Review: "Tenet"

So.

Well.

…yeah.

This is what we waited almost half a year for? After seeing the entire spring and summer movie season swallowed by -- well, you know -- it was finally time for some big-budget, big-name movie-making.

Christopher Nolan -- “Dunkirk,” “Inception,” “Interstellar” -- yeah, that guy. His new creation, “Tenet,” with a $225 million budget (reputedly). John David Washington, Denzel’s boy and the rising star of “BlacKkKlansman.” A high-tech spy franchise supposedly with enough thrills to put James Bond to shame.

And my first trip to a movie theater in six months.

High hopes? Yes, certainly up there. Admittedly, probably, a bit too high. But this? This?

Nolan’s newest is a great big catastrophic mess. How messy? We’re talking toeing the line on sheer incomprehensibility, and often juking gleefully over the edge.

If you had trouble understanding “Memento,” then this movie is the “Hold my beer.”

“Tenet” is a strange, strange bird. It’s got tons of dialogue, long winding scenes of people jabbering away about inversion and freeports and grandfather paradoxes and plutonium 241 and Goya paintings and a bunch of other stuff.

And you. Cannot. Understand it. At all.

There are several reasons why. Primarily the over-complicated plot in which some evil mastermind wants to end the world using time travel. Well, not traveling through time per se, but reversing time. So objects and, eventually, people can actually move through time in opposite directions. More on that in a bit.

Then there’s Nolan’s well-documented penchant for having sound effects and thundering music drowning out the dialogue. (Ludwig Göransson subs in for Nolan’s pet composer, Hans Zimmer, though based on the thundering bass and dissonant chords, it’s mimicry rather than departure.)

And we have a sprawling international cast using all sorts of accent flavors, often spoken rapidly and underneath their full breath. There’s Kenneth Branagh’s vowel-twisting Russian arms dealer, Sator, who is (we think) the chief villain. And his kept wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), in clipped high-class British tones. And a warbling Indian power broker (Dimple Kapadia).

Heck, Michael Caine turns up for a bit, and he’s the most comprehensible of the lot.

Here’s how the movie plays out: there will be an exciting but bizarre action scene. Then a whole bunch of talking to explain what just happened. Then a bunch more talking to set up the next set-piece. But we can’t understand the talking, so we have to amble our way through the chases and explosions, trying so hard to make sense of what we’re seeing it carries no emotional weight.

Because it’s Christopher Nolan, the movie is sleek and shiny and moves well. Some of the bang-bang scenes play quite nicely, including a heist of a MacGuffin from a moving truck using a variety of other trucks. And a bungee-cord assault on a skyscraper.

Branagh brings genuine menace as a controlling monster who keeps his wife pressed beneath his very thumb. This, despite the fact the stork-like Debecki towers above him, and everyone else for that matter. She resembles a normal woman whom God stretched out like taffy.

“Tenet” is not actually the name of Washington’s character, who simply calls himself The Protagonist. As the story opens he has just passed a particularly cruel test to be admitted to the top echelon of spydom and entrusted with this Most Important Mission. Robert Pattinson plays Neil, a smirking playboy wingman who can pick the locks of a lot of closed doors. He’s got foppy hair and a floppy lilt. (Again, hard to make out.)

The science is left deliberately fuzzy, something to do with a nuclear blast inverting the flow of electrons so the object moves backward rather than forward in time, I think. So a bullet hole will appear before the gun has been fired, and so on.

This results in decidedly weird, borderline comical combat scenes in which one person is moving forward in time and the other in reverse. It’s a lot of fumbling around and actions that miss the mark wildly; reminds me of my early love life. Eventually we get entire battles scenes of this.

Everything’s so utterly serious in “Tenet,” as if the movie can’t see itself and grasp how ridiculous it is. “We’re living in a twilight world” is a passcode some of the spies use when they find themselves in a situation where they’re unsure of what’s what, and boy do I know how that feels.

Reeling Backward: "Alfie" (1966)

"Alfie" is the story of a charming letch who woos and uses a string of women in 1960s London. It was a hit Broadway play, but when they went to make it into a movie stage star Terrence Stamp didn't want to have anything to do with it, nor did virtually every other Brit actor of the day.

With frank depictions of casual sex -- including married women -- emotional abuse and a harrowing abortion sequence, the material was considered too controversial for mainstream movies. Richard Harris and bunch of other actors passed.

Finally, a virtual unknown named Michael Caine -- who was actually Stamp's roommate -- agreed to play it, despite warnings against it being a potential career-killer.

We know the rest.

Despite containing one of the most iconic characters of 20th century cinema -- not to mention the instantly recognizable hit Burt Bacharach song sung by Cher that plays over the credits -- somehow I had managed to miss "Alfie" up until now. It did not disappoint.

Like Spencer Tracy, Caine is one of those actors I just naturally associate with middle age, and now senior years. He seemed old early, and for a long time. Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren -- their personas are indelibly marked with a strain of maturity. But they were indeed youngsters once.

So it's a bit of a shock at first to see this young, skinny, blond(ish) scamp bedding women and making a scene.

Director Lewis Gilbert and screenwriter Bill Naughton kept the feature of Naughton's play in which Alfie Elkins speaks directly to the audience. I'm trying to think of an earlier popular movie in which an actor looked directly into the camera and spoke right in the middle of a scene, and am drawing a blank.

Speaking sotto voce was long a staple of the stage, but I imagine it was quite a thing in 1966 for the protagonist to be speaking to another character, turn and comment to the audience about the interaction that is taking place, and then return to it.

Especially since these scenes usually occur with women, and he's incredibly insulting or dismissive of them. Of course, within the conceit of the device, they sort of go into a trance and don't hear themselves being denigrated.

Alfie refers to his girls as "birds" or, when his stripes are showing, as "it." They remade "Alfie" in 2004 with Jude Law, though I've never seen it. I'd be curious how the sexual dynamics of both films played at the time, and how they register now in the #MeToo movement.

Not well for the latter, I'd imagine, though I pretty well loathe the recent of fad of judging cultural artifacts by today's standards and mores rather than the context in which they were born. That way lies madness.

The notable thing about Alfie is that he never forces a woman to do anything. Indeed, he seems exceedingly accommodating and even deferential. He repeatedly stresses to his women that they are free to make their own choices, and if they choose to spend time with them he's pleased to have them.

What's really going on, though, is that Alfie has constructed a fictional alternate world for himself in which everything is consequence-free and the women he sleeps with are well aware that he's a wolf, always roving. So he's deluding himself into believing he's doing no one any harm, while his manipulations leave a wake of broken souls behind him.

For example, as the story opens Alfie is carrying on with a married woman, Siddie (Millicent Martin), including a hook-up in his car next to the metro station. He is a high-end on-call chauffer, which means he is often on the move with a Rolls Royce or other expensive vehicle, and plenty of downtime in between jobs.

But Alfie is also living with Gilda (Julia Foster), a rather dour young thing he refers to as "a stand-by girl." The great thing about a stand-by girl, he says, is that she knows she's a stand-by. Of course, it doesn't take long after meeting Gilda to realize that she doesn't see herself that way.

Gilda becomes pregnant and, despite promising to give the baby up for adoption, bears a son, Malcolm, that they both quickly become attached to. However, given Alfie's refusal to marry and settle down, she eventually leaves him for Humphrey (Graham Stark), a drab but decent bus conductor with whom she'd previously broken up.

