THE FLORIDA PROJECT

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Director and co-writer Sean Baker's follow-up to the superb 2015 film Tangerine is not quite as memorable or distinctive, but it's certainly its own animal, I'll give it that. Instead of transgender sex workers in West Hollywood, the focus shifts to children living in temporary housing in Orlando.

To say these people live in the shadow of Disney World is an understatement. If it's not the dregs of Disney society here, then at the very least it's the outskirts. Maybe the slums. There's a sad irony to a place called The Futureland Inn, with a derelict marquee that reads, Stay in the future right now, amidst a place that has clearly seen better days.

That's where young Jancey (Valeria Cotto) lives with her mother and little brother, where she's met by the central child character, Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), who lives in her own pastel-painted apartment complex called The Magic Castle. She and her friend who lives one floor down, Scooty (Christopher Rivera), like to run amok and cause trouble. But they are by and large good kids, who simply lack discipline and structure.

These kids are all around six or seven years old, and they take up a lot of screen time. They are at an age too young to fully understand the nuances of acting, and I found myself wondering how much of the footage was just cut down from hours of taping the kids simply let loose. There is the telltale element of the somewhat stilted performances of child actors, but it feels more prominent in the trailer than it does in the complete film. It actually doesn't take long to get used to these kids, and contentedly go along for the ride with them.

That said, Baker sure takes his time here with emerging themes of parenting and responsibility. For quite some time after the film begins, the camera just follows the kids around, doing typical kid stuff, often amusing, and incredibly well shot in memorably kitschy locations. Eventually we discover that Moonee's mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite), is a bit of a hustler. She has no regular job, and makes money buying perfume from a wholesaler and then selling them in nicer hotel parking lots. The number of people she actually manages to convince to buy perfume from her is the one thing in this movie I found a bit implausible. But then, who knows? Florida is known for its eccentrics, I guess.

Willem Dafoe plays the building manager at the Magic Castle Motel, and he's the single famous face in this film. Dafoe is a great character actor, in spite of the severe features of his face that made him look like an old man even thirty years ago. He's unusually soft in character here, a guy who takes what the residents dish out amiably, and far more affection than irritation for the kids running around the place.

I suppose it should be noted that things get pretty sad in the end, an unauthorized cameo by Disney World itself notwithstanding. I'm not sure how many people will have the patience to get that far. Who is the audience for this movie, I wonder? Certainly lovers of thoughtful, independent film. That's not a large number. Although there is some crossover -- I would count myself among them -- most people who go to the movies or blockbuster entertainment won't have any interest in this.

For much of The Florida Project -- named for the early development name used for Disney World -- I could not quite pinpoint exactly why I was so engaged. It takes a while for a story arc to make itself clear, but these kids have a unique chemistry and charm. That underscores the tragedy of their lives, as they are brought up by parents either unwilling or unable to get their lives together. Most of the time, these kids live joyfully in the moment, blissfully unaware of the implications of their futures, the adults surrounding them walking signposts of their own possible futures.

I guess all I can say is I quite liked this movie. I can think of few other people easily convinced they would too, but I don't suppose that matters. Sean Baker is clearly a director with singular vision, and I for one truly look forward to what more he has to offer.

Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Prince look back on an intersected life in The Florida Project.

Overall: B+

GEOSTORM

Directing: C-
Acting: C-
Writing: D-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C

Geostorm makes The Day After Tomorrow look like a Stanley Kubrick film. Sure, it brings everything you expect from a typical disaster movie: thinly drawn characters, preposterous scenarios, a barely coherent plot. No one expects a movie like this to be in any way an intellectual endeavor.

The thing with Geostorm, which was directed and co-written by Dean Devlin, is that it's like someone took the standard disaster-movie formula and willfully made it even dumber. Devlin wrote the screenplay for the original Independence Day, which was a unique film in that it had a self-awareness of the ludicrous cinema conventions it also gleefully participated in. For Devlin, that level of sophistication seems to have stopped there: he also wrote the dreadful 1998 version of Godzilla, and . . . oh, wait. He has no feature film writing credits since. Who the hell greenlit this movie?

If Geostorm has any truly impressive achievement, it's that it makes the audience wistful for a movie like Deep Impact. Disaster movies are a dime a dozen anymore, and hardly any effort even gets put into them. To call this script terrible would be a criminal understatement. It's like Devlin just took buzzwords like "mainframe," "code," and "OS" and just offered as many arrangements of them he could think of to have tumbling incomprehensibly out of his characters' mouths. And the plot, such as it is? Even a high school Sophomore's creative writing teacher would be like, "This is so contrived, I expected more from you."

