Review: "Cut Throat City"

"Cut Throat City" is a grim and grating tale of crime and despair. Set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it spins the story of Blink, an aspiring comic book artist who turns to the gang life in order to get his family by. Over the course of the next two hours he descends into his personal heart of darkness, encountering increasingly depraved souls -- and risking the state of his own.

Blink is played by Shameik Moore, a young actor I've had my eye on for awhile. He had a terrific breakout in the criminally under-seen "Dope" five years ago, and was the lead voice actor on 2018's hit "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse." He's got a sly sensitivity to him, and in his portrayal of Blink we see a kind soul who must harden himself to the harsh conditions surrounding him like a shroud.

Blink winds up doing some pretty terrible things, and yet we never glimpse in him a person who revels in these acts -- unlike some other, contrasting figures we'll meet.

"Cut Throat City" is overtly a morality tale, looking at the largely Black community in the Lower Ninth Ward, which was flooded by the storm and then allowed to fester in a fever of drugs, unemployment, abandonment and despair. To Blink, the levees breaking was just the latest act in a long history of being ignored and put down by the government.

It's a solid crime saga with a real social bite to it.

The film is directed by RZA, best known as a rap artist with the Wu Tang Clan but who has increasingly turned to moviemaking, including two previous features (unseen by me). He already shows considerable skill as a storyteller, and has an intrinsic feel for how to get actors to be their most present in a scene. RZA is also good at knowing when to hold a moment a beat or two longer, and when to move on.

The screenplay by P.G. Cushieri, his first feature, isn't nearly as tight as it could be, especially in the second half as we keep introducing new characters that probably aren't necessary to the story. But the ones we do encounter are sharply drawn, and the dialogue has the authentic crack of people who have made their life on the streets and have little patience for sophistry.

"Cut Throat City" also boasts an amazing supporting cast of name actors: Ethan Hawke, Isaiah Washington, Terrence Howard, Rob Morgan and Wesley Snipes among them. Snipes in particular has terrific presence as Blink's absent father Lawrence, who he must turn to in time of need.

Bald, his chin tucked to his prodigious chest and teeth clenching a pipe, Lawrence ambles around his poor shack in the swamp like an exiled king. Here is a man who knows the costs of his mistakes and would impart those tough lessons to his son.

After a career of ups and downs, it's nice to be reminded that Snipes has serious acting chops when he given a chance to use them.

The story starts with Blink's wedding to Demyra (Kat Graham), then flashes to the time after Katrina. Blink is rudely rejected for an artist job, but they don't qualify for FEMA assistance. With the bills piling up, he and his best friends figure they'll try a heist to get them a boost. Of course, the "one job" becomes a downslide to increasing violence.

This means aligning with Cousin Bass, the local head gangbanger (who actually is Demyra's cousin, but everyone calls him that). Cousin is a pure feral creature, concerned with making money and inflicting pain. Chillingly played by musician T.I., he has (ersatz) vertiglio patches on his face that make it seem like his skull is trying to shrug out of his skin.

Blink's crew are Miracle aka T.C. (Demetrius Shipp Jr.), a low-level drug dealer with a temper; Andre (Denzel Whitaker), the quiet, kindly one who plays trumpet; and Junior (Keean Johnson), the white kid who embraces Black culture and is accepted as part of their little tribe, though with a little trash-talking banter.

Their job, ripping of a casino -- seemingly the only legitimate businesses growing in New Orleans -- goes south and they find themselves on the run, caught between Cousin and the cops. Eiza Gonzalez plays Valencia, the stiff-necked detective on the case. And Ethan Hawke shows up as Symms, the corrupt city councilman who's drowning himself in drink and mourning his dead wife, and trying to do the right thing... possibly for the first time ever.

The story loses steam between the second and third acts, as the number of side characters and plots builds up and threatens to upend the weight of Blink's journey. Morgan plays Courtney aka Cowboy C, another local crime boss with an ace up his sleeve; Isaiah Washington is Sinclair, the slithering and perpetually smoking funeral home director; and Howard turns up lat as the Saint, a mysterious figure who seems to live in an old church and is said to be pulling everybody's strings.

There's a lot good things going on in this movie. There are too many extra pieces to the puzzle and the film could easily stand to be 15-20 minutes shorter. (A comment lament I have these days.)

But there's undeniable energy and verve here. Watching "Cut Throat City" feels like a journey into its own little universe where there are no good choices and the rules of fair play have been washed away.

Video review: "Juliet, Naked"

Just for the record: nobody doffs their clothes in “Juliet, Naked.” The title refers to an acoustic early version of a seminal album by Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), a fictional indie rocker who stopped performing 20 years ago in this lovely adaptation of the Nick Hornby (“About a Boy”) novel.

A tape of the record finds its way to the doorstep of Annie Platt (Rose Bryne), a woman living in a quaint seaside British village. Her longtime boyfriend, Duncan Thomson (Chris O’Dowd), runs a website lavishly  devoted to the lost rock god. Annie had written some snarky comments on the site taking Tucker’s work down a peg or two, and the man himself writes her to agree, along with the tape.

A correspondence soon kicks up, and before long Tucker has come to Annie and Duncan’s town on some family business. As her moribund relationship crashes, a potential new one blooms.

The film, directed by Jesse Peretz from a screenplay by Jim Taylor, Tamara Jenkins and Evgenia Peretz, is less about the nature of faded celebrity than the quirky ways human connections happen, and expire. Annie and Duncan are seemingly content at the start of the story, but as events transpire the cracks in their relationship becoming yawning chasms.

Likewise, Tucker comes across at first blush as a lovable loser, a guy sponging off his ex-wife and content to never play in front of an audience again. But we see that his quirks are actually character flaws, such as being an erstwhile father to his far-flung children, though the proximity to Annie compels him to start working on these issues again.