One of the film's most poignant moments comes at the end when Alfie spots the family at a christening of their new baby girl, Humphrey joyfully tossing Malcolm into the air and referring to himself as his daddy.

Alfie has three other notable dalliances in the course of the story. The most heartbreaking is with Lily (Vivien Merchant), a rather frumpy middle-aged wife of his roommate at the convalescent home he is sent to when doctors find a shadow on his lung. Harry (Alfie Bass) and he become friends, despite the older man detesting Alfie's "filthy" love life. After being released Alfie has a one-night stand with Vivien, who confesses that she never been with another man besides her husband.

She becomes pregnant, leading to a truly excruciating sequence where they hire an abortionist (Denholm Elliott), who manages to shame the couple before performing an inducement in Alfie's disgusting kitchen. Alfie sees the aborted fetus and has a near-mental breakdown.

On the flip side is a fun affair with Shelley Winters playing Ruby, an older, self-confident American woman. She is rich and has similar attitudes about sex, so when things are looking down for Alfie he decides he should settle down with her and become her trophy husband. This leads to another painful scene, where he finds her in bed with another man.

What's he got that I don't, Alfie demands. "He's younger than you," Ruby coldly responds. The wolf meets an even bigger, more menacing wolf.

Finally there is the rather pathetic affair with Annie (Jane Asher), a red-headed hitchhiker that Alfie essentially steals from another professional driver, a truck driver named Frank (Sydney Tafler) who had initially picked up her up.

They're only together for a few weeks, but all Annie does is hang around Alfie's flat, cleaning and cooking all day. Part of him quite enjoys having such a servile bird around. But when a pair of his mates kid him about putting on weight from her hearty cooking -- "blown out" and "poncified" -- he abruptly breaks things off.

I quote enjoyed that wording and other British slang of the day. Alfie also uses the word "mumsie" to refer to a sort of comfortable, maternal feeling that some women put off. At varying times he is attracted or repelled by this quality.

"Alfie" has aged well, I think, because though it's very much a product of its time it explores an eternal subject: the competing impulses of young men to seek gratification for its own sake or embracing an existence that's less exciting but ultimately holds greater rewards.

"What's it all about?" Alfie famously asks in the final scene. I think he knows. I's just a question of when, or if, he'll get there.

Reeling Backward: "Battle of Britain" (1969)

There really isn't much acting per se in "Battle of Britain," the big-budget recreation of the war in the skies over the U.K. in the summer and fall of 1940, which historians regard as a turning point in World War II.

If Hitler had pressed the attack after Dunkirk instead of relying on the German superior air power to soften up the Brits, the thinking goes, the United Kingdom almost certainly would have fallen, and they'd be eating sauerkraut in the Bronx these days.

The aerial spectacle is the real star of this show, despite the presence of luminaries like Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine, Edward Fox, Christopher Plummer, Trevor Howard, Susannah York, Robert Shaw, Ralph Richardson, Harry Andrews, Michael Redgrave and even a young and off-puttingly smooth-faced Ian McShane.

Unlike most war pictures of this era that make extensive use of stock footage and terrible models, director Guy Hamilton and his crew assembled an impressive armada of vintage aircraft (or contemporaneous lookalikes) and deployed them in the skies, using real WWII pilots as consultants. They did use models for some of the scenes where planes blow up in the sky, and life-size replicas on the ground for similar pyrotechnic mayhem.

At the time, the producers boasted of having the "35th largest air force in the world." And it pays off: I couldn't spot a single instance of canned footage in the movie.
The final result is a film of impressive verisimilitude. One really gets a taste for what it must have been luck to be a British RAF pilot in those days, where they might fly five missions in a single day and new recruits might last a week. The sound design is quite impressive for its time, often the only audio we hear except for occasional radio chatter.

You might lament the lack of anything more than superficial characterization of any of the figures. McShane gets a surprisingly large amount of the non-flying screen time, playing a young pilot whose entire family is wiped out while hiding in an air raid shelter.

Shaw -- still sporting that blond dye job he used while fighting James Bond -- also gets a few moments on the homestead as Skipper (his name, not title), a demanding squadron leader known for rattling newbies with his aggressive in-air dogfighting simulations.

When one of the green pilots is ordered up for a one-on-one session, the veterans give him a teasing prelude, mimicking the commanders' radio simulation of machine-gun fire: "Attackattackattackattackattacka…"

Plummer and York probably have the most depth as a married couple both in the military. He plays squadron leader Colin Harvey, and she is Maggie, an officer in the women's air support unit. He repeatedly presses her -- demands angrily, really -- that she transfer to a closer station so they can be together. But she desires an identity of her own and keeps putting him off, which sours their infrequent liaisons in pubs or hotels.

At one point she is introduced to another flight officer with severe burn scars, which serves as an obvious premonition to Colin's own bout with being trapped in a flaming Spitfire. Lamentably, the screenplay by James Kennaway and Wilfred Greatorex simply drops their story after the revelation of his injuries, so we don't get to see the impact on their already tenuous relationship.

I rather liked Olivier as RAF chief Hugh Dowding, who is analytical and outspoken, eschewing the usual sort of military bluster. He writes a letter to his superior advocating for abandoning air support of the remaining French forces, knowing it will be controversial and go straight to the desk of Winston Churchill.

Later, after a rare victory in which the British fighters take out a horde of German bombers without a single loss, Dowding is called by a press official looking for confirmation and a quote so he can flog the story. "I don't care for propaganda," he responds, simply hanging up the phone on the man.

Most of the 2¼-hour running time is taken up with the air show, which surprisingly doesn't grow tiresome. My dad was in the Air Force (navigator/bombardier) during the Korean War and there are a number of pilots on my wife's side of the family, so I have a bit of an affinity for this stuff.

Director Hamilton doesn't even use the usual trick of constantly focusing on the pilots' faces to emphasize the human element. There are some cuts to the cockpit, but since it's difficult to even tell which actor is which with their goggles, mask and flight cap, there really isn't much point.

I was joking to myself that Caine's role was more voiceover than lives shots. He could've literally phoned it in, though I don't think he does. He plays another squadron leader, Canfield, who's vexed by how his unit is constantly being moved around. He doesn't seem to have any family or friends, just a dog as his companion/totem.

Interestingly, "Battle of Britain" has two completely different sets of musical score. Sir William Walton's music was rejected by the United Artists chief, who tried to get John Barry to do one, but he declined. Ron Goodwin was finally tapped to do the replacement score.

Olivier got wind of this and threatened to take his name off the credits, so the bigwigs relented and incorporated some of Walton's music into the final film. His complete score was later discovered, recorded and released.

The scenario reminds me of what happened to Bernard Hermann's score for "Torn Curtain," which was rejected by Alfred Hitchcock and ended their long and storied collaboration. To my ear, Goodwin's music is fairly standard-issue military march stuff.

"Battle of Britain" is also interesting for spending a little time on the German side of the fight, as scrappy overconfident pilots slowly become disillusioned with their commanders' tactics.

A festive beachside feast where they look though spyglasses at the white cliffs of Dover across the channel, yearning to conquer those shores, is contrasted with a much more subdued dinner toward the end. Hein Riess plays Hermann Göring, the plump and pompous head of the Luftwaffe, who seems more interested in strutting about in a white uniform that coming up with a winning strategy.

"Battle of Britain" succeeds as a spectacle if not as a human drama. I would contrast it with Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk," which was all about the people with the hardware in the background. Still, watching all those Stukas and Spitefires duke it out in the sky is an undeniable treat.