It's the near future, you see. The world's nations have come together! They created a worldwide systems of satellites that control the weather, as a means of solving severe weather patterns from climate change. But -- oh my god, someone has weaponized it! Can the single man who designed the entire system (Gerard Butler, slumming even by his standards) who was fired by his estranged brother (Jim Sturgess, always coming across as a weasel even when he's meant to be a hero), make it back up to the International Space Station in time to whip a ragtag group of international scientists into enough shape to stop it in time? The suspense is killing me!

I'm kidding, this movie has zero suspense at any single moment. Usually the one redeeming quality of a disaster movie is the thrill of watching the disaster actually happen. Geostorm spends a lot of time setting up a premise that would be implausible even if the producers bothered to consult a single real-life scientist -- which they clearly did not -- using characters so one-dimensional that trying to care about them is like trying to have a relationship with a utility pole. 

Then, freak weather occurrences do begin. There are flashes of excitement when this happens, most notably when a huge tidal wave crashes through the Dubai skyline. Of course it has to happen there, because it's the site of what is currently the world's tallest building, the 163-story, 2,717-ft tall Burj Khalifa. We get to watch that building get damaged, and then stop short of falling at an angle even a ten-year-old would know is not possible. In another sequence, underground explosions in Hong Kong cause skyscrapers to topple into each other, literally like Dominoes. What is this truly sadistic post-9/11 trend of movies showing countless skyscrapers falling down?

The "Geostorm" of the title, however, is what all these freak weather events are working toward: the idea is that so many such weather events occur that they all blend together to become one single, global weather even that destroys the world. Or something. I never said this movie made sense. Spoiler alert! (Frankly, I don't care if anyone gets mad that I spoil the "plot" of this garbage movie.) We never actually get to see the "Geostorm" happen. The heroes prevent the very thing we came to this movie to see!

What we do get to see, on the other hand, is Gerard Butler doing a bit of space-parkour in his space suit outside the International Space Station as it self-desctructs, tons of debris flying everywhere except where he happens to be at. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, and a herculean effort a it for a disaster movie is par for the course. But literally not one thing is believable in this movie. Not even that Gerard Butler and Jim Sturgess are brothers worth caring about.

You might rightly wonder why the hell I went to this movie in the first place. Surely I already knew it was going to be terrible? Indeed, I did. But I wanted to experience a "4DX" presentation at least one time, just so I can say I did. And so, a side not on "4DX": it really would not matter what the movie was, seeing a movie this way is distracting and confusing. The movement of the seat corresponds to a wide range of perspectives, from those of the characters to a simple crane shot of the camera. The seats even shake during a fist fight, leaving no sense of whose jostling we're supposed to be experiencing. There is no consistency.

One could argue, I suppose, that such inconsistency is well matched to a movie like Geostorm, which hasn't even the slightest sense of the most basic physics. That argument would be misleading. There is really no reason to see this, or any movie, in "4DX." There are even fewer reasons to see Geostorm.

Hmmm, seems like we've seen something like this before?

Overall: D+

TWIST Advance: BPM (BEATS PER MINUTE)

Directing: A
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A

I have only good things to say about this movie, which offers a window into an era not well enough remembered, from the unusual vantage point -- for Americans, anyway -- of another culture.

Maybe straight people today aren't as familiar with ACT UP, the radical activist organization started in New York City to fight for the rights of people with HIV and AIDS. The same could be said of younger queer people today, who have no real understanding of the vast devastation this epidemic unleashed on sexual minority communities. And the U.S. was hardly alone in this.

BPM tells the story of ACT UP Paris in the early nineties. The reference point to which director and co-writer Robin Campillo regularly returns is the organization's weekly meetings, the opening scene being a quick orientation of new members. These activists squabble and organize, disagree on certain key points and band together. They discuss whether or not a demonstration going unexpectedly is good or bad for them, and the story flashes back to a group of them storming the stage at a speech by a government official. Cut back to the weekly meeting, all these activists assembled in a large classroom with stadium-style seating. They move on to their plans to throw fake blood all over the offices of a pharmaceutical company that is not acting quickly enough to save lives not deemed valuable enough by the public at large. Then we're in a flash-forward to the actual scene, these angry activists making a mess of an otherwise very normal-seeming office setting.

As such, from the very start, BPM pulsates with tension and urgency; it crackles with excitement until it inevitably evolves into the dread of personal loss. You don't expect this kind of energy when the setting starts in a classroom of political activists discussing strategy.

All these transitions are done with impressive grace, the entire film edited beautifully, shot with a uniquely tender intensity. We meet several of the activists, but the story zeroes in on Nathan (Arnaud Valois), one of the new recruits who has somehow managed not to get infected, and Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), the HIV-positive activist Nathan falls for. They grow close, become a couple, and also emblematic of everything ACT UP fought for.

