ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD

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

It's almost too bad Ridley Scott and his cast pulled off one of the most amazing feats of modern cinema, replacing a key part with a new actor and doing eight days of reshoots a month before scheduled release. It practically overshadows how great All the Money in the World actually is.

It may have even made it better. Let's just set aside, for a moment, the politics of Kevin Spacey's massively misguided response to allegations of sexual harassment, which single-handedly may have tanked this movie's chances at the box office if no changes have been made. It's not hard to find photos online of him as J. Paul Getty, having undergone hours of makeup to look like an old man. Shady behavior notwithstanding, Spacey is objectively a very talented actor, and likely played the part well; the makeup job is even decent. But, when compared to how Christopher Plummer actually looks as a real old man in the part, Spacey winds up looking a little ridiculous.

It's a bit of a mystery why Spacey was hired for the part to begin with. Plummer had already been considered for the part but had scheduling conflicts during the original shoot -- but still, surely there are other older working actors who could have fit the bill without having to spend so much time and energy on prosthetics? Ian McKellen, maybe?

Well, Christopher Plummer wound up available after all, when reshoots were decided upon at the last minute -- and thank God for that. All of Spacey's scenes -- and there was a lot -- were re-shot, many of them including Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams, who traveled to shoot on location over Thanksgiving week. These details shouldn't matter to the end result, necessarily; the film truly stands on its own. But it's all the more impressive with the knowledge that so much was done so late in the game so quickly, because such things can derail any film production. In this case, it clearly enhanced it -- all scenes with Christopher Plummer are integrated seamlessly, and the editor in particular, Claire Simpson, should be commended.

All that said, the performances in All the Money in the World deserve more focus than they are getting, what with all this behind the scenes drama taking up the media ink -- which even I am doing right here. Plummer has never been better, here depicting a man who, at the time, was the richest man in the history of the world -- and, essentially, more of a heartless monster than the criminals who kidnapped his grandson.

Even better is Michelle Williams as Getty's ex-daughter-in-law, mother to the kidnapped grandson, John Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer -- no relation). Williams has a history of great performances, and this ranks among her best. Without knowing how accurate it was -- how many people actually knew Gail? -- she nails the accent, and truly disappears into the role. More than once I watched her onscreen and marveled at how good her performance was, and that does not happen often.

The story itself, of course, is pretty sensational, and somewhat necessarily gleans over what would have been the lasting trauma to young Paul. This was the grandson of the richest man in the world, kidnapped for ransom, and the man who had the money struck with the tenets of not negotiating until the kidnappers did something pretty horrible to him. This is all public information so it's not exactly secret, but I still won't spoil it. Just be warned: what happens to Paul is depicted onscreen, and it is both brutal and disturbing.

What makes this story the most compelling, however, is that J. Paul Getty's response to and attitude about all this is arguably even more disturbing. Early on, we get a couple of vital flashbacks regarding Gail's divorce from Getty's semi-estrange, drug addict son (Andrew Buchan). The elder Getty can't understand why Gail doesn't want money and only wants full custody of the children -- and his perception of her taking the children from him fuels years of resentment. But this is how unlimited riches warp a person's mind: if he loved his grandchildren so much, why would he be so callous in this situation? They say that blood is thicker than water, but resentment is even thicker.

There is slight disappointment in the way Ridley Scott ends this story -- there is no way the real story ended so tidily and dramatically. Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg), the deal maker Getty hires to find his grandson's kidnappers, winds up playing a key role in getting young Paul Back, with several key characters crossing paths in a chase at the end -- including a particular captor with a developed affection for the boy. Wahlberg plays the part well, but it's all storytelling just a bit too convenient, and honestly his part in particular is ultimately the least consequential.

Regardless, All the Money in the World is riveting from start to finish, filled with suspense and intrigue, stunningly well put together for something that had to be taken apart and put back together again in such short order. You'd never know it just to see the finished film itself, which is executed with truly rare finesse.

Standing up to scrutiny: Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg assist in great achievement.

Overall: A-

DOWNSIZING

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

Downsizing is pleasant enough, which in a way is its problem. Director and co-writer Alexander Payne starts with a promising concept: the "downsizing" of the title is the new practice of undergoing a procedure, ostensibly to help the environmental effects of overpopulation, to shrink oneself to just a few inches tall. It's Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves for the intellectual set. Except no one takes this concept and really runs with it -- instead, it gets taken in the least interesting directions imagination.

I suppose movies like The Incredible Shrinking Man or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids already covered the more sensational ideas of being shrunken to a tiny fraction of original size. Perhaps Payne was simply trying to explore uncharted territory here. I can respect that. The story, however, meanders, discarding characters as it moves in new directions without ever regarding them again, in ways that make little sense.

And I'm still a little stuck on how this movie ignores the much more immediate, practical dangers of being only five inches tall. Tackling issues of social justice and pending environmental collapse is all well and good, but what good is a story like this if none of the small people encounter, say, a cat? Or hell -- bugs! Actually, near the end, they do encounter a bug: a caravan of small people riding down a trail to a small-people settlement, the silhouette of a dragonfly seen through a giant leaf overhead. This plays like one of many examples of the wonderment that would come with this experience. All I could think was: what might  dragonfly actually do with people five inches tall? A dragonfly itself can be as much as four inches in length -- 80% the height of these people!

