Tomb Raider

Lara Croft has always been a contradictory icon, simultaneously embodying female empowerment and male objectification. Angelina Jolie's cinematic incarnation, while true to its video game source, largely provided pubescent fanboys a living, breathing embodiment of their fantasy girl. 

Recasting the larger-than-life Croft as something approaching a flesh-and-blood female makes for a more palatable heroine (certainly in the cultural moment of the #MeToo movement) and provides viewers the possibility for an emotional connection with the character. 

To that end, the casting of Alicia Vikander, Oscar-winning Best Supporting Actress for “The Danish Girl,” makes perfect sense. Not yet the Tomb Raider (the signature guns don't appear until the end), Vikander's Croft is less Jolie-style Amazon than scrappy street-fighter. Early on, we see her take a beat-down in the boxing ring where she's training and outruns an entire peloton of her fellow bike couriers as the fox in a two-wheeled "fox hunt" that barrels through the streets (and alleys and sidewalks and stairways) of London. In fact, these early action scenes are among the film's most engaging as we can see in her eyes her struggle and determination.

Once Lara leaves London in search of her long-lost millionaire father, however, the action and the character begin feeling much more like standard Tomb Raider fare. The screenplay by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons strands Croft on an uncharted island where she faces a series of familiar video game challenges: yawning chasms to cross, indistinguishable baddies to kill, puzzles to solve, and a series of booby traps deep within an ancient tomb to outsmart. Rendered in obvious CG effects, any sense of real danger quickly evaporates.

 The best moments on the island are brief reprieves from director Roar Uthaug's (“The Wave”) relentless action sequences. In one scene, Croft slips silently down a lush hillside into the enemy camp, muscles taught and bow drawn, eyes scanning all directions as guards pass, at one point even slipping into the tent of evil archeoligist Mathias (a scenery chewing Walton Goggins) to avoid detection. Later, after fighting an opponent to the death, Vikander's Croft, neither flippant nor triumphant; simply stares  blankly, stunned by what she's done. 

By the film's end, one can only begin to wonder at the many missed opportunities. Why cast Dominic West (Jimmy McNulty on TV's “The Wire”) as Lara's father if he's only going to emerge (of course, he's alive on the island) as a doddering Ben Gunn-style castaway? Why pay for actors the caliber of Kristin Scott Thomas and Derek Jacobi only to relegate them to brief book-ending cameos? 

And why make a film based on a game, in the first place, then painstakingly remove its main ingredient—fun?

A Wrinkle in Time

Ava DuVernay's film adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 children’s novel “A Wrinkle in Time” makes its intentions clear in virtually every image, word of dialogue, and note of its soundtrack. Being the first African-American woman to be handed the reigns of a major studio project, DuVernay seems to have been determined to deliver the quintessential validating, empowering cinematic experience for a modern audience of young black girls. 

Key to that experience is providing a cast that reflects, that represents, the audience. In 2018, the family at the center of this story is no longer of an unspecified racial (but presumably white) background. Meg Murray (Storm Reid), the film's 14-year-old heroine who is struggling with self-image and identity as well as the mysterious disappearance of her father, is also bi-racial and a member of a multi-racial family: white physicist father Alex Murray (Chris Pine), black scientist mother Kate Murry (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and adopted Hispanic younger brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe). 

When a trio of magical beings from another dimension appear to help Meg find her dad, they, too, manifest in multi-cultural. multi-racial, and disappointingly familiar human form: Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, and a colossal, two-story Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, respectively, offering inspirational quotes from the likes of Rumi and Winston Churchill and exhorting timid Meg to "Be a warrior!" 

Those exhortations are reinforced throughout by a multicultural collection of soundtrack artists. Chloe x Halle echo Oprah's command with their soundtrack contribution, "Warrior": "I could be a warrior/ Yes, I am a warrior," and DJ Khaled and Demi Levato invoke a kind of aspirational mantra, repeating, "I can, I can, I will, I will / I am, I am, no fear, no fear." 

Even the sets, at least in the early earthbound scenes, are packed with images--photos, posters--of inspirational African American figures, including Maya Angelou and James Baldwin (used to comic visual effect when Charles Wallace visits the principal's office). 