The sex scenes between Nathan and Sean are unusually frank, and I think this is important to mention. The things they do with each other are very common, arguably even "vanilla," and yet there are few American distributors, if any, who would quite be able to stomach it. The thing is, not only is the sex seen here no more graphic than virtually all straight sex seen onscreen -- it is also among the best I have ever seen depicted, in terms of its parallels to real life experience. Here it is not voyeuristic or necessarily titillating to anyone besides the characters involved. It's a reflection of humanity, an authentic intimacy, a depiction of comfortable sex-positivity gay people have had for ages but gets very little accurate representation on camera. ACT UP was all about fighting stigma, which is what makes BPM's sex scenes so appropriate.

It should come as no surprise that BPM ends in sadness, and a kind that is likely to cut very deep for any viewers who actually lived through the era it depicts. Of course there are countless movies that in one way or another depict the AIDS epidemic, but BPM taps deep into the very specific anger about government inaction, and does justice to the disruptive activists who made a difference.

I found myself thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement as I watched this film. Anyone who insists their disruptive demonstrations are counterproductive would do well to consider groups like ACT UP. Sometimes disruption is the only option available. And with both groups, they were -- and are -- talking about literal lives at stake, lives undervalued by the public at large. These are courageous people fighting to make the world a better place.

Even in my forties, I barely missed the era of HIV and AIDS killing a staggering number of people -- I can barely fathom what the experience was like, both for those who died and for survivors who saw their entire social world decimated, at the same time many of them had families rejecting them. BPM doesn't focus on the latter element (in fact, Sean has an incredibly supportive mother), but it never lets up on the kind of urgency set upon this community. And here is a film that depicts it with finesse. You won't soon forget it, because ACT UP demanded that we never do.

Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Arnaud Valois fall into each other amidst organized chaos and expected tragedy.

Overall: A

TWIST Advance: APRICOT GROVES

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Here is a unique story if ever there was one, weaving threads through Armenia, Iran, America, Christianity, Islam, and above all, gender identity.

One wonders how Apricot Groves would play to someone watching it cold, not having gotten the bit about gender identify from a synopsis or description. There is a moment at the end that feels like a reveal, the first time the main character specifically states "sex reassignment surgery." Anyone paying close attention should easily have figured it out by then, but writer-director Pouria Heidary Oureh is still pretty coy about it.

Narbe Vartan plays Aram, a young trans man who has not yet had his surgery, now returning to Armenia to propose to the girlfriend he met while living in America. The story takes place over roughly twenty-four hours, and after a brief sequence depicting his being taken into surgery prior to the opening credits, it begins with his brother, Vartan (Pedram Ansari) greeting Aram at the airport. Their first major order of business of the day is to visit Aram's girlfriend's family for a traditional "proposal," which comes with many expectant rituals that never quite happen.

But first: a haircut, and a fitting with a tailor. Until the haircut is actually half finished, the camera only follows Aram from behind, never quite revealing any kind of identify. Aram's face is finally revealed in the barber's mirror -- an incredibly soft face, but with stark black eyebrows. He asks for the hair to be cut even shorter, and once the cut is done, that paired with his face makes him quite easily convincing as a man.

Not a whole lot is ever revealed about Aram's and Vartan's family background -- only that Aram immigrated to the U.S. when young, Vartan did not, and right now as brothers they are evidently the only family they've got. Vartan did spend some time in the U.S., as I recall, and maybe that's what opened his mind. He is almost shockingly at ease with his brother, and his transition process. Here is depicted an incredibly loving sibling relationship.

Aram spends much of the story just staring around, as though in a daze. Presumably he is overwhelmed by how fast things are moving, between the official proposal to his girlfriend and a scheduled surgery in neighboring Iran (where, although homosexuality is punishable by death, sex reassignment surgery is actually subsidized by the government -- creating a rather unique society in which trans people are less oppressed than gay people, and gay people are often pressured into changing their gender). The girlfriend's family struggles as you might expect, but begrudgingly accepts Aram.

The girlfriend, by the way, is a bit of a jarring reminder of how differently performances can come across in foreign languages. It's not until Allison Gangi delivers a few of her lines in English when she and Aram have a brief private conversation that you realize how oddly flat she is. I couldn't decide if it was just her or if it was everybody, just less noticeable in a language I don't speak. Most of the time, the performances are totally convincing, Aram's persistently dazed look notwithstanding.

