Hereditary

“Hereditary,” the feature debut from writer-director Ari Aster, is a haunted house tale that ponders what exactly it is that haunts a house—or a household. With nods to horror milestones including “Rosemary's Baby,” “Don't Look Now,” “The Exorcist,” and more recently, “The Witch,” Aster presents an original and genuinely terrifying story of a family in crisis, suggesting that guilt and secrets (often one and the same) can destroy as surely as any evil spirit. 

The film opens with the display of a newspaper obituary announcing the death of the elderly matriarch of the Graham family in the home of her daughter Annie Graham. Then, in a long take, the camera ushers us into that house, floating through an open window and gliding across an artist's studio toward a dollhouse-sized Craftsman with an open side revealing painstakingly detailed furnishings and miniature residents. The camera continues pushing in until the screen is filled by an upstairs bedroom where a figure appears to sleep. With a knock—and utterly seamless editing—the bedroom door swings open, and Annie's husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) enters the real bedroom to wake their teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff) for his grandmother's funeral. 

It's an impressive effect, bringing to mind the scene from The Shining in which the the camera zooms in on a scale model of the Overlook Hotel's hedge maze until the figures of Wendy and Danny come into view at its center. The facsimile house is one of many constructed in meticulous detail by prominent artist Annie (Toni Collette), within which she has recreated, in a series of miniature tableaux, moments of grief and trauma from her past. Her art seems to serve as a way for her to unpack and control her experience, yet the opening juxtaposition of doll- and real house seem to place the Grahams, themselves, in the position of dolls, at the mercy and whims of an unknown artist. 

Early on, despite the appearance of normalcy--the well-maintained Craftsman and middle-class lifestyle--something feels off about the Graham family. Returning from the funeral, rather than commiserate, members abruptly disperse--Annie to the sanctuary of her studio, Peter to his bedroom to smoke a bowl, and daughter Charlie (Millie Shapiro) to her room and the solace of her own art, a collection of dark scribblings and vaguely humanoid found-object sculptures. 

It soon becomes apparent that the Graham's is a house of secrets. Among her mother's belongings, Annie is surprised to discover spiritualism texts and a final cryptic handwritten message from her mother. At school, awkward, blank-faced Charlie snips the head off a dead bird with scissors and quietly slips it into her pocket. Peter's more mundane secrets involve sneaking out to party with his friends. By contrast, relatively normal husband Steve seems distanced from the family simply by his obliviousness to what is going on around him. 

As the signs of an occult influence accumulate (mediums and seances, shadows and spirits, sleepwalking and prophetic dreams), the resulting eruption of suppressed anger, resentment, and guilt within this household remains utterly human, yet poses as much a threat to the family as any supernatural force. 

It is this balance between the recognizably human and the supernatural that raises Hereditary far above average horror movie fare. One almost feels that the supernatural element could be removed from the film, and a very strong dysfunctional family drama would remain. In large part, this is a testament to the power of  Toni Collette's performance, which builds slowly and incrementally from grief to panic and to utter hysteria. Wolff and Shapiro, too, deliver performances that turn on emotions not articulated, but visible in a hurt glance or a slumped shoulder. 

Like Annie with her rooms, director Aster asserts an assured, deliberate control over the proceedings, studiously avoiding the sort of jump-scares that litter most current horror, attending instead to a careful and constant ratcheting up of dread. And the cinematography by Pawel Pogorzelski, like the plot, strikes a creepy balance between the realistic and the phantasmagorical through the skillful use of icy tones, shadows, and long, slow camera movements. 

The result is powerful and upsetting. But be warned: Hereditary is not the sort of roller-coaster horror film that gives you a scream and a laugh, then lets you shrug it off. Aster's vision is brutal and likely to haunt you for days.

The Rider

For her second feature film, writer/director Chloé Zhao (“Songs My Brothers Taught Me”), who grew up in Beijing, attended high school in London and studied political science at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, returns to the Lakota Pine Ridge reservation in North Dakota. Featuring nonprofessional actors in semi-biographical roles, it's a genuine and tender portrayal of the true West.

Zhao's approach to filmmaking is determinedly verité. She hasn't just cast representational actors; she has affectionately developed her script around their stories. It's the antithesis of Hollywood whitewashing.

Lakota cowboy Brady Jandreau plays Brady Blackburn, a bronco-buster whose last rodeo ride kicked him in the head. He's the kind of guy who, after checking himself out of the hospital, stoically removes the staples from the gash in his head himself—an act of self-reliance rooted more in geographical isolation and poverty than machismo. Apparently, the rodeo circuit doesn't offer an HMO plan.

“No more rodeos and no more riding,” admonish his doctors, but the stolid Brady, keeping the seizures that contort his hand into a fist a secret, insists he'll compete again, just as he holds out hope for the recovery of his best friend and bull rider Lane Scott. In the film, Lane acts as a cautionary tale, reminding us how much worse Brady's injuries could get if he rides again. Brady's decision not to sell his competition saddle or to train a young rider has high stakes. In real life, a 2013 car crash caused Lane's brain injury.

In this seamless union of fact and fiction—Zhao claims it's a 50/50 blend—it might be tempting to pick through biographical details to downplay the narrative, but to do so would undo the layered magic Zhao, along with cinematographer Joshua James Richards, have conjured. There's a practically wordless sequence in which Brady trains a near-wild horse that makes it impossible to separate Brady the horse trainer turned actor from the Brady on-screen.

