Pompeii / **1/2 (2014)

Had I still been a naïve teenager obsessed with the mythos of ancient volcanic disasters, a movie like “Pompeii” would have provided one hell of a visual wet dream. Here is an ambitious production mounted in the tradition of old Hollywood epics, stretched beyond the scale of a mere screen, and hitched to that dependable staple of disaster films that seek to show us an array of grandiose visions that are both terrible and awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, time and experience often separates us from simpler pleasures, relegating our measurements of entertainment to comparisons of other, more sophisticated endeavors. A read-through of the premise immediately conjures up all those conventional comparisons: among other things, the story contains a main character obsessed with revenge while fighting for his own life in public arenas (“Gladiator”), ancient roman political intrigue (“Troy”) and a blossoming romance between young faces that are separated by class divides (“Titanic”), all set in the foreground of a catastrophe looming in the distance (any number of well-known blockbusters of the past thirty years). Take away all those call-backs, and what you are left with is basically a competent action picture that retreads to the safety of its formulas, primarily because it doesn’t have the desire, much less the thought, to pursue more challenging avenues.

The Lighthouse / ***1/2 (2019)

On the edge of a rock hugging the violent sea, a weathered lighthouse affirms the mission of two men stalled on a mental tightrope. They plod day and night through a routine that always leads to one outcome: ensuring the illuminating glow of the tower never dims, even as the most turbulent storms loom relentlessly overhead. But a day comes when the winds shift, casting doubt on their own perseverance; a nor’easter draws down like a force of punishment, until their demeanors – one sardonic, the other silent and morose – collide on each other with disturbing gravitas. On the other side of the struggle is only more of the same: a cycle without relief or certainty, unless the primary conviction is to stilt the moods of those eager viewers watching below the projector’s light. Their feelings, I reckon, might parallel what some of the early audiences thought upon first seeing “The Shining,” also about people who were driven mad by isolation. Did the slow plod through a tonal labyrinth, too, undermine their defenses enough to amplify the horror of the climax? Were they submissive to the visual attack, and did it negate any questions of logic they might have had? Robert Egger’s eerie, hypnotic new film mirrors many of those possibilities and finds something rather interesting buried beneath: an imagination that escalates its visions into the fantastical and absurd.

The Head Hunter / *** (2019)

“The Head Hunter” is a creature feature in which the most fearsome beast is man himself, set adrift in a moral wasteland, where civilized behaviors are seized by carnal urges running wild in a horrific wilderness. The first scene establishes his routine while simultaneously pointing to the undercurrent of his vengeful demeanor; as he wanders past the frame to slaughter an unseen villain (we only hear the impact of the sword and the cry of a creature), a small voice calls him back towards his prior location. It is his young daughter, concealed in a tent, needing to know her protector is nearby. They exchange smiles and she returns to sleep, but the morose voiceover indicates this is a memory from the past; one of the beasts has apparently killed her, and now his life has become a long hunt for the animal responsible for her demise. In the meantime, the main wall of his cabin becomes a monument to all the heads he has collected – some frightening, others bizarre, few of them based in any tangible reality. The first reaction is one of befuddlement: what possible villain could be more dangerous, especially when his domicile already looks like a scrapbook of the most diabolical movie monsters you have never seen?

La La Land / ***1/2 (2016)

The ambitious “La La Land” opens with a marvelous scene on a congested freeway overpass, where nameless extras vacate their cars to share in the moment of a colorful musical interlude. Their choreographed zeal is carried by near-perfect technical aptitude that sees the act lifted into the reveries of aesthetical greatness; the camera persists across four minutes of song and dance in one seemingly unbroken shot, and the routine is mirrored by dancers on top of cars that seem to stretch beyond eyesight. What nerve does any modern film have evoking that sense of skill in a moment already overflowing with the heedless optimism of old Hollywood nostalgia? For Damien Chazelle, the director who helmed the brilliant “Whiplash,” that obsessive pitch for perfection is never far from the hearts of even the most good-natured (or spontaneous) entertainers. What they must go through to make their dance moves seem as if they defy gravity, the discipline they endure to find the right key for any number of songs that emerge from their eager lips, is anyone’s guess. Here is a movie with a fascinating duality of values, driven by the same lighthearted spirit that yielded the musicals of the golden age, with an underlying reverence for a craft where the maddening mechanics might have seemed more troublesome than the effort was worth.