This movie had a curious marketing campaign, likely because of how muddled its story ultimately turns out to be. In a second wave of trailers, the marketing itself reveals -- so, if you've seen the trailer, this is not a spoiler -- that the main character's wife backs out at the last minute. This is Paul and Audrey, played by Matt Damon and Kristin Wiig, the latter of whom is criminally underused in the end. And her backing out strikes me as a mite unrealistic on its own: would they really never notify the husband if the wife backs out, when they did everything on the same time table up to that point?

I have to wonder if this script might have been better, or at least more tightly polished, when the cast actually read it. This movie features a great many famous people in ultimately bit parts: Neil Patrick Harris and Laura Dern as part of a "small person" community presentation; Jason Sudeikis as a friend who helps Paul with his decisions. Margot Martindale is now famous just for being a character actress in countless small parts, but here she's onscreen for all of a few seconds.

As Paul moves on from certain acquaintances, he meets new ones: a neighbor (Christoph Waltz) who proves to be key to his destiny; a Vietnamese dissident (Hong Chau, the best thing in this movie) now working as a cleaning lady.

I hesitate to call Downsizing "boring," because it did keep me engaged -- barely. I spent a lot of time wondering what the point was, really. All the "big issues" this story tackles could easily be part of another story that did not involve shrinking people to five inches tall. Even when I saw the trailers, I kept figuring they were deliberately omitting something more sinister to the story, because of course there had to be. But I did imagine something more interesting, like, say, the danger of getting stepped on by normal sized people. In what world would all these small people be kept so uniformly safe?

The closest to real volatility this movie gets is when a guy at a bar argues that small people are not contributing enough to the economy and therefore should only be worth one fifth of a vote. That is to say, Downsizing is relatively inoffensive, the potentially problematic nature of Paul and Ngoc Lan Tran's relationship notwithstanding -- it gets uncomfortably close to "white savior" territory, although to be fair Paul turns out to be kind of a fuckup. It's also not nearly as compelling as it should be.

The concept itself is most compelling, indeed, and that's what holds the interest in the beginning, as the world is introduced to this procedure. The story then steadily heads toward more specific narrative threads, which break off in threads with little cohesion. Why would anyone find all this talk about comparative funds interesting? You won't finish this movie regretting having seen it, necessarily, but neither are you going to be thinking about it much the next day. It's a pretty wasted opportunity when such a unique concept is turned into something forgettable.

Oh, who cares about obvious hazards? Let's talk about money!

Overall: B-

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

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

One might call this the anti-Brokeback Mountain. I mean that as a compliment to both that movie and this; both are excellent, but both are largely reflective of the times of their release. It's been twelve years now since that seminal tragic romance, and here, with Call Me By Your Name, we get a romance, between men, that has no tragedy at all. This is a love to be celebrated, to be regarded with joy. There is some sadness, but it's only the same kind of circumstance that could affect any couple of people who fall in love.

That said, one of the many things to love about this film by director Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash) is that it still acknowledges the challenges facing young gay men in the early eighties -- it just doesn't dwell on them. Seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet, a standout) lives in northern Italy with his progressive professor parents, pretty well free of the typical American socializations of young men. Visiting twenty-something college student Oliver (Armie Hammer), however, more than once acknowledges how his parents would react poorly to their relationship.

Relatively early on, Oliver even says, "We haven't done anything to be ashamed of," the implication being that only if they did anything sexual would that be the case. But then romance does blossom between them, and still neither of them can bring themselves to feel shame. It seems it doesn't even seem to occur to them.

It takes a while even to get to this point, as much time is spent on Elio and Oliver simply becoming friends at first. Upon meeting, Elio isn't even sure he likes Oliver. Guadagnino takes his time here to such a degree that, at first, I began to wonder what the big deal was about this movie. There's nothing wrong with it, sure, but where is this going? It's pleasant enough, but hardly earth-shattering.

It turns out that's precisely the point: Call Me By Your Name contains no emotional cataclysms. It merely draws you in, slowly and confidently, until you just want to wrap yourself in its sweetness, its simple purity. There is a soothing steadiness to its overall tone, and there is sadness in just having the story end.

And although the story is very much about Elio and Oliver, and their connection is genuinely moving, nothing in this movie moved me more than the relationship between Elio and his father, played with a unique level of compassion by Michael Stuhlbarg. Oh, if only every young gay man could have a father as understanding and deeply empathetic as Elio's! This guy's existence almost seems like a fairy tale, but Stuhlbarg grounds him, makes him believable. He and his son just might have something in common.

Unfortunately, there is a couple of somewhat salacious elements to Call Me By Your Name's reputation, and I suppose I should address them. Yes, a certain thing, which I presume is unprecedented in cinema, is done to a peach. Believe it or not the whole sequence, while a tad comical, is surprisingly tasteful. And then, of course, there is the age discrepancy between Elio and Oliver, one of them technically underage. But anyone trying to use that to discredit this film is missing the point about our current cultural discussion about consent -- Elio and Oliver's relationship is believably, plausibly equitable. Neither of them is taken advantage of.