Lilly Jandreau, the actor's sister, and Tim Jandreau, his father, play sister and father to the fictionalized Brady. The same goes for the posse of his friends. These are once-in-a-lifetime bespoke roles, and it's doubtful there will be any other supporting roles, as well as they worked in the film. Some might even suppose the same for actor Brady, who, in a rodeo competition in 2016, sustained a life-threatening injury after he was thrown from a horse and trampled, if he weren't such a natural here.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

The greatest burden that the current Star Wars cinematic product bears is the subtitle it shares with its Disney-produced predecessor, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story." 

Like the addition of "for Target" to designer brands such as Missoni, Michael Graves, Lilly Pulitzer and Hunter Boots, the subtitle makes clear that what is being offered is not the real deal, but a mass-produced, lower-quality facsimile, trading on the reputation of the original. 

For designers, a mass market line may have value because it is aimed at consumers unfamiliar with the original product. The "Star Wars Story" line, however, is aimed precisely at consumers intimately familiar with the core Star Wars saga who bring to the theater relatively high expectations (not to say that Star Wars is to cinema what artisan designers are to fashion, but you get the idea). 

And so there is “Solo,” the second in a series of scheduled stand-alone Star Wars Stories, this one centered on one of the most iconic and beloved characters in the LucasFilm universe. 

Star Wars fans may love Han Solo, the brash, arrogant outlaw-with-a-conscience portrayed by Harrison Ford in the original trilogy. But have Han Solo fans spent the past 40 years wondering about the origin of his surname? where he got his blaster pistol? what exactly the Kessel Run is (which Solo bragged the Millenium Falcon made "in less than 12 parsecs")? 

Well, “Solo” is here to answer these questions anyway, by way of an origin story. 

Written by Lawrence Kasdan, who has been crafting the Star Wars story-arc since “The Return of the Jedi,” and his son Jonathan, “Solo” benefits from telling a much smaller tale in a galaxy only tangentially related to The Saga. Hence, no Death Star, no Force, no lightsabers, and only a smattering of the Empire (stormtroopers, and a familiar cameo by an Imperial Cruiser). What results is an enjoyable, if unremarkable, adventure yard that might have fared relatively well at the box office even without its Star Wars affiliation. 

After a slow start on the slave planet Corellia, bogged down by endless exposition , murky cinematography by the usually-excellent Bradford Young (“A Most Violent Year,” “Arrival”), and a surprisingly static Landspeeder chase, the action jumps planets and time (three years) to an actual plot. 

Fighting as an Imperial infantryman (after being expelled from from the Flight Academy), Han falls in with space pirates led by the amoral Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), is introduced to Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) in a perilous and hilarious meet-cute, and gets roped into the film's central action--an intergalactic Great Train Robbery in service of Beckett's crime-lord boss, Dryden Voss (Paul Bettany), who comes off more unctuous Bond villain than viable counterpart to Jabba the Hutt.  Along the way, he wins the iconic Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) in the fabled game of sabacc.

As Solo, Alden Ehrenreich (“Beautiful Creatures,” “Hail, Caesar!”) is sufficiently swaggering and sarcastic, even if we're never in doubt that this Han will ultimately do the right thing. Better is Donald Glover's take on the 70s-smooth Lando, a performance with enough charm (and capes) to rival Billy Dee Williams'. And both are overshadowed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Lando's companion (in every sense of the word, it seems) droid L3-37. With a nod to the Black Lives Matter movement, L3-37 is a droid-rights activist who takes the heist as an opportunity to act on her rhetoric by fomenting a droid revolution amidst the confusion of the operation.

It's a moment with resonances beyond the confines of the screen, a moment frustratingly unique in a film more interested in simply keeping the action and the Easter eggs coming.

RBG

Directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West make clear in its title the editorial perspective of this biographical documentary. The acronym RBG, a nod to the late combative rap legend Notorious B.I.G., suggests the filmmakers view Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the pop cultural icon she has become over the last 15 of her 85 years, the subject of internet memes, SNL impersonations, bobbleheads, t-shirts, and other merchandise (many featuring the justice's head grafted to Wonder Woman's body).. This is Ginsburg the Dissenter, the "notorious" voice of liberal dissent to the decisions of our highest court's increasingly conservative majority. 

The film uses that notoriety as a jumping-off point, opening with audio of detractors labeling Ginsburg  "a disgrace to the court," "a vile human being," even "a monster." 

Except for a late mention of Ginsburg's roundly-rebuked public criticism of then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump, however, “RBG” generally steers clear of controversy (or criticism), instead celebrating its subject's career-long crusade for gender equality. 

The directors have constructed the film around footage of Ginsburg delivering a brief autobiography as part of her 1993 Supreme Court confirmation hearing and find a lifelong theme for her career and personal life in advice she received at a young age from her mother: to be a lady and to be independent, which Ginsburg explains she interpreted as meaning to avoid wasting energy on distracting emotions such as anger and resentment, and to be able to fend for herself (.i.e., without depending on a man to survive). 

What unfolds over the following hour and a half outlines little more than the highlights of Ginsburg's career, yet even these basic facts are impressive. In a series of interviews, childhood friends, relatives and colleagues describe Ginsburg as a young woman indefatigable in her pursuit of excellence in the field of law despite numerous obstacles, some the product of circumstance, others the result of systemic gender bias. 

As a student at Harvard Law School in the Fifties (one of nine women in a class of 500), she was also caring for her husband Marty as he battled (successfully) cancer, taking notes for the classes he was missing, typing up his class papers as he dictated them, raising a year-old baby, and completing her own classwork so successfully that she became the first woman named to the “Harvard Law Review.” 