The Shape of Water / *** (2017)

Eventually all moviegoers – even the most open-minded – will arrive at a moment that challenges their ability to tolerate arduous realities. One of mine came during the second act of “The Shape of Water,” when the lead character played by Sally Hawkins shares a detail with Octavia Spencer about the anatomy of the sea creature she has rescued. The preceding scene already leaves little to the imagination; as the camera rests at the entrance of her bathroom, she walks seductively towards the animal, disrobes and closes the shower curtain as they come to a very suggestive embrace. For most there is no possibility of mixed interpretation, and yet I was fully content to overlook what transpired for the sake of riding the film’s momentum. But Guillermo del Toro, the movie’s director, refuses to dismiss the discomfort with glossed over platitudes. That’s never been his style. No, he allows the event to become a topic of lighthearted exchange between she and her friend, who is marveled not only by the idea that this beast even has a penis hidden behind that thick mound of his pubic region, but apparently a very satisfying one. Their exchange leads to a strange chuckle, which the audience nervously joins in on. And there I am sitting in the dark, fidgeting uncomfortably, feeling as if I had been submerged in water that was brought to a very slow boil.

The Black Dahlia / 1/2* (2006)

In the murky fringes of old Hollywood glamour are the faint whispers of the forgotten and exploited, of ambitious young faces who came to find their calling amongst a generation of would-be entertainers and instead discovered a world designed to devour them. Though some lived to tell the sad tales of their experiences, others were less fortunate (although their names were usually buried in the annals of historical footnotes, a consequence of knowing more than they could keep to themselves). The hardest of pills to swallow was perhaps necessary to endure: the fact that heads of studios and their most prestigious stars rubbed elbows with dangerous mobsters, whose money influenced as many of the early industry trends as the expectations of eager moviegoers. And somewhere in the chasm created by the cognizant and the naïve is the mysterious legend of the Black Dahlia, a woman whose enigmatic presence looms like a painful reminder of the cruelty of the hills, where big dreams often suffered the irony of nightmarish deceit.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer / * (2006)

Life began as a cold and desolate void for Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Born in a moment of passive biological routine on the floor of a fish market, his cries of uncertainty were a sound unknown to an emotionless mother, who previously birthed four other children that were all stillborn. Confusion in the moment lead passers-by to assume the worst of his strange arrival, and soon his poor mother was sentenced to hang after others mistakenly assumed she tried to kill him. Fate then reduced his purpose to mere existence – first at an orphanage where young boys attempted to smother him, and later at a Tannery where 16-hour work days were interlaced with physical abuse – and all indications suggested he would die out well before his time, another lowly statistic in the unforgiving shadow of French poverty. But destiny seemed to intervene just as fortune evaded him, offering talents so precious they could have, quite substantially, given him the power and prestige to command a generation of thinkers eager for sensation. It was just that pesky notion of murdering women that would louse up all those lofty agendas as the years rolled on.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them / **1/2 (2016)

