Alice Through the Looking Glass / *** (2016)

Strange it must be to have a vivid imagination in the charge of a puritan social class. Just ask young inquisitive Alice: a wild spirit whose existence seems to tug at cultural restraints with certain stubbornness, she continues to persist in literary circles as a symbol of free thinking, a notion made all the more relevant since she happens to be a young girl in the era of impenetrable male ego. But what creator Lewis Carroll did to her over the course of two tripped out narratives says just as much about the curse of daydreams as it does about their virtue, even for an archetype. The farther one is willing to wander into the fantasy, the more inevitable the torment. And so Carroll’s notorious “Wonderland” stories dwell in the recess of school memories like awkward encounters with foreboding superiors. Some continue to find delight in the convoluted puzzles of young Alice’s adventures, but as a child I was swept under the tow of their underlying masochism; it’s as if the pages played like records of extreme aversion therapy, detailing all the scary and eccentric things that a girl could encounter without much in the way of joy to drive them.

Room / **** (2015)

A child’s imagination is not contingent on the closed walls of his reality. Adults that inhibit their growth are a curse to the endurance of a culture. Assuming that these sorts of insights were not already persistent in the mind of director Lenny Abrahamson when he made the difficult “Room,” what else would have been the driving influence of such an unpleasant story arc about a mother and child and their horrific imprisonment? The very thought of this premise makes the hair on the back of our necks stand at attention. And yet the wounding degree of the dramatic charge calls to mind an honor roll of stirring human stories that deal with troubling scenarios at the eruption of their conflicts. “Boys Don’t Cry.” “Monster’s Ball.” “Dancer in the Dark.” “Precious.” Such movies were not made great simply by the acknowledgment of their painful situations; they rose to prominence because their directors and actors swam the depths of their emotional causes, and emerged as voices in the wilderness of genuine human suffering. Here is a movie so overwhelming in its conviction that it’s a wonder the two lead stars, Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, are able to wander through the material with such firm dedication. But they do, and their resonating endeavors concluded with a rigid movie buff walking away from the experience with tears rolling down his face.

Warcraft / *1/2 (2016)

A great many brush strokes of creative dexterity have gone into building the universe of Blizzard’s treasured Warcraft saga, but few of them ever rise to the surface in the first live action movie about the popular game series. How do I know that’s the case? Because I, dear reader, have been an avid player (and reader) of the notorious PC phenomenon for nine years – indeed a treasured pastime that has ebbed and flowed with consistent prominence nearly as much as going to the movies has in recent times. Never one to be loyal to a hobby for longer than a few entertaining months, however, the ongoing hold of “Warcraft” is as bewildering to me as it might be to those unaware of my personal pleasures. It persists like a story you play with in your mind. And that is not an isolated feeling, otherwise the necessity to take the concept into the footholds of cinematic interpretation would have never gone this far. Couple that with the dueling perspectives of video game-to-film trends (seldom successful and usually disastrous) and a reputable director standing at the helm (Duncan Jones, the master behind “Moon”), and what arrives in theaters isn’t so much a standard action flick as it is a predestined clash between cinema enthusiasts and players of the game, both of whom will no doubt be measuring the final result with entirely different gauges.

The Lobster / ***1/2 (2016)

There are two ways that viewers can approach “The Lobster” – either as a facetious dark romantic comedy, or as a metaphor about the decay of civilization. For those trained to think more about surface objectives – certainly the most direct path for rousing curiosity – it is the kind of endeavor that may easily alienate one’s simple desires for payoffs and escapism; the premise is a defiant opposition to decipherable cinematic logic, seemingly drawn out of quirks and movements that would suggest insanity in most traditional undertakings. That others would never be able to find the material funny, furthermore, is certainly the most minor of its potential offenses; so abstract is this universe of paradoxical impulses that one is never privy to understanding the rules, even apart from the obligatory misfortune that follows people as they attempt to find (or rebel from) companionship. Yet for anyone well-versed in the more defining tendencies of the early movie auteurs, there is an ability to go subterranean with this kind of experiment. For all the talk of how traditional values – like a story, characters and a climax – often mask the underlying psychology of intelligent filmmakers, rare is the moment when they step beyond their own irony in order lead us outside the sphere of traditional human psychology.