Unable to find work in New York upon graduation (most firms would not deign to even interview a woman, despite glowing recommendations from classmates), Ginsburg joined the ACLU's Women's Rights Project and, as General Counsel, argued a series of successful gender equality cases  before the Supreme Court. While the filmmakers deserve credit for attempting to emphasize the power of Ginsburg's arguments by featuring key passages on screen as she intones the words, the film moves at such a pace that there is little time to reflect on the influence of these cases. Ginsburg, herself, reflecting on these years, unironically compares her patient, diplomatic delivery of basic principles of equality before an all-male Supreme Court bench to being “a kindergarten teacher" because the justices just "didn’t get gender laws." 

The film touches on the dynamic between Ginsburg and late husband Marty, a successful lawyer in his own right who stepped aside to support her ambitions. Also apparent in interviews with her adult daughter Jane, with whom the justice seems to have a close relationship, is a degree of ambivalence about that ambition (asked to describe the justice as a mother, Jane simply replies, "Exigent").

Interestingly, one begins to get a clearer sense of the justice's personality as she shows off her collection (a closet-full) of jabots (the decorative collars she is known for wearing in court), including the "dissent jabot," made of stylish black velvet with gold and silver studs, and the "majority opinion jabot," a gift from her clerks, crocheted in tones of gold, brown, and yellow.

 Despite a parade of talking heads, including Orin Hatch, who acknowledges a grudging admiration, and longtime friend and fellow opera-lover, the late uber-conservative justice Antonin Scalia, the film is most revealing when it lets its retiring subject speak for herself, something at which she has always excelled.

Un Beau Soleil Interieur (Let the Sunshine In)

Etta James and her signature song "At Last" provide a counterpoint to the trysts that pass for love in Un Beau Soleil Interieur, what may be best labeled a very black romantic comedy by French director Claire Denis (“Chocolat,” “White Material”). 

James's hit plays in a rural bar as Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), recovering from a falling out with some friends at a nearby artists' retreat, sways alone to the swooning string lines and romantic lyrics: "At last, my love has come along, My lonely days are over, and life is like a song." From the back of the room, a  rough-looking workingman approaches, and the two sway together, connected in a moment and movement that transcends words and worlds, far removed from the complications of real life.

The scene embodies a romantic ideal. But Isabelle (and Denis and co-writer, novelist Christine Angot) know that such moments are fleeting at best. Perhaps that's why James gazes down (in judgment? sympathy? amusement?) from an album cover on Isabelle's apartment wall as various men come and go, seldom providing the satisfaction she seeks. 

A middle-aged divorced mother and successful painter living in Paris, Isabelle seems to have no problem attracting men. In fact, the film is essentially built around a series of liaisons with lovers, old and new, that flare up but inevitably sputter.

 It would be easy to blame her disappointments on the men, most of whom are married and looking for a reprieve from their wives (at least one of whom goes out of his way to clarify that he will not leave his wife for Isabelle: “You’re charming, but my wife is extraordinary”). 

It would be easy to attribute her troubled love-life to the limited pool of men available to a middle-aged woman.

 And as we watch her make attempt after attempt to connect, it becomes tempting to blame Isabelle, herself, for her problems. At some moments, as she verbally spars with lovers or endures their vapid seductions and excuses, one wants to shake her and scream, "Dump him!" 

But at her core, Isabelle is a very human knot of contradictions. Her sexual confidence, signified by the too-young pair of thigh-high, stiletto-heel boots she dons for nearly every date, is replaced by tears as she staggers down the hall later that night, awkwardly pulling them off and leaving them where they drop. She mentions a 10-year-old daughter, but we only catch a glimpse of her through a car window. In a single scene, she can move from demanding to end the date to begging her companion to come up. 

Denis keeps those conflicts front and center, the camera fixed closely on Binoche--on her darting eyes, her nervous fingers, her grip on a car armrest as she and a date verbally spar as a form of foreplay. 

Against the film's closing credits, the voice of hope reappears, this time in the form of a charlatan psychic (Gerard Depardieu) who implores Isabelle to remain open to the light (hence, the title), to possibility, to the man who is coming. 

A message of love, or another come-on?

Mountain

A whiff of pretentiousness fills the air as Mountain opens with black-and-white footage of a stage tech tuning a piano in a concert hall, a musician warming up a cello, and narrator Willem Dafoe, sporting headphones, settling behind a microphone. Against a dissonant tremolo, a stark black screen displays the unattributed epigraph, "Those who dance are considered mad by those who cannot hear the music." 

Not a good sign. 

But then then come the mountains. 

Against a washed-out, monochromatic mountainside, a red dot is visible. Presumably a climber. The camera slowly glides in, then suddenly cuts to a shot from almost directly above the figure, peering down, past his head and shoulders, toward the vast chasm beneath as he slowly reaches out, feeling for a grip in the sheer rock. No ropes. No harness. Just a pair of athletic shoes and a thin layer of chalk on his bare hands. 

It's a stunning, vertiginous minute and a half, and nothing else in the film will match it. But several moments will come close. 

Australian director Jennifer Peedom, whose 2015 “Sherpa” documented the commodification and exploitation of indigenous peoples in service of the Everest trade, here teams up with the Australian Chamber Orchestra for something more akin to a tone poem than a standard documentary. Set to a range of classical chestnuts (Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons," Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King") as well as brief original passages by ACO conductor / composer Richard Tognetti, Peedom offers impressive footage of intrepid mountain climbers, as well as base jumpers, freestyle skiers, snow-boarders, and para-bikers. 

