Review: "Certain Women"

I see around 200 movies a year, plenty of good ones, a healthy portion of bad ones, a whole bunch of mediocre ones. What I rarely see these days are movies that are just plain boring.

Say what you will about our current system for making and delivering films to the public -- the overemphasis on spectacle, too few indies and foreign movies making it out to the heartland, etc. But there’s almost always something interesting going on in films that get a significant theatrical release, even in the weakest cinematic fare.

I mean, “Jupiter Ascending” was a screaming pile of laughable dog doo-doo. But it wasn’t like I would’ve rather spent the time folding laundry.

I can’t honestly say the same about “Certain Women” -- at least, most of it. It’s three disparate stories of women living in Montana, based on the short stories of Maile Meloy. Adapted and directed by Kelly Reichardt, it has three chapters that barely intersect with each other -- literally, one character from a section may pass by another, but that’s it.

Like a lot of episodic movies, some parts rise and other parts fall. In this case, the final act is breathtaking in the quiet power of its fragile emotions. The first two are so listless I wondered why anyone thought these stories deserved to be on celluloid.

Let’s be generous and talk about the last one first.

It stars Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone as two young women who are drawn to each other. Stewart is Beth, a newly minted lawyer who signed up for a job teaching education law at night school, not realizing it was a four-hour drive away. Gladstone is Jamie, a f’real cowgirl who takes care of horses at a local ranch.

Jamie wanders into the class -- she’s not a student; she just saw people going in and was looking for something to do. She was mesmerized by the awkward, honest grace of Beth, and keeps coming back to the class. They hook up for meals at the local diner after class.

Jamie doesn’t really talk much, but Gladstone’s wide, strong face does all the communicating we need. She’s clearly smitten, and uses her limited verbal and emotional vocabulary to let Beth know how she feels.

This section, which feels both workaday and dreamy, reminded me in a lot of ways of “Brokeback Mountain” -- not just the same-sex attraction, but how everyday folks have trouble expressing their inner selves.

There’s some of that in the other two acts as well, but it’s far less compelling. Certainly there is not anywhere the emotive resonance of the final section.

Laura Dern plays another lawyer. She’s got a PITA client ( Jared Harris), who suffered a devastating on-the-job injury but foolishly signed away any liability for a small settlement. She’s spent eight months explaining to him that their hands are tied, but it’s not until she takes him to consult with an older male attorney that he finally accepts it. On the ride back to town he jokes with her about taking a machine gun to his old job, and we’re not sure where the joke ends and the pain begins.

In the middle piece, Michelle Williams and James Le Gros play a married couple building a house in the woods. They’re currently living in a souped-up tent, and there’s some friction over their parenting styles toward their teen daughter (Sara Rodier). They visit an older man (René Auberjonois) who obviously has dementia and sorta/kinda sweet-talk him out of some sandstone bricks from the old schoolhouse that are lying around his property, which they want to use for their project.

I wish I could say there’s more going on in these parts beyond what I just described, but there isn’t.

“Certain Women” is a terrific short film that is stitched unnecessarily to two far lesser short films. If you can survive the dullness of the first two acts, the third is worth hanging around for.

Video review: "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."

“The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” cost a bundle to make and made not such a large bundle at the box office, so it’s already been written off as one of 2015’s biggest flops. Actually, it’s all disinformation and propaganda: this was probably the most fun I’ve had at the cinema this year.

Based (loosely) on the 1960s TV series, it pits East-versus-West superspies who are forced to join forces to get back the nuclear technology that’s been stolen. Henry Cavill plays CIA star Napoleon Solo, a rakish scamp who gets by on charm and improvisation. Armie Hammer is Illya Kuryakin, a KGB agent who’s all iron and cold fury.

They clash, they grudge, they clash some more.

Of course there’s a damsel, though she tends to distribute distress rather than needing to be saved from it. Alicia Vikander plays Gaby, a German mechanic whose dad was a Nazi scientist and is now at the center of the trouble. Napoleon goes for the frontal romantic assault, but she’s got eyes for the dour Russian.

Director Guy Ritchie breaks out every trick in his book, with lots of jump-cutting, musical interludes and time displacement. The movie is festooned with dashing suits, nifty gadgets, sexy villains and lots of color. The result is jazzy and loose, an ironic tug at the smug façade of the spy genre.

Forget what you’ve heard and remember this message (though you may have to destroy it afterward): “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” is the best time this side of Bond.

Bonus features are pretty good, though the DVD comes with only one featurette, “A Higher Class of Hero.”