The message seems to be that a woman—young or ancient, of any color—can save the world, even the universe, by believing in herself. 

It's undeniably a worthy message, but it's relentless reiteration threatens to eclipse the film's other elements, including plot (visits to other dimensions feel more like sight-seeing than sortie) and characterization (Mrs. Murray and Meg's fellow traveler Calvin O'Keefe barely make an impression). 

In the film, as in the novel,, Meg's father has been imprisoned by the source of all evil, something known only as IT, located on a planet in another dimension, Camazotz, over which it wields complete control and from which it is relentlessly extending its dark influence throughout all planes of existence, including Earth.  DuVernay's film offers a relatively faithful glimpse of Camazotz, as described in  L’Engle’s novel. Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O'Keefe (Levi Miller) descend to what looks like a suburban cul-de-sac filled with tract homes, pruned trees, and children bouncing balls in clean, uncluttered drives. They\ visitors notice that the balls all bounce in sync to a rhythm emanating from IT until the blank-faced children are called in to dinner simultaneously by nearly identical mothers. 

DuVernay abandons the scene abruptly as Meg and co. are ushered on to other, more threatening scenes. 

For L’Engle, however, this scene is the threat, the relentless, insinuating influence of the powerful in determining what is best for the rest of us. In the novel, IT posits that such uniformity and conformity will put an end to all war and suffering. 

One can't help but be haunted by this scene as Meg and her companions, as well as the audience, are subjected to wave upon wave of the best-intentioned, well-meaning indoctrination.

All of this insistent encouragement begins to feel a bit like coercion, leaving Storm Reid's Meg little to do but passively follow on a journey which should be hers. It's a puzzling and dispiriting consequence for a movie so laudably devoted to liberating young viewers.

A Fantastic Woman

Singer Marina Vidal (Daniela Vega) and her inamorato Orlando Onetto (Francisco Reyes) have much to celebrate. It's Marina's birthday, and they're both giddy about their May-December romance. In a few weeks Orlando plans to whisk Marina away to a romantic getaway at Iguazu Falls, on the Argentine-Brazilian border, though he's misplaced the tickets sometime during his day, which included a stop at a Scandinavian sauna located in downtown Santiago, Chile.

After a night of dinner, dancing and sex, Orlando wakes up not feeling well. In a rush to get him to the hospital, Marina forgets the keys to the apartment and leaves Orlando in the hallway near the elevator. Confused, Orlando heads for the stairwell and falls down a flight of stairs. Later, in surgery at the hospital, Orlando dies.

Such is the traumatic opening of Una Mujer Fantástica, the Oscar-winning film from Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio (“Gloria”), who co-wrote the script with frequent collaborator Gonzalo Maza, and it only gets worse before it gets better.

In her very first onscreen role, Vega portrays the grieving Marina with a steely vulnerability. She's devastated, heartbroken and concerned about propriety in her new status. Without legal standing, Marina calls Orlando’s brother, Gapo (Luis Gnecco), to handle Orlando's affairs, but it's Orlando’s ex-wife (Aline Kuppenheim) and adult son (Nicolás Saavedra) who are rabid to take over his affairs, desiring to expunge Marina from not only his high-rise apartment but the memory of his life.

In their respective bereavement, Marina and the newly widowed Jackie Kennedy (Pablo Larraín, director of 2016's Jackie, is listed as a producer) have this purgatory in common, except Marina literally embodies a further complication: she's transgender.

Subsequently, everyone Marina encounters—from the hospital staff who insist on calling her "sir" to the supposedly sympathetic policewoman called in because she fears the bruises on Orlando's body may indicate he was abusing Marina—pile on microaggressions, mistaken accusations and outright hostility. Her existence is regarded as perversion, and accordingly the relationship with her beloved Orlando comes under suspicion; the only imaginable possibilities being abuse or sex work.

Bucking the trend of casting cisgender actors in trans roles, newcomer Vega, too, is transgender. She's charged with battling the very misperceptions that film, for years, has planted in our collective unconscious. Whether villain or victim, the most common parts, they're rarely taken seriously. Marina's greatest challenge is having her grief recognized.