The real star of this effort, however, is cinematographer and professional climber Renan Ozturk, who makes impressive use of the most current drone and helicopter cam technology to obtain truly remarkable footage of activities never before captured so closely or vividly. Frustratingly, Peedom eschews subtitles identifying the peaks, locales, and climbers on screen, inadvertently creating a distraction in her determination to avoid them.

Dafoe's brief narrative interjections suggest the film's historical and philosophical focus: When, and why, did we stop fearing these foreboding regions and find ourselves, instead, drawn to conquer them?

The narration is drawn from British writer Robert Macfarlane's 2003 historical reflection “Mountains of the Mind” and includes such blanket statements as, "Three centuries ago, risking one's life to climb a mountain would have been considered tantamount to lunacy," and, "During the second half of the 1700s, however, people started for the first time to travel to mountains."

It quickly becomes clear that "we" and "people" refer solely to westerners, certainly not the ancient cultures that have inhabited mountainous regions the world over for centuries. Despite the occasional shot of a Sherpa village or eastern religious temple for color, the film's focus stays firmly on the western interlopers.

Even at a brief 74 minutes, an overreliance on time-lapse shots of nightfall and slow zooms from wide vistas to a tiny human figure pinned, like an insect, to a cliff face suggest that the filmmakers have run out of new things to show. And Dafoe's florid pronouncements, such as ”They watched us arrive. They will watch us leave," suggest that no real answers to the film's ruminative questions will be forthcoming.

Tully

For their latest release, director Jason Reitman and writer by Diablo Cody, the duo behind “Young Adult,” have once again teamed up with Charlize Theron. For the role, Theron padded her svelte frame with as much as 50 extra pounds. It should be noted that the last time the actor put on noticeable weight for a role was for her Oscar-winning turn as serial killer Aileen Wuornos. This time she portrays a different kind of monster: a bad mom.

Theron is Marlo, who, when first introduced, is pregnant with her third child—a mid-life surprise. Husband Drew (Ron Livingston), when not traveling for work, helps their oldest, Sarah (Lia Frankland), with her homework but does little else around the house, leaving Marlo to deal with Jonah (Asher Miles Fallica) whose undiagnosable sensory sensitivities cause teachers and relatives to repeatedly describe him as "quirky," much to Marlo's irritation. "Do I have a kid or a f—ing ukulele?" she eventually snaps at his school's principal (Gameela Wright).

To be fair, it's not that Marlo is abusive, or even that neglectful. She's smart-alecky and stand-offish. “I have my own personal hug-buffer now,” she says of her pregnant belly, and Drew confirms she may prefer to navigate the world that way were she not aware that her mammoth belly, beyond mere baby bump, is considered obscene to some. But Marlo's biggest problem isn't that she doesn't live up to the unforgiving standards of perfection for privileged mothers; it's that she actually wants to, despite her contempt.

A chance meeting with a former roommate at the beginning of the movie informs us that a lifetime ago Marlo possessed a creative, adventurous identity that she traded for a dull, settled suburban life without much thought about the casualties of her safe choices. "Women don't heal," she laments later. They just cover the scars with makeup.

Enter Tully (Mackenzie Davis), the night nanny. She's an energetic, flat-bellied sprite who offers comfort through sibylline scientific facts and philosophical conundrums. She has the assured wisdom only one so young can possess; an attitude as pacifying, if not more, to Marlo as it is to new baby Mia. The two women have much in common, save for where they are in the chronology of their lives.

Under Tully's spell, cupcakes are baked for treats to bring to school, balanced meals are put on the table on time, flowers are arranged on the breakfast table. More important, Marlo is happier, if not exactly happy. But then the obvious, inevitable final twist—played out in a repeat of the film's pivotal scenes edited for any viewer who as yet didn't see it coming—takes it all away.

The Death of Stalin

It's almost impossible to anticipate the whims of tyrants. One may demand a second scoop of ice cream while his guests receive just the one, or another violates his own travel ban on Westerners to bring in a championship basketball player in the waning days of his celebrity.

In British political satirist Armando Iannucci's second feature, adapted from the French graphic novel series by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin by Iannucci, David Schneider and Ian Martin, Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), just home from a drunken evening around Joseph Stalin's (Adrian McLoughlin) table, gives a play-by-play recap to his yawning wife (Sylvestra Le Touzel) for her to write it all down so that the next morning he may more soberly study which jokes made the General Secretary laugh. Khruschev is like a comedian perfecting a bit, except it's for an audience of one person who has the authority to send him to the gulag.

But not even Khrushchev, with his detailed notes and the tomatoes he carries in his pockets should the need arise for a prop gag, can predict Stalin's next yen. Radio Moscow is wrapping up a live broadcast of Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 23,” when a call comes into the booth. The architect of the Great Terror wants a recording of the performance brought to his dacha that night. After an alarmed realization that no recording has been made, the station director (Paddy Considine) implores the musicians and conductor for a repeat performance. For crowd sounds, they drag in people off the street. “Don’t worry,” he reassures the fearful new audience. “Nobody’s going to get killed.”