Video review: "Going in Style"

Three old guys hard up for cash and with an axe to grind turn to a life of crime -- or, at least an outing -- and in the process discover a sense of purpose that’s been missing.

Sound familiar? And not just because “Going in Style” is a remake of a 1979 film. It turns out movies about oldsters robbing banks and such are a veritable enterprise unto themselves.

There are zero surprises to be had with this dramedy caper starring Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin. We know how everything’s going to go, 1-2-3. Part 1: Grievances. Part 2: Planning the Heist. Part 3: Things Don’t Go Exactly as Planned, But Turn Out Fine.

The main reason to watch this film is the threesome of outstanding lead actors plus a nice supporting cast. They convey a sense of lived-in warmth and contrariness that you just can’t fake without four-fifths of a century of living, or thereabouts.

Freeman plays Willie, Arkin is Albert and Caine is Joe. All three are retirees from the same steel company that’s pulling up stakes and moving overseas, dissolving their pensions in the process. Turns out their bank is complicit in the move, so they feel no qualms about robbing the place.

They’re not greedy: They just want what they’re owed, and not a penny more.

John Ortiz plays a career criminal who hooks up with the boys and walks them through the paces. Matt Dillon plays the obtuse FBI agent leading the chase. Ann-Margret is the local seventysomething hottie who casts an amorous eye at Albert.

“Going in Style” isn’t a bad movie, just an unambitious one. With three great actors like this, you could just have them read random Tweets onscreen and it’d probably be equally entertaining.

Bonus features are rather modest in scope. The DVD version contains a feature-length commentary track by director Zach Braff. Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo pack, and you add a handful of deleted scenes.

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Extras: C

Reeling Backward: "The Hand" (1981)

OK, that's more like it.

After my dispiriting foray into checking out a film I incorrectly assumed was related to to 1981's "The Hand," I followed through and watched the horror film that I only saw once 35 years ago but still holds a strong place in my mind.

When it's been that long you don't really remember a movie; all you have is memories of memories -- vague impressions of mood and emotion punctuated with a few crystal-clear flashbacks.

"The Hand" was writer/director Oliver Stone's second feature film, falling into horror/psychological thriller geography. It was a big flop, got savaged by critics and didn't do much for the careers of Stone or star Michael Caine.

It's really a garbage movie, but the kind you can enjoy without guilt.

(As opposed to the British 1960 version of "The Hand," which brings guilt but no joy.)

Caine plays Jon Lansdale, a famous-ish cartoon artist who draws a syndicated newspaper strip called "Mandro," who is a not-at-all disguised clone of Conan. He loses his drawing hand in a freak car accident caused by his wife, with whom he was growing increasingly distant. They can't find the hand to reattach it, and Jon spirals into a psychotic state in which he imagines the disembodied hand comes to life and starts killing people who have wronged him.

As I mentioned in the previous column, we're lulled into thinking the entire thing is a figment of Jon's tortured mind, but the final scene would have us believe the supernatural hand is a real, malevolent entity after all.

After Jon has been incarcerated for his many crimes, a psychologist has him strapped into a medical chair, his hair disheveled into a Jewfro of impressive proportions, with a bunch of electrodes attached to his head in a scene that is very reminiscent of the one in "A Clockwork Orange."

The shrink, an older, authoritative woman -- more on that in a minute -- gets Jon to say that the hand is crawling toward her neck because it wants to kill her. But she pushes him hard, urging him admit that it's he who wants to hurt her, and confront his own fear and anger. That he does, but then the hand appears to choke her out.

I guess that was a breakthrough, of a sort.

Stone based his script on the 1979 novel, "The Lizard's Tail," by Marc Brandel. Though after the movie came out the book was reissued under the title "The Hand." Brandel was the type open to change, having legally switched his name from Marcus Beresford in the 1960s.

Back in the day, I was fascinated by the idea of a severed hand killing people, and the idea that a guy could be committing horrid acts without being aware of it -- projecting his negative emotions into an object that may or may not exist.

Also, it must be said, my teen self enjoyed the tawdry special effects (by Stan Winston) and the sheer gore of the film. Jon's un-handing scene is still arresting for the sheer amount of arterial spurts and Caine's extreme depiction of agony in a very un-Mandro type of way.

Today, the movie's horror plot perambulations are less interesting to me than the subtext about shifting gender roles. 

Jon clearly idolizes Mandro, a noble savage who knows what he wants and takes it through force of will and (ahem) hand. That's how he would like to see himself, instead of a scared, sensitive artist who is petrified that losing his hand will also rob him of his vocation, his identity as patriarch and the love of his wife.

Andrea Marcovicci plays his wife, Anne, who was already in the preparatory stages of leaving Jon when the accident occurs. She's become involved in some New Age-y movement that seems to involve a combination of yoga, Scientology-esque self-analysis and sleeping with your instructor. Mara Hobel plays their daugher, Lizzie.

(Apropos of nothing: I was struck by the downright eerie physical resemblance between Marcovicci and Gabriel Jarret, who had brief run in the '80s playing androgynous boy/men, most notably in "Real Genius." Same person?!?)

Like Jon, Anne has both redeeming and loathsome qualities. She's a woman who has spent much of her adult life under the yoke of a controlling man, and strives for independence and self-discovery. But she also treats Jon quite shabbily after his maiming, pushing through with her plan to live separately on a trial basis -- this is what they were arguing about when she caused the accident -- essentially abandoning him in his time of greatest need.

Jon never says outright that it was Anne's fault that he lost his hand, though it lies there always between them unspoken, like a marker in the quiet game of wills they're playing. Jon, in his backward way, thinks that her guilt over his injury will cause her to reaffirm her marital duties as loyal wife; she uses his alienation as justification to pull further away.

Jon tries drawing with his left hand, but it's for naught. Then his agent arranges a tryout with a younger artist (Charles Fleischer) to handle the drafting side while Jon provides the writing. But he's infuriated when the other artist changes it around to make Mandro an existential character pondering his own motives.

Rather than turn the strip over entirely to an interloper, Jon vetoes the deal, thus also ending his family's entire source of income. Outfitted with a prosthetic hand -- which, inaccurately, is depicted as being capable of super-human strength -- he moves out to California to teach at a tiny hick community college, living by himself in a ramshackle cabin in the woods provided by the university. He befriends a drunken psychology instructor (Bruce McGill), who advises him on his blackout spells when the hand takes over.

And he dallies with a student (Annie McEnroe) named Stella who's a total figment of a male screenwriter's imagination: she simply shows up on his doorstep one evening, takes her shirt off and informs Jon that "I'm old-fashioned; I like to make it in a bed, OK?"

(As opposed to... what? The laundry room?)

The movie's deeper theme -- don't laugh; the better horror films always have ample subtext -- is about Jon's loss of masculinity, of his craving for dominance and respect.

He's a guy who lives vicariously through his creation, an all-conquering he-man who takes guff from no other. In reality, Jon is a rather effete fellow with a lilting Brit accent who wears colorful sweaters, dotes on his daughter and stands idly by while his wife's yoga instructor-cum-life-coach gradually seduces her under his nose. He earns a living by drawing pictures, not by competing with other men for the spoils of the land.

Rather than dilute Mandro's strength, Jon chooses to destroy him. Instead of accepting a payout, he forges his own, harder path. The hand becomes his new avatar for projecting his will onto others, and thus replenishing his own identity.

(If I were writing this for my old NYU cinema studies professors, I'd likely throw in some junk here about the hand being an extension of his man-parts, castration anxiety, etc. But I'm not, and I find most psychological/feminist/political analyses of film to be much more revealing of their authors than the movies themselves. So hie thee elsewhere for your dick metaphors.)

