FILM REVIEW CONTINUED FROM PAGE 19 wood’s greatest romance, if not the most popular Hollywood film period. With Paul Heinreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, S. Z. Sakall, and Dooley Wilson. Directed by Michael Curtiz (Yankee Doodle Dandy). Fri-Sun, Tue 7:30pm. Screening Room. FORCE MAJEURE (TURIST)—Winner of the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, this dark comedy follows the effects on a model Swedish family during a luxury ski vacation after an act of cowardice by the father. Directed by Ruben Östlund (Involuntary). Weds-Thurs 7:30 pm. Screening Room. TIME BANDITS (1981)—A boy joins a group of time-travelling dwarf thieves in Terry Gilliam’s most openly entertaining post-Monty Python film. Various historical heroes and villains are played by Sean Connery, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Ian Holm and David Warner, but the show-stealer is Ralph Richardson as a dotty deity. Look fast for a young Jim Broadbent, if you can imagine such a thing. Sat-Sun 11:30am. North Park.
IN BRIEF:
AMERICAN SNIPER—Clint Eastwood’s adaptation
Will Smith and Margot Robbie in Focus.
APOLLO’S CREED FOCUS / MAPS TO THE STARS BY M. FAUST The end credits of Focus identify as a production advisor Apollo Robbins, and if you know who that is you’ll know what kind of movie you’re in. Robbins is possibly the world’s greatest pickpocket, at least among those willing to identify themselves in public. He doesn’t steal, at least not permanently; instead he makes a living as a showman and as a security consultant, using the skills he learned from his father and brother as amplified by his own research into the workings of the human brain. He can get anything out of your pockets without you noticing it, even after he tells you he’s going to do it. I don’t know for a fact that he can remove your underwear while you’re fully dressed, but I wouldn’t want to be the test subject in a bet that he can’t.
That Smith and Robbie are attractive movie stars of course indicates the other direction in which this movie is going to go: They hit the streets and the sheets. It’s a tale of three cities: After meeting in Manhattan, Nicky takes her to New Orleans to show her a big-scale operation he has going to prey on tourists in the week leading up to the Super Bowl. He dumps her at the end, afraid that his kind of business and pleasure don’t mix. But they meet again a few years later in Buenos Aires, both working different cons on a famous race car driver (Rodrigo Santoro). As a romance among thieves, Focus at its best has some of the sultry ambiance of Out of Sight: The soundtrack has more smooth funky grooves than a 1970s prom, and if Smith and Robbie are no George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, they’re not bad either. Focus was written and directed by the team of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, whose oddball I Love You Philip Morris also featured a con artist. Recall that Smith’s career in the movies got started as a young con in Six Degrees of Separation, so it’s familiar turf for all. For the most part it’s a slickly entertaining popcorn movie. The only place it stumbles is in the last section. That’s when, by the rules of this genre, the filmmakers have to lull the audience away from guessing where the story is going without boring them: That’s a third act problem to which Ficarra and Requa fall prey: It’s not enough to have an interesting surprise ending ending (which they do); you have to get there in an interesting way. It’s hard not to feel bad for Julianne Moore lately. Oh sure, she got an Oscar this week, and long overdue. But Still Alice wasn’t nearly as good as her performance in it, which is often the case. At least in Seventh Son, which just made it to theaters after sitting on the shelf for over a year, she
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BIRDMAN—Too much and not enough. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning “meta-movie” stars Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson, a once famous actor whose career took a downturn after he stopped playing the superhero character he was famed for. In need of a comeback vehicle and artistic validation, Thomson mounts a Broadway play as a vehicle for himself, a troubled production that forms the basis of this film’s increasingly wild proceedings. It’s certainly challenging, dynamic, and technically fluid. But it’s also erratic, lurching from scenes of banal domestic confrontation and confession to deliberate comic excess to surreal flights. In the end it’s too much structural complexity for one film to handle. Co-starring Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, and Andrea Riseborough. -GS BLACK OR WHITE—As a story of a family dispute generated by racial differences—a mixed-race girl is fought over by her white (maternal) grandfather and black (paternal) grandmother, who both want custody—Black or White arrives at a perfect time to add something to the freshly simmering debate about race and civil rights in America. But it brings little to the table, either substantively or aesthetically. It’s a rather plodding, insufficiently focused effort, uninformed by real insight or narrative facility. It mostly resembles Kramer vs. Kramer, succumbing to a melodramatic conclusion that resolves nothing. Starring Kevin Costner, Octavia Spencer, Jennifer Ehle, Anthony Mackie, and Bill Burr. Directed by Mike Binder (Reign Over Me). -GS
The information about how pickpockets work is one of the most entertaining aspects of Focus, which stars Will Smith as veteran con artist Nicky and Margot Robbie as Jess, the fledgling femme fatale he takes on as a protégé. It’s not just a matter of getting your fingers in and out of the recesses of a person’s clothing: You have to be able to manipulate them in other ways to draw attention away from what’s happening. As Smith’s Nicky explains, “If you can get their focus, you can take whatever you want.” This if course is also how movies work, which explains why the art of the con powers so many engrossing films, from The Sting and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels through grittier examinations like The Grifters and David Mamet’s House of Games. (Con artists have been in films at least as far back as Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve in 1941, but they hit their stride in the 1970s when they could get out of the movie with having to go to prison.)