The statement isn't exactly true. Stalin, after reading a seditious note slipped into the sleeve of the recording by the orchestra's pianist (Olga Kurylenko), succumbs to a stroke. In the morning a hushed alarm is sounded and soon Stalin's prone body, lying on the urine-soaked carpet, is surrounded by the members of his Central Committee, to a man, too cowardly to declare him alive or dead, and no doctor can be called because the man in need of one had them all either exiled or killed.

The members of the Central Committee are played by a roster of distinguished British and American actors—Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor, Dermot Crowley, Paul Whitehouse, Paul Chahidi, Michael Palin and Buscemi—eschewing Russian accents for exaggerated versions of their own dialect. A stroke of comedic genius if there ever was one, and Jason Isaacs letting loose his Yorkshire accent for the celebrated WWII general Georgy Zhukov is the pinnacle of inventiveness. “I fooked Germany," he deadpans. "I think I can take a flesh lump in a fookin’ waistcoat.”

There's not a decent guy in the lot, and though there seems to be no end to the bald-faced irony that turns the biggest laughs into guilty ones, the movie begins to sag a bit under the weight of their scheming. A literal shoving match almost comes to blows mere feet from the open casket where Stalin's body lies in state. Eventually, the maneuvering boils down to who can get Tambor's Georgy Malenkov, the titular leader of the Soviet Union, to waffle their way—the worst of the worst or just the least worst of the worst.

Lean on Pete

In the latest release from British writer-director Andrew Haigh (“45 Years,” “Weekend”), adapted from the 2010 novel by Willy Vlautin, Charlie Plummer is Charley, a weedy 15-year old being nominally raised by an impetuous father, Ray (Travis Fimmel). Ray and Charley get along, but Charley's expectations of home life are low. Bacon and eggs cooked by a woman who spent the night with his dad is an unexpected treat. (Later, this dalliance will separate father and son in a grisly but not unexpected way.)

For Ray's new job they’ve moved into a run-down rental in the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. It's running distance from the horse track Portland Meadows where Charley, training for a spot on his new hometown's football team, chances on a job looking after worn-out American quarter horses for gruff trainer Del (Steve Buscemi). They're soon joined on the fair circuit by jockey Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), who can make Del see the absurdity of railing against competitors who accuse him of cheating just mere minutes after doing just that—their only way to win. She also advises Charley not to get too attached to the horses. "They're not pets," she warns.

Enter Lean on Pete, or Pete, as he's called, a five-year old run into the ground by Del and bound for a slaughterhouse in Mexico. Unhinged by a recent life-upending event, Charley takes off across eastern Oregon in Del's truck with Pete in the trailer hitched to the back. Charley has a vague notion of finding a long-lost aunt in Wyoming, but his more pressing concern is staying out of range of any adult who could impede their freedom. Charley hasn't just gone feral; he's wild.

As his films attest, Haigh understands desperate isolation. Especially amongst other people, his characters are uncomfortable or agitated, looking for an answer or somewhere to belong. Charley is no exception. Any assistance he receives, whether it's from Del or Bonnie, the rural videogame-playing roughnecks or an addict living in an RV (Steve Zahn), is bristling with menace. His one solace, pouring his heart out to Pete as they make their way across the desert, inevitably ends in grief.

So why, other than sadistic voyeurism, should viewers put themselves through these travails with Charley? For all its grimness, the film also depicts moments of pure joy, if only as relief. In one scene, a waitress convinces her manager to let Charley go after an attempt at a dine and dash; not out of the goodness of her heart but because a bus of tourists has just arrived and the kitchen is slammed. Still, Charley never fails to be grateful.

I Feel Pretty

For their directorial debut, writing partners Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein (“Never Been Kissed,” “He's Just Not That Into You”) stick to a familiar theme. A woman's insecurity, bordering on neurosis, forces her to accept a ridiculous challenge that inevitably leads to humiliation. Although it's played for laughs, this scenario often results in a victory of sorts, likely of the romantic variety, for the woman. But this time around there's a mean twist.

When the movie starts, Renee (Amy Schumer) is so convinced of her inadequacy that she's given up on any ambitions save one: transforming herself to conform to conventional beauty standards. To do this she screws up the courage to step into the modern equivalent of Cinderella's slippers—spin class cleats. Just as Renee is getting into the groove in the middle of the second class (the first ends even before it begins when Renee is put through the timeworn gag of splitting her exercise tights with the added abuse of impaling her crotch on the saddle) her cleat slips and she falls off the bike, hitting her head.

The concussion causes an inverse body dysmorphia. Albeit no change to her physical appearance, Renee now believes she's beautiful, much to the amusement or chagrin of everyone around her. And what's a woman who suddenly believes she's desirable finally desire? The receptionist job at a cosmetics company, a date with the guy standing behind her at the dry cleaners (Rory Scovel) and to win a Coney Island bikini contest.

The sad fact is that, despite the big speech Renee gives at the end, the messages being conveyed by thie movie are that confidence can go a long way to the realization of goals so long as the bar for those goals is exceptionally low and, for anyone but the rarefied good-looking, possessing confidence is a form of cognitive dissonance; a mental illness.

Having made a successful career in defiance of conventional standards—beauty and otherwise—for women, Schumer isn't convincing in the least as the unconfident Renee. There is one authentic moment, unsurprisingly, the one not meant to be humorous, when she stands in front of a mirror in Spanx and ill-fitting bra. Her performance is livelier after Renee is inflicted with the head injury but, unlike with her own material, she's not in on the jokes. The audience is encouraged to mock her overreach and laugh at every jiggle of her belly. The movie collapses under its own humor, which reinforces the status quo; not challenging it.

