Review: "Tomb Raider"

 I hadn't even seen "Tomb Raider" yet and I was already sick of hearing about it.

How they translated the video game series into a rebooted film franchise for a new generation. About all the nifty stunts and set pieces. How tiny Swedish star Alicia Vikander worked out for months and subsisted on one of those fish-avocados-and-eggs diets in order to bulk up and get the prerequisite bumpy belly.

(I really don't know when in our popular culture bumpy bellies became a thing. It used to be you wanted to look trim and tight. Now we're supposed to want our stomachs to look rippled potato chips. Seems like a screwy contradiction, if you ask me.)

As a ciswhiteoldishmale, I've been reliably instructed that I'm not allowed to comment on women's bodies. Nuts to that. If you make a big-budget movie based on a game whose major appeal was a heroine who looked like a Victoria's Secret model, then her appearance is well within the bounds of discussion -- especially when it impacts how the film plays.

This is decidedly different take on Lara Croft than the Angelina Jolie movie from 2001. Say what you will about that movie, but Jolie seemed more than physically capable. Could take it, and dish it out, like any male action hero counterpart. In a word, she was tough.

Vikander, in a word, is frail. Even with the aforementioned buffing-up, her look is still more ballerina than badass. Her Lara gets her ass kicked a lot in the movie, almost entirely by male combatants (with the exception of a female sparring partner near the beginning, who also wipes the floor with her). And she emits a lot of girlish squeaks and dainty yelps in the process.

So it's a much more vulnerable version of the character. I guess the idea for director Roar Uthaug and screenwriters Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons was to have Lara more relatable. But the overall effect is to make her come across as weak.

Arriving in the footsteps of the physically and thematically muscular "Wonder Woman," this feels like something of a retreat.

Lara isn't even a real adventurer as the story opens, just an orphaned young woman working as a bicycle courier and doing a little kickboxing on the side. She's a sadgirl because her beloved daddy (Dominic West) disappeared mysteriously seven years ago, leaving her with regrets -- along with a massive fortune and estate, if only she'll sign the papers declaring him legally dead.

This she has refused to do, because... well, there is no good reason. Only movie people would toil, unable to even pay their gym fees, when there's billions at your beckoning.

Anyway, she discovers that father was secretly an Indiana Jones-type archeologist. When he went missing, he was working on the mystery of an ancient Japanese queen named Himiko, a sorceress who could kill with just a touch. Her tomb is shrouded in secrecy on a mystery island, and the elder Croft was trying to prevent an evil group called the Order of Trinity from finding it and exploiting her wretched powers.

In his death decree, daddy Croft instructs Lara to destroy all his research so as not to endanger the fate of the entire world. Instead, she carefully gathers it all up and books a ship so she can sail to the island and deliver it right to the bad guys.

This Lara Croft may be tight in the abs, but she's soft in the head.

Walton Goggins plays Vogel, the heavy leading a force of mercenaries and slave labor on the island. Unable to escape himself until he's completed his mission, Vogel stumbles about in a fog, occasionally shooting someone to make a point. Daniel Wu plays Lu Ren, the helpful ship captain who becomes Lara's henchman.

"Tomb Raider" is a decently entertaining movie, especially in the second half as they make their way into the tomb and encounter all sorts of nasty traps, tricks and puzzles. I never played any of the video games, but those who have tell me the film's plot follows the recent reboot of the game fairly faithfully.

I especially liked one river-born sequence, where Lara is in danger of being swept over a massive waterfall, and uses the carcass of a rotted B-17 bomber as her (rapidly deteriorating) lifeline.

I'm not sure we needed a wimpier version of Lara Croft, or indeed if we needed another film version of the video game at all. Energetic but unnecessary, it sits there like a giant meatball, simply existing.

Review: "My Old Lady"

Kevin Kline is in fine, fine form in “My Old Lady,” a movie that is not about his character’s wife. In it he plays a middle-aged man with a squandered life who finds that the incredibly valuable Parisian apartment he has inherited comes with a catch: the 92-year-old woman who already lives there, and isn’t about to leave.

She’s played by Maggie Smith, no slouch herself.