A side note on Narbe Vartan playing Aram. This is a film with very little information published about it online. I found Vartan's Facebook page (that's the real-life Vartan, mind you, as opposed to the character Aram's brother Vartan -- confusing), and he is clearly a man. Is he trans? One would never assume so. I found myself studying both Vartan and Pedram Ansari (as the brother, Vartan) closely while watching the film -- I could clearly see Ansari's Adam's apple, for instance, and could not see one on Vartan. This made me figure that Vartan was either a trans man playing a trans man, or a woman playing a trans man, but not a cisgendered man playing a trans man. Which is it? Does it matter? It would be tempting to say no, except for the longstanding sticking point regarding the desire for trans actors to play trans characters.

All that aside, the story stands well on its own. I was particularly touched by the brother Vartan's support of Aram in all things on this incredibly specific journey: meeting potentially hostile future in-laws on the way to surgery. For a story that only takes place over mostly one single day, the pacing takes its time a bit. You get to know these characters, though, mostly in the moment, and in spite of the specificity, it's easy to sympathize with them. This is the rare film that could broaden the horizons of virtually anyone who watches it.

Pedram Ansari and Narbe Vartan are a uniquely tender pair of brothers in Apricot Groves.

Overall: B+

LUCKY

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: A
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

Lucky won't be for everyone. It's too bad. This is a movie that operates at a slow burn and gradually turns into something profound.

It's also a poignantly appropriate swan song for legendary character actor Harry Dean Stanton, here in a rare lead role. This guy, who just died last month, is 90 years old in this movie. How many other lead roles in wide release films have been acted by someone that old? Are there even any others?

This should be said up front though: Stanton's age also makes for a bit of a double-edged sword in experiencing this movie. I would hesitate to call Stanton's performance all that notable, or even nuanced. He walks around delivering his lines like he's in a deadpan dream. You know how many young children in movies deliver their lines like they don't quite understand they're acting? This is almost the same thing, just at the other end of life. Certainly Stanton understands he's acting -- he's got literally sixty years of experience -- but he also, well, in his own words, doesn't give a fuck. The end result can feel very similar.

On the other hand, director John Carroll Lynch and co-writers Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja here craft a story very well suited to Stanton at this point in his life -- to wit, at the end of it. This is Lynch's debut feature, and at times it shows, albeit slightly: this film lacks the assuredness of more experienced directors. The pacing is nearly as slow as Stanton himself, although that proves one of many surprisingly effective elements in the end.

Stanton plays the title character, and it's a while before we learn specifics about the origin of this nickname. Suffice it to say he's very old, and in excellent health for someone his age. Much of the beginning of the film just follows Lucky around on his daily routine in his tiny desert town, including daily morning yoga exercises he's been doing for years. It should also be noted that for a small town depicted in a motion picture, it's unusually diverse: the cafe Lucky frequents has a mostly black staff, and the woman who operates the small grocery store where he gets his cigarettes invites him to her son's 10th birthday fiesta.

The local bar Lucky hangs out in has a mixed, if generally rather old, crowd. And here we see how Lucky's supporting cast is rounded out by other screen legends and longtime character actors: a drinking buddy obsessed with his tortoise that ran away is played by none other than David Lynch; another barfly played by James Darren. Barry Shabaka Henley plays the operator of the cafe, in which Tom Skerritt shows up for an extended cameo with a monologue about encountering a Japanese girl in World War II that will really stick with you. This scene is a wonderful on multiple levels, as this is the first time Stanton and Skerritt have shared the screen since 1979's Alien.

And Lucky is filled with these artfully written monologues, increasingly revealing themselves to be a collective meditation on getting old. Because just when you start to wonder whether the entire movie is just going to follow Lucky around on his daily routine, he has an inexplicable fall in his kitchen. His doctor (Ed Begley Jr) can't find anything wrong with him except that, well, he's reaching the end of his life. Most people don't make it this far, he notes. So what of the ones who do?

Here is an unusually honest portrayal of how scary it can be do to nothing more than age. Death is coming for all of us in one way or another, after all, even if we live to a ripe old age. Even when you've still got your wits about you, it can be a fearful experience. Lucky is never particularly dramatic about this; he deals almost exclusively in subtleties, as does the movie overall.

How appropriate, then, for Harry Dean Stanton to be the star? You can practically feel him walking around onscreen delivering his lines dutifully while thinking, fucking whatever. All these players surrounding him complement him well. When a young waitress from the cafe visits his house to check up on him, they share an unusually tender and frightening moment. Even the young have to face their own mortality at some point.

I suppose it could be argued that there is something nihilistic about Lucky, in the end. Except for the very end, which pointedly finds joy in all of it. And it's not exactly a surprise when that happens; the story is sprinkled with regular bits of humor. And sweetness. And a huge heap of compassion. Lucky is a film that defies expectations that last well into its first half. It turns a uniquely dark mood into a delightful surprise.

Harry Dean Stanton gains a new understanding of the way out.