Blumhouse's Truth or Dare

Blumhouse Productions, known for such low-budget independent horror offerings as the “Paranormal Activity,” “Insidious,” and “Purge” franchises, had a high-profile 2017 as production company for Oscar contender Get Out and  M. Night Shyamalan's return to form, “Split.” With their latest release, the Blumhouse name has literally been attached to the title, ostensibly as an assurance of quality for horror- and thrill-seekers. This new branding, however, is liable to backfire as “Blumhouse's Truth or Dare” is a lazy assemblage of stale horror film tropes cast with a handful of fresh-faced young stars from the CW, ABC Family, and MTV networks. 

“Pretty Little Liars”' Lucy Hale plays good girl Olivia, whose noble plans to devote her last college spring break to Habitat for Humanity are secretly undermined by sexpot bestie Markie (“The Flash”'s Violet Beane) in order to coerce Olivia to join her more hedonistic plan to party in Mexico with recovering alcoholic schoolmate Penelope (“Faking It”'s Sophia Ali) and a cross-section of undergraduate bro-dom: Markie's nice-guy boyfriend Lucas (Tyler Posey of MTV's “Teen Wolf”), arrogant med-school candidate Tyson (Nolan Gerard Funk), dufus horndog Ronnie (“Awkward”'s Sam Lerner), and Brad (Hayden Szeto), whose only distinguishing characteristic seems to be his homosexuality. 

Opening credits roll over a split-screen Snapchat montage of every cliche springbreaker behavior imaginable, inclining viewers to rather dislike these characters even before they start acting like selfish jerks. 

On their last night south of the border, they inexplicably agree to keep the party going after closing time by following rank stranger Carter (“DeGrassi: The Next Generation”'s Landon Liboiron), by cell-phone light, into the desert and up a mountain to a deserted Catholic mission. Yep, perfect spot for an after-party. Here, Carter passes out a few beers and suggests the titular game. The usual discomfort and sexual tension arise as each member is faced with revealing an embarrassing truth or performing a humiliating dare--that is, until Carter, choosing 'Truth,' reveals that they have all been ensnared in a cursed version of the game that will follow them home. 

If that doesn't sound particularly terrifying, it's not. 

Back at college, members of the party squad are visited, one by one, by a malign spirit demanding they play the game. Lie, fail to perform the dare, or refuse to play, and you die. The otherworldly challenges usually come from someone nearby whose face has assumed a not-all-that-terrifying Joker-type rictus grin. At other times, though, the demands come from brick walls, or just out of nowhere. Nothing much about the curse seems all that consistent.

 At one point, a  player chooses "Truth," clearly one of the game's nominal options, but the voice, like a sort of infernal game-show host, advises that the rules have changed: after any two consecutive truths, the next player must choose a dare. Perhaps the demonic game should have come with a demonic rule book. 

Director Jeff Wadlow (“Kick-Ass 2”) and an entire roster of screenwriters seem unable to tap into what is truly frightening about being forced to reveal oneself to those closest to us. Instead, the plot turns on a number of soap opera-y admissions and betrayals, leaving viewers simply waiting for the next inevitable death. Yet even these are hampered by the film's PG-13 rating, resulting in neither a satisfying teen soap nor a sufficiently creative or grisly bloodbath.

Ready Player One

If you grew up during the 80s, there is, admittedly, a delight in spotting the pop-cultural references, or Easter eggs, that fill the periphery—in truth, the entire cinematic tapestry—of “Ready Player One.” In a triumph of both the digital animation and copyright licensing departments, director Steven Spielberg stuffs the film with cultural nods to everything from Van Halen and Twisted Sister to Freddy Krueger and The Iron Giant to Joust and Street Fighter. 

And there is surely a segment of the film's audience for which the ephemeral pleasure of mere recognition will be satisfying. In fact, it's likely DVD sales will benefit from a contingency of real-life "gunters" (the film's term for those who hunt Easter eggs within the film's virtual gaming world), determined to identify the most references. 

For other viewers, however--including, I suspect, Spielberg himself—the perception of the degree to which popular culture has in undated our every waking moment is ambivalent at best. And it's this ambivalence about the role of pop culture in our lives that makes it difficult to view this hero's journey as particularly heroic. 

The film opens in Columbus, Ohio, which by 2045 looks a lot like one vast salvage yard. Wade Watts (Ty Sheridan, looking for all the world like a 20-year-old Steven Spielberg) is departing the home he shares with his aunt Alice (Susan Lynch) in The Stacks, a vertical shantytown of travel trailers and shipping containers, criss-crossed at perpendicular angles like a colossal picked-over Jenga structure. As Wade maneuvers down poles and around girders, the camera's vertical pan provides a Rear Window-style glimpse into the lives of his neighbors, all of whom have abandoned this bleak existence for the virtual realm of The Oasis via ubiquitous headsets: an overweight woman in sweats works an in-home stripper pole; a young child living in apparent poverty plays a non-existent piano, his fingers rolling silently over the trailer floor; a mother ignores her offspring as she hops and kicks perilously atop an ottoman. Meanwhile, Pizza Hut drones drop-off pizzas so tenants never have to leave their virtual cocoons. 

In any other dystopian scenario, this existence would be the threat. But not so for Spielberg or for author Ernest Cline, who co-wrote the screenplay with Zak Penn from his 2011 novel of the same name. In this dystopia, the threat to humanity comes from an amoral corporation that wants to control the difital environment in order to add--gasp—advertising.