It seems Mathias Gold’s estranged father purchased the lovely chateau-sized place from Mathilde Girard more than 40 years ago under a “viager” arrangement. This especially French concoction involves selling a home at a low price, often to an elderly person, with the agreement that the seller will continue to live there, indefinitely. The buyer only gets the place when the seller dies.

Mathias, a failed writer, has little to show for himself other than two divorces and the clothes on this back. He used his last penny to fly to Paris to arrange the sale of his the apartment, which his hated father left him (unaccompanied by any funds, which went to charity).

Looking at a payday of millions of euros, he’s none too pleased to find Mathilde living there. A retired British teacher with an elegant if snippy personality, Mathilde has the legal right to stay – and even charge Mathias rent while he’s there!

(I feel compelled to point out that though the characters are supposed to be decades apart in age, Kline and Smith are actually only divided by 12 years -- yet another example of sexist showbiz ageism. Though both thespians have been blessed with stubbornly unchanged looks. And Smith had already been in the old biddy business for quite some time: she played a centenarian in “Hook” 23 years ago!)

Thus begins a sly contest of wills, as these two cagey warriors battle to outlast each other. To pass the time Mathias sells off some furniture for pocket money, gets advice from a real estate agent (Dominique Pinon), lines up a potential buyer and begins to take an interest in Mathilde’s daughter Chloe (Kristin Scott Thomas), who also lives at the apartment and is more openly antagonistic than her mother.

Kline has always been one of the unlikeliest movie stars, a cards-down actor who always gives the sense of an internal complexity at work, only a peek of which he’s showing us at any given time. That’s especially true with the wily Mathias, who is presented as a loathsome opportunist, and yet is winningly charismatic and droll.

Writer/director Israel Horowitz, who adapted his own stage play, manages to craft a movie about a trio of characters, all of whom are deeply flawed in some way, and yet make the audience care deeply about them. Just when we might feel ready to judge them for some past action, new information comes along that makes those dark deeds, if not justifiable, then at least relatable.

Filled to the brim with smart, snappy dialogue and engaging characters, “My Old Lady” is one of those movies that keeps revealing new layers to itself. I certainly hope Kline’s turn, one of the best of his career, is remembered come Oscar nomination time.

Review: "In the House"

“In the House” is either not clever enough, or too clever for its own good.

This French drama is about a teacher advising a gifted student about a story he’s crafting based on his experiences worming his way into a schoolmate’s family. The teacher gives constant feedback, encouragement intermixed with criticism, and it soon becomes clear that the writing is directing the real-world interactions, rather than the other way round.

This is a nifty idea from writer/director François Ozon (“Swimming Pool,” “Potiche”), who adapted a play by Juan Mayorga. But it telegraphs its intentions and outcomes too broadly, so there’s a sense of everything unpacking itself exactly as we knew it would.

The result is a movie that thinks it’s being very coy and subtle, when viewers will see it as over-obvious and predictable.

Fabrice Luchini plays Germain, an owlish high school teacher of literature. He’s a failed novelist – something he admits freely – and burnt out on the job, complaining annually to his art gallery manager wife, Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), that this year’s batch of students is the worst ever.

But Germain is intrigued by Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer), a quiet boy who sits in the back row and shows promise. For his obligatory what-I-did-this-summer essay, he writes about sitting in a park staring at an upper-middle-class house with a seemingly perfect family, and finding a way to insinuate himself into their midst.

He ends his essay with a promise “to be continued” – installments being a rare thing in public education writing assignments. Germain gives Claude a B+ and encourages him to continue the story.

Things go along with the school year, with Claude befriending the classmate who lives in the house, Rapha (Bastien Ughetto). A lonely, virtually parentless kid, Claude ingratiates himself with Rapha’s parents, Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner), a bored housewife who dreams of designing houses, and Rapha Senior (Denis Ménochet), a sports-obsessed middle manager who’s fixated on not getting enough respect at work.

At first Claude’s main focus is Esther, but Germain scolds him that having a teenager with a crush on a middle-aged mother is too clichéd. So the story moves into developing the Rapha characters, and their intrigues with Claude.