Overall: B+

TWIST Advance: SATURDAY CHURCH

Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-
Music: B+

Back in 2008, there was this thoroughly charming, coming-of-age / coming-out movie that was also a gay-themed musical, called Were the World Mine. Its music was so wonderful that I bought the soundtrack. Ah, those innocent -- or maybe ignorant -- cisgendered, white-centric days.

That's not to denigrate Were the World Mine in any way, as to this day I would eagerly recommend it to anyone. Its Shakespearean themes are magically interwoven into its story, and it remains a unique vision worthy of attention. But a lot of time has also passed since then, and we now live in a post-Tangerine world. In 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected, we lived in a time of naive hope. The 2017 Trump era underscores the need for attention to wider ranges of oppressed communities, and to intersectionality, and Saturday Church couldn't be coming at a better time.

Indeed, it should be very much considered a compliment to say that Saturday Church bears notable resemblance to Were the World Mine. It doesn't rip it off in any way, and neither is it literate in the same way -- rather, it expands upon similar concepts, and draws a clearer line between fantasy and reality, even as it indulges in fantastical musical numbers. These are all literal fantasies of its main character, Ulysses (Luka Kain, fairly new to feature films after some experience in both commercials and on Broadway, very well cast here), a young teenager withdrawing from the harsh real-world reactions to a budding interest in women's clothes.

With Saturday Church, writer-director Damon Cardasis is not preoccupied with gender identity, particularly when it comes to his main character. The hard-nosed Aunt Rose, recruited to look after Ulysses and little brother Abe (Jaylin Fletcher) in the wake of their father's death as their mother has to take on extra work, is the only one who makes a point of characterizing Ulysses as both "a black boy, and he's gay." But Aunt Rose, played by Regina Rose without much nuance perhaps because her character is the most one-dimensional, clearly doesn't know what she's talking about.

Ulysses takes the subway into Manhattan, encounters a group of young trans women, and gets invited to the Saturday Church of the title, inspired by a real-life church program for LGBTQ youth.  These transgender women, who are a few years older, takes Ulysses under their wing, along with a young boy, Raymond (Marquis Rodriguez), who develops a sweetly romantic interest. Neither he nor any of Ulysses's other new friends spend any time discussing labels -- an almost ironic notion, given that Saturday Church is one of very few films in which trans women of color are actually played by trans women of color: the only other notable one that comes to mind is, again, Tangerine. That said, for all their entertainingly jaded sarcasm, they prove to be real friends to Ulysses, very much encouraging the blossoming of interest in makeup and high heeled shoes.

In its way, Saturday Church is also a coming-out story, only within the context of gender variance. And make no mistake, there is some real emotional pain and some sexual trauma, a realistic reflection of what too many people go through in order to survive. This movie goes out of its way to reflect the stark realities of many trans women of color in particular, the wide range of attitudes toward sex work and the constraints on finding lasting relationships. What makes this movie truly stand apart is how it spends equal time on the unequivocal joys that can also be found along the journey of authentic self-discovery.

To say I found Saturday Church deeply moving would be an understatement. Sure, it made me laugh, it made me cry. It made me cry for multiple reasons. I shed tears for the familiar tensions Ulysses endured in the face of ignorant family members, contrived as they sometimes were. But for perhaps the first time at a movie with so much focus on transgender issues, I shed far more tears of joy, quite literally, as I watched a young person never specifically gendered find an authentic self.

The musical sequences, used both sparingly and effectively, are icing on the cake. Unlike a more conventional musical, where characters burst into song for no discernible reason, here the singing is always part of the main character's elaborate fantasies, which still grounds them in the real world. Compared to Were the World Mine, which I just can't help doing because the films are so similar in concept, the songs are not quite as good, the lyrics less refined or clever, but on average the vocal talent here is far better.  Saturday Church features some truly great singing, albeit paired with choreography that could have used a little more polish.

That said, any minor complaint I might have about it is nothing but nitpicking. It's all about the story, and even with at least one particularly one-note character, this story is deeply affecting. Saturday Church has charms all its own, unlikely to be forgotten for some time.

Luka Kain turns tragedy into beauty in Saturday Church.

Overall: A-

THE FOREIGNER

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

There's a shot that opens The Foreigner that immediately makes the film feel like something with potential, a birds-eye view of students exiting a school building that's so well composed, you think this movie might be more than just a suspense procedural, maybe something a little artful.

Well, that's also where that potential pretty much ends. The cinematography remains solid throughout, but it doesn't take long for the unfolding of the story here to prove it's by the numbers. A lot of this is in the details, only noticeable if you find yourself looking for it. This, I suppose, is the double-edged sword of seeing movies far more frequently than most: "movie magic" has to make far more of an effort to woo critics than it does regular audiences. The swiftness with which computer forensics zeroes in on the details of things like video surveillance of a vehicle license plate -- none of that is ever realistic, but if it were, these movies would be very dull.