The Oasis, a virtual reality platform where one's choices for identity and reality are limitless, is the creation of ate tech genius James Halliday (Mark Rylance), a self-described geek whose social behavior suggests he is on the spectrum. Upon his death, Halliday offered complete control of The Oasis to any player who could collect three keys by winning a series of competitions. Halliday has also left behind a virtual library of his life for players to pore through for hints to solving the challenges. 

Watts maneuvers The Oasis though alter-ego Parzival, a cross between David Bowie's Goblin King and a member of A Flock of Seagulls, and our first visit with him is the the most impressive--an auto race in the Back to the Future DeLorean through a virtual New York, which has been altered to include Hot Wheels loops, the obligatory swinging wrecking balls, and appearances of both King Kong (Peter Jackson's, not Willis O'Brien's) and Spielberg's own “Jurrassic Park” T-Rex. 

Funny thing about virtual reality, though: the more time you spend with it, the less interesting it becomes. And when you aren't actually involved in the action--making decisions, maneuvering obstacles--the excitement drops dramatically, much like watching someone else play a video game. 

By the time we venture forth on Parzival's second test (more accurately, "quest" for this Arthurian hero), we're beginning to get more of the same--a mash-up of identifiable 80s-era pop culture  references: Buckaroo Banzai, Chucky, Jason, Atari, A-ha, Tab soda, Monty Python, and the initial thrill begins to fade to exhaustion. After a desecration of Kubrick's “The Shining” which reduces it to a sort of Disneyland ride, the final battle, despite hundreds, maybe thousands, of iconic pop culture images, comes off like the nondescript throngs that fill the battlefields of films like “300.” 

Watts is given a love interest in tough, Final Girl-type avatar Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and a best friend, the muscle-bound brutish Aech (pronounced "H"). And the film attempts to raise stakes by pitting Parzival against corporate rat Nolan Sorrento (the appropriately sleazy Ben Mendelsohn), who has an army of human players navigating The Oasis 24-7, attempting to accumulate the keys. 

Still there's something stubbornly two-dimensional about the proceedings. The plot touches on issues of identity that arise when one can cultivate an electronic persona (certainly relevant in our own developing dystopia), and the film offers some surprising character reveals. Yet time and again, Spielberg sidesteps the sticky philosophical questions for easy answers and jokes. 

In fact, although Parzival (SPOILER ALERT) ultimately succeeds in his quest with the help of a Goonies-style band of confederates, Spielberg leaves viewers with a central contradiction. Parzival saves the Oasis only by embracing the same geekish fetishization of the details of Halliday's life that the socially stunted Halliday devoted to pop culture. Yet in the film's final scene, Halliday seems to repudiate his creation. 

Leaving one to wonder whether, for all his struggles, Watts has saved the world or condemned it.

Madame

The social satire in the second theatrical release from French novelist, playwright and writer-director Amanda Sthers can't quite be described as "biting." Co-written by American New Wave veteran Matthew Robbins (“The Sugarland Express,” “Jaws”) the story is too drawn-out and passive to be pointed, but there's still plenty there to chew on.

The plot hangs on a superstition—13 guests at a dinner party is unlucky. And on this particular night newly broke Americans in Paris Anne (Toni Collette) and Bob (Harvey Keitel) need all the luck they can get; to keep up appearances, Bob must liquidate his treasured Caravaggio. To that end, they've invited a group of well-heeled friends, along with mild-mannered British art dealer David (Michael Smiley), to dine at their ornate apartment.

All is going to plan when Steven (Tom Hughes), Bob's son from his previous marriage, shows up, and Bob, without consulting Anne, invites him to dinner. Not wanting there to be 13 place settings, Anne bullies their housekeeper Maria (Rossy de Palma) into evening out the group. Anne introduces Maria—now dressed in a tacky white tea-length gown and glittery shoes—as an old friend, but bored wastrel Steven (played just as smugly as Hughes portrays Prince Albert in the TV series Victoria), despite a close relationship with Maria, lures in the bootlick David by intimating she is a member of the Spanish aristocracy.

What follows departs from the precedent set by previous comedies of manners, sparing us the usual night of hysterical antics and tell-all quarreling, though it could easily have gone that way. Maria isn't the only diner with a secret: the potential buyer for the painting, the smarmy Antointe (Stanislas Merhar), seems to want to possess all that Bob has, including Anne, though his wife, Hélène (Violaine Gillibert), is Anne's friend.

Surprisingly, the evening comes to a quiet close, with Maria the reluctant center of attention. The sale of the painting now depends only on its verification, and A-ha! The theme emerges. Integrity is what's being tested here. Maria temporarily forgets she has it under the attentions of David, but gets it back when the flirtation becomes more serious. The arriviste Anne, who it turns out was once Bob's golf pro, never had it and never will. David doesn't seem to notice it's missing, but then again there's a lot that goes unnoticed by him. The worst of them is Steven, whose pot-stirring has all been in service of breaking his spell of writer's block.

It's about time de Palma, whose striking asymmetry has made her the standard-bearer of unconventional beauty, takes center stage. She came to prominence when Pedro Almodóvar cast her in 1988's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and since has appeared in eight of Almodóvar's movies but usually in a supporting role. So it's difficult to believe that David, in the film's most heart-wrenching scene, doesn't notice Maria as she serves him tea when the rest of us can't stop looking at her.

