Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016) ***/*****

Tina Fey is funny and attractive. She’s a great writer and a talented comedian. That’s why she was able to become head writer during her stint on Saturday Night Live, why the network series she created and starred in, 30 Rock, was such a big hit, why the feature film she penned, Mean Girls, was so good that it even made Lindsay Lohan likable, and why she gets rave reviews every time she’s tapped to host an awards show. There’s no real mystery behind Tina Fey’s success. What is a huge mystery, however, is why the film industry has never been able to give her a starring role in a movie that wasn’t bad to mediocre, considering Fey’s massive movie star potential. The good news on that front is that Fey is great in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and it’s by far the best movie role she’s gotten to date. The bad news is that the film is still not good enough overall to be the thing to solidify her as the type of A-list actress who regularly gets to headline exciting projects.

From directing team Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris, Focus), Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is an adaptation of the memoirs of wartime reporter Kim Barker, focusing on the time she spent reporting on the war in Afghanistan in the mid 2000s. Fey plays Barker, or actually, she plays a fictionalized version of her named Kim Baker—you’ve got to leave enough room for plausible deniability, after all. Over the course of her stay in Kabul, we see the dangers of being out in the field, the partying the journalists get up to at night to escape the stresses of their situation, the friction that gets generated when you plop Westerners down in an Islamic society, and the struggles the media faces when it comes to getting a fickle public to pay attention to the day-to-day realities of our seemingly endless “war on terror.”

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) ***/*****

The idea behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, that of rewriting Jane Austen’s classic novel of social repression so that it takes place in a world full of flesh-eating zombies, is one that should have been clever and amusing for about a minute or two. It’s the sort of thing you hear about, chuckle at the notion of, and then dismiss. It shouldn’t have been enough to actually support an entire book, let alone a film adaptation of said book. And yet, here we are, watching a Burr Steers-directed (Igby Goes Down) film adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s bastardization of Austen’s novel, and the results are pretty dang entertaining.

Nine times out of ten a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies film would have ended up being some kind of bottom of the barrel exploitation farce—something that looks cheap, lacks weight, and fails to connect with the audience in any substantial way, like Grahame-Smith’s other foray into this sort of cinematic myth corruption, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. This one isn’t just a one-note joke though. Not only does it maintain the bulk of what makes Austen’s story entertaining and resonant to modern audiences, and not only does it handle the horror of its zombie elements pretty well, but it’s also surprisingly well-crafted.

Carol (2015) ***/*****

Was anyone progressive and cool enough to write about lesbian relationships in the conformity-embracing climate of the early 1950s? Yes, Patricia Highsmith (‘Strangers on a Train,’ ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’) was, which is just the sort of thing you’d imagine capturing the interest of filmmaker Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine). Carol is his adaptation of Highsmith’s 1952 novel ‘The Price of Salt,’ in which an unhappy housewife named Carol (Cate Blanchett) indulges in a lesbian dalliance with a pretty young shop girl named Therese (Rooney Mara) during the final stages of separation from her wealthy husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler). Carol is quaffed, mysterious, and enchanting, and Therese is young, spun-around, and trying to figure out what kind of woman she wants to be. This being the 50s, things aren’t going to be easy for either of them.

The reason to see Carol is that it’s ridiculously pretty to look at. The exhaustive work of costumer Sandy Powell and production designer Judy Becker teams with the work of probably about a thousand other artists to create an immersive, expansive journey into a romantic and idealized version of the early 50s. Haynes and his cinematographer Edward Lachman’s decision to shoot the film on Super 16mm rather than 35 mm or digital lends their images a fuzzy, tactile graininess that separates the film visually from any other recent release. Carol is rich and warm and layered—the kind of movie that you feel like you could reach out and touch, or even wrap yourself up in like a blanket—and when that aesthetic gets paired with the gloss and glamour of the period-set production design, the results are a viewing experience that has the emotional resonance of flipping through a cherished old photo album that belonged to your grandmother.

Anomalisa (2015) ****/*****

A surface explanation of its plot makes Anomalisa sound like a very mundane movie. It’s about a rather ordinary guy named Michael (David Thewlis) who wrote a successful book about customer service getting flown to Cincinnati to speak at a sales conference. The first part of his trip sees him feeling isolated from everyone around him, then he tries and fails to connect with an old flame, and then he meets and finds a spark with an intriguing new stranger. That’s it. Boring, right? Not so, which makes sense once you factor in that the film was written and co-directed by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and that Michael and all of the rest of the characters are marionettes brought to life through stop-motion animation.