As this goes on, the story ventures into didacticism. “We were a couple,” Marina is forced to explain. “It was a healthy, consensual relationship between two adults.” It's terrible dialogue, but then speaking isn't Marina's strength; her power comes from music and singing, which Lelio expresses in whimsical fantasy scenes that give Marina a much-needed reprieve from her grief, an escape from the hostile world and the fortification to move on.

The Party

English director and screenwriter Sally Potter (“Orlando,” “Ginger & Rosa”) continues her unpretentious experiments in film, choosing, along with cinematographer and frequent collaborator Alexey Rodionov, to shoot her latest in black and white. But even before the canapés can be served in this drawing-room comedy, the drama comes to a spumy boil and stays there, getting acrider by the minute.

The movie begins at the ending: a slow flash forward reveals an agitated Kristin Scott Thomas opening the door and aiming a gun at the person on her doorstep. Who is the target of this inhospitable greeting? For now, it's us, the viewers. But before we can wonder what we did to deserve such a hostile welcome, the movie switches to a calmer but not much happier time.

Janet, played by Scott Thomas, is preparing a small dinner party to celebrate her appointment as the country's health minister. Her husband, Bill (Timothy Spall), already stewed, leaves his chair in the living room, where he sits almost comatose, only to clumsily and obsessively change the record on his turntable. Their guests, cherry-picked bourgeois caricatures, include Janet's cynical best friend April (Patricia Clarkson) and a cliché-spouting pseudo-philosopher and her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, Gottfried (Bruno Ganz), along with lesbian couple Martha (Cherry Jones) and Jinny (Emily Mortimer), newly pregnant with triplets. Last to arrive is the sweaty, coked-up banker Tom (Cillian Murphy) who keeps changing his mind about shooting Bill.

These seven, embroiled in a hot mess of two ill-timed confessions (inopportune for both the dinner party and the structure of the film), make up the entire cast. Two offscreen characters, an illicit lover represented by a burner phone hidden in Janet's bosom and Tom's wife, who is also Bill's cohort, complicate these relationships somewhat, though the former, overshadowed by the onscreen theatrics, is easily forgotten.

In an already small space fraught with tension, Potter divides her small cast into twos and threes and shuttles them into even more claustrophobic spots — the bathroom, the kitchen, the backdoor alleyway near the garbage cans. There isn't a single person onscreen who's not engaged in an argument or worked up into a homicidal rage. So much of this is unnecessary, though, such as the tension between Martha and Jinny over Martha's lack of maternal excitement, which just feels like overkill.

Comparisons to the 1972 Luis Buñuel film “The Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoisie” are inevitable. Potter's party guests, too, never get to the dinner part of the dinner party. But unlike Buñuel's film, where a series of dreamy, spectral interruptions keep the guests from sating their appetites, those at Potter's party only get in their own way. They know the dinner's in the bin and the party has devolved into a version of hell. Yet, nobody leaves.

Midnighters

Treading, as it does, in neo-noir territory and credited to sibling writer-director duo The Ramsay Brothers, “Midnighters” is likely to invite unfavorable comparisons with the Coen Brothers' cinematic debut “Blood Simple.” Like “Blood Simple” (as well as Danny Boyle's directorial debut “Shallow Grave” and Sam Raimi's  “A Simple Plan”) “Midnighters” follows as the consequences of bad decisions and greed spiral out of control.

In this case, driving home from the company New Year's Eve party, the less-than-happily married Lindsey (Alex Essoe) and Jeff Pitman (Dylan McTee) run down a stranger walking on the road out in the middle of the New England woods. Lack of cell phone service and the realization that they might face breathalyzer tests at a hospital or police station topple the first domino as the couple decides to take the victim to their home until their BAC falls a bit. 

Discovering their address on a scrap of paper in the stranger's wallet is a twist worthy of Hitchcock and, by itself, might have provided sufficient suspense for the proceedings. Screenwriter Alston Ramsay (former speechwriter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General David Petraeus), however, overly concerned with keeping audiences guessing, loads on the twists and turns. 

Lindsay's mooching younger sister Hannah (Perla Haney-Jardine), who has been staying at the house, returns from her own New Year's celebration. Beat cops arrive, having found the Pitmans' license plate at the site, not far from an abandoned car. But when "Detective Smith" (Ward Horton) shows up at the door, grinning like a maniac from an episode of Criminal Minds, it becomes clear that the plot has careened into slasher film territory. 