Sweet and sad, “Juliet, Naked” is a tale of possibilities -- to do more and be more than we were yesterday.

Bonus features are alas rather scant. It consists of just a single documentary short, “Making Juliet, Naked.”

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Review: "Blaze"

“Blaze Foley was a genius and a beautiful loser.”
                       --Lucinda Williams

“Blaze” is a hazy, mournful elegy for a man many have called the greatest country music singer-songwriter nobody’s ever heard of.

He’s revered by folks in the industry, many of whom have covered his songs (Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson) or wrote their own about him (Lucinda Williams, Townes Van Zandt). Blaze died nearly 30 years ago, gunned down at age 40 while defending a friend. His few albums barely leave much of a recorded legacy, , including instances where the master tapes were stolen or disappeared.

This film is Ethan Hawke’s attempt to resurrect Blaze’s ghost and give us a haunting portrait of a legend that never was.

Hawke has quietly directed a few small films over the years. He co-wrote the script with Sybil Rosen, based on her memoir of her romance and doomed marriage with Blaze. Musician Ben Dickey, stepping in front of the camera for the first time, gives a memorable, aching performance as a man who, as a friend described, knew the value of being zero.

An enormous person, Blaze was physically arresting, hobbling on one leg shortened by infant polio, sporting a waist-long beard and festooned cowboy hat that hid most of his head, his coat and boots trimmed with duct tape -- partly to keep them together, partly as a poke at the urban cowboy trend of the time.

He was usually drunk when he performed, and also when he did not.

Alia Shawkat plays Sybil, and the movie is at its best in skimming through their relationship. The story jumps forward and back in time, like a family album that’s being flipped around by someone clutching at painful memories. For a time they lived in a ramshackle treehouse on a commune, he picking out songs on his guitar and she acting in the local playhouse.

Narratively, the movie is deliberately unfocused. It plays out with not one but two framing devices. In the first, Blaze delivers his final performance at a dive bar in Austin -- quite literally the “Outhouse” -- where he is recording an album using his last few dollars. In between songs he delivers a heartbreaking sermon-slash-confession to the spare, indifferent audience, with one interruption to throw down with a rude patron yammering on the phone.

In the other, two of his collaborators and best friends, Townes Van Zandt (an arresting Charlie Sexton) and Zee (Josh Hamilton), are being interviewed by a radio DJ (Hawke himself, only heard and seen from behind). It’s ostensibly to promote a new album by Van Zandt -- a fellow traveler on the path of wastrel gypsy troubadours -- but they spend the whole time talking about Blaze, someone the DJ has never heard of.

Watching the movie is like walking through a waking dream. It’s an absolutely gorgeous-looking film (cinematography by Steve Cosens) that uses Blaze’s music as the quiet engine that powers the imagery, which is often a mix of montages with little narrative intent.

For example, a song will start with Blaze singing it at that dive bar, then switch to a vignette of Blaze and Sybil rambling around their shack decades earlier, and then the moment when he first wrote it.

Characters speak in lifelike, hard-to-understand dribbles of overlapping dialogue. Especially Dickey, whose deep-chested rumbles often seem like they barely pass through his mouth for refinement into coherent words. It’s an odd trend, this incomprehensible dialogue, undertaken by disparate filmmakers in recent years, and one best reconsidered.

“Blaze” is a very atypical biopic about a rather unusual figure. By any reasonable reckoning, Blaze Foley was a drunkard who failed at everything he tried. But he wrote a few songs that people still sing, and left an indelible portrait on those few fortunate enough to have known him. Some might call that very lucky indeed.

Video review: "First Reformed"

Ethan Hawke is quietly enjoying the richest period of his career. Alas, most of these revelatory performances have been in small movies few people saw: “Born to Be Blue,” “Maudie” and this effort from writer/director Paul Schrader. Hawke plays Toller, a middle-aged reverend at the titular church, a small, ancient place of worship in upstate New York.

“First Reformed” is a challenging but ultimately rewarding film. Not since Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” can I think of a movie that has treated the subject of religious faith with such devotion and a complete absence of condescension. Both are about clergymen having their beliefs tested and found, at least for a time, wanting.

Toller is more caretaker of a facility than minister to the faithful. Few people attend services at First Reformed, in part because it’s seen as more of a historical stop-off for tourists, and partly because Toller is clearly a man who’s struggling too much with his own doubts to allay those of others.

He gets a chance at redemption when he is approached by a young couple (Amanda Seyfried and Philip Ettinger) in crisis seeking his help. The husband is depressed and suicidal, obsessed with climate change, and Toller shares some of his own troubles in an attempt to relate. A former military chaplain, his marriage crumbled when his son enlisted -- with his encouragement -- and died in Iraq.

Instead of helping the young man, though, Toller finds himself swept up in the same fixation he has. This causes problems in his relationship with Reverend Joel Jeffers (a very good Cedric the Entertainer), who runs the nearby megachurch that props up First Reformed financially. They’re about to celebrate the church’s 250th anniversary, and an energy tycoon is funding the lavish ceremony.

Things go from there. “First Reformed” takes some surprising turns of the plot -- ones that I’ll admit left me feeling alienated from the movie at first. But the emotional navigation is true, anchored by Hawke’s wonderful performance as a man whose torment is the only thing left sustaining him.

This is not a film for everyone. But for those willing to be challenged and questioned by a movie, it’s as worthy a cinematic experience to come along in 2018.

Bonus features are modest. Schrader delivers a feature-length commentary track -- pity it did not include Hawke; this film would be a perfect conduit for an imtimate conversation between filmmaker and star -- and a making-of documentary featurette, “Discernment: Contemplating First Reformed.”

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Review: "First Reformed"

Some movies you know exactly where they're going to go, and others take you to the places you least expect. The latter isn't necessarily superior to the former, since it's the journey that has to be satisfying to the audience, not just the destination.