X-Men: Apocalypse / *** (2016)

There’s a sly exchange between characters in “X-Men: Apocalypse” that confronts the preconceived attitude of filmgoers at action movies: specifically, that third chapters in trilogies are usually the worst when it comes to offering a thorough payoff. This morsel of wisdom is uttered during a very quick scene showing a handful of young mutants exchanging conflicting opinions as they leave a movie theater showing “Return of the Jedi,” the third “Star Wars” film; when one immediately speaks up in protest of those notorious third chapters, all those present nod in collective agreement. And if that’s as widely accepted as an attitude in this climate as it is with mere characters, then it is no wonder Bryan Singer, the loyal filmmaker behind many of the better “X-Men” movies, integrated this morsel: after the failure of so many other pictures in many of these comic book series (including the last “X” story arc, which ended with the awful “The Last Stand”), this is a director fully aware of the destinies that await lengthy film excursions. Certainly a handful in the audience might find some cruel irony in that sentiment as “Apocalypse” – also a third film in a series – thoroughly disinterests them, but those are the ones looking in from an unreasonable context. This is in no way the ambitious or intricate achievement that “Days of Future Past” was, nor does it aim to conquer the most zealous narrative summit. But what it lacks in the pitch of liveliness it more than makes up for in character exposition and effective trickles of story progression.

The Wrong Man / ***1/2 (1956)

During a recent viewing of the astounding “12 Angry Men,” my mind was persistently drawn to another picture from the same era – Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Wrong Man,” also starring Henry Fonda, about a middle-class individual who is accused of a series of burglaries he did not commit. Filmed and released within a year of one another, both movies were parables of a legal system that created vacuums for error, and while the innocence of the plaintiff in Sidney Lumet’s film was up to speculation, the certainty in Hitchcock’s was not; here was in a man who simply was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and bore a striking resemblance to a crook responsible for hundreds of lost dollars at the end of a loaded gun. Their common themes, one might say, reflected an attitude of the times that both filmmakers found strikingly relevant; no greater threat could undermine the security of people than a flawed justice system, especially one that had not yet adopted the values of surveillance or forensic advancement. Yet to consider both movies now in this time of artifice is to marvel at the unwavering power of truth, a tool often weakened in the face of investigative limitations. Was it also diminished by prejudice? Misconceptions? Or was one’s faith in the system simply misplaced? When the director briefly appears in the prologue to announce to the camera that his “true” story is perhaps stranger than most of his own fiction, one is inclined to sense there is equal parts resignation and befuddlement in his voice.

Lessons from Criterion:"12 Angry Men" by Sidney Lumet

Released in 1957 on the cusp of Hollywood’s new fascination with hard-hitting legal dramas, Sidney Lumet’s “12 Angry Men” was a film seemingly destined to forever tread the tide of cinematic obscurity. While initial reviews had ranged from middling to respectable, desires for commercial appeal had been set adrift by most box office analysts; the endeavor had not been released to the public under any substantial promotional campaign, and studio executives scoffed at the challenge of marketing a picture that featured only one prominent mainstream actor (Henry Fonda) in the middle of an audience boom for epics and star vehicles. That the movie had also been the filmmaking debut of a small and unknown director of teleplays did little to add to their enthusiasm, inevitably casting his work in a shadow of uncertainty. Yet when one takes part in any discussion about the use of the American Justice system in motion pictures today, nearly every reputable source cites it as a watershed moment for the genre, a stubborn relic that refuses to fade from the periphery of vivid moviegoeing experiences. In some way that has less to do with the premise (an important factor all its own) and more to do with how the characters echo the volatile nature of extreme human behaviors in a state of agitation. These are not actors playing up the parts of fictionalized projections; they are embodying the facets of common middle class men of their era, all of whom must burrow their way through the demand of deciding the fate of a human life in a case where evidence may not exactly paint the clearest portrait of guilt.