Indeed, their budding romance takes so much time, and there are subtle signals in the beginning, they likely will enrich the film upon multiple viewings. Therein lies the answer to where the story is going. It's going someplace new, at least for American mainstream cinema -- somewhere beautiful, and lovely, and deeply affecting.

Are Elio and Oliver gay? They both start off having experiences with young women. Some have argued that a movie like this should be characterized as bisexual rather than gay, but this movie is clearly sidestepping any such politicizing. Its answer seems to be another question: does it matter? These two are as surprised as anyone that they fall in love with each other. I did feel bad for the women enamored with them, though -- they represent all too many women who have longed for men looking for what they cannot provide.

Call Me By Your Name is a love story, pure and simple, but of a kind some of us have long wished to see more of. Even the practice described by the title, which seems on its face to be rather odd, plays sensibly in context. As does every minor event in this film. That's what this is: a series of minor events, which, when taken together, add up to something wonderful and true. So it goes with any of us who fall in love with another person who is decent and good -- the very attributes that make it easy to fall in love with this film.

Hey, 1983 -- 2017 called, to say "A peach is a little on the nose, isn't it?"

Overall: A

THE SHAPE OF WATER

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: C+

What. Wait -- what?

Okay, some of this should not exactly come as a shock. The trailers made it pretty clear that The Shape of Water involves an intimate relationship, possibly even a romantic one, between Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and what the credits list as "Amphibian Man" (Doug Jones -- not the one that just won the senate seat in Alabama, for the record). What I wasn't prepared for was the extent, the physicality, of that intimacy. I'm having a little difficulty getting past it.

Sure, this is a fanciful and pretty dark world characteristic of director Guillermo de Toro. But Elisa, a cleaning lady in the government research facility housing this creature they consistently call "the asset," forges an unnatural bond with the thing. I could almost get past that under the right circumstances of storytelling, actually. But Elisa actually discusses this intimacy Zelda, with her best friend from work (Octavia Spencer, always a delight) -- and somehow, Zelda never says, "Elisa, you're fucking a fish!" Instead she learns how the thing's penis comes out of hiding. I'm not kidding.

Maybe I'm just being closed-minded. I'll freely admit that. It's very, very rare, but once in a blue moon, a movie everyone else seems to love comes along and I just can't get on board. The same thing happened with Pixar's Ratatoulle -- cartoon or not, I don't want to see rats, no matter how cute they are, running a restaurant kitchen. Yuck! So they ran themselves through the dishwasher. They're still rats.

And so it is with The Shape of Water -- it's still a fish-man. And an uncomfortably humanoid fish-man, at that: it's basically a man with scales and fins and webbed feet. The outfit is very form-fitting for the actor who portrays him, and I'm just not used to thinking a fish's ass isn't half bad looking.

I'm usually all for being challenged by a film, if it does it in the right way. I'm even good with being made uncomfortable, if there is good reason for it. I just can't bring myself to come up with any truly good reason for the story in The Shape of Water to be told. Sure, I could offer up reasons to see it regardless, most of all the performances -- Sally Hawkins in particular gives an excellent performance as a mute woman overcome with empathy for a mistreated creature.

Then again, perhaps you should also be warned that Elisa is weirdly horny from the beginning. She jerks off in the bathtub every morning and even sets a timer to it -- an egg timer, by the way: she also loves to eat hard boiled eggs and shares them with her beloved Amphibian Man. Lots of fertility symbolism, I suppose. This is the most fucked up Easter ever imagined.

Elisa has a lovely gay friend who lives in her building, Giles, played by Richard Jenkins -- another actor who is always a welcome presence. Maybe these actors just know something I don't, and can see some intrinsic value in this script that I can't. The Shape of Water would easily fall flat without the likes of these actors elevating the otherwise mystifying material.

"Forbidden love," a timeless trope, is one thing. In this case, all I can think of is how amphibian sex gives "slippery slope" new meaning. This isn't a boy and a girl from rival families. It's literal bestiality. The government program boss played effectively by Michael Shannon is clearly meant to be seen as the villain, but I'm kind of on his side on this one. "That thing is an affront," he says. He's right!

I'll give The Shape of Water this much: it certainly is never boring. This truly is a movie all its own. I couldn't even tell you what genre it's supposed to be -- it's set in a sort of alternate-universe fifties, full of whimsical flourishes, and treats sex between members of different species with a "love makes a family" vibe. It certainly feels like a Guillermo del Toro movie. Honestly, most fans of del Toro's, or of twisted dark fantasies, will probably love it. With what I feel are legitimate reasons, however, I'm just not feeling it.

Overall: C+

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

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

Here is a classic example of a movie that is critic-proof. No one reading this review is going to decide whether or not to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi based on what I say about it. In all probability, anyone reading this will by and large have waited until after seeing the film, just to see how well aligned my point of view is to theirs. Some may even be part of the Star Wars Nerd Army, waiting to pounce on any criticisms I may have. And I do have a few, in spite of my immediate contention that The Last Jedi is easily the best of the new Star Wars films.