Creating a world of puppetry isn’t the only stylistic trick Kaufman and his co-director Duke Johnson have come up with for this one either. They’ve also made the decision to have Tom Noonan voice every other character Michael encounters, in the same monotone. Well, every other character except for Lisa, the intriguing conference-goer who sports the voice of Jennifer Jason Leigh. What this does is create a great filmic shorthand for that feeling depression causes where everyone around you turns into a faceless mass of humanity who you feel completely isolated from, as well as a shorthand for that electric feeling you get when you meet someone who finally stands out from the crowd and who you feel an instant connection to. Thus, with a couple of high-minded filmmaking risks (and the help of strong vocal performances from Thewlis and Leigh), our dynamic directing duo take a story that initially sounds ordinary and ends up making a movie that’s anything but.

Z For Zachariah (2015) ***/*****

While the premise of setting a movie after some sort of world ending apocalypse has occurred is far from unique, Craig Zobel’s new film, Z for Zachariah, is able to separate itself from the pack a bit by telling a small story and keeping its focus squarely on character. The setting is a fertile valley on an Earth that has been otherwise ravaged by radioactivity. The setting is just the catalyst for the story though, not the focus of it. This isn’t a movie that’s all that interested in explaining why exactly the whole world went to shit, or why this particular valley was immune from the devastation, it’s just interested in putting a few characters in the middle of the situation and then exploring how the way they react to it speaks to the human condition.

The basic setup is that a farm girl named Ann (Margot Robbie) has always lived here, and she’s doing her duty as the last living member of her family to keep the farm going when she finds an explorer named Loomis (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who has wandered into her isolated little world. He’s the first person she’s seen in a really long time, and thanks to an understandable mishap he’s suffering from some pretty serious radiation poisoning when they meet, so being the trusting, down to earth farm girl she is, she takes him home and nurses him back to health, and after a period of time they predictably start to form a bond. Before they can consummate that bond in the way that adults do, however, a second figure from the outside world makes his way into the valley. His name is Caleb (Chris Pine), and while Loomis is a learned man of science who doesn’t have much room for religion or sentimentality, Caleb has a personality that seems to be much more copacetic with the way country girl Ann’s is on the surface. Perhaps predictably, tension both sexual and murderous then begins to be built.  

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015) ****/*****

One of the annoyances of being the type of person who’s really into movies is when other people ask you about the newest action movie, or the newest teen comedy, or whatever type of movie Hollywood constantly churns out new versions of—and they’ve clearly seen the movie and are excited about it—and then you have to break it to them that you didn’t like it very much. People take it personal. They tell you you’re a snob. They tell you that you go into movies wanting to hate them. Then you think back to the latest indie or foreign or whatever kind of alternative movie that you recently saw at a little arthouse that really affected you—that too few people are ever going to see—and how much more interesting, or thoughtfully made, or just plain better it is than whatever generic product they’re praising, and you want to tell them that you don’t go into every movie wanting to hate it, they just don’t see enough movies to know what’s actually good; but you don’t say that, because you want to be polite, even though people aren’t polite to you when you disagree with them. Well, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is that interesting, affecting, more thoughtfully made movie that too few people are going to see that you’re going to be thinking about the next time someone is pissed that you didn’t like the Pretty in Pink remake, or whatever is next on Hollywood’s agenda.

From a Jesse Andrews novel that he himself adapted into a screenplay, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl tells the story of Greg (Thomas Mann), a closed-off teenager who has decided to navigate the pitfalls of the high school social structure by opting out of it entirely, Earl (RJ Cyler), the childhood friend Greg calls a “co-worker” because they make cheesy parodies of classic cinema together, and Rachel (Olivia Cooke), the “dying girl” who Greg’s mom (Connie Britton) forces him to spend time with and be nice to after she’s diagnosed with cancer. If this development seems to you to be destined to break down the walls that Greg puts up between himself and others, you’re not wrong, but the great thing about this movie is that it doesn’t take the usual path to get to that point that you’d expect it would, and once it gets there it doesn’t hit the usual emotional beats that stories about death always do.