Captain America: Civil War / *** (2016)

“Victory at the expense of the innocent is no victory at all.” So goes a key proclamation early on in the third “Captain America” film, made by a weary witness to the catastrophic events that follow an assemblage of superheroes known as the Avengers. His words are more than just a call for accountability on the behavior of physically superior beings in mainstream society – they echo a misplaced undercurrent that I have wondered about in the comic book films as of late, where chaos has run rampant and the fates of nameless victims have lost relevance in the blur of an ambitious foreground. That recurring trend also creates a strange quagmire, I think, for fans of the heroes: how can you support a group of elite and powerful figures when their endeavors to save a world from tyranny come at the expense of flattened cities and countless casualties? When the Tony Stark character shares an early scene with the mother of a man who was inadvertently killed by his team, their interaction penetrates to the most complicated angle of this conflict – no good deed goes unpunished, especially if you’re a person who can flatten buildings with the wave of a fist.

Seven / **** (1995)

Expanding into the reaches of marginal film genres was a defining impulse for the career of Morgan Freeman, a man whose screen presence is usually at the service of plots in search of a voice of reason. The stubborn conviction of formula stories certainly provided him an ample supply of such platforms; as was the case in “Glory” or “Driving Miss Daisy” (two of his earliest successes), he thrived on playing characters that had an underlying edge to them, written from a suggestion that they were the sorts of people who endured through the grind by being honest and assertive when others wallowed in delusion. Why did it take him so long, then, to appear in crime thrillers, which had usually been robbed of protagonists with calm temperaments and informed demeanors? As we watch David Fincher’s “Seven” in hindsight of all the came after, his presence takes on an almost ethereal dominance, as if to suggest he is there because fate insisted his was the only perspective qualified to give such deplorable narrative undercurrents an intellectual meaning. For nearly every movie about a sadistic criminal that would come after, some part of us recalls the careful modulation of words of Detective Somerset, who may be one of the first men in mainstream cinema that dares to ask the question: why do we easily dismiss serial killers as lunatics?

Son of Saul / **** (2015)

The sad and disquieting holocaust tragedy “Son of Saul” compels us to ponder a myriad of difficult questions, but none greater than this: what is it about a person’s face that gives a movie such decisive emotional meaning? The great Ingmar Bergman believed expressions were the passage to one’s very soul – a device that mirrored the pain and confusion of the human experience – and his movie camera frequently studied them as a means in dealing with agonizing moral complexities. If that doctrine rings true in the minds of more modern thinkers, then it is little wonder László Nemes, the impassioned Hungarian filmmaker behind this endeavor, carved his picture in the image of that sentiment. This isn’t a straightforward retelling of one man’s struggle in the hell of a Nazi concentration camp, as a reading of the premise would suggest – it is an observation of behavior that is dictated by a terrifying pattern of military orders, murder and persecution, and how one’s endurance can reduce such realities to a blur of confusion when the hope for a good deed lingers beyond the line of sight of an unending massacre.

Hello, My Name is Doris / *** (2016)

Like fine wines uncorked from a lengthy shelf life, a great actor has the capability of disappearing from view and then resurfacing with surprising potency, inspiring us to fall in love with their dependable brand of charisma all over again. We seldom recognize the possibility as a reliable prospect, and perhaps that speaks just as much to the narrow focus of modern Hollywood as it does our own cynical expectations. Many of those thoughts crept into my mind as I watched Sally Field on screen in “Hello, My Name is Doris,” a movie she possesses with the utmost zeal. Should we have believed that this brilliant woman, a vibrant presence, would have faded quietly into oblivion? Who’s to say she was not destined to persevere against the ageist trend that dominates the industry? A lengthy departure from film that saw her dabble predominantly in major television dramas has done nothing to diminish any of her abilities, and there are moments in the movie where our admiration isn’t so much about the likability of her character as it is the refreshing candor of its portrayer. “Norma Rae” may have announced the arrival of one of the great screen stars of the 20th century, but here is an endeavor that validates all of those early proclamations in immense clarity.