The Last Jedi locks us in, in a way The Force Awakens could only offer in a somewhat shaky promise: the re-ignition of a franchise many felt taken in the wrong direction by George Lucas’s ridiculously self-indulgent prequels; a return to the grittier, lived-in (as in: not bogged down by CGI) feel of the original trilogy; a thematic connective tissue that linked the characters we originally fell in love with to a new vision of a franchise future with even more exciting characters. The power of that film in its cultural context was undeniable, in spite of its overall plot being basically a retread of A New Hope (with the explosion of what amounted to a third Death Star), but there remained the feeling that the next installment of this new trilogy could be great, or it could be a disaster. It had great potential but offered no reliable promises.

Well, fear not! I don’t have to give away any plot details to tell you that The Last Jedi improves on its predecessor, escapes the clutches of its deeper flaws, and reaffirms Star Wars and its place in modern American mythology in a way The Force Awakens could not. The resulting relief is deepened by the very existence of last year’s stand-alone Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which was good but had nowhere near impact of the official, episodic installments, and served as a warning about market saturation. Do we really need a Star Wars movie every single year? I remain unconvinced, and the impact of The Last Jedi would be even greater with a longer wait before returning to the Lucasfilm universe. These stand-alone movies are fun but are basically tangents to the broader story arc – and, let’s face it, a tangent is never nearly as compelling as the primary story being told.

I will say that The Last Jedi starts off with dialogue clunky enough to have given me mixed feelings about how the rest of the movie was going to go. Rian Johnson, previously known for the decent but forgettable Looper (2012), proves up to the task as director, but was maybe not the best choice as the sole writer of the script. Then again, let’s be honest with ourselves: what single Star Wars movie has not featured clunky dialogue? One could argue convincingly that it’s part of the package.

Of course, that attitude can be a double-edged sword: millions of fans who grew up loving Star Wars – indeed, the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy alike – will come to this movie completely closed off to seeing its flaws. Minds are made up that the movie will be loved; therefore, it is loved. Who cares what dumb things come out of any characters’ mouths? There’s Princess Leia – excuse me, General Leia – on the screen! There’s Luke Skywalker! And Rey, the best new Star Wars hero – of any gender – since Princess Leia herself! And Finn! And Po! Captain Phasma! Chewbacca! And BB-8 and C-3PO and even R2-D2! It’s so exciting it’s exhausting! And that’s not even the end of the list of exciting characters who turn up -- speaking of which, by the way: what's with the porg haters? They are adorable and fun, and one of this film's many surprises is that these creatures are onscreen just enough, never overused.

Even Kylo Ren – pitch-perfectly portrayed by Adam Driver – gains a deeper meaning in this film. In The Force Awakens he was a petulant child; now he’s a dangerous young man whose emotional instability has greater clarity. No longer is he the villain trying in vain to emulate his idol Darth Vader; for once he’s becoming a villain of his own unique expression – one which, frankly, may be (so far) less iconic, but has greater nuance than Vader ever had.

In any case, once the initial dialogue finally gives way to the immediacy of the story itself, it cannot be understated how satisfying it is to watch the pieces of the story fall into place. And it is precisely the powerful mythology of this franchise that gives it unique weight, the way it can give the viewer chills just to see certain specific characters engage with each other. Battle scenes, particularly between characters wielding lightsabers, are expertly staged with staggeringly well-shot backdrops. The cinematography is epic in scope, with deliberate uses of light and color that make this film stand apart both as a Star Wars film and as a piece of cinematic pop art. The special effects are not groundbreaking – Star Wars has been incapable of that since the early eighties – yet flawlessly executed, using CGI when appropriate but more practical effects when it works better (something the aging George Lucas never understood).

Also: a surprising amount of humor, a welcome element in a pretty dark series of events for our heroes. Minor but effective gags are peppered throughout, although the first example I thought felt slightly out of place in this world – but, it fits with 21st-century American sensibilities. All three trilogies are very much products of their time, and we can’t really begrudge them that.

Finally, perhaps the biggest relief of The Last Jedi is that, after The Force Awakens – as thrilling as it was – was a transparent retread of A New Hope, there was much speculation as to whether The Last Jedi would be a retread of The Empire Strikes Back. It’s not even close. More than once the story seems headed in one direction, and then veers truly unexpectedly – to the point where I actually thought, Well, where are they going to go from here then? To me, this is the greatest compliment I could give it, The Last Jedi’s greatest strength: its element of surprise, of discovery not truly felt since the original trilogy. There is no “great reveal” in the vein of Vader’s “Luke, I am your father!” – but the potential is always there. As such, the key difference between The Force Awakens and this movie is that the former left its fans with cautious optimism about the future of Star Wars, and now we’re left with unbridled excitement.

Feels like home: Luke Skywalker re-enters the Millennium Falcon.

Overall: A-

Advance: DARKEST HOUR

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

Gary Oldman has long been impressively chameleonic as an actor, disappearing in roles from Dracula to Zorg in The Fifth Element to Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise to Commissioner Gordon in the Christopher Nolan Batman movies – among a great many others. But he has never disappeared quite so completely as he does as Winston Churchill in <i>Darkest Hour</i>, a truly great performance in – well, okay, it’s a very good, if not great, movie.

