Cinemutants - Dark Phoenix (2019)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

This week, from 2019, it’s Dark Phoenix. A daring rescue mission in space brings Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) into contact with the mysterious Phoenix entity, a powerful force that has the power to destroy or recreate the universe. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) leads the X-Men in trying to help their teammate, while a shapeshifting alien (Jessica Chastain) pursues the Phoenix for her own ends.

1. Last of the First Class. Dark Phoenix is entirely aware of its position as the grand finale for the Fox X-Men films, and more particularly for the sub-franchise that began in 2011 with First Class. Set now in the early 1990s, it becomes increasingly impossible to believe that these characters have aged 30 years; Michael Fassbender’s Magneto wears a few wrinkles around his eyes, but everyone else seems a spry early-30s rather than approaching (at minimum) 50. It feels as though the movie can’t introduce much in the way of new material, stuck as it is with characters like Storm, Nightcrawler, and Quicksilver, who don’t have much at all to do in the plot. Instead, the movie knows it’s an ending, and so it ties up as many plot threads as it can; mutants live, mutants die, and Xavier and Magneto play one more game of chess as the credits roll.
2. X-Women. In the eight years since First Class, Jennifer Lawrence won an Oscar, helmed her own Hunger Games franchise, and became the highest-paid actress in the world. Consequently, her presence here feels continuously compulsory, and you can practically hear her breathe a sigh of relief when (spoiler warning) Mystique dies early in the second act. Her leadership of the X-Men is an intriguing prospect, a far cry from the source material, but it comes with the grievously on-the-nose dialogue about changing the team name to “X-Women.” Granted, the women have almost always been the best developed characters, particularly under the pen of Chris Claremont (who cameos here), but the sentiment drew a derisive laugh in the theaters. Mystique says it to be profound and defiant, but Deadpool had, only a year earlier, made satirical mincemeat of the gendered team name. It’s a weird note, then, on which to start a movie about the X-Men’s most powerful woman.
3. You are not broken. I’ll say this for Dark Phoenix; as boring and underbaked as the movie is, Sophie Turner is never quite bad in it. With a different script, she might have been a Phoenix for the ages, but this movie feels like another speedrun through the X-Men’s most iconic storyline. Where it took Chris Claremont four years and around 40 issues, both The Last Stand and Dark Phoenix try to knock it out under two hours. I have no doubt that the MCU will eventually, inevitably, take one last swing at “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” but my biggest advice would be to slow down, give the story room to breathe, and develop it as a proper three-act tragedy that impacts the universe, not just Jean’s boyfriend Cyclops. Given that Turner never got to be reborn as the Phoenix, it would be nice to see her once more in Deadpool & Wolverine, but I rather doubt it; with Hugh Jackman in tow, a cameo from Famke Janssen seems much more likely.
4. Gap. Although no one really believed him, Hans Zimmer claimed to have retired from superhero movies after Batman v Superman. A scant three years later, he was back for Dark Phoenix, and thank goodness, because he’s one of the only performers who doesn’t seem bored. Indeed, Zimmer’s score elevates the picture and ends up being a fantastic listen when divorced from the film. (I should know, considering how often I’ve got Zimmer playing around me!) Case in point, in one of the film’s major action sequences, the X-Men struggle to cross the street, but Zimmer plays it like the definitional conflict of an era. The film’s final battle sequence, aboard a speeding train, is a little stronger, even as Zimmer continues to shred at eleven, all pounding percussion and swooping melodies. Like so many casting decisions and plot points in this franchise, one wonders what Zimmer could have done with a truly terrific film around him. If nothing else, one of the best comic book worlds now has a Hans Zimmer theme to hum while you read the latest issue.
5. A new beginning. One almost feels a pang of regret as Dark Phoenix ends. The film’s final moments propose a few interesting ideas, including Hank McCoy as headmaster of the newly-formed Jean Grey School. But with the very first movie set in 2000 or thereabouts and Dark Phoenix landing in 1992, the film’s erstwhile prequel premise became a sort of asymptote, approaching and imitating the original films but never quite lining up with them. So we’ll never find out, for example, whether “Stewart or McAvoy?!” was Deadpool’s Professor Xavier or what became of Weapon X Wolverine after his Apocalypse cameo (or will we?). And while the film’s final frames imply that Jean’s still out there as the Phoenix, there’s no post-credits scene and no indication that Disney intends to do much of anything with the First Class timeline. Before the TVA arrives, we can safely consider this timeline pruned.

Sound off in the comments, true believers: did the First Class timeline overstay its welcome, or should the Phoenix rise one more time? Up next, you might have forgotten that Dark Phoenix wasn’t actually the last Fox-verse film. You can’t be blamed, because I never formally reviewed The New Mutants... until next week.

Crimson Peak (2015)

It’s no secret around these parts that Guillermo del Toro and I have had something of a parting of the ways when it comes to his most recent films. I’m a staunch admirer of his Hellboy films, and I think Pan’s Labyrinth is about as good as it gets when it comes to stylized magical realism. But Pacific Rim (at the risk of reopening that can of worms) left a bitter taste in my mouth. Fortunately, Crimson Peak is a bit of a return to form for del Toro, even though it suffers through a bumpy opening act or two to get there.