Nothing wrong with that, except that Lindsey and Jeff's motivation also shifts abruptly from protecting their already-shaky family unit to simple greed and vengeance.For characters that have been introduced as an honest working-class couple, the facile embrace of betrayal and violence feels contrived. Faring even worse, Hannah never coalesces into a character, remaining a mere plot device to connect all the players. 

With no one left to care about, the film contents itself with hide-and-seek in the unfinished house, with occasional bursts of gruesome violence (including a more prolonged take on “Blood Simple”'s nail-in-the-hand). 

Even the locale remains undeveloped and unexplained. Why New England? 

The Texas heat and desolation informed the characters and action of Blood Simple, just as the snow-covered expanses of rural Minnesota provided a suitably desolate backdrop for the morality play that unfolds in “A Simple Plan.” “Midnighters”' few exterior scenes feature dimly-lighted woods and country two-lanes, but it could just as well be the Ozarks as this nebulous "New England." 

With neither characters nor location to anchor the proceedings, Director Julius Ramsay's game attempts to develop suspense are ultimately undermined by a script that substitutes plot contortion for character.

Annihilation

Based on Jeff VanderMeer’s “The Southern Reach Trilogy,” the latest release from writer/director Alex Garland begins with an interrogation. An unnamed authority figure obscured by a hazmat suit aims a barrage of seemingly simple questions at a shell-shocked young woman, portrayed by Natalie Portman. We don't yet know her name or the circumstances that have put her in a guilty quarantine, but the way she answers each question—with a discouraged "I don't know"—leads her peeved inquisitor to finally ask, "What is it you know?"

What then follows in the rest of the film is, presumably, what our battered protagonist knows. Her name is Lena and she teaches, based on the sample lesson, what appears to be high school sophomore-level biology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. (Lena, the script warns us, specializes in the genetically programmed life cycle of cells, especially, the triggers built into them that cause mutation and death.)

Lena isn't just some elite living in aseptic gray interiors; she's a secret warrior, having served seven years in the Army, where she met her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac). It's been a year since she last saw him, so when he reappears, zombie-like and resembling an Andrei Tarkovsky-inspired doppelganger, on the weekend she's resolved to repaint their bedroom as a symbol of her moving on, she's both elated and angry.

But before Lena can get any answers from the Kane-like being, they're whisked off to a secret government stronghold charged with the study of Area X, a portion of the Gulf Coast enclosed by a mysterious energy force called "The Shimmer." Although penetrable, the variegated oily aura conceals a Wonka-like puzzle; many go into the area but none come back out, that is, until Kane, whose dire condition inspires Lena to consider acting out a reversal of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth; venturing into hell to get her husband back.

Luckily, having exhausted its crack teams of male soldiers the government is now willing to send in a voluntary team of women scientists. In a world in which creation runs amok, shouldn't those most tempted to eat the fruit of knowledge be the first choice? Led by Dr. Ventress, played by an anesthetic Jennifer Jason Leigh, and made up of a recovering drug addict and medic (Gina Rodriguez); self-harmer and physicist (Tessa Thompson) and anthropologist Cass (Tuva Novotny), Lena bivouacs with them but doesn't bond. The other members of the squad are defined by their broadest characteristics and dispatched with relative ease (minus a disturbing encounter with a vocal bear that gives the one batting Leonard DiCaprio around like a ragdoll in “The Revenant” a run for its money).

These characters—more like paper dolls—practice only the most elemental science. They aren't going to inspire little girls. In fact, instead of the awe and grit exhibited by the likes of Laura Dern's Dr. Ellie Sattler and Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley or even the outright clumsy joy of the most recent Ghostbusters, they give way to hysteria and heebie-jeebies too soon and too often. This film may pass the Bechdel test, but it's only statistically feminist.

Hostiles

In its earnest attempt to de-romanticize the myths promulgated by the classic American Western, "Hostiles" merely winds up replacing one set of clichés with another. 

Read Mike's review on KCActive.