The Foreigner is hardly perfect, but neither is it at all dull. Anyone going to a movie like this will get all they're asking from it -- and possibly more, in fact. The plot is a little more complicated than just Quan Minh (Jackie Chan, in an unusually dramatic tole) seeking revenge on the terrorist bombers who kill his daughter in the film's opening sequence.

A whole lot of the movie involves Minh doing a bit of terrorizing of his own, aimed at Irish deputy minister Liam Hennesy (Pierce Brosnan, never better and giving easily the best performance here) in an effort simply to get the names of the bombers. Minh never kills anyone, just uses his extensive background of special forces training to scare the shit out of Hennesy and his staff and bodyguards with nonlethal explosions and traps, going so far as to follow him to his secluded farmhouse and hide out in the nearby woods.

There is an intriguing backstory to all this, involving the IRA and a new faction behind the terrorist bombings calling themselves "The Authentic IRA." This taps into some real-world politics in the UK, and it bears noting that American audiences are perhaps more likely to swallow any historical details here without question -- that part all seems realistic enough to me, but who knows how British audiences will perceive it.

In any case, Quan Minh finds himself inserted into the midst of some very messy and violent political activism just by virtue of his daughter being collateral damage. The unfolding of this plot offers much more food for thought than movies of this sort tend to have, and that is to its credit.

In the end, though, The Foreigner is just a straightforward revenge flick, with a martial arts legend proving he's still got the goods at age 63. Chan has long been famous for doing his own stunts and he's not letting up here, which makes a lot of the fight sequences a joy to watch. They do take a while to get to, because the story comes first, which is refreshing in the midst of today's endlessly brainless blockbusters.

Here is a movie with much going for it, and also a lot of unrealized potential. Chan himself is great as an action star, and serviceable as an actor. Engrossing though the story may be, ultimately this is still a genre flick, and one that will please those with interest, and leave everyone else assured they aren't missing anything vital.

Jackie Chan and Pierce Brosnan find themselves with shady connections.

Overall: B

VICTORIA & ABDUL

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

It can be fun to hear untold stories about hugely famous historical figures, and in the case of Queen Victoria, it was only revealed within the past decade that her close friendship with a Muslim Indian man had been kept secret for over a century.

To call this a juicy story would be an understatement, and that's what makes the film adaptation of Victoria & Abdul somewhat disappointing. One can only presume the book of the same name on which it's based, by Shrabani Basu, gets into much more depth. For the movie, director Stephen Frears (The Queen, Philomena) turns it into little more than a pleasant diversion. And there is a lot to mine in a story like this, considering the story begins only three decades into Britain's rule over India, and the context of overt racism of the British toward South Asians.

Queen Victoria is the one person in her house who not only doesn't seem to care that Abdul isn't white or Christian -- she even enlists him to teach her his native language of Urdu -- but is largely ignorant of the geopolitical details behind the racial resentments among her household staff, or among the rest of her country for that matter.

A lot of this is touched on in Victoria & Abdul, but it is also largely glossed over, in favor of telling this amusing "opposites attract" story. Within that context, Frears offers something fairly entertaining, but fails to impress upon the audience how historically significant this really was. The tone is very "isn't it funny this happened!" rather than demonstrating how extraordinary it was, both that it happened, and that Victoria's successor, her son, King Edward VII, nearly succeeded in scrubbing Abdul completely from the historical record.

But, I suppose there's another approach you could take with this film. It's telling a story not yet told on film, at least, and a unique one at that. It gets a tad corny at times ("Based on true events ... mostly," we are told at the beginning), and with a different approach it could have been much more profound. Still, the performers elevate the material.

How can anyone resist Judi Dench as Queen Victoria -- twenty years after she played the same character in Mrs. Brown, also about another scandalous relationship with a servant? Dench is now 82 years old and is as commanding a screen presence as ever. Ali Fazal, as Abdul, is plenty convincing as the exotic man who charmed the queen. And it's a treat as always to see Eddie Izzard, here playing her son Bertie with unusual subtlety.

I do wish Frears did more to unpack the gender politics of a Muslim man fawning over a British queen in the 19th century, while the wife and mother-in-law the queen insisted he bring out from India spend all their time in burqas. That was a bit too heavy for the tone Frears was going for, though, so Abdul's family is just regarded as exotic curiosities rather than figures of cultural misogyny. I guess racial prejudice and classism were enough for Frears to tackle -- and even there only superficially.

Realistically, the criticisms I have for Victoria & Abdul are not going to be on the minds of most people actually bothering to watch it. This is the kind of movie that makes it easy for viewers to convince themselves they can feel good about how much progress has been made since the time of its setting, and admire the independent streak of an unusual woman in power. In much the same vein but to far less a degree than Gone with the Wind, it gets more problematic the deeper you dig but within the context of undeniably compelling storytelling.