It’s easy for a performance to get weighed down – so to speak – or distracted by the massive amount of prosthetics Oldman wears here, reportedly weighing half his own weight. This transformation alone, really, should garner <i>Darkest Hour</i> on Oscar for Best Makeup, because from the moment he appears on the screen, you don’t even realize you’re looking at Gary Oldman. Granted, Churchill was Britain’s Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955 (this movie focuses on the first stretch), and he died in 1965, so I’m not sure it means much for me to say I really felt like I was looking at Winston Churchill. And some could argue quite easily that John Lithgow did a better job of portraying him in the Netflix series The Crown in its first season last year – he certainly had better enunciation in his delivery. A quick search for the audio of any Winston Churchill speech, however, quickly reveals that Oldman’s is the more realistic one, adding one more element to the astonishing way in which this consummate actor completely transcends any limitations put on him by this production.

That is to say, Gary Oldman alone makes Darkest Hour essential viewing, even if the movie overall is imperfect. I still use the word “imperfect” with some hesitation, because it is also thoroughly entertaining from the start, mesmerizing from the opening frame, and its contrivances play on the audience’s emotions in all the ways they come to the movies specifically for. Getting to the multiple layers of critical appraisal is one thing, but if you enjoy historical biopics in general, movies made for adults, then this is definitely for you.

Now, to call Darkest Hour “Oscar Bait” is both on the nose and an understatement. It’s a period piece set in Britain with a famous actor in the lead giving a stellar performance – anyone with an eye on the coming Oscar race quite rightly places Gary Oldman as the current front runner for Best Actor. It’s early enough, though, that his momentum could still falter, although given the current slate of competitors it seems unlikely. I feel so strongly about this other category that I’ll mention it again, though: this movie deserves Best Makeup. Specifically, Kazuhiro Tsuji as Gary Oldman’s prostethic makeup and hair designer.

There are other actors in this movie, of course, and the two other standouts are women: Kristin Scott Thomas as Clementine Churchill (although her apparent role of “woman who keeps her powerful husband grounded” seems slightly problematic); and Lily James (seen earlier this year in Baby Driver) as Elizabeth Layton, Churchill’s personal secretary. There’s also Ben Mendelsohn (now perhaps best known as the Imperial Commander Orson Krennic in last year’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) as the only slightly stuttering King George VI. The presentation of the initially strained relationship between Britain’s king at the time and its new Prime Minister Churchill is much more subtle than the movie is overall, making it one of its most compelling relationships.

And, indeed, most of the rest of Darkest Hour, which details the first couple of weeks after Churchill first became Prime Minister, engages little with subtlety. For a movie of this sort, however, it strikes all the right notes for giving its audience what it wants; few people who aren’t professional critics but have an interest are going to have any complaints. And to be sure, this movie, as directed by Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement), looks at a rather fascinating time in history – at the very beginning of World War II, when the U.S. was studiously trying to remain neutral, honestly a rather shameful (among many) points in U.S. history. A brief scene can say a lot, such as when Churchill makes a phone call to U.S. President Franklin, practically begging for assistance, and getting none.

Darkest Hour certainly provides a lot of uncomfortable things to consider in retrospect. The focus of this story is on Churchill’s ultimate decision whether or not to engage in peace negotiations with Hitler, something he resists with all his might from the beginning. It seems obvious in retrospect that he clearly made the right decision to fight rather than acquiesce to anything Hitler wanted, but the uncomfortable truth is that no one knew this for certain in 1940 – and how do we gauge any similar decisions that might be made by world leaders today? Churchill is at times characterized here as a guy who seems to many like a babbling lunatic, bringing uncomfortable visions of the current American president. Churchill, by contrast, came down on the side of hard, if brutal, logic in the end – a man of integrity in the face of a world crisis, an important distinction.

It was, of course, Britain’s handling of the Dunkirk situation that brought things around for them from the start. One has to wonder what the deal is with the sort of “Dunkirk renaissance” that occurred in 2016 – this is the third movie this year whose story is either all about or hinges on the Dunkirk evacuation. Their Finest, about the making of a British movie about the Dunkirk evacuation starring an American actor in an attempt to persuade the U.S. to get involved, was released in May. Christopher Nolan’s much-talked about Dunkirk, all of its action set in the thick of it, came out in July. Darkest Hour, which features the leaders in Britain making the decisions that set the evacuation in motion – most notably calling on the civilian boats to cross the English Channel to assist – is the best of these three films, doing the best at delivering what it promises. (Incidentally, Joe Wright’s own Atonement had its own sequence set in the thick of the Dunkirk evacuation, which multiple people have said was far more realistic than the entirety of Christopher Nolan’s film.)