Short Round: About Elly (2015) ****/*****

Back in 2011, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi turned heads and won awards with his tense drama A Separation, which not only featured great performances and subtle writing, but was particularly interesting to Western viewers because of the way it mined Iranian culture for dramatic moments that just wouldn’t be all that dramatic if they happened over here. Watching it felt fresh. Well, it turns out he also made another film that was first screened in 2009, About Elly, which has slowly been playing the festival circuit ever since, and which is now finally getting a regular release in the US.

How does this earlier work stand up to A Separation, which amazed everyone with how affecting it was able to make the dissolution of a marriage by exploring its conflict from each opposing point of view, while obscuring the truth of the inciting incident being squabbled over from the audience? It’s not quite as good, doesn’t feel quite as assured in its filmmaking, but it’s still really great, and it has a lot in common with the later film (e.g. awkward interactions aplenty). 

The story sees a group of young parents and their children traveling to the sea alongside one of their kids’ kindergarten teacher (Taraneh Alidoosti) and a single male friend (Shahab Hosseini), with the duel purposes of having a relaxing weekend and hooking the teacher up with the friend. The chill vibe collapses when the teacher, Elly, disappears though, and nobody is quite sure if some curious behavior led to her suddenly bolting without telling anyone, or if she drown in the sea while trying to save a young boy. Thanks to some judicious editing, we don’t know her fate either, so we’re left just as confused as the characters as they panic, try to process the situation, and eventually fall apart as their conflicts bring various lies and indiscretions to the surface. About Elly is human drama in capital letters, and well done human drama to boot. It’s exactly the sort of thing we need more of in theaters. Go see it, if for no other reason than to see the performance given by Golshifteh Farahani, who plays the story’s matchmaker, who clearly took herself to hellish emotional places to properly play the role, and who deserves the recognition.

Short Round: Adult Beginners (2015) ***/*****

When movies tell a story that features dramatic and comedic elements pretty equally, we’ve taken to calling them dramedies. Many indie movies fall into this category, because the category itself usually lives and dies on acting and screenwriting—two things that are more dependent on talent than they are funding. The best thing we can hope for from these movies is that we care enough about the characters to find the dramatic moments affecting, that the actors are charming enough to make the comedic elements funny, and that enough tonal consistency exists in the script that the success of one element doesn’t sabotage the success of the other. Adult Beginners, the new film from co-writers Nick Kroll, Liz Flahive, Jeff Cox, and director Ross Katz, is solid enough that it accomplishes all of these essential goals, but never so successful at them that it truly excels. 

The story sees Kroll playing one of those adults in an arrested state of development who these indie dramedies love so well. He’s financially crashed and burned while trying to launch an internet startup and now he has to go back to his childhood home to stay with his sister (Rose Byrne), her husband (Bobby Cannavale), and their three-year-old son (Caleb and Matthew Paddock). While their life seems more idealistic on the surface than his, parenthood has lead to them having their own problems, and when they all start bubbling to the surface and their lifestyle starts to chafe against Kroll’s, we then have adequate enough sources for comedy and pathos alike.

As was mentioned earlier, the nuts and bolts of this movie are fine, so in general it’s fine. The characters are well drawn and played by talented, likable actors, so you care when they’re going through something rough and you laugh when they’re saying something funny, but there are still a few things holding Adult Beginners back from being a true success. While you care about the characters in general, they way they’re drawn is so archetypical for indie movies like this that watching them navigate their travails can feel quite a bit like experiencing deja vu. And while the film does feature a few really big laughs, the chuckles don’t come consistently enough for it to succeed as a straight up comedy. The biggest problem may be that the story peters out a bit in the third act though. The tension and the conflict builds well throughout, but their resolution comes in a scene that exists as a too on the nose visual metaphor—so suddenly there is clunkiness where the movie needed there to be catharsis. Adult Beginners is well-acted and entertaining enough to be a perfectly pleasant diversion, but it just misses that next level of being a truly memorable film.

While We’re Young (2015) ****/*****

A lot of people have taken a love them or hate them approach to Noah Baumbach’s movies, but often it feels to me like these people didn’t watch enough of the guy’s stuff before making such an extreme judgment. It’s true that his movies can get a bit rough to watch, seeing as they feature realist characters who often have bleak and cynical points of view that make them difficult to root for, but they also unapologetically speak to truth, and there’s only been one or two of them that actually went too far in the direction of being an unpleasant experience. Plus, his most recent film, Frances Ha, took a big step toward letting a little bit of hope break through all of that doom and gloom, and this new movie, While We’re Young, keeps that energy going, even if it isn’t quite as light. What this one does is deal with the struggle of losing the hope and energy that comes from youth once you’re older and wiser and you’ve had reality creep into your dreams a few too many times. It’s the happy medium between his bleaker stuff like Margot at the Wedding and Frances.