Soon the bodies pile up, the police grow suspicious and the hand turns its ire upon its weak, would-be master. Anne and Lizzie come for a Christmas visit, which is really Anne's excuse for running off to San Francisco to live with her new friends. We all know where this is heading.

More or less a forgotten film, "The Hand" brought back a lot of welcome memories from my earliest days as a movie lover. It's a silly, scary, rather skeevy film that touches a lot of erogenous zones for maturing minds.

Review: "Going in Style"

Movies about oldsters turning to crime, in particular robbing banks, are hardly a novel event. Between "Tough Guys," "The Crew," "The Grey Fox" and "Family Business," Geriatric Robbers is practically a genre unto itself. Heck, even Sinatra and the Pack were getting a mite long in the tooth when they made "Ocean's 11."

Indeed, "Going in Style" is a loose remake of 1979 film starring George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg that no one really remembers.

The new version features Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin. All are charming playing up their familiar persona: Freeman has a twinkly charisma and tart wisdom; Caine is peevish but warmhearted; Arkin is cantankerous and grouchy.

The plot the movie puts them through is quite tired and predictable, though. All play retirees of a steel company that's moving to Vietnam and dissolving their pensions, so they decide to get payback by robbing their own bank, which is complicit in both the pensions and trying to foreclose on one guy's house.

(I love that the screenplay, by Theodore Melfi, doesn't even bother trying to explain why a Brit has been living and working in New York City for at least 30 years but hasn't lost his Cockney accent.)

Caine is Joe, Arkin is Albert and Freeman is Willie. They're working-class guys who live across the street from each other, meet at the same coffee shop most days and are all unmarried -- whether bachelors or widowers, we know not.  Their pension checks have suddenly stopped showing up and Joe has fallen behind in his mortgage payments. When he goes to the bank, the smarmy banker (Josh Pais) blows him off. But then some bank robbers knock the place over, and as they say a seed is planted.

Willie is in the latter stages of kidney failure, and as an old guy with crappy insurance he's near the bottom of the transplant list. Arkin is Willie's longtime roomate, the kind who spends a lot of time complaining and sleeping.

Roughly the first half of the movie is the planning of the heist, with a little help from a local criminal played by John Ortiz. The second half is the actual robbery and aftermath, with Matt Dillon as the full-of-himself FBI agent investigating the case. Even dogs don't like him!

In between is a little bit of character and family stuff. Joe lives with his daughter (Maria Dizzia) and granddaughter (an irrepressible Joey King), and during the course of the heist preparation he tries to get his estranged ex-son-in-law (Peter Serafinowicz) to reeneter their lives. Willie wants to be well enough and wealthy enough to travel to see his people more than once a year. Albert finds himself pursued by Annie (Ann-Margret, still a dish at nearly 76), a grocer who shares his appreciation for cooking and jazz.

Director Zach Braff ("Garden State") milks the obvious laughs for all they're worth, such as elderly sex. Albert seems stunned to find himself in a relationship with a hot old mama. "She likes me for who I am. I don't even like me for who I am!"

And, of course, there are plenty of old jokes. "Are you guys 5-0?" asks a suspicious low-life. "We're closer to 8-0," Joe deadpans.

Christopher Lloyd -- great name, that -- shows up as Milton, the hilariously senile guy at the local seniors club. Among his foibles is using a bullhorn for most of his conversations. For him, life's a non-stop bingo game and there are always balls to be called.

Ziobhan Fallon Hogan is the sassy waitress at their diner, who we just know is destined for the world's fattest tip. Kenan Thompson plays the security chief at the Value King grocery store where the boys first practice their criminal ways; he feels professionally insulted as he reviews video of the trio stuffing hams down their pants and whatnot.

"Going in  Style" reminds me of an old test Gene Siskel used to give movies: instead of the film, would you rather just watch that same cast of actors sitting around, eating lunch and chatting with each other? I'm not sure this movie would pass.

Video review: "Kingsman: The Secret Service"

A bit of charm and a lot of smash-mouth, “Kingsman: The Secret Service” was one of 2015’s earliest, and best, surprises.

This super-spy thriller/comedy operates as both a send-up and celebration of the 007 genre. Colin Firth plays Harry Hart, aka Galahad, a member of the sophisticated and ultra-secret spy agency knows as the Kingsmen. They prefer to do their bidding beneath the veil of anonymity, using all sorts of cool gadget hidden inside their signature dapper suits and eyeglasses.

Harry recruits rough-and-tumble street scamp Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton) to be his protégé, and the story is framed around the familiar training and initial missions of the new guy. It seems some nefarious force is taking out the Kingsmen one by one, so graduation will have to come early.

The bad guy is a Steve Jobs techie type, deliciously played by Samuel L. Jackson – a combination of computer nerd, gangster and maniacal villain. His henchwoman has two prosthetic legs outfitted with swords to dice up her victims.

Directed by Matthew Vaughn, “Kingsman” has got terrific action scenes and also terribly funny ones. It’s a smart and energetic flick that evinces a tone somewhere between a smirk and a gasp. This is a movie that makes fun of spy movies, but loves them, too.

Video extras are pretty decent. There’s a gallery of photos of sets, props and behind-the-scenes peeks. There are also six making-of documentary featurettes: “Panel to Screen: The Education Of A 21st Century Super-Spy,” “Heroes And Rogues,” “Style All His Own,” “Tools Of The Trade,” “Breathtakingly Brutal” and “Culture Clash: The Comic Book Origins Of The Secret Service.”

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Extras:

Video review: "Interstellar"

Some people were fascinated by “Interstellar,” Christopher Nolan’s ruminative space adventure, while others were simply bewildered. Count me as both.

The film, which Nolan directed and co-wrote, is at once very science-heavy and dreamy. It uses the mechanics of space exploration to tell a humanist tale about parents and children, reaching for the stars versus keeping your head on the ground, and other big-think topics.

Matthew McConaughey plays an engineer/pilot who’s been grounded by an ecosystem disaster that’s destroying all of mankind’s crops. The human race will eventually starve. He’s offered a chance to lead a last-ditch mission to find a way to save the species by traveling through a wormhole to distant galaxies.

It seems other astronauts were dispatched on similar trips years ago and never returned. So it’s a high-risk/high-reward situation.

Anne Hathaway is the doubting Thomas co-pilot, while Jessica Chastain plays McConaughey’s daughter. If the age difference between Chastain and McConaughey doesn’t sound plausible, that’s because in different parts of space time can flow much faster – meaning years pass by while they’re dawdling on a lonely planet.

The visual majesty of how Nolan and his crew depict inter-dimensional travel is just mind-blowing. I wish I could say the same about the soundscape, which in a typically Nolan-like way with a thrumming musical score by Hans Zimmer, makes it very hard to make out dialogue at times. You may remember having similar difficulty understanding Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.”

(Of course, now you can just turn on subtitles during those hard-to-decipher scenes to see what McConaughey was really saying. I’m taking bets on whether it was actually anything substantive, or if he was just muttering something about Earth chicks getting older while he stays the same.)

In the end it’s just well-crafted sound and fury signifying not much, but “Interstellar” is certainly never boring.

The film is being released with a host of goodies, though you’ll have to pay for the Blu-ray edition to get any of them: the DVD comes with exactly nothing.