World War II is so ingrained in our pop culture psyches, from entertainment alone, it’s easy to oversimplify what a cataclysmic time it was – and the difficulty of the decisions the people in charge had to make. Gary Oldman plays Winston Churchill as a bit of a blowhard, but a man of conscience. How do you live with sacrificing four thousand soldiers in order to save three hundred thousand? It’s cold blooded math, and there is merit to his argument that great nations that fall rise again, but those that willingly subjugate themselves do not. One of Darkest Hour’s many rather contrived scenes involves Churchill shocking the public by taking his first-ever ride on a London Underground train, to ask random citizens their opinion: would they fight the Nazis even when the odds are stacked against them? You can imagine how they all answer – but, for this movie’s purposes, it does the trick, and quickly gets to the heart of Britain’s national mood at the time. “Never surrender” sounds like a cliché now, but in the context of 1940 Britain, it was a notion that had real weight, and as such this movie does too.

Is that Gary Oldman or Winston Churchill himself? I can't tell!

Overall: B+

JANE

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

Jane Goodall is a woman of extraordinary historical significance, a key element in mankind's understanding of chimpanzees, ourselves, and how the two relate. It seems this woman's amazing life continues unabated: Jane is a documentary filled with early 1960s footage of her very first research, thought to have been lost -- until 2014.

To say it's fascinating to see this footage from the vantage point of the 21st century is an understatement, and writer-director Brett Morgen (Cobain: Montage of Heck; The Kid Stays in the Picture) curiously sidesteps some of the more obvious questions -- perhaps most notably the question of how chimps might have been affected by the mere act of being studied. This was the first time chimpanzees were observed in the wild; Goodall was initially chosen for the project precisely because she had no scientific training at the time; for some time, she interacted with them directly. And this was thought to be a study of how chimpanzees behave in the wild.

That said, this is still a woman who made observations never made before, which shook the worldwide scientific community. And here, in Jane, we see plenty of the footage first demonstrating these observations. For instance, a primate other than a human fashioning and using tools.

Nothing is said of the quality of the film stock discovered in 2014. It is simply presented here, often with plainly creative editing to enhance dramatic effect -- that part is a minor disappointment, when so much of the footage can clearly speak for itself. Most of it is of stunning quality for something thought lost since the sixties, thanks to the process of remastering.

I must mention my one major complaint, which is the original score by Philip Glass, usually an indispensable composer. And perhaps I'm the only one who feels this way, but I found this score to be pointlessly obtrusive and distracting, full of dramatic crescendos entirely unneeded. Unless it's a musical, I don't usually grade a film's music or score as its own element, mostly because I have so little musical knowledge or insight. That said, it could be argued that the score is very much an aspect of sound editing, and therefore the editing overall -- which is why that gets the lowest grade here. I stand by the solid B, as the story this film tells is compelling from beginning to end. But it is slightly sullied by this score.

Otherwise, Jane is a documentary more than worthy of being seen. Morgen interviews a present-day Goodall, who reminisces about her early research on chimpanzees, how they informed her own outlook on life, and how becoming a mother herself helped her understand the instincts of the mother she observed mating and then birthing in the wild. We see a large amount of related footage, including a whole lot of a young Goodall herself.

We see footage of the era when she met her first  husband, wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick, and the son she raised for the first three years of his life in Gambia, around the chimpanzees she was studying. Knowing what more we know now, a lot of this is stunning -- early on we hear Brett Morgen ask from behind the camera about how chimps were capable of tearing their faces off. Goodall just says matter-of-factly that there was no wildlife research on these animals at the time: they just didn't know. So, she lived among them, after months became accepted by them, and ultimately found herself disheartened to become the person who discovered they can be just as brutal in primitive warfare as human beings can.

A lot of these discoveries are common knowledge now, and it almost seems quaint to hear about those who had no clue. It's incredible, though, to hear -- and see -- the story of those who made these discoveries and first-time observations. It's too bad Goodall was the only one interviewed in the present day; van Lawick passed away at the age of 65 in 2002, but some insights from their son, who she called Grub, could have been invaluable. Instead we only get footage of him as a toddler, and a brief bit of footage as a young man with his father. At one point Goodall notes that Grub "always hated chimpanzees." That seems like something ripe for exploration, but here that's both the start and the end of it.

Jane Goodall's life is rife with amazing stories, and Jane is but one, a slice rather than anything approaching true biography. That said, so much of the footage is jaw dropping, you can never look away from this movie.

An unconventional relationship indeed: Jane Goodall and one of her many unprecedented subjects.

Overall: B+

THE DISASTER ARTIST

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

It turns out you don't have to be a fan of "so bad it's good" movies to be a fan of movies about the making of a "so bad it's good" movie. That is, I am one of the likely relatively few people seeing The Disaster Artist who has never seen The Room, and still has no particular interest in seeing The Room -- and I still very much enjoyed The Disaster Artist.

So, in case you're one of the few who don't know, The Room was a notoriously terrible 2003 film about . . . well, I couldn't tell you what it was about. Even actors in the movie, as portrayed in The Disaster Artist, talk about how they don't quite know what it's supposed to be about. Here, I'll just give you the iMDB.com synopsis:

Johnny is a successful banker who lives happily in a San Francisco townhouse with his fiancée, Lisa. One day, inexplicably, she gets bored with him and decides to seduce his best friend, Mark. From there, nothing will be the same again.