Call Me By Your Name

Based on André Aciman's 2007 novel and adapted for the screen by James Ivory, the acclaimed director of literary adaptations such as "A Room With a View" and "Howard's End," "Call Me By Your Name" plays like an idealized, haut monde inversion of last year's justifiably celebrated gay coming-of-age drama "Moonlight."

Read Mike's review of "Call Me By Your Name" on KCActive.

Wonder Wheel

While on stage at the London Film Critics’ Circle Awards, actor Kate Winslet tearfully confessed to "bitter regrets" about working with "men of power" who have been accused of sexual abuse. The actor didn't name names, but she's appeared in Roman Polanski’s 2011 film “Carnage” and Woody Allen’s latest theatrical release, which could also be his last, considering the rumors regarding the cancelled distribution of his next film.

Before contrition overtook Winslet, she played Ginny, a migraine-prone waitress in a post-war Coney Island clam house who pines for her days on the stage. Ginny is now unhappily married to Humpty (Jim Belushi), a loud but soft-hearted slob who when he's not fishing with his buddies off the pier doesn't quite scrape together a living as the ticket-taker for the park's carousel, the Wonder Wheel of the film's title. Neither pays much attention to Richie (Jack Gore), Ginny's red-headed juvenile delinquent son from a previous marriage to a handsome actor.

With the 2013 release of Blue Jasmine, starring Cate Blanchett, some thought Allen had finally exhausted his obsession with tragic Blanche DuBois-like female characters. But this time, instead of a modern interpretation—Anjelica Huston's turn as the inconvenient mistress in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” is a further example—Allen employs cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's claustrophobic framing and colorist Anthony Raffaele's contrast and shadows and highlights to channel the Technicolor melodramatics of mid-century Tennessee Williams adaptations.

Nevertheless, it's to dramatist Eugene O’Neill that lifeguard Mickey (Justin Timberlake), an aspiring playwright, pledges an affinity, interrupting his summer affair with Ginny to introduce her to one of O'Neill's books and lecture her on the concept of self-deception for survival. It's a schoolish lesson redundant for someone so practiced in delusion (Ginny pretended to like fishing with Humpty just so she could start pretending to be a waitress on the boardwalk).

Such is the fundamental deficiency of Allen's storytelling. From the opening scene, he relies on the narration of Mickey, a nebbish interloper, for the moral supervision of the film. For any role more substantial than a two-minute comedy sketch, Timberlake's acting abilities are limited to a stiff impersonation. When Mickey throws Ginny over for the pretty Carolina (Juno Temple), Humpty’s prodigal daughter being tracked by the mob because she "knows where the bodies are buried," it's hard to believe in the sincerity of the feeling or to care about the consequences. Perhaps this failure could signal the need for Allen to take a closer, clearer look at himself.

The Shape of Water

Embracing magical realism as well as personal obsessions with horror, history and myth, co-writer and director Guillermo del Toro has conjured a film that is simple like a fairy tale yet unfolds into surprisingly relevant commentary on an increasingly intolerant culture, our glorification of the "good old days" (when America was "great"), and the importance of fantasy (on screen, on the radio, in books) in our lives. All of which is presented in the cinematic language of a filmmaker at the height of his powers.

Read Mike's review of "The Shape of Water" on KCActive.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

IIn the latest film from writer/director Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges,” “Seven Psychopaths”), Frances McDormand plays grieving mother Mildred Hayes. Determined to resuscitate the investigation into the case of who raped and killed her daughter, Mildred hires out three billboards near the scene of the crime off a lonesome highway. “Raped While Dying,” “And Still No Arrests?” and “How Come, Chief Willoughby?” the billboards demand.

Notwithstanding McDormand's considerable range—which unfortunately seems to be reduced to a flippant irascibility as she ages—Mildred's sole emotional reaction to her guilt-ridden bereavement (the source of which is revealed in a heavy-handed flashback) is a strident tenacity, intensified by the baffling mechanics overalls she stubbornly wears throughout the entire movie, even while on a date with a man (Peter Dinklage) who has just done her a substantial favor and over the coat she wears while stocking shelves at the gift shop where she works. McDormand gives an undeniably powerful performance but the role is not dynamic.