"First Reformed" is an austere, bold picture that looks at the crisis of faith being experienced by Toller, a Protestant pastor played by Ethan Hawke. I was completely absorbed in the plight of this man of faith, and Hawke's absolutely committed performance.

Religion is not a topic that films tackle regularly with anything resembling insight or sensitivity, so I was engrossed in what appeared to be a genuine attempt to do so by veteran writer/director Paul Schrader ("Taxi Driver," "Affliction").

Then the movie starting going off in some weird directions, progressing from off-putting to disturbing to shocking. Part of me resisted all the left turns. But I still found myself believing in the authenticity of Toller's emotional and spiritual journey.

Toller is a former military chaplain whose life crumbled some years ago when his son joined the Army and died in Iraq, which also doomed his marriage. Now he's the pastor of the titular church in Snowbridge, N.Y., a beautiful relic where almost nobody attends services. First Reformed is about to celebrate its 250th anniversary, and Toller's job is more caretaker of the facility than to flocks of the faithful.

He gives tours, sells T-shirts and hats, fixes leaky toilets, etc. Toller's church is under the financial and ecumenical wing of Abundant Life, a nearby megachurch where Joel Jeffers (a surprisingly un-showy, effective Cedric the Entertainer) is pastor. Toller does a little volunteering there, since there aren't really enough duties at First Reformed to fill his time, and checks in with Jeffers.

Jeffers isn't an unkind man, but his relationship with Toller holds a lot of casual disdain. He refers to First Reformed as "the souvenir shop church" and treats Toller more as a wayward child than a pastoral partner. He expresses concern, which borders on impatience, for Toller's recent health troubles and political/environmental leanings, which he worries will impinge on the big reconsecration celebration being financed by an energy tycoon (Michael Gaston).

"For you, every hour is the darkest hour," Jeffers counsels/criticizes.

The truth is Toller seems to be on a downward path with no turning. As the story opens, he has decided to keep a daily journal of his thoughts, which he sees as a form of prayer to replace the traditional kind he undertakes less and less. He starts out with the resolution that he will do this for a year, then shred and burn the handwritten pages so that no one ever reads them.

What is going to happen in 12 months? We don't know, but the self-imposed deadline doesn't portend well.

Schrader presents us with a bleak but bountiful portrait of a man in crisis, whose religion is failing him even as he tries to be a good shepherd. The director gives us stark spaces in his frame, such as Toller's residence nearly lacking in furniture, and fills them up with the turmoil of the soul.

The film reaches a crescendo when Toller is approached by a young married couple. Mary (Amanda Seyfried) is pregnant and worried about her husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger), who's become despondent about the lack of political movement on climate change, foreseeing the very end of mandkind.  Here is a reason to be a real clergyman again.

Toller and Michael's first counseling session is electric, in which Toller offers no sugar-coated reassurances or appropriate Bible quotations. He talks about his own struggles, and says that wisdom comes from having the ability to keep both despair and hope in your heart at the same time.

I'll say no more about what follows, other than even as Toller reengages as a reverend, his own temptations toward depression loom ever larger.

Hanging around the edges is Esther (Victoria Hill), the choir director at Abundant Life. She and Toller are friends, with hints at something more happening between them in the past. It's clear she wants more, and he does not have that which she needs him to give. Their final encounter is utterly naked in its raw, devastating emotions.

"First Reformed" is not the movie I expected. But even though I know some people will be disturbed or even offended at what transpires, in many ways it's a deeper, richer cinematic experience than I could have hoped for.

Review: "Maudie"

With every one of Sally Hawkins' endearing, deeply etched film roles, we fall a little bit more in love with her.

Hawkins' performance as Maud Lewis is essentially a portrait of pure love. Maud was a woman from Nova Scotia who was racked by crippling rheumatoid arthritis from childhood. She spent most of her life in a tiny shack without electricity or running water, living in abject poverty with her husband, Everett, a fish peddler who was gruff and ornery on his best days, a much worse on his worst.

Despite this, Maud became a renowned artist whose work was collected far and wide. Her paintings were bright, bold sweeps of unmixed colors, flowers or other nature scenes. She painted on almost everything: cards, pieces of scrap wood, virtually every single surface of their cottage. Today Maud's entire house is a work of art enshrined inside a museum.

Directed by Aisling Walsh from a screenplay by Sherry White, "Maudie" focuses not on the tiny, disabled body but the titanic soul contained within it. Hawkins portrays Maud's disease without fetishizing it, a slightly crooked, awkward woman who becomes more bent and bowed with the passing of years, her little hop of a limp turning into a tremulous stagger.

But that's not what the movie is about. Indeed, I don't think the word "arthritis" is even spoken aloud until near the end.

Like nearly all of Hawkins' other roles, even the most tragic of circumstances cannot bury her character's joyful essence. Maud smiles and twinkles, even when she is ignored or treated ill, always finding a way to carry on and hope for better.

Among those failing to give Maud her due are her Aunt Ida (Gabrielle Rose) and brother Charles (Zachary Bennett). They view Maud as a naive invalid, someone to be looked after and kept inside tight bookends of their own proscription. After Charles sells the family home to fund his business schemes, Maud is forced to live with Ida, under her strict rules -- a kept woman with no lover.

Certainly, Maud is not very smart in the traditional sense. She's a simple woman of simple tastes and desires. She wanders down to the local club to have a beer and do a little dance by herself, which Ida finds scandalous.

Then Maud spies a disheveled man coming into the local five-and-dime store to advertise for a housemaid. The man is obviously simple-minded, prone to outbursts of anger, and fiercely independent. Despite this, Maud answers the ad, seeing an opportunity to move out of Ida's place and have a piece of life that is her own.