That's about the best you're going to get as far as that goes. Suffice it to say, its score on MetaCritic (based on 5 reviews) is a 9 out of 100; it's Rotten Tomatoes score (based on 27 reviews) is 27%. People now flock to midnight screenings of this movie like it's The Rocky Horror Picture Show, turning it into a cult classic that's actually turned a profit.

The Disaster Artist is the story of how this movie came to be -- and it clearly has plenty of fans in Hollywood itself, what with James Franco as writer-director-star Tommy Wiseau; Dave Franco as his best friend and costar Greg Sestero; and Seth Rogen as Sandy, the script supervisor. James and Dave Franco may be brothers actually playing best friends here, but this movie has some amazing makeup and costuming, because the two never look at all related here.

The supporting cast includes a bunch of recognizable names in parts of varying sizes, including Alison Brie, Jacki Weaver, Josh Hutcherson, Megan Mullally -- even Zac Efron shows up, so well costumed as one of the cast members that I didn't even realize he was in this film until I looked at the cast list after I got home.

All of these people are great, but James Franco is a revelation as Tommy, the hilariously enigmatic movie maker with the bizarre accent and grammatically weird dialect, who consistently insists he's younger than he could possibly be. He's so deluded it moves into the realm of being endearing. And there's actually something sweet, maybe even authentic, about the bond of friendship between him and Greg.

You may wonder how well they recreate the scenes from The Room here. I've never even seen that movie and I can tell you they are immaculately recreated: the ending treats us to split screen presentations of scenes from both this film and The Room. It's actually the most amazing part of The Disaster Artist, and kind of a thrill to watch.

The climactic scene at the movie's premiere is where The Disaster Artist becomes a little much. Could the audience really have loved it as much as depicted here, so immediately, upon its very first viewing? Maybe it was -- I wasn't there -- but it seems a little overdone. In spite of that, The Disaster Artist is an eminently entertaining film whether you've actually seen The Room or not.

So bad it's good? A scary thought.

Overall: B+

ROMAN J. ISRAEL, ESQ.

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

If you want people to remember the title of your movie, and thereby know what to purchase tickets to at the multiplex, maybe don't use a title as fundamentally cumbersome and unmemorable as Roman J. Israel, Esq. Also if you want people to stay interested in your movie, maybe don't start and end it with transparent contrivances, including the lengthy narration of a legal brief detailing a man evidently suing himself.

On the other hand, if you want a great actor to play the title role in such a movie, who can single-handedly keep the story compelling in spite of its shortfalls, by all means hire Denzel Washington. Israel is so socially awkward that I squirmed in my seat repeatedly, while also finding it easy to believe this man had a deep knowledge of criminal law. Who knows how realistic it is? I'm not a lawyer, and neither is Denzel Washington.

We never actually meet Israel's partner, who does all the courtroom lawyering. We see his body in a hospital bed, in a coma after a heart attack -- the event that sets this story in motion. Israel has spent three and a half decades immersing himself in legal texts to serve as his partner's most knowledgeable legal advisor. Now he's suddenly out of his depth, attempting to cover for him in court.

Meanwhile, it turns out the firm has been "operating at a deficit" for years, and Israel is faced with losing his job. In comes another lawyer from a huge firm (Colin Farrell, adequate in performance and stunning in appearance -- I may have a bit of bias here) to help close things down, and ultimately offer Israel a new job.

The plot gets much more complex from there, but suffice it to say that Roman J. Israel, Esq details the descent of an idealistic defense attorney with activist roots into greedy nihilism. With that in mind, this is a surprisingly cynical movie, and it's difficult to gauge what to think or how to respond to it. What are we, as audiences, supposed to do with this?

There's a lot of places writer-director Dan Gilroy could have gone with this movie, and ultimately he never goes anywhere as interesting as it could be, or as Denzel Washington makes you want it to be. This would not be half the movie it is without Washington's performance, which nearly makes it worth seeing all on its own.

It's engaging enough: while watching this movie, the script, even as the film's weakest element, never allows the mind to wander. There's a grounded sensibility here that winds up being a bit of a double-edged sword: it feels more real than most legal dramas, but it also lacks much in the way of excitement. It's a compelling ride while it's being taken, and pretty forgettable in the end. That doesn't make the movie bad per se. It just makes it no better than good enough for now.

I did find some fascination in the details, particularly in the cinematography and production design. Gilroy offers a very evocative Los Angeles as his story's setting, and although I suspect this was not intentional, a couple of shots felt a lot like a presentation of the real present-day L.A. largely in the style of Blade Runner. It's not often you see present-day L.A. presented as a dense urban environment, but that's how it often looks here. One shot in particular seemed almost obvious, with its camera looking through a cityscape from the middle of a city alley between aging residential complexes, drenched in rain.

Plenty of the story takes place in bright daylight as well, from inside high-rise office and even one pseudo-chase scene on a remote highway in the desert, presumably on the outskirts of town. "Outskirts" in Los Angeles are always a long way away, so I was left to wonder how Roman J. Israel got that far out so quickly. But I like to nitpick, I guess.

And this is an easy movie to nitpick. It's also an easy movie to experience  pleasantly, without being too critical. A story like this, with a mostly black cast and frequent references to civil rights, should really have a greater amount of thematic depth. Gilroy makes little effort to challenge his audience here -- but he succeeds in superficially entertaining them.