Extras include interviews with the cast and crew reflecting on the filmmaking experience, and a ton of making-of featurettes touching on virtually every aspect of production. This includes the real science behind space travel, shooting in Iceland to replicate a desolate planet, concept art and much more.

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Extras:

Review: "Kingsman: The Secret Service"

Matthew Vaughn, the talented young filmmaker behind "Kick-Ass" and "X-Men: First Class," dropped out of directing last summer's "X-Men: Days of Future Past" to make this movie. In other words, he passed on a sure thing to make a film adaptation of a comic book hardly anyone has heard of about British super-spies, which is being released in the cinematic wasteland known as February.

Some might call that move questionable -- including Vaughn's agents, no doubt.

Then he went and did something even more dubious: he changed the name of the movie, based on the graphic novel "The Secret Service" by Dave Gibbons and Mark Millar, to add the "Kingsman" moniker, and switched the story around so the spies all wear similar natty suits. He even commissioned a line of "Kingsman" clothing from a high-end clothier, so you can affect the same stylish look you saw star Colin Firth wearing.

(Want the wristwatch? It's only $24,430!)

Which essentially renders the entire movie an exercise in brash product placement. I'd be tempted to be disgusted, if the film weren't so dashingly, gleefully superb.

"Kingsman: The Secret Service" is a heaping squirt of hot sauce in the cinema calendar's equivalent of the salad course. It's a daffy, dizzy send-up of the James Bond genre that nonetheless checks off the list of everything we love about super-spy flicks.

It's got a suave, charismatic leading man (Firth), outstandingly staged action scenes, crazy gadgets, a mad global plot, and a terrifically strange villain who maintains a running commentary on the stupidity of movie villains. (Without, apparently, realizing that he is one.)

The set-up is that young Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton), a Cockney street tough, is recruited by the Kingsmen via Harry Hart (Firth), aka Galahad, who once had his life saved by Eggsy's dad. Harry has a cool intro scene where he takes out an entire pub full of thugs who want the lad's head using only his umbrella -- which, to be fair, has all sorts of super-power functions like stopping bullets when opened.

(If you think that's neat, wait'll you see what the watch can do.)

Soon Eggsy is going through super-spy school, competing with a bunch of high-class wankers to see who can claim the only open slot in the Kingsmen ranks. Or Kingswomen -- there are a couple of highly competent female recruits, too, including the resourceful Roxy (Sophie Cookson), who takes a shine to Eggsy's rough edges. Merlin (Mark Strong) is the veteran taskmaster and outfitter, while Arthur (Michael Caine) is the wise old leader.

Harry takes on Eggsy's tutelage personally, teaching him how to dress and behave and, above all, remain discreet. The Kingsmen are a privately funded intelligence agency, and take pride in having their exploits remaining unknown. "A gentleman's name should appear in the paper three times: when he's born, when he marries and when he dies," he instructs.

The heavy is Richmond Valentine, a ridiculously powerful tech billionaire who gives away his merchandise and Internet service for free, because he has a dastardly plot to... well, I won't spoil. Suffice to say his plan has a certain liberal Machiavellian purity, enough to convince most of the planet's prime movers and shakers to sign on.

Valentine is played by Samuel L. Jackson in a performance that is deliciously over the top... or under the top, or somewhere completely sideways of the top. He sprays his sibilants in a mighty lisp, dresses in slanted hats and neon pastels like a ghetto bopper who hit the lottery, and grows girlishly nauseous at even the hint of violence, despite setting quite a tidal wave of it in motion.

His henchwoman is, if possible, even more exotic. Gazelle (Sofia Boutella) has two prosthetic legs, the kind used in running known as blades, except hers are also outfitted with actual blades, which she uses to slice and dice her foes while spinning through the air with athletic aplomb. She makes Oddjob with his killer top hat seem positively pedestrian.

Co-written by Vaughn and Jane Goldman, "Kingsman: The Secret Service" maintains a careful tone. It's incredibly funny, yet the gruesome fight scenes have weight and kinetic punch. Jackson's scoundrel is simultaneously laughable and chilling. This is a pastiche, mockery and homage to spy movies all wrapped in one well-tailored package.

Review: "Interstellar"

"Interstellar" sure is an odd, dense, occasionally brilliant and occasionally maddening cinematic experience. The latest from director Christopher Nolan continues the mind-trippyness of "Inception" and marries it with an outer space story about astronauts from Earth exploring other galaxies and dimensions, in between disastrous explosions and human frailty.

It wants to be the thematic and aesthetic inheritor to "2001: A Space Odyssey" but registers several orders of magnitude lower on the scale of worthiness. It plays out as one long (nearly three-hour) space ride with a lot of mind-boggling science and pseudo-science mixed into the humanist blender.

The movie never failed to engage me, but it didn't leave me very satisfied, either. Nolan and his cast and crew get the quantum mechanics of their space tale right, but the human element never makes it off the launch pad.

The story -- Nolan and his brother, Jonathan, wrote the screenplay -- is set in a typically vague near-future where things have gone awry for humanity. An agricultural blight is wiping out the Earth's crops one by one, and dust storms blow in from time to time like biblical revelations.

Cooper (Matt McConaughey) is a pilot/engineer-turned farmer. There's not much use for science guys these days, just those who make food. Cooper resents the way humanity has bookended its ambitions -- we're supposed to be explorers and pioneers, he laments on his dirt-caked porch, not tenders of sod. His son, Tom, embraces the agrarian future but his 10-year-old daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), dreams the dreams of her father.

Through a quick, not entirely coherent succession of expository scenes, Cooper is recruited to lead a NASA mission that represents humanity's last hope. It seems a stable wormhole opened up near Saturn 50 years ago. Previous astronauts were sent through to scout out a habitable new home world for the species. Cooper and his crew, chiefly Anne Hathaway as astrophysicist Dr. Brand, are supposed to link up with them.

The space travel scenes, through wormholes and gravitational slingshots and whatnot, are transcendently beautiful and awe-inspiring. Aided by Hoyte Van Hotema's cinematography and the familiar pounding musical score of Hans Zimmer, Nolan has captured the notion of space wrapping in itself in an ingenious way previously unseen on the big screen.

I won't give away too much about what they find on the other side, other than to say the passage of time is a primary consideration. The theory of relativity states that time travels at different speeds depending on where you are, so the team must complete their quest before everyone on Earth starves. Meanwhile, Cooper frets upon the children he left behind, who transmit video messages into the ether they aren't sure if he'll ever see. (Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck play them as adults.)

Unfortunately, the Nolans' script suffers from similarity lapses in relativity, though on the narrative rather than the temporal plane. The story races ahead heedlessly at times, testing the audience's ability to keep up based on half-garbled dialogue. Then it will go into a slow spin, as the characters get all moony and contemplative, and we wish they'd fire up the jets or blow a hatch, or something.

(I should also mention I often had difficulty hearing the dialogue -- not understanding it, but just hearing it. I'm not sure if was the speaker system in the theater or the film's sound mix, but Zimmer's music blasts at you in waves of organ chords that overpower the actors' voices like lily pads caught in a tidal wave.)

There's power and majesty in "Interstellar," but also smallness and limitation. The film's sheer grandiosity serves to expose its inability to coherently line up the X-Y-Zs of its plot. Nolan & Co. aim for the stars, quite literally, and if they don't reach them they provide us enough of a glimpse to leave us dazzled and befuddled. It's like being knocked out of your regular orbit, teetering off to points unknown.