The advertisement is for a live-in position, despite the fact the man's shack would qualify as what we today call a "tiny home," with a single walk-up loft bed. It soon becomes apparent that what the man was really advertising for was a wife to look after him.

We hear Everett before we see him, and it's hard to believe that sound could come out of Ethan Hawke. Low and guttural like a pair of stones being ground together, Everett's voice is that of a man not used to speaking, because he does not have much to say.

Everett is very particular about how things are done. He believes his home is his castle, and he the unquestioned lord. Everett is at once a very proud man and one who believes that everyone looks down upon him. Possibly there are undiagnosed mental health issues.

The arrangement causes a minor scandal in their little town -- "shacking up together" is tossed around. Maud doesn't really mind, and part of her is happy to be noticed at all, or spoken about in a romantic context.

The relationship, such as it is, gets off to a rocky start. There are outbursts, controlling behavior, even some physical violence. Everyone expects Maud to crawl back to Aunt Ida's. But she stays, the wavelength and intensity of Everett's rages become wider and smaller, and they settle into something like a routine, which finally becomes a marriage almost by default.

There's not much house to clean, so Maud passes the time painting little flowers here and there to brighten up the place. One of Everett's fish customers, a sophisticated woman from New York named Sandra (Kari Matchett), notices one of Maud's doodles and offers 25 cents for it.

Soon others buy them, painting becomes a regular source of income, and eventually people from all over stop by the little house to purchase a Maud Lewis original. Newspaper reporters and TV camera crews come calling.

Everett begrudgingly takes over the chores so Maud can have more time to paint -- which is as close to an overt expression of love a man like him can utter.

In its own plain way, "Maudie" is an incredibly beautiful movie. The photography by Guy Godfree has an unornamented charm, and the sweet strings of Michael Timmins' musical score sing a lullaby of humble passion.

Walks are used as a visual representation of Maud and Everett's evolving relationship. At first she walks behind him while he pushes his cart of goods about town; later they walk together, then she sits in the front of the cart facing away from him, and finally she rides nose-to-nose with her husband.

I think these are among the finest performances of both Hawkins' and Hawke's careers -- and that's saying something. Theirs is a duet of troubled love, expressing how two people with fierce challenges and emotional limitations can find contentment and a sense of permanency together. Both should remembered come time for Academy Award nominations.

"Maudie" is a quiet, candid movie that reminds us that beauty is not just found, it often must be made.

Review: "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"

"Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" is a very creative movie, but it's a shallow sort of creativity.

Based on the comics by  Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, "Valerian" is kind of a goofy James Bond-in-space adventure with tons of aliens and CGI. Written and directed by Luc Besson, it makes his "The Fifth Element" look like a hard and gritty drama.

Government agents Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and his partner and hoped-to-be lover, Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne), traipse through the galaxy getting into and out of all sorts of scrapes. The plot is barely comprehensible -- not that it's really meant to be -- having to do with a refugee race of aliens, a critter MacGuffin and the prerequisite sneering villain.

The tone is overtly comic book, and the expensive digital imagery ($180 million, I hear tell) has a deliberately cartoony look. I never quite knew how I was supposed to take the movie, or its characters. Certainly, we never feel any kind of connection to them. They're like our avatars in a video game that can't control all that well.

I'm not sure about the casting of the two leads. DeHaan, with his tired eyes and spindly frame, certainly doesn't look the part of an action movie hero. I'm actually OK with that: not every male body we see onscreen needs to have a six-pack and cannonball biceps. DeHaan plays Valerian as a smirking playboy who thinks he's finally found true love in Laureline, and tries to live up to that.

Delevingne brings some kick-ass authority to her role, a duty-bound soldier who's also able to look past the rule book when it doesn't fit circumstances. She continually puts off Valerian's advances, but the way she glances at him when he walks away tell us she secretly wants it to go on.

Things center around Alpha Station, a former Earth orbit platform that grew and grew as humans encountered more alien species and incorporated them into their galactic government. Eventually it got so big its gravitational pull threatened Earth's, so Alpha has traveled millions of miles over the last 400 years, and is home to multitudes.

The creature effects are quite impressive. Some, like those from planet Mül, look like stretched-out humans with translucent skin and no hair. Other aliens resemble the ogres from the "Lord of the Rings" movies, or butterflies, or sea slugs. Some are even liquid or gaseous, contained within space suit for interaction with humanoids, and others are living machines.

Combined with the wonders of Alpha and beyond, there's no denying "Valerian" is a feast for the eyes.

In one neat sequence, we enter a marketplace that exists in another dimension, so visitors don special eyewear to interact with the peddlers. Valerian sticks a laser pistol and his hand into a special gizmo, so he can shoot at bad guys while the rest of him remains phased in safety.

The adventure, though, soon grows tiresome as it seems there are no consequences to be encountered. For every obstacle or enemy, there's some kooky solution involving cool technology or interaction with a bizarre creature.

For instance, when Laureline needs to track down the lost Valerian, she seeks out a jellyfish that she has to, uh... interface with in an interesting way to learn his location. When roles are reversed, Valerian recruits a "glamopod" named Bubble who can transform her appearance. She's played by Rihanna, who does a very sexy and athletic burlesque routine as her introduction.

When she has to do dialogue, though... ugh. Rihanna can certainly perform, but she can't act.

Others rounding out the cast are Herbie Hancock (!) as the intergalactic minister calling the shots, Clive Owen as the local commander with a history, Sam Spruell as his upright number two, and Ethan Hawke as a cowboy pimp.

I had fun for awhile watching "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets," but it grows tiresome, like a circus show that runs too long. There's only so much bedazzlement the eye can take in before becoming strained.

We jump from dizzying scene to scene like we're progressing through a role-playing video game, and waiting at the end is a prize we don't really want that badly.