The most elusive of assets in any yarn about whimsical adventure is a writer’s confidence in the material: the assuredness that words and actions have profound ramifications towards a story arc and its characters. Those that lack such an assertion usually become lost in their own inspiration, and rarely offer any sort of significance other than vague interludes of wonder. The new “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” a film within the “Harry Potter” universe that arrives just as the demand for franchise consistency has awoken in the hearts of moviegoers, is of the latter distinction – certainly ambitious in scope and filled with images as enchanting as they are sharp, it rarely seems to know what it has in mind for the ambitious events that are destined to play out. Instead there are only rough connotations for us to rely on; it tells the story of Newt (Eddie Redmayne), a former student of Hogwarts who has arrived in New York carrying a suspicious briefcase filled with magical creatures from the wizarding world to, I suppose, research their bizarre behavior without overreaching influences. Unfortunately, chaos ensues in the presence of an unknowing witness and Newt’s creature are set free in the city, just as the divide between human and magic worlds runs dangerously blurred.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street / ** (2007)

There is a cold and menacing presence lurking in the shadows of Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd,” but it has nothing to do with characters or their histories; rather, the feeling is one of unrelenting despair, obstructing our ability to see past the gothic production and find the humor (or indeed the purpose) of the material. Much of what we accept as value in stage musicals is dependent on a general sense of interior cognizance that can carry us through all of the absurd fantasy, but a lot of that has depended upon the precision of skilled modulators who know of the delicate balance between art and theme. But in nearly every incarnation I know of Hugh Wheeler’s infamous revenge story, I sense the agony of the scenario but far less about a specific reason. Is there a dramatic purpose that I am missing? An agenda far too intricate for me to comprehend, perhaps? So detached are the characters from their plight that when they sing, they aren’t convincing enough to create the impression that they are legitimately living in this hell; they play through the material more like silent aggressors who have lost all contact with sanity and seek only to make everyone else wallow in the pain they inflict.

The Witch / ** (2016)

They want you to believe the hype. They have sold the illusion well. Everywhere you turn – whether it is in media plugs or face-to-face acknowledgments – “The Witch” is the latest commodity hot on the lips of filmgoers, who have lauded the endeavor as a bold new precedent in the method of modern horror movie approaches. What that practice entails, however, isn’t nearly as profound as so many colleagues and observers have bought into. Perhaps the relative ambiguity of it all gives it a quality of fascination, and it’s easy to see why; we live in the clutches of a horror genre now drunk on the blood of its own gratuity, and the mere suggestion that all of it can be restrained for the sake of evoking a mere mood seems like such a novel concept. But it is one, in either case, that is already familiar to anyone who has ever taken the time to look beyond the mainstream supply of hack-and-slash vomitoriums. Psychology is the driving force of the most resonating scarefests, and good ones will take their time to silently unravel our security before hitting us with the sensational stuff. Unfortunately for this one, that trajectory is uncertain in a premise that seems orchestrated from an absent-minded perspective.

Hail, Caesar! / **1/2 (2016)

As a straight narrative, “Hail, Caesar” by the Coen Brothers represents a shocking misfire of intent, but as a collection of scenes that offer a slice of their infectious wit, it is an exercise in some of the most delightful chuckles of recent memory. How rare to arrive at the embrace of so much joy and enthusiasm in the midst of a perpetual nothing of a plot. It’s not as if there wasn’t an underlying set of values going for it all, either; set in the days of old Hollywood when the concept of movie illusions kept us at bay from the realization that pigs and idiots could populate the sets of our treasured epics, there is a great sense of comic awareness running through every scene – not cynical or insulting to the legacy of the craft, but certainly cognizant of the strange motives of the puppet masters. A wide array of sequences showcase these ideas to the peak of possibility, and like eager schoolboys these dependable filmmakers wrap them in a subtext that disregards seriousness, embraces the absurdity and caps it all off in a show of charm and wisdom. It’s just that pesky nuisance of a story that seems to louse it all up.