Reeling Backward: "A Bridge Too Far" (1977)

Recently this column focused on "Theirs Is the Glory," a fairly unique film in which the actual participants of the failed Allied stratagem to end World War II by Christmas 1944, Operation Market Garden, returned to the site of the battles one year after the fact to recreate the action for a motion picture. The same military operation later became the basis for the 1977 feature film, "A Bridge Too Far."

In my essay on "Theirs Is the Glory," I mostly concentrated on the similarities between it and "Bridge," wondering if screenwriter William Goldman or author Cornelius Ryan, on whose book the latter film is based, were influenced by the earlier picture. That inspired me to go back to "A Bridge Too Far," and see how it has held up to my memory.

It only reinforced my opinion: "A Bridge Too Far" is one of the great WWII epics, and an incredible marriage of narrative structure, inspired direction, gritty performances and technical mastery from the support crew, particularly the musical score by John Addison (who himself served as a soldier in Market Garden).

Market Garden would remain a forgotten bit of history for 30 years until Cornelius Ryan wrote his book about the adventure, in which the Allies dropped 35,000 paratroopers behind enemy lines to capture a series of bridges. The plan was to have XXX Corp, the British armor column, punch up the road to connect the bridges, thus creating a hole directly into Germany.

Except, the Allies ignored evidence of a great deal of German resistance along the route, including an entire Panzer tank division near Arnhem, the last and most important of the bridges, since it spanned the Rhine River and the border into Germany itself. The British paratroopers, who were only supposed to have to hold the bridge for two days, gave up after nine, leaving behind 80% of their men as casualties or prisoners of war.

That's a lot of story to cram into a feature film, even a three-hour one, but Goldman's screenplay is an exercise in elegant structure. The story begins and ends with generals, both Allied and German, as they plan bold stratagems and then later try to pick up the pieces of where things went wrong. The middle section focuses on the lower ranks of soldiers, the dogfaces who actually have to carry out the fight their superiors dreamed up.

You've heard of "all-star casts," but this one is simply jaw-dropping. For the Brits: Anthony Hopkins, Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Edward Fox, Sean Connery. For the Germans: Hardy Krüger, Maximilian Schell, Wolfgang Preiss. For the Americans: Robert Redford, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, James Cann, Ryan O'Neal. Not to mention Liv Ullman and Laurience Olivier  as Dutch civilians. And Denholm Elliott and John Ratzenberger turning up in bit roles.

Redford, arguably the biggest movie star in the world at the time, doesn't even show up until after the two-hour mark. 

I found it interesting how the script is laid out into essentially four sections. The first is the planning of Operation Market Garden, in which British heads are swelled and the first seeds of doubt creep in. Frank Grimes has a terrific role as a nervous major who unsuccessfully points out the presence of tanks, and is sent on medical leave as a result. The second section is the actual drop, a beautiful and daunting ballet of parachutes -- more than 1,000 men jumped out of planes for the sequence -- and the Allies' initial success in taking their objectives. The third is what I call the "American vignettes," and the last act is when everything goes to hell.

The vignettes are a quick succession of three stories centered around American characters. Elliott Gould is up first in a semi-comedic bit about his regiment failing to take the first bridge before the Germans blow it up, necessitating the building of a claptrap "Bailey bridge" to get the tanks across -- but not before delaying them 36 hours. Gould is terrific and charismatic, chomping on a cigar and shouting jokes in between the orders. Addison's music goes into a jazzy, bouncy mode.

Then we get James Caan as a nearly monosyllabic sergeant who protects his young captain -- he doesn't put on his coat at first, so we think he's just a punk private or something -- even guaranteeing the officer that he won't die. He appears to fail in his mission, as the captain is left for dead after being shot in the head. But the sergeant carries the body in a jeep through enemy lines to a mobile Army hospital and, at gunpoint, forces the surgeon (a spot-on Arthur Hill) to examine the wounded lad, revealing that he's still alive. 

(This may sound like Hollywood bullshit, but other than the part about being chased in a jeep by German soldiers, it really happened.)

The last and most harrowing of the vignettes is Redford as the major tasked with crossing the Waal River and taking the bridge at Nijmegen. Due to logistical snafus, they had to make a daytime crossing in flimsy portable boats, the wind blew away their smoke cover, and the unit was cut to pieces. Watching Redford with his helmeted head tucked down, pulling his rifle butt through the water like an oar, all the while chanting "Hail Mary, full of grace..." remains one of my seminal cinematic moments. (Again, this really happened.)

Sean Connery also gets a mini-vignette of his own as Major General Roy Urquhart, commander of the British airborne division dropped near Arnhem, who gets cut off from his own command and has to hide out in a little Dutch enclave, dodging from house to house, during which time he is presumed dead.

Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning, played by Dirk Bogarde, more or less acts as the heavy, playing the gung-ho Brit general who will not cancel the operation for any reason. Those who "rock the boat" are encouraged to clam up or suffer the consequences. 

At the end of the film Browning is depicted as duplicitously claiming to always have been skeptical about the operation -- "As you know I've always thought we tried to go a bridge too far" -- rather than an unreserved booster. In reality, Browning raised his doubts prior to the operation, and he and his family -- Bogarde actually served alongside Browning during the war -- were outraged at his villainous portrayal.

It being only three decades and a bit after the events depicted, many of the actors had an opportunity to talk with and even befriend the men they were playing. Edward Fox knew Lt. Gen. Brian Horrocks, commander of XXX Corp, prior to filming and later cited it as his favorite movie role. Michael Caine changed some of his dialogue after asking his counterpart how he would have issued orders, and the real Lt. Col. Johnny Frost had to explain to Anthony Hopkins that he would never have run too quickly between cover, because he had to show his men how contemptuous he was of enemy fire.

The production of "Bridge" is a Homeric story unto itself, and one others have already told better than I could -- notably by Goldman himself, who wrote a making-of book, "Story of a Bridge Too Far," and also included an entire chapter about it in his seminal showbiz tome, "Adventures in the Screenwriting Trade." 

(Extremely short version: Joseph E. Levine, a lifelong maverick producer, personally financed the film's $22 million budget -- about $86 million in today's dollars -- himself, then convinced some of the biggest global movie stars to participate by all accepting the same weekly pay rate. He recruited Richard Attenborough (him again) to direct, undertaking an incredible logistical and artistic challenge. Then as some of the amazing footage of the airdrops and battle scenes started to come back in, Levine showed the rushes to distributors who bid on the international distribution rights to the film. As a result, "Bridge" was already in the black before the first ticket was sold.)

The ultimate result was surprising, and not. Everywhere but the U.S. the film was a smash hit. Here, American and audiences and critics used to rousing pro-Allies depictions of the war collectively shrugged their shoulders at a massive production about a colossal military screw-up. Thus, "A Bridge Too Far" is barely known on these shores.

Their loss; "A Bridge Too Far" was perhaps the last of the great World War II epics.

Reeling Backward: "The Eagle Has Landed" (1976)

"The Eagle Has Landed" is a pretty preposterous movie based on a ridiculous premise, but a terrific cast almost pulls it out of the garbage heap. Director John Sturges -- veteran of several terrific pictures including "The Great Escape" and "The Magnificent Seven" -- has a keen eye for composition and knows how to stage action scenes very well.

But this was also his last film, ending his career on something of a sour note (though commercially the movie was quite successful).

I'm not sure what Sturges really could have done with the material, based on a novel by Jack Higgins. The setup is that the Germans come up with a cockamamie plot to kidnap Winston Churchill. In late 1943, the war is considered already lost by most high up in the Third Reich, but they figure capturing the bull of England can at least delay the inevitable for awhile, and increase the morale of the Axis.