While We’re Young’s story sees Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts playing a married couple who find their routine and stagnant lives suddenly blossoming with passion and energy after they befriend a much younger married couple played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. You see, Stiller’s character is a once promising but currently floundering documentary filmmaker, and Driver’s is an ambitious amateur looking to get into the game. What starts off as a professional mentor relationship between the two men quickly turns into a friendly relationship where the younger couple begins to mentor the older in how to embrace the sort of laissez-faire, hipster lifestyle that’s currently thriving in places like Brooklyn—so there we have a premise ridiculous enough to make for a movie, old people becoming hipsters. Stiller even starts to wear a fedora as an affectation once his character becomes enamored with being hip and feeling young. Yeah, this movie turns it up all the way to fedora.

Faults (2015) ****/*****

Last year’s The Guest was a great movie for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was that every role in the film, no matter how small, was played by a great actor who got at least a small chance to do interesting work—and one of the big highlights of that highlight-filled cast was Leland Orser playing the put-upon, casually alcoholic father. Orser’s performance was magnetic, hilarious, anxiety-inducing, and I left that film wanting to see much more from him than I’ve been getting in recent years. The producers of The Guest must have felt the same way, because now they’ve released Faults, a film from first time feature writer/director Riley Stearns that casts Orser as its lead and gives him a chance to the same sort of uncomfortably hilarious things that he was doing for them there.

This time around Orser is playing a character named Ansel Roth, a man who purports to be one of the world’s leading experts on mind-control, but whose credibility is clearly in question because when we meet him he’s stuck doing pathetically small time speaking engagements set up at chain hotels that are meant to hawk a book he wrote that nobody is reading. If things were ever going well for the guy, they aren’t going well anymore, to the point where he’s been reduced to trying to scam free meals from hapless restaurant employees. An opportunity to make some quick cash and pay off an old debt comes when an older couple approaches him and offers to hire him to abduct and deprogram their adult daughter, Claire (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), however. You see, she’s fallen in with a cult called Faults, and Roth has a reputation for helping people who have fallen in with exploitive religious sects. Roth takes the job and abducts the girl tout de suite, but complications occur when she proves to be a stronger mind than he anticipated, and soon they find themselves butting heads in a struggle for control.

Focus (2015) ***/*****

Based on its advertising, Focus looked like it was going to be just about the most commercially driven, Hollywood production that could possibly be conceived. It featured one of the industry’s most established stars, one of its hottest potential breakouts, a story about conmen collecting huge stacks of cash to appeal to the fellas, and a story about an emotional love affair to appeal to the ladies, all wrapped up in a glossy package. The thing looked so self-consciously commercial that there was almost no chance that it could end up being anything other than completely homogenized and boring. 

No chance except for the fact that it comes from writing/directing duo Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who also made the largely non-commercial and fairly interesting I Love You Phillip Morris. Was it possible that Focus’ advertising was hiding some interesting twists and turns that make it more than just a grab at mainstream cash? Not really, no, but it turns out that it’s not so bad anyway.

Short Round: Amira & Sam (2015) ***/*****

Writer/director Sean Mullin’s first stab at a feature, Amira & Sam, sticks pretty closely to the content and structural format of the modern romantic dramedy. It introduces two young people who chafe against each other initially but eventually fall in love, and then it introduces a moment of crisis that may or may not sabotage their blossoming relationship before it’s really started, leading to an emotional climax. It also manages to separate itself from the romantic dramedy pack in a couple of important ways though. The most obvious of which is that the two characters who are involved in the romance feel like real, three-dimensional people with actual problems and relatable faults, instead of being the affluent, insufferable, faux-hip ciphers that these movies usually tell stories about.

Amira & Sam stars Dina Shihabi as Amira, an Iraqi immigrant with a traumatic past who’s struggling to find her place in New York City, and Martin Starr as Sam, an Iraq war veteran who’s also having difficulties finding his place in the vapid cultural wasteland last was the United States somewhere presumably after the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, but before the economic collapse of 2007. Starr is a great actor who I’ve been a fan of since his early days on Freaks & Geeks, so it was a lot of fun getting to see him play a lead role here and expand on what he’s been able to do with the supporting types of roles that he’s usually given, and while relative newcomer Shihabi is a new face to me, she’s such a lovely and live-wire presence here that I’m already confident we’ll be seeing much more of her in the very near future, so, if there are any problems with Amira & Sam, they definitely don’t come from the acting.