Observe, an interesting guy who is unpleasant to be around.

Overall: B

COCO

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

Oh, Pixar -- how great it is when you are great! And you are great more often than most, if less often than you used to be: Pixar films were reliably worth the time and money, without exception, with every film released between 1995 and 2004. I'll never really understand the enduring appeal of Cars (2006), their first movie that was really good rather than great, yet is the second of their franchises to spawn not just one, but two sub-par sequels (in 2011 and 2017; Cars 3 was the first-ever Pixar film I never even bothered to see, from sheer disinterest). For the past decade or so, they've been churning out about two adequate movies for every great one.

Case in point: after 2015's truly spectacular Inside Out was followed by the undeniably entertaining mixed bag that was The Good Dinosaur later that same year; the delightful yet by-definition unoriginal Finding Dory  last year; and then Cars 3 earlier this year -- two sequels in a row, in fact. And if there's any company that benefits most from not recycling material, it's Pixar -- who steps up to the plate yet again with Coco, a movie lacking in the thrills of the Toy Story series or The Incredibles or WALL-E or the sophisticated wit aimed at the adults in the audience found in most of Pixar's output, but containing all the visual dazzle now long expected of the Pixar brand, and a refreshingly straightforward amount of depth and heart.

I didn't laugh as much at Coco as I have tended to at most Pixar films in the past. I may have cried more than I have at any other Pixar film -- and that includes the opening sequence of Up (2009). This is a genuinely moving film, with pretty universal messages of the importance of familial love, and a very specific context in which to give it: during the Mexican tradition of honoring ancestors on The Day of the Dead.

Should I mention the ways in which Coco is unwittingly politicized? Talk about uncanny timing: animated features of Pixar's type are many years in the making, and when work on this began, no one had any idea it would be released to an America with Donald Trump as president, a man who has whipped up hatred toward immigrants and Mexicans in particular. And here comes along a film about a Mexican family, starring a clearly deliberate all-Latino voice cast -- you won't find any white people speaking with fake Mexican accents here.

And the script, by Adrian Molina and Matthew Aldrich (with additional original story credit by Jason Katz and co-director Lee Unkrich), is pretty close to perfect. There is a semi-provocative sequence regarding skeletal ancestor characters passing through check points to visit family on the Day of the Dead that's pretty evocative of immigration, but it stops short of being any direct commentary on immigration issues. This would have been an interesting choice for Mexican characters regardless of the era of the film's release, though.

As it happens, the film's original title was Dia de los Muertos, but when Disney made the clearly misguided attempt at trademarking the phrase and it understandably caused a backlash among Mexican-Americans (who all was in the room when everyone present thought that was a good idea?), the title was changed to Coco. This is the name of a minor but key character, the oldest living relative -- great-grandmother -- of a little boy named Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez). He is the central character, and he loves music, but is forbidden to play it because his great grandmother forbade it after her musician husband abandoned the family in favor of his musical passions. The family went on to become shoemakers who for generations refuse to have music in their homes. Sounds pretty depressing, no?

There's something a little flimsy about that premise -- only in an uber-manufactured world like a cartoon would such a scenario fly -- but, oh well. When Miguel attempts to steal the mounted guitar at the grave of his musical idol, the strum of the guitar on the night of the Day of the Dead passes him through to the world of the Dead.

It is here that he meets all the deceased ancestral characters, each with the same basic design as the skeletons typically decorating the scene at Dia de Muertos celebrations -- stark skeletal features on which are imposed stenciled patterns. Miguel finds himself in a spectacularly rendered "Land of the Dead," where the animation is on the level of all the best Pixar films that came before it -- painstakingly colored, awe inspiring in its detail, dazzling in its scope. This can even be said of scenes in cemeteries where people have brought offerings and candles to honor their dearly departed.

It's tempting to ask if Coco is like Corpse Bride, just because both feature skeleton characters. The key difference is that Coco places them in a very specific cultural context, and expands the imagination and the world they inhabit. Coco also has far greater depth in its themes, storytelling, and even its visual palate. Miguel meets his ancestors who began this moratorium on playing music in the family, and they must find a way to help him return to the land of the living. The aforementioned singer (voiced by Benjamin Bratt), and Hector (Gael García Bernal), a man denied entry to the land of the living to visit for the Day of the Dead because he no longer has living family to remember him, also feature prominently.

I suppose it should be noted that not only does Coco deal pretty directly with the concept of death and dealing with the loss of family members, actual murder does fit into the plot. I'm not sure how appropriate it would be for the smallest of children, who could be frightened by some of it. That said, children of at least Miguel's age (about ten, I suppose?) are certainly perfect audiences for Coco's themes of family and honoring elders lost.

Rarely is an animated film as textured in its storytelling as it is in its visual scope, and Coco delivers in spades on all fronts. The final fifteen minutes or so are particularly moving, and tie it all together in ways not easily predicted from the beginning of the story. This is a movie that is beautiful both on sight and in feeling, an accomplishment that belies its surface simplicity. It's family entertainment done right.

Visiting the Land of the Dead is more fun than you might expect.

Overall: A-