of the memoir of Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), who as a Navy SEAL sniper killed between 160 and 250 targets in Iraq, is hardly the only recent film “based on a true story” to play fast and loose with the facts. But the goal here seems to be less dramatic shaping than hagiography, a disappointment given Eastwood’s more nuanced films of recent years. The script doesn’t only ignore Kyle’s human failings (which is understandable if unfortunate); it erases most of what might have made him interesting as a character. Eastwood remains the consummate craftsman, but the film serves no real point. With Sienna Miller, Jake McDorman, and Luke Grimes. -MF
THE DUFF—High school girl rebels when she discovers that her friends keep her around only because they think she makes them look prettier. Starring Bella Thorne, Mae Whitman, Robbie Amell, and Allison Janney. Directed by Ari Sandel.
Agatha Weiss in Map to the Stars.
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY—B&D goes mainstream in the movie adaptation of the books that have sold an estimated 100 million copies (even though no one will admit to liking them). Starring Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan and Jennifer Ehle. Directed by Samantha Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy).
Set in Hollywood, this is one of those ensemble pieces that doesn’t let you know how everyone relates to everyone else until the end. Moore plays a middling actress who boosted her career by revealing that she was sexually abused by her mother, a famous actress who died young. These memories were brought to the surface by her therapist ( John Cusack), who hawks his programs on TV infommercials. That of course doesn’t make him prima facie a huckster, but who would think otherwise? He and wife Olivia Williams have a 13-year-old son (Evan Bird) who is trying to restore his career after overcoming drug addiction. (Yes, this is the kind of movie where 12-year-olds are drug addicts because that’s what rich movie stars do.) Just arrived in town is Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), an 18-year-old with severe burns and secrets to reveal.
HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2—John Cusack had the sense not to show up for this sequel to his 2010 hit, though all of the rest of the cast is back, along with director Steve Pink (who wrote Cusack’s High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blanke). The trailer tries to make it look like Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, and Clark Duke (joined by Adam Scott) get caught in a lot of back-and-forth time-traveling a la Back to the Future II, but in fact it’s all set 10 years in the future—a bad decision given that the only charm of the original was making retro jokes about the 1980s. It’s certainly unpredictable, but that’s not necessarily a good thing: It plays as if they were making it up as they want along (and hoping that Cusack would step in at the last minute). Caveat emptor: If you don’t remember the previous film, you’re going to be very confused (though on the other hand you won’t remember the repeated jokes either, so maybe they’ll seem fresh to you). Worth seeing only if you’re a huge fan of dick jokes. With Gillian Jacobs, Bianca Haase, and Chevy Chase. -MF
I don’t know what Hollywood ever did to Bruce Wagner, but he’s certainly made a career out of trashing the place in novels and screenplays. Few of the characters here are evil, but they’re all venal, petty, and self-obsessed. The plot is pervaded with incest, which is to a dramatist what anchovies are to a cook: a little bit goes a long way, and there’s a lot more here than he has any metaphoric need for. The film is directed by David Cronenberg, who has one of the modern cinema’s coldest eyes—in his films you always feel like you’re looking at specimens under a microscope. Hollywood has always been fond of making itself it’s own whipping boy, and this is by no means the ugliest example of Tinseltown self-laceration I’ve ever seen, but P I can’t see where you would take that as a recommendation.
THE IMITATION GAME—The story of English mathematician and logician Alan Turing, who was instrumental in breaking Germany’s Enigma code during World War II but was later driven to suicide for being gay. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing as a kind of comic but poignant genius in a clever and vivid performance. Britain’s stringent secrecy laws kept Turing’s role in the Allied victory a secret until the mid-1970s, since which point Turing has become both a hero of the code-breaking program and as a martyr of the oppressive, sometimes vicious treatment of homosexuals in the British Isles. Although the movie’s dramatic arc is consistently entertaining, it bears only a limited general resemblance to the more complicated story told
had the sense not to try to hard in a movie where she was only going to be overshadowed by special effects. But she’s back this week in Maps to the Stars, baring her all (literally) in a film that just isn’t worthy of it.