The Danish Girl / ***1/2 (2015)

The first appearance of the mysterious Lili Elbe occurs at a public social in the Danish suburbs, where locals have turned out to engage one another in sumptuous discussions about art. Her friend, the talented Gerda (Alicia Vikander), is attempting to break into this medium, but is facing a steep challenge: she paints human portraits, and such material is seen as blatantly ordinary for potential investors. As she passes through the scene in a gentle sweep of charismatic involvement, men stare at Lili like sharks circling a fresh catch. No one has seen her before, and it is scarcely a wonder as to why they are so enraptured: aside from being extremely beautiful, she is also incredibly shy and nervous, which seems to add fuel to their burning passions. It never dawns on them that the woman they are gazing at with lustful insinuation is actually a man, a well-known landscape artist rising quickly to the peak of his potential just as he begins questioning the nature of his own identity. Do they quietly know the reality, or are they looking only through the lenses of false pragmatism? And when a handsome stranger (Ben Whishaw) offers to whisk her into a private setting for an opportunity to get to know her, is his intrusive dialogue an admission of comprehension, or is he oblivious to the truth?

Lessons from Criterion:"The Magician" by Ingmar Bergman

A fair selection of identities in the Ingmar Bergman canon serve as metaphorical projections of the director’s own inner workings, but none confront his thinking as directly as Dr. Vogler does in his mysterious “The Magician.” The great French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, a champion of those cathartic sensibilities, once referred to it as his “first self-portrait,” and perhaps in that statement it is apropos to consider the central implication in greater context. While the emerging artists of international cinema were still discovering their identity in the 1950s, their endeavors reflected a negation of the melodramatic tendencies of Hollywood, and instead sought to challenge the sweeping deceptions by telling stories that existed close to their eager (and often weathered) hearts. The examples left behind by Ozu, Clouzot, Kurosawa, Goddard, Fellini and even Truffaut were the embodiment of that sentiment, an anchoring dose of evidence in perpetuating the concept of auteur theory. But by the time Bergman got involved in the movement, it was no longer just a matter of recognizing those sentiments in a mere yarn; to him, they had to be visualized in the sincere faces of his actors, all of whom didn’t so much occupy space in a narrative as they exemplified a personal thesis within the framework of his meditative thought process.

W.E. / **1/2 (2011)

Across a broad pool of time are the figures of two women worn down by inconsolable desires. On one end is the face of Wallis Simpson, a divorcee who would forever be outcast from British nobility because of her damaging association with King Edward VIII; on the other is Wally Winthrop, a brooding socialite in a modern world too busy to notice her internal unrest. Both are troubled beings who have gone long past the point of seeing their lives from a point of eternal optimism, and no wonder: for each, they have discovered – and lived – in the warm embrace of the ever-so-treasured fable that romance often lulls them into, only to discover that all of those storybook tribulations are elaborate ruses to mask devastating scars. For one, the love story endures beyond the limits of immense personal sacrifice, and that prospect is what drives the compulsive behaviors of the other, a woman whose own crumbling marriage becomes the catalyst in which the most important question must be confronted head-on: is it really possible to find a love so deep that one would be willing to give up everything for the sake of preserving it?

Pathfinder / zero stars (2007)

“Pathfinder” is one of the ugliest and most incomprehensible movies I have ever seen, a cynical exercise so unpleasant to endure that it doesn’t even have the gumption to inspire disbelief, much less unintentional laughs. Had the camera been a firing squad pointed towards its actors, their careers would have taken less damage. And what’s far worse a notion is that its filmmakers, obviously caught somewhere between insanity and masochism, actually had the nerve to make and release a movie in this utterly wretched condition. Was no one in the pre-production stages willing to speak up in protest, if for no other purpose than to prevent undoubtedly talented individuals from embarrassing themselves? Or were their protests simply unheeded because of misplaced arrogance? A documentary dealing with that answer would make for far more interesting a movie than the result currently staggering around in front of us.