Instead, the problems that I had with the film, that other people may share, come from the writing. The script includes a handful of moments of effective comedy, and a handful of moments of affecting drama, but it’s also heavy-handed in the way it establishes the title characters as being likable and relatable, and some distracting phoniness creeps in as a consequence. This happens a bit because the greed and bigotry of many of the side characters comes off as being amplified and cartoony, which seems to have happened in order to paint our star-crossed couple as put-upon underdogs who we can root for, but the big problems stem from a subplot where Sam tries to dip his toes into the world of finance only to find that his morality doesn’t jibe with the shady dealings of Wall Street. The whole scenario could only have been written by someone who has the hindsight of watching the housing bubble burst and studying the causes of the collapse, which makes all of the dialogue we get about the bundling of mortgages and the undervaluing of the bundles some of the clunkiest and falsest-sounding I’ve heard in a movie in a while. And, even worse, none of it was necessary. Starr’s performance was already enough to get us to like and relate to the Sam character, we didn’t also need him to become a prognosticating warrior fighting for the safety of the underclass.

Inherent Vice (2014) *****/*****

One of the best things about the movies Paul Thomas Anderson makes is how rich and dense they are. They’re full of thematic dots that need to be connected, visual details that need to be noticed, and the revelatory sort of performances that are so fresh and nuanced that they send your mind racing off in a thousand different directions all at once. They’re the kind of movies you have to see more than once to feel fully comfortable with, and that tend to get better the more times that you see them. He’s a master director, and maybe the only one working who has the skill set necessary to make a worthy adaptation of one of the works of Thomas Pynchon, a novelist who’s also known for creating art that’s difficult to digest, though rewarding once you do so.

Inherent Vice is the fruits of Anderson’s attempt at bringing Pynchon to the big screen. It’s a drug and sun-soaked detective story set in 1970 LA that has more to do with the mourning of lost love and the corruption of the 60s counter culture thanks to its poisonous introduction to sex-crazed cult figures and heroine than it does to presenting you with an actual mystery or introducing you to a protagonist who does any real detective work. Said protagonist, Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), is much more of an observer than he is anything else—an incorruptible figure who’s pushed through a gauntlet of deceit and wrongdoing by a femme fatale ex-girlfriend named Shasta (Katherine Waterston) so that we can see if he’s able to come through the other end still pure and in one piece. 

Selma (2014) ****/*****

Biopics of famous historical figures are probably my least favorite type of film that Hollywood habitually releases, and there are a couple reasons for that. The first is a matter of focus. Too often these movies feel an obligation to cover the entirety of their subject’s life, from childhood to death, and they suffer from their attempts at cramming too much in. A lifetime is made up of thousands of stories, and when you try to touch on all of them you can’t help but give each short shrift. The second reason is the problem with recreating iconic imagery. When you’re recreating moments that have been replayed and reabsorbed by an entire culture time and time again over the course of decades, your recreation can’t help but distract the audience with its creepifying inauthenticity. Thankfully, Ava DuVernay has avoided these potential problems by making a Martin Luther King movie that focuses on one specific period of the man’s life rather than glossing over its entirety, and that doesn’t include his legendary “I have a dream” speech anywhere in its run time.

Selma manages to get to the heart of who King was as a person and what it was like for him to be at the forefront of the civil rights movement of the 60s by lasering its focus in on one critical period of the man’s life—when he was organizing a march from Selma, Alabama to the capital building in Birmingham in order to protest the extreme levels of voter suppression that blacks were experiencing in the state. Despite the fact that this event is only one piece of a very large puzzle when it comes to the things that King and his supporters were able to accomplish over the course of their efforts, it alone is enough to convey to us the personal toll that dedicating your life to a cause puts on a public figure, the shrewd politicking that’s necessary to bring about even the most righteous and idealistic change, and the danger that comes with confronting people’s prejudices and trying to change beliefs that they very passionately hold. By not being the typical biopic of a historical figure, Selma manages to be one of the rare entries in the genre that actually accomplishes what every one of these movies should be setting out to do—giving us a window into the everyday humanity of their iconic subjects.