Upgrade to the blu-ray combo pack, and you add more making-of mini-docs: “Spy Vision: Recreating ‘60s Cool,” “Metisse Motorcycles: Proper -- And Very British,” “The Guys from U.N.C.L.E.,” “A Man of Extraordinary Talents” and “U.N.C.L.E: On-Set Spy.”

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Review: "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."

Brisk, daring and deliciously sexy, "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." is the end-of-summer surprise we've been waiting for.

Let's face it, August has historically become the summer movie season's dumping ground. Many kids are already back in school, vacations are mostly wound down, and films with lower profiles and stars of lesser wattage don't want to compete with the behemoths of May and June. I get it.

So it's always a thrill to encounter a flick that shakes off expectations and bounds over the doldrums. "Man," based on the TV show from the 1960s and set during that same period, is the best August time at the cinema since 2011's "Rise of the Planet of the Apes." Both were based on moldy franchises that went from moribund to magnificent under the spell of energetic filmmakers and an electrifying cast.

Director Guy Ritchie did much the same to rejuvenate the "Sherlock Holmes" movies, though not to my liking. The dim steampunk streets and slo-mo chop-socky quickly grew tiring. Perhaps I like "Man" so much because it is those films' total opposite in tone and hue.

It's a gorgeous-looking movie, with vibrant primary colors and crisp focus. Henry Cavill's blue eyes, black forelock and incisor-sharp jawline practically seem to leap off a clothing designer's onionskin. Of course, he's helped by the splendid full-chested suits he wears. With a lavish production design, it's a world where even the thick glass tumblers the characters grab to fill with scotch look expensive and just-so tasteful.

Cavill plays Napoleon Solo, who if you'll recall is the rakish thief who got caught by the C.I.A. and threatened with jail if he didn't join their ranks. His opposite is Illya Kuryakin, a cold-blooded KGB tough who gets thrown in with him as his enforced partner. (He's played by Armie Hammer, who somehow wrangled top billing out of Superman's hands.) They form a ying-and-yang duo, the smooth operator and the psycho ready to snap, to get the job done.

"The job" is a nearly comprehensible MacGuffin of the classic order: some bad people have gotten their hands on nuclear technology, are building a bomb and trying to sell it to the Nazis, who somehow haven't heard about their surrender 18 years earlier. Don't worry about following the plot; it's just an excuse to set up big action spectacles, face-downs and hiss-able villains.

Cavill and Hammer are just about perfect in their respective parts. Cavill has got a Bond-esque thing going, cherishing his own unflappability, and he speaks his lines in a distinctive way that's somehow both charming and condescending. You've heard of "mansplaining"? He's spysplaining.

Since his breakout in "The Social Network," Hollywood really hasn't figured out what to do with Hammer, casting him as a hapless prince ("Mirror Mirror") or suffering the humiliation of making him the Lone Ranger and then having the cowboy icon usurped by his sidekick. He's flat-out terrific here, playing it straight and finding comedy by never winking at the camera. His Illya is simultaneously chilling and touching, a resentful lost boy in a superman's (small "s") body.

Alicia Vikander is Gaby, an East German mechanic who gets smuggled across the Berlin Wall because her dad was a nuke scientist for the Nazis, and is now suspected of helping some Italian aristocrats with the aforementioned bomb. The expected thing here would be to have her ensorcelled by the suave Napoleon, but she seems to only have well-mascaraed eyes for the sullen, withdrawn Russian.

Elizabeth Debicki is slithery and seductive as Victoria Vinciguerra -- just try saying that name, you'll love it -- who regards Napoleon like some viperous insect, something with which to copulate and then consume. Hugh Grant pops up as a likeable Brit harboring a secret agenda.

Ritchie pulls all the tricks out of his considerable director's bag: backward time jumps, split screens that keep splitting different directions, letting the music swell up and take over the movie for a moment, etc. Here the fancy stuff complements the material, rather than trying to dazzle us for its own sake.

But dazzle "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." does. It's a fresh cut on an old suit that plays its cards as they lay, and plays them with panache.

Video review: "The Boxtrolls"

“The Boxtrolls” was easily my favorite animated film of last year – partly because the stop-motion gem is so visually alive and imaginative, but also because there really wasn’t much in the way of competition. Let’s face it, once we got past this movie and one or two others, 2014 was something of a cartoon wasteland.

This picture, based on a book by Alan Snow, simply oozes with British culture and appeal, from the Cockney accents and damp cobblestone streets down to the diaspora of wonky teeth. Set in the late 19th or early 20th century, the story concerns a secret society of gentle pointy-headed critters who live underground and wear castoff cardboard boxes instead of clothes.