A Million Ways to Die in the West / **1/2 (2014)

So much comedic skill trickles from the brain of Seth MacFarlane that it comes as a surprise to see it all circumscribed in a movie as half-realized as “A Million Ways to Die in the West.” It might have helped if he had stuck with the sitcom format. Certainly this premise was instinctively attractive on paper; after creating rousing cartoon comedies in “Family Guy” and “American Dad” and being the guiding influence of 2012’s hilarious “Ted,” here was the right man to helm a parody on the old west, where targets are ripe for the picking and clichés abundant enough to inspire terrific laughs. But what a miscalculated muddle it all amounts to, lumbering around on screen like a lethargic underachiever in a school of high-aiming competitors in the era of immeasurable gross-out comedies. At one point the main character makes a passive admission that underscores the movie’s very own energy level: “I’m not the hero. I’m the guy in the crowd making fun of the hero’s shirt.” It turns out he’s not very reliable at doing that, either.

Noah / *** (2014)

It’s just as well that the biblical legend of Noah, the man whom the great creator would task with building the Ark to save animals from Earth’s greatest flood, would arrive in the hands of Darren Aronofsky. Already a specialist at character studies revolved around people obsessed with nearly infeasible tasks, here is a filmmaker who takes less direct an approach than most of his contemporaries would with the material, and instead discovers a persona withered by a sense of deep inner turmoil. That it finds the time to descend into this prospect is astonishing given the urgency of the sweeping narrative, but it justifies the crusade with one notable takeaway: when we pit man against creation, is there anyone strong enough to thoroughly fulfill the will of a God whose silence can be harsh and mocking?

300: Rise of an Empire / ** (2014)

Leonidas of Sparta would have benefitted from having a man like Themistokles standing in his ranks. When the king of a war-driven city in the Greek countryside ignored the advice of oracles and marched 300 soldiers against the vast Persian Empire in protest of their invasion, his impulse came from a place of foolish defiance rather than strategy. What did he hope to accomplish or inspire, despite that the men in his ranks were bred for such war and taken to the absolute peak of fearless engagement throughout their upbringing? The admiral of Athens, on the other hand, stands in contrast with more thoughtful convictions – in his eyes, success is achieved by uniting with neighboring allies rather than marching into a hopeless onslaught severely outnumbered. Had he been present during the course of events in “300,” perhaps the egos and utter madness of Spartan soldiers would have been undermined long enough for certain logic to overtake their misplaced confidence, allowing for a much different outcome.

Apocalypto / **** (2006)

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

There are a plethora of subtexts in Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” that come scurrying off the screen, but the most commanding of them is also the most subtle: the presence of a calm acceptance encasing the barbaric catastrophes of its characters. Movies often paint portraits of primitive cultures with certain detachment as a way of dealing with their tragedies, but here is a movie that skillfully masks its displacement with an air of alarming cognizance, as if to suggest the material is being viewed from human eyes rather than movie cameras. There is never a sense that what we are seeing is merely staged for an effect of shallow entertainment or even mere education, either. Gibson’s famous “Braveheart” and “The Passion of the Christ” embellish on these feelings, but here the concept arrives at the absolute center of its psychology, and doesn’t look back for any relief. Like a survivor of inconsolable suffering, the movie endures its findings even as they grow darker and more gratuitous. And after two long hours of simple people being victimized, humiliated and tortured beyond comprehension, we are left with a hard reality that points, alas, to a universal pattern amongst all civilization: no force between men is greater than violence, and those that endure do so because they reject fear in the face of immense pain.

Richard III / ***1/2 (1995)

There are few certainties rushing through the great Shakespeare plays, but a consensus does persist when it comes to considering the notorious Richard III: he is easily the most vindictive and cunning of all the bard’s major villains. Essays have been written over countless centuries as cathartic measures to understand the ruthless driving forces of his persona: the ability for him to anticipate human response in the face of grief, to manipulate grave tragedies to his political advantage, and to even create a convincing façade that masks his obsessive impulses in front of those who would grant him great power. It was the playwright’s first well-received tragedy, and its endurance through a career punctuated by more highs than lows adds substantial weight to its overreaching influence: for most audiences, the shadowy visage of a hunched man ruthlessly playing his way through the ranks of familial hierarchy represents the kind of multi-faceted antagonist one hopes for in all modern storytelling.