Short Round: Foxcatcher (2014) **/*****

After directing Capote and Moneyball, Bennett Miller has become fairly renowned for being a go-to guy when it comes to biopics. So you’d think that him tackling the life of John du Pont—who was an heir to a fortune, weirdly obsessed with amateur wrestling, and who suffered from issues with self esteem and mental illness that eventually led to him committing a murder and being incarcerated—would make for a pretty amazing movie. Unfortunately, this time around, it doesn’t. Miller isn’t a director who I’ve found to be too on the nose in the way he tells stories before, but for some reason his hand gets fairly heavy here (through extraneous use of flashbacks, camera work that over emphasizes what we’re supposed to be feeling about a scene, etc…), and the result is a movie that contains individual scenes that are good on their own, but that doesn’t work as a whole.

Probably the thing about Foxcatcher that’s earning it the most attention is its performances, which makes sense, because Steve Carell is really going out on a limb as du Pont, and Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum are burning an equal amount of calories playing David and Mark Schultz, a pair of Olympic gold medal earning brothers who get sucked into du Pont’s bubble of influence thanks to his obsession with wrestling, and eventually suffer negative consequences because of it. Each performer doesn’t work to the same result, however. Ruffalo is absolutely amazing here, disappearing so completely into the older brother David that you never once catch him performing. Tatum and Carrell are a different story. Tatum is so forcefully playing the younger brother Mark as a hulking, confused, lump of focus and simplicity, that to behold him on screen is like laying eyes on a cave man. But at times he goes a bit far and it feels like he’s doing a caveman impression—and poor Carrell fairs even worse. He’s really making a go of it as du Pont, but they’ve got him buried in so many stupid looking prosthetics and have dressed him in so many silly outfits that it’s never not clear that you’re watching Steve Carell play-acting a wacky character.

The main problem with Foxcatcher is that it’s boring though. Slow burns can be effective, especially when they’re building up to as big a moment as this film is, but this one goes beyond being a slow burn. This movie is barely ever smoldering. It’s so much longer than it needs to be, it spends too much time on scenes that don’t actively drive the narrative forward, and it asks us to be far too interested in the day to day existences of characters who exist as little more than blank slates with one critical personality flaw. There’s no life, no humor, no anything in this script other than a slight awkward tension in the interactions between the principals that’s just barely able to keep you from turning it off. Foxcatcher is a story that may have been worth 100 or so minutes of screen time, but at 134 minutes it gets sunk by its own weight.

Short Round: Laggies (2014) ***/*****

The film industry creates no shortage of indie movies about characters who are old enough to be adults, but who nonetheless live in a state of depressed, arrested development. That doesn’t mean that these movies can’t still be good if they find a unique voice or are made especially well though. Lynn Shelton is the kind of director who likes to make loosely-scripted, improv-heavy, small-scale, realist movies, so they too need to bring a little something extra to the table in order to be good. Her Your Sister’s Sister cast found an amazing chemistry and created an amazing movie together as a result, while her more recent film, Touchy Feely, came off as more of an unfocused mess. Laggies, which is both a lost young adult movie as well as a Lynn Shelton movie, is a solid-though-unspectacular effort that puts it not only right in the middle of the pack of slacker movies, but also somewhere right in between the spontaneous joy of Your Sister’s Sister and the frustrating faults of Touchy Feely. What that means to you will probably depend on how strongly you respond to the genre and the creator.

Laggies is about a girl who’s probably somewhere in her late 20s, named Megan (Keira Knightley). After a decade or so of hanging out with the same group of friends she’s had since high school, Megan comes to realize that everyone she knows has turned into married, careered, dead-eyed yuppies, while she still feels that exploratory spark of youth and has yet to figure out what she wants her life to be. One proposal from her painfully earnest-though-lame longtime boyfriend (Mark Webber) later and Megan reaches a crisis point. Is she really ready to lock in to this kind of traditional existence? Retreating, our would-be hero ends up skipping out on her responsibilities and loved ones and holing up in the bedroom of a random high school girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) who she meets outside of a liquor store. As if this wasn’t intrigue enough, even more conflict creeps into the picture when, after running away from her own problems, Megan then finds herself deeply involved in the troubles of not only this young girl, but also the frazzled-though-charismatic single father (Sam Rockwell) who’s been raising her.