Judi Dench and Ali Fazal are an internationally platonic odd couple in Victoria & Abdul.

Overall: B

BLADE RUNNER 2049

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-
Special Effects: B+
Production Design: B+

If "Future Noir" actually is a genre, then the 1982 film Blade Runner both originated it and remains the gold standard. How long that has been the case is perhaps up for debate, given the film's definitively lesser version that was seen in its original theatrical run; its much-improved tenth-anniversary "Director's Cut" in 1992 (which director Ridley Scott, ironically, did not directly work on); or the 25th-anniversary "Final Cut" released in 2007, which Scott did supervise and which remains widely considered the definitive version.

This puts Blade Runner 2049 into a peculiar position, with a uniquely rich cinematic history behind it, which includes what is arguably the most influential science fiction film of the past forty years, something it took years to be recognized as the masterpiece it remains, and gives this sequel truly impossible standards to live up to. Those of us with a working knowledge of the original Blade Runner are left to wonder: How does Blade Runner 2049 play to the many people likely to see it that have not seen its predecessor?

This movie, made 35 years after the first but set only 30 years later (so the aging actor Harrison Ford is playing five years younger than his real age -- typical), does work on its own terms. But is it a wholly original, or even potentially influential, cinematic vision? Plainly it is not. But that doesn't mean it isn't worthy of our attention -- original writer Hampton Fancher returns as story writer and co-script writer; Ridley Scott serves as an Executive Producer; and visionary director Denis Villeneuve, who brought us the likes of Prisoners, Sicario and Arrival, steps in as director. All of these things are to its benefit.

But those things alone are not enough. I don't usually focus as much on production design as other elements of a film, and perhaps I should, but the world of Blade Runner commands it. What made Blade Runner unique was its very deliberate film noir aesthetic, set in the future -- right down to its 1940s-influenced fashions, Sean Young with her sculpted hair and high shoulder pads. Not one single scene was bathed in bright light; all exterior shots were at nighttime, and any daytime interior shots featured deliberately dimmed beams of daylight filtering in through tinted windows at sharp angles. This shroud of darkness served a dual purpose: it kept the film's look in line with film noir, and also helped obscure any set designs that might otherwise look far more dated over time. Almost every detail of that movie still holds up after all these years, with few exceptions (perhaps most notably, all the indoor smoking, which never occurs in 2049).

And while Blade Runner's claustrophobic and crowded cityscape was exclusively confined to Los Angeles -- that film's characters never leave the city -- Villeneuve goes out of his way to expand those horizons in Blade Runner 2049: there's even a fleeting glimpse of a sign that says NOW LEAVING GREATER LOS ANGELES. Police Officer K (Ryan Gosling), on a mission to unravel a new mystery very much tied to the first film, visits a vast area of San Diego turned into a gargantuan waste dump, and spends an extended sequence in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, virtually uninhabited and shrouded in orange fog, "radiation: nominal." This makes for several exterior shots featuring no crowds whatsoever, Ridley Scott's world of overpopulation replaced with vast, open spaces. It succeeds in making Blade Runner 2049 its own thing, but also pulls it rather far from the film noir aesthetic on which this world was originally predicated. Even the office of LAPD's Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright, continuing her late-career trend of delivering all her lines like a robot), is stark white -- so stark, in fact, that one can easily imagine that set looking dated within just a few years.

So what of the story itself, then? There really is too much to spoil, preventing me from saying much about it -- true fans of the original film in particular will want to experience on their own how this film turns what is accepted to be true on its head. Anyone who hasn't seen the first film should be able to follow, but they won't have a full grasp on the historical significance of 2049's twists, within the Blade Runner universe.

As such, I am left to comment on that universe itself -- the very thing that made the original Blade Runner the cultural touchstone it is. One thing slightly bugs me: the worlds of Blade Runner's 2019 and Blade Runner 2049 are a tad too similar. Villeneuve takes Ridley Scott's original vision of a future Los Angeles and successfully expands on it, but I hesitate to say he updates it. The world changes dramatically in three decades. Consider what an average crowd looked like in 1982 versus today -- most notably how today's crowds are made up of people looking down at mobile devices. The key change here is that in 1982, what Ridley Scott presented seemed like a completely new, but still plausible future. But that film's setting is essentially our real-world present, clearly turned out to be nothing like it, and by necessity turns Blade Runner into an alternate rather than future universe. Even within that framework, I would expect greater cultural shifts over three decades than what we see here. The Los Angeles cityscape remains the same kind of dense world of giant advertisements, just switched from screens to holograms and rendered with crisper special effects.