Video review: "The Magnificent Seven"

There’s not a lot that’s quite magnificent about “The Magnificent Seven,” though there is plenty to like. It’s got great actions scenes, twinkly anti-heroes, scornful villains, memorable supporting characters and lots of eye candy.

What it doesn’t have is any reason for existing. A remake of the seminal 1960s Western, which itself was based on Akira Kurosawa’s landmark “Seven Samurai,” this film is essentially a PG-13 nostalgia romp for its own sake.

Still, what’s not to like about Denzel Washington as creased, calculating bounty hunter Sam Chisolm? Or Chris Pratt as wise-cracking gambler/shootist Josh Faraday? Add in Ethan Hawke as a genteel Civil War legend/sharpshooter, Vincent D’Onofrio as a weirdly amusing mountain man/lunatic and a passel of other wayward cowpokes, and you’ve got yourself a movie.

You know the story: evil power-monger (in this case, Peter Sarsgaard’s sneering cattle baron) puts his boot on the collective neck of a town of farmers, who decide to hire their own gunslingers to protect them. Our seven heroes are mercilessly outnumbered, but with a little luck and some careful planning, they make a battle of it.

Director Antoine Fuqua, who’s made some stellar movies with Washington, and screenwriters Richard Wenk and Nic Pizzolatto don’t try to fancy things up beyond the essentials: stand-offs, wisecracks, a few lightly scary moments, a noble sacrifice or two. The last third of the movie is essentially one long action scene, and it’s harrowing stuff.

This film surely won’t be immortalized like the original was. But “The Magnificent Seven” has a job to do, and does it with skill.

Bonus features are decent if not especially expansive. The DVD edition comes with four making-of featurette documentaries. Upgrade to the Blu-ray version, and you add two more plus several deleted scenes.

The Blu-ray’s highlight is a “Vengeance Mode,” where you can watch the movie with key scenes broken down with comments from the director and cast.

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Review: "The Magnificent Seven"

“The Magnificent Seven” is a thoroughly enjoyable Western shoot-em-up that really has no purpose for existing. It’s a remake of the 1960 classic that itself is an Americanized version of a greater film, Japan’s “Seven Samurai.” But the basic tale has even deeper roots: a band of castoffs and deplorable is thrown together for a noble purpose in service to something greater than themselves.

So we watch this iteration of the familiar folklore, knowing full well what’s going to go down. There are no surprises to be unearthed, only admiration for the craftsmanship of the filmmakers and some finely drawn characters courtesy of the cast.

This is not the first rodeo together for director Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington (“Training Day”), and their films always seem to have a hum of energy about them. There are no dull patches, though we don’t delve into the backstories of the seven gunmen too much, or the villain who besets them.

It is 1879 in the tiny mining town of Rose Creek somewhere in California. The opener is a slam-banger in which sneering robber baron Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) kills most of the tougher men in town and demands the rest of the farmers leave in exchange for $20 apiece for their plots. Sargaard brings a sort of feral sickliness to the man, a bit of Biblical brimstone married to some notions about capitalism that even Ayn Rand would find overly harsh.

It’s all designed to make us hate Bogue and his army of faceless mercenaries, and it does.

Haley Bennett plays Emma Cullen, wife to one of the murdered who takes it upon herself to find some hard men of their own to stand up to Bogue. The first she recruits is Sam Chisolm (Washington), who demonstrates his affinity with the six-shooter by waltzing into a saloon and taking out half the local miscreants.

Washington is obviously having fun with this role, the bounty hunter of dark deeds who carries a carefully hidden chip on his shoulder. Outfitted in black garb, black hat and black horse, he carries a classic sense of righteousness and a modern undertone of grievance. The scene where Chisolm emerges from the saloon with hands in the air while half the town has their guns on him, the only black man around, speaks silent volumes.

Next up is Josh Faraday, a smirking gambler played by Chris Pratt. He’s a self-described ladies’ man whom all the women turn their noses up at, though he’s fast with a gun and card tricks. I kept waiting for the movie to peel back more layers on him, but it never happens. Pratt gets a lot of the best one-liners, and milks them well.

The rest sort of blur together, as the movie hurries through the recruitment phase to get to the showdown.

Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke) is a marksman whose accuracy made him a legend during the Civil War, but now the genteel Southerner seems to get by more on bluster than bullseyes. “Fame is a sarcophagus,” he opines over his whiskey, and he is overly fond of both his drink and his own voice.

His partner is Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), an Asian assassin of indeterminate origin who’s equally adept with guns and blades. Apparently Goodnight and Billy made some sort of pact to protect each other’s secrets, but they protect them too well.

Vincet D’Onofrio is an oddball bearcat of a mountain man, Jack Horne, a lonely former scalp-hunter who warbles in a high-pitched voice, saying nonsensical things that bemuse and befuddle his compatriots. He seems more than slightly teched, killing brutally but always seeking assurance that he is justified in doing so.

Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Martin Sensmeier are Vasquez and Red Harvest, rather generic warrior types of Mexican and Comanche heritage, respectively. Red Harvest at least gets some titular war paint to make him distinctive. Bogue has himself an evil Indian, so we just know it’s going to come down to a standoff with our good Indian.

The gunfight takes up almost the second half of the movie, and that’s the main attraction. It’s an orgy of choreographed PG-13-rated violence, in which blood flows after someone is shot but never spatters on impact. Our seven heroes manage to seem incredibly skilled but not superhuman. One guy gets shot full of arrows (bad Indian!) and we think he’s going to keep on coming, but… well, you’ll see.

If it’s possible to like a movie without really admiring it, that’s my take on “The Magnificent Seven.” I think the time and energy of cast and crew would’ve been better spent making any sort of original movie instead of remaking a remake. But the picture shoots straight.