Robert Duvall plays Radl, the colonel charged with coming up with a plan to grab Churchill. The idea came from the real-life rescue of Benito Mussolini by German paratroopers from the mountain ski resort where he was being held by the Italians who deposed him.

His commander (Anthony Quayle) gives Radl the assignment out of disgust, calling it a silly joke. Write up a contingency plan so somebody can stick it in the bottom of their desk, is how he puts it. Radl laughs along, but as he pokes into the intelligence he learns that the idea actually has merit. Churchill is scheduled to vacation in the remote (fictional) coastal town of Studley Constable. It would be a simple matter to sneak in a team of soldiers, snatch him up and get out on a disguised ship.

I liked the Radl character quite a lot. A decorated hero, now relegated to unimportant duties by his wounds -- he's missing an eye and, apparently, his left hand is a prosthetic. Duvall gives him a sad, noble quality, the weary soldier who knows he serves a corrupt and loathsome regime but offers his full loyalty nonetheless.

Michael Caine plays Steiner, the disgraced paratrooper colonel selected by Radl to lead the mission. When we first meet Steiner, he and his men are returning from a tough fight on the Soviet front, and encounter German soldiers putting Jews aboard a train.

Inexplicably, Steiner goes into a rage, strikes another officer and helps a woman captive attempt to escape. Instead, she's shot and killed. He and his men are court-martialed and assigned to suicidal duty in the English Chanel, so Radl's offer is their only chance to be regain honor.

Why would a loyal soldier of the Reich object to the well-known plan for the Jews? It's never really made clear, and the Steiner character remains something of a mystery until the end. Caine and Sturges reportedly battled during production, and it resulted in the main character remaining distant and unrelatable.

Donald Pleasence also has a terrific little turn as Heinrich Himmler, who personally authorizes the Eagle mission via a letter signed by Hitler himself, which may or may not be a forgery. It's soon clear that Radl is Himmler's catspaw, to be used and disposed of based on the outcome of the operation.

Donald Sutherland has a corker of a role as Liam Devlin, an IRA insurgent who gets recruited into the mission by the Germans. He's a red-headed charmer and brawler, sent ahead to infiltrate the town as a marsh warden -- a position of dubious meaning to these American ears. He carries a shotgun and patrols the countryside, so I gather he's a constable of some sort.

While spying things out, Devlin falls for local lass Molly (Jenny Agutter), almost 19 and an accomplished equestrian. Their affair is perhaps the most outlandish aspect of the whole over-the-top story. Despite knowing Devlin for a grand total of two days, Molly is somehow willing to betray her countrymen, and even kill one of them, to protect a German spy.

Devlin gets into trouble with a local tough who has a sweet eye on Molly. Upon their first meeting at the local pub, he refused Devlin's offer to buy him a drink. After Devlin pummels the man in a bout of fisticuffs, the old gravedigger throws a bucket of water on the man's face to revive him, and offers the movie's funniest line:

"Well Arthur, looks like he bought you a drink after all!"

The whole cast acquits themselves well, and all of the half-dozen leads are terrific in their roles, even as the script (by Tom Mankiewicz) requires them to do and say some pretty zany stuff.

I should point out that this is a rare World War II movie in which English and American actors play Germans, which makes for some strange audience dynamics as the action plays out. Late in the game we're introduced to an imbecile American reserve colonel played by Larry Hagman, who frets about the war ending without him getting any combat experience.

When he learns about the Churchill plot, he declines to inform his superiors and rushes off with a few men to stop take on the Germans himself. Steiner's seasoned men quickly dispatch the Yanks in a sequence that almost reaches Keystone Kops levels of comedy -- until we remember these are American soldiers fighting and dying (poorly).

The film ends as absurdly as it progressed. Steiner, his entire command decimated, refuses to flee and impersonates an American soldier (Jeff Conaway), continuing the mission to kidnap Churchill, alone. He manages to make it to the mansion where they've hidden him, sneak up and kill him, dying himself moments later when guards arrive.

The young American captain (Treat Williams) marvels at his audacity to single-handedly murder the British leader -- but then we learn that the dead man is the double of the real Churchill, who's actually meeting with FDR and Stalin in Tehran.

In other words, the entire enterprise was a ruse. It's a fitting end for a movie about a made-up plot that was a joke until it became something more.

I loved the cast of "The Eagle Has Landed," but it fails Gene Siskel's test of whether you'd prefer to watch the same people doing almost anything else instead.

Reeling Backward: "Battle of Britain" (1969)

Made nearly three decades after the events it depicted, "Battle of Britain" is an exercise in deliberate hagiography. It's a British movie extolling the heroism and and strategic thinking of their own kind during the summer and fall of 1940, when the over-matched Royal Air Force stopped Hitler's planned land invasion of the U.K. long before it even got started.

It's a big-budget spectacle with an all-star cast, including Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard, Christopher Plummer, Susannah York, Robert Shaw, Ralph Richardson and Edward Fox. A young Ian McShane even turns up as a novice pilot with a family of young children who are imperiled during the London bombings.

The cast is distinctly subservient to the aircraft, however, with very few characters getting any sort of development. Pretty much the lone exception is Plummer as a Canadian pilot married to a British section officer. He needles her to ask for a transfer so they can be nearer, but bound by a sense of duty, she puts him off.

It's notable that York wears a short pouffy bob haircut and modern makeup, resulting in a look that transposes 1969 for 1940. She could easily be one of Austin Powers' flower-power girls via a quick wardrobe change.

Director Guy  Hamilton and screenwriters James Kennaway and Wilfred Greatorex (working from the book "The Narrow Margin" by Derek Dempster and Derek Wood) approached the material with the apparent goal of making the most historically accurate account possible. Much of their efforts went toward recreating the airborne battles, gathering together a sizable air force of actual WWII craft, or close approximations.

They also used a large number of realistic replicas, both life-size ones on the ground and flying models. The special effects are decent enough for 1969, although it isn't too hard to detect the shifts between real and replica aircraft.

Explosions on the ground look too much like rigged effects -- such as how a lone airplane on the ground will be hit dead-on by a single bomb, with no other explosives landing nearby. That's simply not how cluster bombing of that era worked; that tactic involved hordes of bombs being dropped at once, hoping a small percentage would detonate on target.

They also employ not-very-special effects for the flying explosions, which appear to have been hand-drawn directly onto the celluloid. The result looks something like when you successfully hit your target in an early 1980s arcade game.

Coming out a year after "2001: A Spacey Odyssey" and only eight years before "Star Wars," the effects in "Battle of Britain" were already anachronistic.

The film is mostly fair to the German side, though the lack of comparable Teutonic stars as counterparts to the English ones belies the notion of a truly balanced depiction. But we get to see how the cockiness of both sides' pilots soon crumbles into fatigue and despair.

The movie does illustrate how the tides of war, and even human history, can be changed by the smallest of events.

Hitler had expressly decreed that London was not to be bombed, with the Luftwaffe instead concentrating on wiping out the British airfields along the coasts. But during a run a German Heinkel bomber goes off-course, and the pilot decides to dump their payload before heading back. In retaliation for some minor damage near the outskirts of London, the Allies organize a bombing run of their own on Berlin -- something the leaders of the Third Reich had vowed would never happen.

Vexed, Hitler and company shifted the focus of their airborne attacks from the airfields to the British capital. This resulted in terrible loss of life -- but it also gave the RAF a chance to recover sufficiently to start mounting a serious air defense. Most historians regard this blunder as a turning point in the war.

