does not rise above the generic, despite the obvious autobiographical intent.  Still, if you were there, this film will bring it back.

In the same way, The Sapphires (MC-67, NFX) brings back the heyday of Motown, and the musical numbers make it fun to watch.  As do the four Australian Aboriginal girls who are molded by itinerant musical impresario Chris O’Dowd into a fair simulacrum of The Supremes.  They take their act on the road to Vietnam, entertaining American troops.  They succeed, they have adventures, romantic and otherwise, they hit all the expected notes.  The story and characterizations are perfunctory, but the girls are appealing and the music is rousing.  More formulaic than intimate, this script was put together as a celebration of the writer’s mother and aunt, and the affection does come through.  If you can turn off your brain and turn up the music, these girls will put a smile on your face.

Moving right along, I have a few more pairings of recent films that are somewhat above average, though far from must-see.  As he got better over his first three films, culminating with Goodbye Solo, Ramin Bahrani became one of the most promising young American directors, so I was surprised that At Any Price (MC-60, NFX) came and went without much notice.  Moving into the mainstream, this look at modern industrial farming stars Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron as father and son, with Kim Dickens as the mother and Heather Graham as the hottie who seduces them both.  The best part is the documentary-like exposition of the stranglehold of seed companies, and the concentration of money and power that makes a myth of the family farm.  The film takes a wrong turn into manslaughter and the burying of secrets.  Quaid is always interesting, but Efron is nothing but a pretty face, and the women are bystanders.  The corruption of a family is meant to be a tragic downfall, but fails to engage.

Promised Land (MC-55, NFX) also has some rural documentary value, as Matt Damon and Frances McDormand go around buying up fracking rights from impoverished small landowners.  Gus Van Sant’s direction doesn’t have quite as much feel for the landscape as Bahrani, and fails to make its story and characterization seem more real than manufactured.  The script was written by Damon and John Krasinski, who face off as gas company pitchman and environmental activist, though which is which?  Once again, overplotting undermines the approach to a serious topic, but the film is not without merit.  For more on fracking, watch the documentary Gasland, but don’t bother with Gasland II, in which Josh Fox’s personal quirks become tiresome rather than authenticating.

Two films recently looked back at points on the spectrum of Baby Boomer history, the Beats in On the Road (MC-56, NFX) and the Weather Underground in The Company You Keep (MC-57, NFX).  I value the former for removing any temptation I might ever have of reading Kerouac.  Attentively directed by Walter Salles, and decently acted, this seems a fair enough adaptation of a book that never interested me in the least.  And now this movie has offered a relatively painless Cliff Notes version, to confirm the lack of interest.  Robert Redford’s film casts little light on a rare radical turn in American history, which is covered much better in the excellent documentary The Weather Underground (2002, MC-77, NFX), but it does rehearse some old arguments in one man’s quest to clear his name, with Sundance at sunset going on the run, and running into the likes of old co-conspirators Susan Sarandon, Chris Cooper, Nick Nolte, Richard Jenkins, and (sigh) Julie Christie.  Meanwhile he’s pursued by hotshot investigative reporter Shia LeBeouf, in a callback to Redford himself in All the President’s Men.  I found this journey much more involving than the Beats’, though I would not call it a good film.

I had less patience for two recent attempts by Americans to do the Masterpiece Theater thing.  Some people enjoyed Quartet (MC-64, NFX), but I could not see why Dustin Hoffman would want to make his first directorial effort on such a thin piece of material, about a group of elder musicians banding together to save their retirement home by giving a concert.  Maybe to work with Maggie Smith and other old pros of British acting -- and they do deliver in their usual way, but the proceedings are remarkably inconsequential.  Roger Michell’s Hyde Park on Hudson (MC-55, NFX) had more potential, with Bill Murray as FDR and Laura Linney as one of his mistresses, and Olivia Williams as Eleanor, as they received the first English king to set foot in America, George VI, suffering his now familiar speech impediment and seeking military support at the start of WWII.  But little of the potential is realized by a nondescript script, and a succession of mild and minor moments.

Into the final phase of this round-up of films from the past twelve months, I have three romantic comedies for mature couples that I frankly cannot recommend.  Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones do breathe some life into David Frankel’s odd little number Hope Springs (MC-65, NFX).  They’re a classic Middle American couple, and she hopes to revive their marriage by luring him on retreat to the eponymous Maine town, where couples therapist Steve Carrell plays his sexual advice oddly straight.  TLJ is obviously resistant, La Streep sweetly persistent, the docking in space becomes mission accomplished.  Is this a message movie, or a comedy?  It’s not really clear, but they are an entertaining couple to spend time with.

We’ll always have Freaks and Geeks, but I fell out with Judd Apatow somewhere on his way to becoming a brand name.  With This is 40 (MC-59, NFX), he manages to be too personal and too commercial at the same time, casting his wife (Sally Mann) and daughters against Paul Rudd as his alter ego, to bring the news of the comic indignities of entering middle age.  Sorry, can’t quite empathize with such upscale angst over a privileged existence, and yet the travails of high school will remain ever fresh.

Given Susanne Bier’s directorial track record, it’s surprising that Love is All You Need (MC-60, NFX) is just as vapid and unmemorable as its title.  Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm are quite appealing as the mature couple who meet cute on the way to their children’s wedding celebration, on the also appealing Italian coast.  I could only think of it as Momma Mia! without ABBA, though equally forced by musical cues.  It wasn’t painful to watch, but the pleasure was pretty hackneyed.

If you’ve made it this far, you deserve to come away with a pair of hidden gems.  I’m no great fan of women’s tennis, but I was engrossed by two recent, interrelated documentaries, well worth seeking out:  For “American Masters,” the inspiring Billie Jean King (PBS) ranged as far and wide culturally as Billie Jean herself, and I found Venus & Serena (MC-65, NFX) exceptionally engaging, as much for the sororal relationship as for the rock-’em, sock-’em volleys.