Germain and Claude refer to all these people as “characters,” though it’s left deliberately unclear how much of Claude’s writings are fabrications. At one point young Rapha turns up dead in his bedroom, having hanged himself, but after Germain frets about the boy’s absence at school the next day, it turns out he just had the flu.

Later on, Germain will actually invade the action in the house, offering observations and reproach for what is transpiring.

Of course, it’s not hard to guess that the real object of Claude’s machinations are his own teacher – something Jeanne, who religiously reads the episodes herself, surmises more quickly than her husband: “He’s manipulating you. He’s the one teaching you a lesson.”

“In the House” is sometimes engaging, but it’s too much an exercise in examining the creative process than establishing believable characters and putting them through some paces. The concept is novel, but the execution barely merits a passing grade.

Review: "Nowhere Boy"

"Nowhere Boy" distinguishes itself as much more than a drippy "before they were stars" biopic of John Lennon, and manages to wade into some actual soulful territory. How accurate a depiction it is of Lennon's teen years is impossible to say. But even if we can't assess its historical genuineness, the movie is faithful to its own truth.

It succeeds as a moving story of a boy, expressively played by Aaron Johnson, whose life would have been interesting enough to justify a movie about it even if he'd never gone on to be one of The Beatles.

Johnson, who affected an American accent so believable in this spring's "Kick-Ass" that many of us were shocked to discover he's British, nails the Liverpool speech patterns of Lennon and his peers. His features are a far sight too pretty to resemble the pinch-faced Lennon, but more importantly we believe he could be Lennon -- particularly later in the story when he acquires a swelled head bigger than the pompadour he copied off Elvis.

His Aunt Mimi is played by Kristin Scott Thomas, doing that rigid, emotionally closed-off British thing that few do as well as Scott Thomas. Early in the story she loses her husband George (David Threlfall), who encouraged John's playful side, leaving the disparate pair stuck together in the cramped confines of Mendips house.

John has lived with his aunt and uncle as long as he can remember, though there are some hazy recollections of trouble involving his parents. When his mother Julia (a marvelous Anne-Marie Duff) shows up at George's funeral, it's an excuse from them to reconnect.

John is shocked to learn his mother lives just a short walk away. At first, he's enthralled with the renewed relationship. His mother, red-haired and vibrant, is passionate about life and music. Soon he's ditching aunt Mimi to spend more and more time with his mum.

Eventually, dark secrets about Julia and his own past rise up to complicate things, and John finds himself estranged from both his aunt and mother. He funnels that anger, of course, into music.

Julia introduces John to rock 'n' roll and teaches him to play the banjo. The scene where she sings him "Maggie May," a ribald tune about a whore that is something of an unofficial anthem of Liverpool, is pure magic. At that moment, with John's eyes twinkling, we can see the boy's fate is sealed.

John launches a band called The Quarrymen that plays a few local gigs, and soon attracts the attention of 15-year-old Paul McCartney, a musical prodigy whose expertise on the guitar puts their three-chord progressions to shame. I'd have said Thomas Brodie Sangster was too baby-faced to play Paul, but if you look at photos from the era the resemblance is actually fairly spot-on.

Although it's not the central dynamic of the film -- John's relationship with his two mother figures is -- the interaction between John and Paul is interesting. Despite being younger and subservient to John's leadership of the band, Paul manages to subtly influence John about both his musical and personal direction. He even introduces a friend, George Harrison (Sam Bell), into the band.

"Nowhere Boy" is based on a memoir by Lennon's half-sister Julia Baird, adapted for the screen by Matt Greenhalgh. It was skillfully directed by Sam Taylor-Wood -- who is engaged to her star Johnson, despite being more than twice his age. (I'm not judging, just reporting that which is interesting.)

I should note that Johnson did his own singing for the film. He doesn't quite sound like Lennon, but he sounds good enough to have become Lennon. One scene, where The Quarrymen are recording "In Spite of All the Danger" at a two-bit studio, is a delightful aural feast.

Ultimately, "Nowhere Boy" is less about the artistry of John Lennon than the boy who had a yawning hole in his life that he desperately needed to fill. Music just happened to fit the bill.

3 stars out of four