Overall, Laggies is good but not great, though if there is one aspect of the film that elevates it above mediocrity and makes it worth seeking out, it’s the lead performance given by Knightley. She’s an actress who I’ve been hot and cold on in the past, but after what she accomplished here, I feel as though I’ve reached the point where I’m sold on her as a leading lady completely. Not only is she great at playing open-wound vulnerability (a refreshing change from all the repressed period picture performances of her early career) while letting every nuance of emotion that her character feels play over her naturally emotive face, but she’s also able to impress with the chemistry she’s able to conjure with her co-stars, which is just off the charts. Whether she’s lending an ear to Moretz’s confused kid or trading quips with Rockwell’s lonely adult, you absolutely believe in the onscreen relationships as they’re developed; which is essential to a movie like this whose premise is so inherently ludicrous. A movie about an adult hiding out in a teenager’s bedroom probably should have been a train wreck, but in the hands of the people involved here, it’s more like a train ride—maybe not the most exciting way to spend an afternoon, but it certainly has its charms.

Two Days, One Night (2014) ****/*****

Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (La Promesse, The Kid With a Bike) are known for making movies that are grounded in reality, gritty, and steeped in basic human drama in all of the best ways. They tell simple stories that shine a spotlight on the inherent struggles that exist in the lives of normal, usually lower class people. Their films manage to resonate while still defying the expectations of how “cinematic” a story needs to be in order to make for a good movie. It should be said though that their work is often slow to build to a climax, once that climax happens it’s generally a personal one that affects only the protagonist and not the greater world around them, and the places their films take you can often leave you feeling a little down. If you’re the sort of person who can get on the Dardenne wavelength, then their movies are always easy to appreciate—and Two Days, One Night is no exception there—but they’re certainly not for everyone. So beware my praise.

Two Days, One Night focuses on a very important weekend in the life of a blue collar mother of two named Sandra (Marion Cotillard), who’s recently had some troubles at work thanks to a bout of depression leading to her having to take a leave of absence. Turns out the forced time off was just the beginning of her professional troubles though, as her boss has recently made the decree that the company she works for can’t afford to both give everyone bonuses and also keep on 17 employees, so if everybody wants to get a bump in pay, somebody’s going to have to get fired, and it’s Sandra’s head on the chopping block—a true problem, because she and her husband depend on her salary in order to pay their rent and feed their kids. When we meet Sandra it’s at the beginning of a weekend where she’s informed that there will be a vote on Monday to decide her fate—bonuses for everyone else or she keeps her job, everyone in the company gets a say, and she only has the weekend to visit each one and convince them to make a personal sacrifice for her well-being. It would be a daunting and awkward task even for someone who wasn’t prone to depression.

Short Round: Gone Girl (2014) ***/*****

Over the years David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club, The Social Network) has built up such a reputation as a master director that his name on the marquee is pretty much the only thing a movie needs to sell itself. Gone Girl has more going for it than that though. It’s also got a best-selling Gillian Flynn novel as its source material, and it’s got an intriguing ad campaign that introduces us to a couple played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, has Pike’s character mysteriously disappear, and then puts Affleck’s through the wringer as the news media turns him into the primary suspect. What happened to this man’s wife? Is he truly the good person that he projects himself as being when in the public eye, or does the handful of dark secrets he keeps behind closed doors point to the fact that he might have done something sinister? It’s a good mystery, but it only makes for about half of the story.

The problem with writing about a movie like Gone Girl is that it goes in so many unexpected places and it relies so heavily on its surprises to be a satisfying moviegoing experience that you can’t really talk about much of anything without ruining said experience. To even say anything about Pike’s performance would give away too much about her character’s fate, which is the uncertainty that everything gets built around. What should be said though is that the second half of the film, which is where all the twists start taking place, is completely different in tone than the first half, which is the material used in the advertising. Gone is a grounded story about the fate of real people and suddenly in its place is soap opera melodrama involving characters who behave far too insanely for you to maintain any real attachment to. Gone Girl’s true intentions are eventually revealed to be to stun the audience with ridiculous twists, and then to needle them with matters of gender politics that are sure to fan the flames of a good number of post-movie arguments. How one responds to all of the pulpy weirdness will likely come down to the individual and how engaged they found themselves with that first half of the film that proves to be a fake-out.