Town & Country / 1/2* (2001)

What in heaven’s name were these people thinking? What inclination could possibly possess anyone with a reputable mind to surrender to blatant artistic prostitution? Those are but just two of dozens of pragmatic questions that arise during the experience of watching “Town & Country,” a movie so thoroughly miscalculated and awkward that merely thinking about it causes one to feel robbed of brain cells. And what’s essential for us to consider certainly must have been contemplated tenfold from within; after over two years of exhausting rewrites, reshoots, problematic schedules, misplaced egos and disastrous test screenings, someone at the helm must have known they were overseeing a gargantuan failure, or at least detected that they all were destined for a troublesome launch. But how did it even get that far in the first place, we ask? You would think at some point during a story conference, perhaps, someone – anyone – would have been audacious enough to rally against the incompetence of the dialogue or the disconnect in the human behaviors, well before a single frame was shot. Great amounts of revision certainly didn’t help; what remains on screen inspires us to the height shock and awe, and not for any purpose of redeeming value or unintended humor. Here is such a colossally bad film that there is little wonder in how it failed so catastrophically in the public eye.

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 Jungle Book / *** (2016)

Readers of Rudyard Kipling’s novels are apt to find some kind of  profound statement running within the veins of fantastical adventures, but to encounter “The Jungle Book” is to sense disconnect between intention and result. The plague of the premise comes down to our inability to find logic in the context of the idea: what was the author driven by when he wrote the stories of Mowgli, a young and innocent face who was destined to be raised by wolves in the thick of a menacing jungle filled with carnivorous predators? As an observer of Disney’s animated 1967 film, I felt uneasy with the very idea of any child – even one with some level of awareness of his surroundings – placing his safety in the hands of talkative panthers and bears. What if they were hungry, I wondered? What if lackluster food sources forced their natural instincts to take over? Not one iota of the premise grasps reasoning beyond that of lurid fantasy, and the quests he is destined to partake in seem burdened by an unspoken expectation of doom, as if all those claiming to be his friends are only doing so for the sake of getting closer to his young and ripe flesh.

10 Cloverfield Lane / ***1/2 (2016)

There have been an ample supply of movie premises involving maniacal tormentors rescuing and imprisoning helpless victims after some sort of accident or crisis, but “10 Cloverfield Lane” is the first I can recall that pairs the idea with an even bleaker reality — namely, that what may exist beyond the walls of confinement involves something more monstrous than what is isolated within. The movie doesn’t come right out to establish such certainties until a pivotal moment of the climax, but up to that point the ambiguity of the scenario pulls at us with profound duality. It begins when young Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is seen in the early scenes fleeing her apartment, apparently after becoming estranged from her boyfriend, who calls her repeatedly over a road journey to make amends (reasons are never clarified). When she is struck on the highway and her car is sent tumbling down a hill, invisible hands pull her from the wreckage and she comes to consciousness in a small empty room, where she is hooked up to an IV and chained to the wall by her leg. Who pulled her from the wreckage? His name is Howard (John Goodman), and he is a stone-faced and foreboding entity who intercuts his proclamations of caregiving with frightening demands of respect. She wants to leave, fearing abduction. He announces that the world beyond the doors has been destroyed by nuclear fallout, unconcerned with her impulsive fears. And for a good duration of the film that particular detail is left in doubt – perhaps as a way to amplify the suspense, or maybe even to underscore the notion that a world apocalypse can (and will) turns its survivors into monsters.