Video review: "Maggie's Plan"

A smart and sharp comedy with a streak of insightful social commentary, “Maggie’s Plan” is the latest starring Greta Gerwig, the current queen of indies. Writer/director Rebecca Miller fashions a story that’s funny, sad -- even enraging at times – about the conflicting choices young women face these days.

Maggie is an accomplished woman who has a great job, great friends (Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph) and an overall wonderful life. The one thing she’s lousy at his relationships. But she hears the tick-tick-tick of that biological clock, and determines to have a baby on her own. She arranges a donor and seems headed for a life of bliss as a mother.

But then she falls for John (Ethan Hawke), a brilliant but troublesome academic who wants out of his miserable marriage to Georgette (Julianne Moore), a domineering type. Flash forward a couple of years, and Maggie now has a wondrous little girl, takes care of John’s kids… and John, too. He’s writing a novel that will never be finished, and Maggie finds herself burdened with an extended family she didn’t really plan on.

So she hatches a scheme to get John and Georgette back together. He’s like a car she bought that, showing a bunch of knocks and pings once it got down the road a bit, she’s looking to trade into the dealership.

“Maggie’s Plan” is very funny, with wonderful performances by the three main actors. Mina Sundwall also is terrific as John’s teenage daughter, who knows a lot more about what’s going on than the adults do.

But the film goes the extra mile to explore these people and their confounded relationships, and question whether having a spouse is really necessary to a rewarding life as a parent.

Bonus features are decent. Miller provides a feature-length audio commentary track; there are funny outtakes; a Q&A at the Sundance Film Festival; and a making-of documentary short.

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Review: "Maggie's Plan"

About 25 years ago Vice President Dan Quayle caused a stink when he criticized Murphy Brown’s decision to have a baby without getting married, or even locking down a permanent male partner (beyond providing the requisite genetic material). The controversy seems almost quaint today, given society’s rapidly changing mores on what constitutes a proper family (not to mention that Murphy was a fictional TV character).

I thought of this while watching “Maggie’s Plan” because the film serves as the unwitting antithesis of Quayle’s argument. Greta Gerwig plays the titular young woman whose plan to go the single mother route is derailed when she falls in love with a married man, and suddenly finds herself thrust into stewardship of an entire family.

With all the heartbreak and pain she suffers -- and causes -- it becomes pretty clear by the end that staying single would’ve been the best route to happiness for everyone involved.

The film is written and directed by Rebecca Miller, her fifth feature film over the past two decades. It’s a smart and wry exploration of yet another fully fleshed Gerwig character, and also provides some interesting thoughts on the ever-brewing Mommy Wars.

Maggie is in her early 30s, settled and accomplished as an administrator in the arts program of a New York City college that remains unnamed. (It’s obviously NYU, my alma mater, as evidenced by the locations, especially Washington Square Park; I assume there was a legal reason for remaining coy.)

She’s awesome at most everything, except romance, which is why as the story opens she’s decided to get pregnant using a donor. The male half of her best friend couple, Tony (Bill Hader) and Felicia (Maya Rudolph), offers his sperm, but she’s decided to obtain it from some guy from college -- whose name is Guy (Travis Fimmel) -- who used to be a promising mathematician but is now a crunchy type selling organic pickles.

Meanwhile, Maggie falls hard for John (Ethan Hawke), a slightly older adjunct professor who’s married with two kids. He’s a rock star in his field, fictocritical anthropology, which basically means he can write about whatever wants and receive an academic stipend for it. Currently he’s trying to write a novel, and escape the clutches of his controlling wife, Georgette.

Just as Maggie is about to culminate the, uh, transaction with Guy, John shows up on her doorstep and professes his love. Flash to 18 months later, and now she is ensconced as the mother of an adorable little girl, as well as playing den mother to John, still working on that novel, as well as his kids. Mina Sundwall plays the knowing, critical teenager.

Georgette turns up, played by Julianne Moore, after having written a book about the dissolution of her marriage, Maggie seeks her out, and the two spark up an unlikely friendship. She’s a strange, cold woman of vague Nordic background, also an academic, who tries to dominate every interaction she has. Moore plays her rather broadly, which is how Georgette is written, but the performance could’ve benefited from more shading.

Maggie realizes that, behind her veil of Valkyrie-like power, Georgette is vulnerable and still loves John. This also forces Maggie to admit that she is miserable with him. So she hatches a scheme to get her husband to leave her for his ex-wife.

Hawke is terrific as John, a generally decent guy whose worst instincts come out when he’s allowed to lean on someone else for everything, instead of being the lean-ee.

Ultimately it’s Gerwig’s show, though, and she continues to demonstrate why she’s one of the best actresses her generation. Maggie may be just as fictional as Murphy Brown was, but this movie gives us a funny, nuanced look at the choices and expectations Millennial women face.

Video review: "Boyhood"

“Boyhood” is running away with awards for best film of the year from various regional film critic groups -- including my own here in Indiana -- but I’m not quite as high on it as others. It’s a wonderful cinematic effort, a beacon of originality and brash, ambitious filmmaking.

I just don’t think it’s a great film.

As you’ve probably heard by now, writer/director Richard Linklater spent 12 years filming a single child actor, Ellar Coltrane, as he grew from a young boy to manhood. They would shoot a little each year, so we literally get to see his character, Mason, grow and age right before our eyes. Ditto for Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke and Lorelei Linklater, who respectively play his mother, father and sister.

The script was also written as they went along, so the result is a very organic narrative that flows like a river, meandering this way and that, occasionally picking up speed and turbulence or slowing down into a contemplative eddy.

There are no big, clashing events like you’d see in a typical drama -- nobody dies in a car crash, or encounters a terrorist, or is diagnosed with a brain tumor. It’s just life, unspooling. Sometimes languorously.