Woody Harrelson plays Chief Willoughby, the man the final billboard calls to account by name. Short of violating the civil rights of every man in America, Willoughby has performed a competent investigation, based on the DNA sample found on the burned body of Mildred's daughter. Willoughby expects the case to break in the same way all small-town crime gets solved—when someone overhears the perpetrator bragging about committing the crime at the local bar.

But before that can happen, McDonagh, who in his last movie proved to be a fan of a meta narrative, plays tricks with the story. Not since Alfred Hitchcock's sleight of hand, forcing viewers to switch identification, if not allegiance, from Marion Crane to Norman Bates, in 1960's “Psycho” has a MacGuffin been used so audaciously in place of plot. Viewers hoping for a showdown between McDormand and Harrelson must instead make do with one between Mildred and Willoughby's hotheaded deputy Dixon, played by Sam Rockwell.

Bullied by an overbearing mother (Sandy Martin) and stupid enough to answer "What?" when Mildred addresses him as “Hey, f**khead," Dixon is forced to make leaps in intelligence and integrity, spurred on only by a few kind words in a letter from his former boss. Where Mildred's personality is uniformly outraged throughout, Dixon's is miraculously, unbelievably transformed.

There's more than a clue to the overall feeling of the film in the opening sequence. When Mildred approaches Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones), the young media marketing tycoon in the town, about his terms for renting the billboards, he's reading a paperback of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Later, after a brutal encounter with Dixon, Red repeats the sentiment: life has "no pleasure but meanness."

Wonder

Auggie Pullman (Jacob Tremblay) likes Star Wars, Minecraft and his dog, Daisy. In other words, he's a typical 10-year-old, if just a bit nerdy. What sets him apart, however, is the genetic disorder, Treacher Collins Syndrome, that even after 27 surgeries leaves his face looking underdeveloped.

To spare Auggie the inevitable stares and cruelty, his mom, Isabel (Julia Roberts), has been homeschooling him in a corner of the kitchen in their Brooklyn brownstone. His dad, Nate (Owen Wilson playing his usual silly, people-pleasing golden retriever of a person), thinks continuing this arrangement would be easiest for Auggie, but Isabel wants Auggie to start fifth grade with the kids at a prep school.

It's at this point that writer/director Stephen Chbosky (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower”) begins the story, based on R. J. Palacio's 2012 bestseller, and it follows Auggie from the first day of the school year to the last. Of course, Auggie is bullied, but he also makes friends. His best friend is a sweet scholarship kid named Jack (Noah Jupe), whose easy-going nature also makes him a target for the school bully through peer pressure—less aggressive but just as damaging.

Auggie is a singular kid, and under the prosthetics Tremblay plays him with a careful inhibition. But thankfully, the film expands to reveal not just Auggie's point of view, but also that of Jake and Via (Izabela Vidovic), Auggie's older sister who, because of Auggie's great needs has her own, smaller yet no less significant to her, overlooked by their parents.

This provides an important lesson in perspective, even coming as it does in a film in which the family's privilege makes their greatest concern about a serious medical condition about the public's reaction to visible differences and not access to healthcare. By comparison, in the 1985 film Mask, starring a young Eric Stoltz under his own prosthetics as the real-life Rocky Dennis, director Peter Bogdanovich upped the stakes; his condition was life-threatening so as a result Rocky and the motorcycle gang he considered his family weren't nearly as concerned about how people would react to his face.

Still, Chbosky infuses a contagious tenderness into his scenes that even his use of Daveed Diggs as the boys' teacher and the platitude-spouting moral authority of the film can't dampen. Roll your eyes if you must but keep your heart open. Sometimes rich white people problems are still problems.

The Florida Project

In writer/director Sean Baker's latest film, six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) runs riot at the Magic Castle, a garish lavender monstrosity subsisting in the shadow of Disney World. The place is kept from total squalor through the grudging but persistent labors of manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe). A few tourists, who call it "a welfare slum motel," check in by mistake, but there's really just one reason anyone, including Bobby, ends up there—they have nowhere else to go.