They don’t have a discernible language or even names; they each go by whatever picture is on their boxes, which they pilfer – along with many other things – from the humans above. The exception is Eggs (voice of Isaac Hempstead-Wright), a human boy who was kidnapped (sort of) by the boxtrolls as a baby and raised as one of their own.

Their adventures take them above ground, where the terrifying Archibald Snatcher (a delightful Ben Kingsley) has appointed himself chief boxtroll catcher. Soon most of the troll population has been grabbed up and tossed into his dungeons. The daughter of a local lord (Elle Fanning) provides reluctant help, mostly out of resentment toward her absentee father.

It seems Snatcher dreams of joining the cadre of “White Hats” – genteel gentlemen who run the town, ostensibly -- though they don’t seem to do more than sit around sampling exotic cheeses. By portraying the boxtrolls as a scourge, Snatcher hopes to stoke public fear and use it to springboard himself into their good graces.

Visually arresting and impishly funny, “The Boxtrolls” is a family-friendly treat.

Fortunately, the film is being released on video with a host of excellent extra features. There’s a feature-length commentary track by directors Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable, and a raft of featurettes touching on all aspects of production, from casting the voice actors to creating a fancy ballroom dance scene with stop-motion puppets.

There are also preliminary animatic sequences and much more.

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Review: "The Boxtrolls"

I thought last year a slow one for quality animated films, but if anything 2014 has been even duller. “Frozen” finally came along at year’s end to brighten things up, and this time September has delivered its own wondrous surprise: “The Boxtrolls.”

This stop-motion gem is one of the best of its ilk since “Coraline.” It’s a whiz-bang collection of fun action, Dickensian backdrop, cute critters and one really nasty, yet pleasing, villain.

Based on a novel by Alan Snow, the story centers on the titular trolls, who live underground and wear old cardboard boxes instead of clothes. Though they tend to pilfer things left unattended, they’re more tinkerers who love to build junk than malicious marauders. They go by the names of whatever’s on their box: Fish, Shoe, etc.

I just love the trolls’ look, with pasty skin, pointy ears, tufts of random hair and big liquid eyes surrounded by dark patches like a domino mask, which makes them look like vintage cartoon burglars. They don’t really speak, using a collection of croaks, clicks and squeaks to communicate.

The boxtrolls have gotten a bad rap from the humans after they allegedly pilfered a baby years ago. Archibald Snatcher, a lowlife climber who yearns to wear one of the “White Hats” signifying town leaders, appoints himself chief boxtroll catcher, and sets about exterminating the population.

Snatcher is voiced heroically by Ben Kingsley, in one of the best vocal performances in recent memory. Snatcher chews and growls his words as if they are poison to his mouth – not unlike the fine cheeses favored by the White Hats, which he craves to share despite the fact they make him swell up like a landed jellyfish. And he’s got a buxom alter ego.

He has a trio of henchmen who range in malevolence from reluctant to gleeful – Nick Frost, Richard Ayoade and Tracy Morgan do the voices. The nicer pair proclaim themselves the good guys, but worry they’re really evil stooges.

Isaac Hepstead-Wright provides the voice of Eggs, a human boy who was the baby kidnapped by the boxtrolls, though there’s more to it than that. He’s grown up with them and is convinced he is a boxtroll, despite evidence to the contrary. (He insists his ability to use English is a “speech impediment.”)

Eggs finds himself stranded on the city streets topside, where he encounters Winnie Portley-Rind (Elle Fanning), daughter of the local lord (Jared Harris). Willful and obstinate, Winnie is infuriated by her parents’ continual ignoring of what she has to say, particularly with regard to the truth about the boxtrolls.

Directors Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi are animation veterans without a lot of experience in the top seat, but prove to be top-notch visualists and storytellers. Irena Brignull and Adam Pava wrote the screenplay.

My guess is the stop-motion work has been augmented with some computer-generated effects, since there some things – like smoke dissipating from Snatcher’s various steamworks contraptions – that couldn’t be achieved otherwise.

I’m no purist myself – whatever works onscreen, works. This is a movie of dense layers, from the grimy cobblestone streets and buildings to extreme close-ups of the characters, which are incredibly detailed and facially expressive. (And those wonky teeth – so British!)

“The Boxtrolls” is the sort of delightfully inventive family picture that parents might be tempted to indulge in a second viewing – on their own, with the kiddies tucked in at home.