Yet, for all that nitpicking, I found myself completely absorbed by Blade Runner 2049, both its story and its world. Does it really need to be two hours and 43 minutes long? Probably not, but even for a film with very little in the way of action set pieces, that times goes by without a dull moment. Not even the friend I saw it with, who had never seen the first film and even declared "I'm just not that into sci-fi," complained about the run time.

And Blade Runner 2049 certainly has provocative and beautiful and haunting moments all its own. The themes of what it means to be human remain, and are expanded; not only does this world contain the original "replicants" -- synthetically created humans with shortened life spans whose rebellious members are hunted by the officers known as Blade Runners (of which Officer K is one) -- but here we have the addition of Joi (a luminous Ana de Armas), a holographic companion K keeps at home, who seems very convincingly to develop real feelings for him. If a replicant sex worker says, "Oh, you don't like real girls" as means of recognizing her own rejection, what are we to consider "real"?

It's hardly a spoiler to acknowledge that Blade Runner 2049 answers the defining question of its predecessor: whether Rick Deckard himself was a replicant. This alone is sure to disappoint some fans of the original, as many hold dear the joy in the mystery. But once Officer K catches up to Deckard, solving that particular mystery only gives way to myriad new ones. 2049 occasionally suffers from clunky dialogue like "If this gets out, it breaks the world," but there is something to the way this film expands that world. It can't possibly live up to what came before it, but it is still filled with riches that are their own reward, which likely increase with repeat viewings.

A Blade Runner takes a 2049 detour to a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.

Overall: B+

BATTLE OF THE SEXES

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Here is a movie that is fun from the very start. The moment the 20th Century Fox fanfare begins the picture, the sound design as deliberately made to come across as though it's something literally from 1973. And thereafter, the detailed seventies-era production design is very impressive, at least to someone who wasn't quite born yet. Maybe it's different if you were actually around at the time.

But it can hardly be argued that Emma Stone and Steve Carell aren't both perfectly cast as tennis champions Billie Jean King and Boby Riggs. Carell had to wear clearly prosthetic teeth, but with the makeup and hair design, the actors' similarities to the real-life people they played is uncanny.

There is much to love about Battle of the Sexes, not least of which is its depiction of King's sexuality. Here it is seen with a unique level of understanding in historical context -- King's fears regarding secrets being made public at a time when homosexuality was far less accepted in American culture. That said, her husband, Larry King (Austin Stowell, classically handsome and almost pointedly unthreatening), is depicted as so supportive and understanding it's almost suspect. It's not unrealistic to think the two of them remained friends, but was he really so understanding so quickly?

It's just a movie, after all -- but an effectively entertaining one, with just the right amount of subtle poignancy. Battle of the Sexes is clearly intended as a rallying cry for feminism, but never at the expense of its existence foremost as a fun time at the cinema. This is the almost curious thing about Bobby Riggs, in fact -- Carell makes him easily sympathetic, in spite of his bloviating about being openly chauvinistic. He may be a genuine tennis champion, but he's also a showman, something Billie Jean King always understands. "He's just a clown," she says. It's Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) she has a problem with, as he's the guy going out of his way to keep woman players unfairly paid a fraction of what the men get.

Bobby Riggs as a character is somewhat problematic, being characterized as this "lovable sexist." But when Riggs wins his publicity stunt of a match against women's champ Margaret Court, who buckles under pressure, King finally takes on his challenge because she can't stand Riggs getting publicly validated as he declares men the superior sex, no matter how ridiculous the context. She largely plays along with the silly publicity, but when it comes down to it, what matters is the match.

There's a lot going on in Battle of the Sexes, a sports movie that triples as a women's liberation period piece and a coming-of-age lesbian love story. In lesser hands, it could have been a mess. This is a quasi-biopic that necessarily oversimplifies things, but in all the right ways, moving the story forward at a steady clip but never feeling rushed. King falls for a hairdresser, and honestly Emma Stone's onscreen chemistry with Andrea Riseborough is moderate at best -- this might provide a little weight to the argument for casting actually gay actors in gay parts. Stone is otherwise wonderful, however, fully convincing otherwise as Billie Jean King and playing well off of Carell.

With unusually well-executed cinematography for a film about athletes, Battle of the Sexes is always nice to look at. And since it's not so much challenging as it is a reflection of changing times and one of the key women in manifesting change, it qualifies as a crowd pleaser, offering a story easy to get pleasantly lost in. The movie itself isn't shattering any of the barriers that Billie Jean King did herself, but a reflection of where we once were as a society and how far we've come from it. It's subtle on this point, but it's hopeful and comforting.

Emma Stone and Steve Carell turn showboating into a match point.

Overall: B+