Mostly, the movie is a series of revolving conversations, especially between Mason and his parents, which reflect and affect the path of his growth. His mom and dad divorced long ago, and each present a set of good and bad attributes to emulate or avoid. She tends to make poor choices about the men she falls for, while he still harbors dreams better suited to an adolescent, even as he’s raising one.

It’s a splendidly well-made film, especially the acting -- I expect both Hawke and Arquette to receive Academy Award nominations. Unfortunately, “Boyhood” sometimes feels more like an exercise in creativity than a work of creation.

Video extras are rather modest, and are only to be found on the Blu-ray edition -- DVD has nothing. They are limited to a Q&A with Linklater and his cast, and a making-of documentary, “The 12 Year Project.”

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Review: "Getaway"

The car in "Getaway" may be tricked out like a rolling Christmas tree, but the story is stripped down to shiny metal and bare essentials. A desperate man, in a car, on the run -- that's all there is to it.

A B-movie thriller with A-list crashes and stunts, "Getaway" doesn't have aspirations beyond a few scares and some good fun. That it delivers, though it's best to shift your brain into neutral to make things go faster. Even at a lean 90 minutes, the pacing is occasionally draggy.

Luckily, any time things get too talky and dull, more bad guys or police suddenly appear out of a side street to give chase, setting up another 10 minutes of roaring engines, grinding fenders and gravity-defying wipeouts.

Something like 90 percent of the action takes place inside the car, a smoking-hot Mustang Shelby GT500 Super Snake. (If you don't know cars: imagine a nuclear reactor on wheels.) Like other cinematic pony cars of yore ("Bullitt," "Gone in Sixty Seconds"), the 'Stang practically becomes a separate character in the movie, seeming to take on more attitude as it gets progressively beaten up.

The man at the wheel is Brent Magna, a former pro racer gone to seed. He's taken some jobs for some shady characters, but he and his wife (Rebecca Budig) have tried to put it behind them and relocated to Sofia, Bulgaria.

As played by Ethan Hawke, Brent resembles a wolf who's been starved too long and relishes getting back in the action. He returns to his apartment to find his wife kidnapped, and a mysterious voice on the phone (Jon Voight) calls him with instructions to steal a certain car.

Supercharged and armored, the Mustang makes mincemeat of the local constabulary. But the evil voice has installed video cameras all over the car so he can control Brent's every action, ordering him to follow instructions or see his wife killed.

At first the orders seem loony -- drive through a park full of people and deliberately smash up Christmas decorations. But gradually a method becomes clear, especially after Brent picks up a smart, mouthy kid (Selena Gomez) with a more than passing interest in his ride.

Rookie screenwriters Sean Finegan and Gregg Maxwell Parker have essentially put story elements from several other movies, notably "Speed," into a blender and cranked it up to high. The characters don't really emerge beyond their role in moving the plot ever forward, though we get some mumblings about Brent losing his nerve on the pro circuit.

Director Courtney Solomon ("An American Haunting") keeps things moving along pretty well, and his action-scene chops are rather good. He knows how to shoot car chases and stunts, and the editing is zippy and rhythmic.

Whenever the car slows down or stops, though, things quickly grow a little lazy, so a new chase is always just around the corner. This leads to the movie having a wash/rinse/repeat vibe.

No one will claim "Getaway" is a great piece of filmmaking. But it's a fleetingly entertaining chase picture that should satisfy your need for speed.

Review: "The Purge"

"The Purge" is a pretty dumb movie, but it goes about its business in a fashion that is not without intelligence and skill. It starts out with an allegorical premise, about a dystopian America where people are legally allowed to kill each other one night a year. But then it dives into familiar action/horror movie tropes while the audience spends the last half yelling at the people onscreen not to behave like total ijits.

Personally, I think writer/director James DeMonaco should've taken a more intellectual and dramatic approach, something like "Gattaca," which also happened to star Ethan Hawke (a frequent collaborator of DeMonaco's). This movie instead opts for boo-gotcha scares and fist-pumping takedowns of bad guys -- but at least it embraces this dumbed-down role instead of trying for a wishy-washy hybrid.

It's the year 2022, and the U.S. has been taken over by a political leadership that calls itself the New Founding Fathers. Their ethos is very heavy on religiosity, but it's more of an Old Testament version with lots of smiting and wrathful vengeance.

One night a year for 12 hours, all laws and public protection are suspended, and people are free to kill, maim and otherwise inflict their pent-up savagery on each other, without consequence. The idea is that while they talk a lot about God, the populace also recognizes its inner demons. Instead of confession, they let their sins out for one wanton night of orgiastic purging.

Most people barricade themselves in their homes and watch the action on television. James Sandin (Hawke) understands this, and makes a very nice living selling high-end security systems to wealthy types like himself. Wife Mary (Lena Headey) is also onboard, though their children are uncomfortable with the reasoning behind the mayhem.

Zoey (Adelaide Kane) is a pouty teen made poutier by the fact her dad disapproves of her older boyfriend (Tony Oller). Charlie (Max Burkholder) is morose and brainy, building a roving surveillance robot out of old toys that will come in handy later.

The Sandins are settling in for a comfortable night behind the protection of their steel-shielded doors when a homeless African-American man (Edwin Hodge) comes begging for mercy from the band of purgers chasing him. Soft-hearted Charlie shuts down the security and lets him in, and a brooding standoff ensues with his pursuers.

The purge crew is not the usual movie collection of illiterate rednecks, but well-heeled prep school types who see chasing down the dregs of society as not just their right, but a civic duty. They wear sinister Guy Fawkes masks, except for their charismatic leader (an excellent Rhys Wakefield), whose patriotic/pious fervor burns luridly brighter.

There are a lot of potential intriguing jumping-off points here, from the rich-vs.-poor underbelly of the purge system to the racial overtones that remain largely unspoken -- and I mean that literally; the black guy seeking sanctuary utters a total of about a dozen words.