Pacific Rim Uprising

“Pacific Rim Uprising” is not a particularly successful or engaging film, but not because it's about giant robots battling huge monsters. In fact, to a lot of kids who, like me, grew up with Ray Harryhausen movies, “Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot,” and Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, there is something innately appealing about the industrial age-meets-retrofuturistic aesthetic of the mechanical colossus. Time and again, in comics and serials, manga and tokusatsu, giant robots have figured as heroes and villains, invaders and defenders, battling each other or battling skyscraper-tall monstrosities. 

Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 “Pacific Rim” was a love-letter to the genre with CG animation replacing Toho Studio's rubber-suited actors trampling miniature sets. Not surprisingly, del Toro also brought along plenty of backstory, including a dimensional fissure at the bottom of the ocean as the source of the bizarre creatures, or kaiju, and military robots, called jaegers, so large that two humans are needed—mentally synched by means of a delicate neural link called the Drift --to operate the virtual controls from inside.

 The result featured plenty of jaeger-on-kaiju battles amid moody, tempest-tossed seas and Idris Elba as the preposterously named Stacker Pentecost, heroically sacrificing his life to "cancel the apocalypse." While certainly not without problems, Pacific Rim went a long way toward satisfying that inner 12-year-old in the au8dience. And it dangled interesting ideas such as The Drift for viewers to walk away with. 

del Toro stepped back to a producer role for the sequel, and as directed Steven S. DeKnight, best known as creator of the Starz series "Spartacus" and show-runner for Netflix's "Daredevil" series,  “Pacific Rim Uprising” feels as though the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the original film have been stripped away until all that is left is a generic blockbuster more akin to Michael Bay's Transformer films than del Toro's vision. 

The moody, mythic sea battles of its predecessor have been replaced by the sharp sunlit delineation of unsullied pixels, granting these behemoths all the weight of piñatas. Hell, the robots hardly even tangle with kaiju anyway, devoting most of their energy to battling new drone jaegers gone rogue. 

With a couple of exceptions, the characters exude about as much personality as the bots. Drawing on the militaristic fetishism of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, minus the irony, DeKnight and fellow screenwriters Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, and T.S. Nowlin portray the aspirational vision of a world defense corps that represents all races and nationalities, then rely on the broadest stereotypes for personalities.

 Only two characters avoid this two-dimensional treatment, and that, solely on the strength of the performances. John Boyega appears as Jake Pentecost, son of the man who saved the world 10 years earlier, now surviving by stealing and selling black market jaeger tech. Boyega brings to Jake much of the same charm he brought to Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Cailee Spaeny, too, rises above script cliches as a young girl orphaned by the Battle of the Breach who grows up fast when she is drafted into the Pan Pacific Defense Corp. Faring less well is Scott Eastwood, son of  Clint, who offers little more than his daddy's squint and jawline to delineate his character.

There is a simple core pleasure to the spectacle of giant monsters and robots. Retooling it to satisfy the demands of the blockbuster franchise seems to have stripped it of that inherent magic, leaving only a loud, empty machine of a film.

7 Days in Entebbe

On June 27, 1976, two Palestinian and two West German militants boarded Air France flight 139 from Tel Aviv to Paris at a stopover in Athens. Armed with handguns and grenades, the hijackers threatened to blow up the plane with its 250 passengers on board unless the pilots changed the route, with only a stop to refuel in Benghazi, Libya, to land at Entebbe airport, the principal international airport of Uganda, the unlikeliest of places.

Joined by three cohorts on the ground, the hostage takers kept 94 passengers—Israeli passport holders and other non-Israeli Jews—and the 12-member flight crew under guard in a disused terminal, threatening their lives in exchange for the release of 40 Palestinian and affiliated militants imprisoned in Israel and around a dozen prisoners jailed as terrorists, including Baader-Meinhof gang member Ulrike Meinhof, in Germany and Sweden. On July 3, after almost a week's worth of intensive debate, the Israeli government sent in 100 commandos, who freed all but four of the hostages and killed all seven hostage takers.

It's on this escalation of events, assembled into a script by Gregory Burke, that Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha, the director responsible the 2014 remake of “RoboCop,” bases his latest release. Notwithstanding brief interruptions from a stark, contemporary dance ensemble piece choreographed by Ohad Naharin and performed by the Batsheva Dance Company, the action dutifully (to the point of plodding) follows the crisis as it intensifies day-by-day, shifting location between the airport and, eventually, the Cabinet of Israel.

As if the hijacking and subsequent military operation weren't enough drama, within both storylines are set up diametrically opposed viewpoints. The West German ideologues Wilfried Böse (Daniel Brühl) and Brigitte Kuhlmann (Rosamund Pike) disagree over the treatment of the hostages and their commitment to the mission. How does it look that German sentries are separating the hostages into two groups—Jewish and non-Jewish—and allowing the latter to get on buses to leave? Brühl does a satisfactory, if not singularly earnest, job of speculating on how Böse, plagued by second thoughts, may have handled losing control of the situation to the more personally motivated Palestinian hostage takers. As Kuhlmann, Pike's one response is a wide-eyed confusion that devolves into a psychotic break involving a long-distance call to a long-gone boyfriend on an out-of-order payphone.

The other interpersonal brouhaha is between the no-nonsense Defense Minister Shimon Peres, played by the squat but always agile Eddie Marsan, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, portrayed as elegant, diplomatic but not very cunning, at least in comparison to Peres, by Lior Ashkenazi. Eventually, Rabin stops dithering, Peres gets his way and the hostages are freed, but whether this military operation was a success is still up for debate.