The last time a kid had the run of a hotel in a movie was in Stanley Kubrick's “The Shining,” and he was terrorized by visions both real and paranormal. In Baker's script, which he co-wrote with frequent collaborator Chris Bergoch, Moonee and her gang, made up of a sensitive kid called Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), the new girl from a neighboring motel, are the terrors. This ragtag crew plays at a lot of the usual kid stuff: hide-and-seek, cartoons. But they also trespass in foreclosed houses and start fires.

Moonee’s mom, Halley (Bria Vinaite), is supposed to be watching over the kids while Scooty's mom waitresses at a nearby diner (she sneaks waffles out the back door for their lunch). Halley's not absent but she's not engaged either. Viewers quickly learn she's the source of Moonee's brazenness as well as her mature vocabulary. Anytime either of them feels threatened, they unleash a stream of angry vulgarity, sometimes warranted but never helpful to their cause. Still, you can't help but root for them.

It's a testament to his acting skills that to see Dafoe appear on screen means not knowing right away whether he'll be playing savior or menace. But with this project, Baker and Bergoch have handed the veteran actor the role of a lifetime. Much like any sympathetic member of the audience, Bobby is allowed to remain conflicted.

Baker shot the entirety of his previous feature film Tangerine using only iPhone cameras. Far from a gimmick, the photography created a sense of intimacy and an insider's familiarity with place as the camera closely followed the two transgender friends as they hustled— figuratively and literally—around L.A.

The action in Florida takes place in a more confined area; Halley and Moonee never venture farther away from the motel, located near Seven Dwarfs Lane (the street sign is one of the few actual references to their proximity to the Magic Kingdom) than they can walk. Cinematographer Alexis Zabé shoots the local off-brand landmarks in colorful widescreen, as if to not just reveal the tackiness of the strip mall but to elevate it.

The fruit market in the shape of an orange, a gift shop lorded over by a giant wizard and the cone-shaped soft-serve ice cream stand, where Moonee and friends beg for money for ice cream and when they can't get that they beg for the ice cream, exemplify the once delightfully novel now discarded. It's revealing the hidden realm of the déclassé, and Moonee is its queen.

Jane

Archival director Brett Morgan ("The Kid Stays in the Picture") pieces together the early days in Africa of world-renown conservationist Jane Goodall from hundreds of hours of 16 mm footage taken by National Geographic wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick. Goodall herself, now 83, provides the narration, describing in detail how her innate desire to live in Africa took precedence over the more traditional trappings, such as marriage and motherhood, made all the more compelling (and just a little bit sad) by her matter-of-fact delivery.

Morgan gives depth to Goodall's reputation by focusing on her unusual single-mindedness and allows her to answer those who dismissed her findings, more likely because she was a leggy blonde than not having any scientific training when she began her surveys. The male gaze is present in van Lawick's footage — Morgan and cinematographer Ellen Kuras manage to soften and brighten it — after all, the baron fell in love with her by watching her through his lens. And so do we.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos ("Dogtooth," "The Lobster") continues to explore the dread and foreboding that comes from an isolated world in which the rules of society are external and immutable. In his most recent English-language feature, surgeon and recovering alcoholic Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) is both the cause and the means of a family sacrifice that's meant to restore balance to the universe; the terms laid out to him by the unnervingly mature 16-year old Martin (Barry Keoghan).

The story follows an amped-up game of an eye-for-an-eye revenge, but all its participants remain disturbingly sedate. An early scene in which Steven's wife Anna (Nicole Kidman), also a doctor, pretends to be under general anesthetic while her husband makes love to her acts as baffling portent. All lines of dialog, while intensely personal — during their first meeting, Steven's kids have a lengthy discussion measuring Martin's sparse underarm hair against their dad's; hardly a fair comparison considering Farrell's hirsute state — are delivered in the same matter-of-fact tone one stranger would use to tell another her shoelace is untied.

Lanthimos drew inspiration from the legend of Agamemnon, whose sails were stilled by goddess Artemis after he poached a deer from her garden. To mention more of the original Greek tragedy would be to give away too much of the movie's plot but don't expect any actual deer. Unlike "The Lobster," in which the random appearance of animals provided some absurdist humor, the titular mammal is merely a metaphor. In this, one of the best films of the year, Lanthimos is strictly interested in the human, pushed to the extremes of discomfort in order to restore the universe's dispassonate balance.