But DeMonaco elbows these notions aside in favor of obvious but effective scare tactics. "The Purge" has an eerie claustrophobic feel, underlined by the director's tendency to keep his camera right up in people's faces. I lost count of the number of times somebody was about to die, their would-be killer leering over them with a gun or blade, and at the last second something intervenes.

There's a better movie to be made using this concept, but the one they did make isn't awful.

Reeling Backward: "Gattaca" (1997)

"Gattaca" is a great modern example of good old-fashioned "hard" science fiction.

Back in the day, sci-fi writers were obsessed with technology and the how-tos of things like space exploration and time travel. Only later did the genre become more concerned with how people existed psychologically in fantastical settings, what helped them emotionally navigate the stars.

Put it this way: "Star Trek" is a franchise that started out as hard science fiction, and got softer as time went on.

Writer/director Andrew Niccol's 1997 film is obsessed with minutia of a how a genetically inferior human -- an In-Valid -- passes himself off as one of the test tube-created Valid elites. We watch in fascination as Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke) carefully scrapes his skin down every day, fills false finger pad prosthetics with blood and surreptitiously dumps capsules full of skin flakes and hair follicles at his work station.

All this is so he can pass himself off as Jerome Morrow (Jude Law), one of the anointed who was paralyzed in a car crash and is renting himself out as a "borrowed ladder." The term refers to the double helix that makes up the genetic code. Jerome stays at home, filling up specimen bags and vials with his blood, urine and surface detritus, which Vincent then uses to pass the frequent genetic scans necessary for access to the upper echelons of society.

It's a world in the proverbial not-too-distant future, where ancestry determines the future.

Vincent/Jerome is amazed when applies for a job at Gattaca, the mammoth agency that runs all the space missions that he yearns to voyage on, and is accepted after a scan of his urine. What about the interview, he asks, and is told that was it. "My real resume is in my cells," he narrates. "We now have discrimination down to a science."

Vincent is a "God child" -- one of the unwashed who was conceived naturally. Later his parents decided to have another son, Anton, using genetic screening. As a teenager, Vincent's father shoots down his dream of becoming exploring space in the harshest terms, pointing to the 99 percent chance the doctors foretold that his faulty heart will not allow him to live past age 30: "The only way you will ever see the inside of a spaceship is if you are cleaning it."

Undeterred by the total lack of parental faith, or the preening bigotry of his younger brother, Vincent takes a job as a janitor at Gattaca, spending his nights pumping up his frail body and studying to be a space navigator. But all his applications are a dead end as soon as he's asked for a DNA sample.

Then he meets a "degener" broker (Tony Shalhoub) who pairs up In-Valids with Valids. Upon meeting Jerome, glumly trolling around his swank modernist apartment in a wheelchair, Vincent complains that he can't pass as him since Jerome is British. "Blood has no nationality," the broker smoothly assures. "As long as it's got what they're looking for, it's the only passport you'll ever need."

And it works. Vincent/Jerome has spent the last few years working his way up the rungs at Gattaca, and is slated for the next mission to Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, the next week.

Then all hell breaks loose when the program director is murdered, bludgeoned to death with his own keyboard. Despite his precautions, a single eyelash of Vincent's is found nearby, so all suspicion falls upon him. Of course, the authorities can't find him, because they don't know he's living as Jerome.

Alan Arkin plays a crusty police detective who wants to do scans of all the Gattaca employees, Valid and In-Valid, but his boss (Loren Dean) is worried at upsetting the company honcho (Gore Vidal) by disturbing their work.

Even though the story is set up as a whodunit, "Gattaca" is so much more enjoyable beyond the potboiler plot mechanics. It's wonderful to sit back and soak in the textures and the subtext.

For example, dating is tricky in a world based on eugenics. Uma Thurman plays Irene, a co-worker at Gattaca who takes a keen interest in "Jerome" as a potential mate. She steals a hair from his desk drawer (which had been carefully placed there) and takes it to a genetic boutique. There the clientele -- mostly women -- anonymously turn in bits of DNA they've collected on the sly for scanning (one woman has her lips swabbed after a kiss). Irene is complimented on her purloined hair: "A 9.3 ... quite a catch!"

Irene fesses up to her crime to Vincent/Jerome, and even admits that she has a slight imperfection with her heart that will keep her from ever blasting off into deep space. She plucks a blonde hair from her head and offers it to him for scanning, telling him to get back to him if he's still interested.

Sounds horrible, but is it really that dissimilar from today's dating world where prospects offer their vital statistics online -- often fudged, particular when it comes to male height and female weight -- and people run criminal background checks before the first date, and research credit history before getting in too deep?

Or consider the film's outright discrimination against the genetically inferior, or "genelism." The sorting of people into one walk of life or another based on a DNA scan is an extreme representation, but again, we can find parallels in our current society.

People are denied medical coverage, or charged exorbitant rates for it, based on mere predispositions toward certain conditions -- often determined by the health of one's parents, grandparents and siblings. And anyone who's ever shopped around for life insurance can attest to the ridiculous premiums demanded if something like diastolic blood pressure comes up a couple of blips above what is considered ideal.

I love the look of the film, which was nominated for an Oscar for art direction. It's sort of an early 1960s New Frontier meets 1940s film noir, flavored with a futuristic antiseptic look. The Valid women and men wear similar dark suits, and troll around with their hands grasped behind them. Cars resemble little classic European sports cars converted to electricity.

What's most disturbing about "Gattaca" is the way everyone seems to blithely accept this "DNA is destiny" mentality -- all except Vincent, of course. He seems driven as much to prove himself to be as good as any of the genetically pure humans as any actual desire for space travel. His real grasping for something beyond his human limitations occurs within.

3.5 stars out of four