At the start of the movie, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding (Olivier) had unctuously predicted that they would have to inflict losses on the German attackers in the neighborhood of 4 to 1 to have any hope of winning the air battle. Eventually, the German losses indeed became too high, and the plan to invade Great Britain was scrapped.

I think "Battle of Britain" is one of those movies that recedes as time goes by, rather than its reputation swelling. Seen now, it's an often dull litany of aerial sequences interrupted by talkie exchanges of dialogue on the ground with little impact. The film's only real enduring legacy is the fact that its aerial footage was reused many, many times in other cinematic portrayals -- including "Midway" and "Hope and Glory."

Part of this had to do with the considerable skill with which those sequences were shot (minus the hokey fake explosions). But also with the fact that the airplanes used in 1969 simply weren't available later on.

A serviceable if unremarkable WWII war film, "Battle of Britain" exists mostly as a marker of great deeds rather than truly capturing them.

Video review: "The Dark Knight Rises"

The conclusion of the Batman collaboration between director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale is a big, ambitious film just like "The Dark Knight." And also like its predecessor, "The Dark Knight Rises" is overburdened with too many supporting characters and secondary plot lines.

As the story opens, it has been eight years since Bruce Wayne last donned the caped crusader's cowl. Peace has reigned throughout the land, but then a mysterious terrorist named Bane (Thomas Hardy) arrives. He handily defeats Batman in personal combat and takes the reins of Gotham City.

Meanwhile, super-thief Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) plays the lines of loyalty between the two, whispering ominously about a storm brewing to wipe the city's veil of security away.

The biggest problem with Bane, other than the fact that he pales in comparison to Heath Ledger's Joker, is that his motivations never really come into clear relief. Hardy's choice to play him with an odd speech cadence, coupled with Bane's metallic face mask, also make him difficult to understand.

Familiar faces return, including police commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman), loyal Wayne family butler Alfred (Michael Caine) and weapons guru Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman). New on the block is Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young police detective whose importance becomes clearer late in the going.

It's still a worthy piece of filmmaking, especially for those who like their superhero tales in the dark-and-portentous mode. But I can't help thinking the finale would've been better stripped down and sleeker.

In terms of extras, Blu-ray is the only way to go for the serious videophile. The DVD comes only with a single featurette chronicling Bruce Wayne's journey from zero to hero.

The highlight of the Blu-ray edition is "Ending the Knight," a comprehensive making-of documentary examining virtually every aspect of the filmmaking process, from the story concept to special effects. It also includes a gallery of images and a documentary on the Batmobile, chronicling all five of the dark knight's motorized chariots.

Movie: 3 stars out of four
Extras: 3.5 stars

Review: "The Dark Knight Rises"

And so the Batman saga ends, not with a bang but an allegory. Director/co-writer Christopher Nolan has made it clear "The Dark Knight Rises" will be the last movie about the caped crusader -- at least that he will make -- and this knowledge seems to have freed him to make a superhero movie that's different from any other in the genre, one in which the superhero has grown tired of the mask and has to be convinced to put it on again.

It's notable that Christian Bale spends far more screen time out of the Batman costume than in.

It's a big, epic, sprawling movie that, like the last entry four years ago, is too overstuffed with tertiary plot lines and secondary characters for its own good.

And, of course, nothing can replace Heath Ledger's unique, disturbing presence as the Joker. Even though he was captured at the end of the last movie, and at one point Gotham City's prison is busted open for all the criminals to escape, there's no half-hearted (and misguided) attempt to cast another actor in that now-iconic role.

As the story opens, eight years have passed since the events in "The Dark Knight." Wayne has not donned Batman's cowl since then, with the populace mistakenly believing that he killed Harvey Dent, who actually went mad and became Two-Face. Dent has become a symbol of the peaceful good times that have endured since -- thanks in part to some draconian laws put in place in Dent's name.

When we first see Bruce Wayne, he seems to have aged 20 years. He has graying hair and a lined face, and walks around with a cane and a severe limp. He's become a recluse, rarely leaving his mansion despite the urging of loyal butler/henchman Alfred (Michael Caine) to do so. You quit being Batman, Alfred tells him, but you didn't start a new life.

The villain here is Bane, played by Tom Hardy underneath a strange metal mask of tubes and 30 pounds of muscle he put on for the role. Bane is a brilliant terrorist who's utterly unnerving, but whose motives never really come into clear relief. He emerges from a mysterious past, supposedly growing up in darkness inside a pit of a prison, and seems to have dedicated his entire life to destroying Batman and the city he loves. Why? We're never really sure.

When Bane first appears on the scene, Bruce resolves to get back in the game. He is cocky and confident in his gadgets and combat abilities, despite a doctor's assessment that he has no cartilage in his knees and scarred internal organs. He shouldn't even be skiing, let alone tangling with super-strong madmen.

Bane easily defeats Batman in personal combat and exiles him. Bane then steals something really, really powerful that belongs to Bruce Wayne and turns it against Gotham. And then he ... waits five months to unleash the destruction. Which just happens to be enough time for Bruce to convalesce and return to foil his plans.

Hardy makes a few bold performance choices, some of which pay off and some don't. Much has been made about his voice, which can be difficult to understand behind the metallic echo of his mask, which resembles a shark's maw coming at  you. Beyond the comprehension issues, Bane speaks in an oddly-inflected pattern with a stiff sort of formality to it. He also has a habit of placing his hands on the lapels of his coat or armor, like a Dickensian barrister puffing himself up.

The other big addition is Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle, a slyly seductive jewel thief who tries to walk a risky line between loyalty to Bane and Batman. Neither really trusts her, or her either of them, but there's a connection between her and Bruce Wayne. He represents the 1% and she makes Occupy Wall Street-ish threats about "a storm coming" to wash away the privileged, which supplies an edge to their banter.

I should mention that no one ever actually calls her Catwoman, and she doesn't wear a costume, other than some minimalist sartorial adornment. It's a surprisingly beefier role than you'd expect, and Hathaway has a strong presence in it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is another important new character as young police detective John Blake -- or, at least, seemingly important. Blake seems to be everywhere during the movie, popping up to assist Commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman) with a key bit of evidence or even fight alongside Batman. But after the movie I started thinking about what purpose Blake plays in the story, and decided he's really not that pivotal at all, except for that part at the end where ... well, you'll see.

Matthew Modine is another new add as Gordon's right-hand man, Ben Mendelsohn plays a mercenary-minded industrialist making a play for Wayne Enterprises, and Marion Cotillard plays Miranda Tate, a former business partner of Wayne's who got burned on a bad business deal.

Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Bruce Wayne's R&D man, returns to the fold, and apparently has spare Batman suits and gear stuffed in just about every corner of Gotham. Most notably is a flying machine that's part helicopter, part jet and all seriously badass.

I saw this film in a genuine IMAX theater at the Indiana State Museum. More than an hour of the 165-minute film was shot on special IMAX film, and when that entire picture opens up from widescreen to a massive six-story wall of spectacle, it's quite tremendous. This one is definitely worth the ticket upsell.

"The Dark Knight Rises" isn't as good as the last film, but I wouldn't call it a disappointment. If anything, its faults arise from being too ambitious, too big and too much. A shorter film that focused on the dynamic between Batman, Bane and Selina Kyle might've been a better fit for this material. But that's the sort of movie you make when you're starting out something big, not wrapping it up.

3 stars out of four