Fincher’s established aesthetic and that master craftsman’s touch that he brings to everything he makes are both on full display here, he’s gotten strong performances out of all the featured members of his cast, and he’s commissioned Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor to compose another moody score that increases the tension of everything that’s happening on the screen, but when I walked away from having seen Gone Girl, I left not astounded by the work of all of these talented artists, but instead wondering what it was about this silly story that was able to draw them all together in the first place. Taking the ride that is Gone Girl is engaging in the moment, but afterward I couldn’t help but feel like all of the dour gravity of the first act and the pedigrees of the artists involved had tricked me into watching something trashy and dumb—like if I went to a fancy restaurant and the Chef’s Special turned out to be Frito pie. I’ll eat the junk food, sure, but next time I’d appreciate a little more transparency in the menu. Expectation can be everything when it comes to how you respond to a film.

The Skeleton Twins (2014) ***/*****

We’ve been asking the question of whether or not actors known for comedic work should be able to make the jump to doing more dramatic work probably as long as there have been actors acting, so it’s likely that it’s time for us to finally retire that old debate. One of the most important aspects of being an effective comedic actor is being able to play silly things straight, and one of the elements necessary to being funny in the first place is compensation for a lifetime full of pain, so of course comedic actors are generally able to transition over to dramatic roles easily. As a matter of fact, this movie, The Skeleton Twins, seems to exist solely because of its director Craig Johnson’s confidence that Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader are so good at keeping straight faces during sad clown routines, that of course they would be perfect for playing damaged, suicidal characters.

Which is basically what The Skeleton Twins is, a movie about trauma and suicide. Wiig and Hader are playing a pair of twins here, who were all but inseparable when they were growing up, but who now haven’t spoken in 10 years. That all changes when Hader’s character tries to commit suicide and Wiig’s gets a call that she has to come take care of him though. One offer for him to move from Los Angeles to her New York home later, and suddenly secrets start to come out, past traumas begins to bubble to the surface, and a whole heaping pile of open wound humanity gets puts on display. Will these twins figure out how to get their shit together so that they can go forward as healthy adults, or will the pains of their childhood consume them and ultimately put one or both of them into an early grave? I’m not going to tell you the answer to that. You have to watch the movie to find out.

Short Round: The Drop (2014) ****/*****

The Drop, which is the latest film from Bullhead director Michaël R. Roskam, works on several levels. On its surface it’s most obviously a street-level crime drama, and it tells a tale with enough twists and turns and rampant corruption to be effective as that, but it also manages to get deep enough into the personal lives and motivations of its players to work as a sort of working class character study too; plus it puts enough focus on the dramatization of the adopting of a puppy by a sad sack bartender to be a fairly effective boy-and-his-dog story as well. Mostly though, what it really succeeds at is being a showcase for a handful of really talented actors to put on a handful of really strong performances.

The film stars James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy as the manager and bartender of a local watering hole that’s owned by a ruthless gangster who uses it as a way of collecting and moving money that he acquires through various illegal gambling ventures. Gandolfini and Hardy’s characters are basically given the tasks of keeping up the bars’ legitimate appearance, protecting the money in their care, and keeping their mouths shut about everything that’s going down. What seems to be a regular routine for them gets interrupted after a late night robbery raises questions about everyone’s loyalty, however. Does the crime have anything to do with Gandolfini’s resentment over being usurped as the local tough guy by the foreign invaders who are now his bosses? Maybe it somehow involves the local hood who keeps claiming that the dog Hardy recently adopted is his own? Whatever the case may be, it’s clear that the status quo has been interrupted, and before the end credits roll, somebody is going to have to die.

Gandolfini and Hardy get the bulk of the focus here, and they prove to be really effective in their roles, both when paired together and when paired with supporting players. Gandolfini is basically using what brought him to the table—that undercurrent of aggression that’s clearly stemming from a place of insecurity thing that he used so often as Tony Soprano—so it should come as no surprise that he appears completely comfortable in his role. Hardy is showing a bit more vulnerability than we’ve seen from him before though, and he’s still really authentic, even when working out of his comfort zone. His bartender character wilts like a flower in the face of violence, he looks at the ground and shuffles his feet in the face of social interaction, often muttering to himself afterward; but, through it all, Hardy is able to keep enough of a resolve burning in his eyes that you never write him off as a cowardly or unrelatable protagonist. It’s akin to those early scenes in Rocky, where we watch Sylvester Stallone interacting with his lower-class neighborhood and working as a low-level thug, but stretched out for an entire movie, and it’s pretty dang entertaining. Throw in Noomi Rapace resonating as a live-wire abuse victim and Matthias Schoenaerts intimidating as a Randy Savage-esque street tough who seems like he could explode into violence at any minute, and The Drop is a movie that’s well worth checking out just based on its acting alone.