A modern woman in the fin de siècle mode, Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) falls for the dashing Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) while finishing her first novel – not a ghost story, but “a story with a ghost in it.” Though her stern banker father (Jim Beaver) disapproves, Sir Thomas courts Edith with everything he’s got. When the two marry and move to Allerdale Hall with Sir Thomas’s sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), Edith discovers that there are skeletons in the Sharpe closet, ghosts in the ancestral home, and a bevy of other gothic tropes imperiling her very life.

It’s probably better to start with the bad news, because the effect Crimson Peak had on me did something very similar, tempering my exuberance for the film’s climax with a middling-at-best first hour. The problem with Crimson Peak is that it isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be a satire of the Gothic or a wholehearted revel through the genre. We can tell that del Toro is extremely well-read in the Gothic; the film carries with it a virtual checklist of tropes. (Moody castle? Check. Uncomfortably close siblings? Check. A murder/inheritance plot? Check.) But there is at the same time an accompanying sense that the performers are playing their parts a little too earnestly, working perceptibly too hard to convince the audience to play along with the fiction.

Take, for example, one of the worst things a film can do – a long and brutally on-the-nose expository monologue. Crimson Peak has such a one, in which Edith’s father chastises Sir Thomas for his effete and privileged upbringing, something that the coarse hands of a true American could never know. Now, this is a fine subtext, and it’s been played often enough that the audience could probably glean it from a well-crafted scene or two. But del Toro, for reasons that escape me, verbalizes these sentiments with painstaking precision, turning a subtle character motivation into a blunt instrument. This is to say nothing of the unsubtle parallels between Edith’s novel and the film we’re watching, both of which take great pains to tell us that “it’s not a ghost story, but a story with a ghost in it.” Yes, we know, but why does del Toro feel he needs an apologia-cum-apology to enter the genre?

The truth of the matter is that Crimson Peak is at its best when it surrenders wholeheartedly to the Gothic genre and turns into an unapologetic haunted house of horrors. del Toro’s ghosts, grotesquely gory skeletons, are genuinely terrifying, and the jump scares they elicit are first-rate fare for Halloween. What’s more, there’s enough left unspoken, communicated solely by the mood of the film, that Crimson Peak is a fine discussion-prompter once you’ve left the cinema. (And if it’s a dark and chilly night, so much the better!) I am more convinced by Edith’s efforts at detection as she pieces together the myriad mysteries of Allerdale Hall than I am by a comparable effort on the part of her physician (Charlie Hunnam), who extemporizes at length on the Sherlock Holmes books which sit in his office.

Cinema is a medium of showing, not telling, and del Toro proves in the back half of Crimson Peak that he’s a master at it. But it does very much feel like the first hour of Crimson Peak was made by the same man who made Pacific Rim, not Pan’s Labyrinth. Where the former was all sound and pixelated fury, signifying nothing but an orgiastic self-indulgence in digital trickery, the latter served as evidence of a sophisticated and sensitive cinematic eye. Crimson Peak is of two minds about its own identity, but if you can slog through the first half you’ll love the second.

Crimson Peak is rated R for “bloody violence, some sexual content and brief strong language.” The ghosts are skeletal, gruesomely bloody, or both, and there’s a fair amount of other graphic violence in store. There’s a somewhat intense sex scene in which only a man’s rear end is show (the woman keeps on her gown, which is somewhat ridiculous for the number of petticoats it contains). One F-word appears.

Interstellar (2014)

It’s been a good month for science – we landed on a comet, Big Hero 6 brought scientific imagination to the Disney crowd, and the Internet was able to withstand the gravitational pull of Kim Kardashian’s bottom.  But leave it to Christopher Nolan to outdo all of the above by treating us to what a true filmmaker can do with his own material and his own vision.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, a top pilot turned farmer in the midst of a total collapse of the earth’s ecosystem.  Without giving away too much of the plot, Cooper is torn between his loyalty to his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and the initiative spearheaded by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), which promises hope for humanity among the stars.

Interstellar is, to be quite blunt about it, Inception meets 2001: A Space Odyssey, combining Kubrick’s science-fictional aesthetics with Nolan’s knack for tight and highly personal storytelling.  Where 2001 lacked humanity amid god-babies and monoliths, and where Inception delved deep into an individual’s dreamspace, Interstellar opens the scope considerably, beyond galaxies, while never forgetting the heart of the story is Cooper’s love for his family.  This, I think, will be the crux of Nolan’s oeuvre – high concept anchored by a deeply personal love story (especially, more recently, the love of a father for his children).

It’s been six years since Christopher Nolan’s last wholly original film – with 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises in between, concluding his take on the mythic DC Comics character – and as much as I loved his Batman films I couldn’t be more excited that Nolan is doing his own work again.  By way of disclaimer, I do feel a bit like a devout churchgoer when I attend a Nolan film, seated quietly as the lights dim and expecting to receive some enlightenment or at least feel the touch of the divine.  Nolan hasn’t disappointed me yet, and I appreciate his emphasis on the cerebral.  Nolan is, for my money, one of only a handful of “directors to watch,” whose output has been consistently strong and who deliver a stable brand of films.

Interstellar is through and through a Christopher Nolan product, which is to say that it continues to develop his major themes, continues to push the envelope in terms of practical effects, and does so in a very smart way that resists the puzzle-box style of Inception while preserving that film’s investment in dense scientific concepts.  That is to say, Interstellar isn’t a rigorous intellectual workout like Inception, but it isn’t any less clever for being more temporally straightforward; Nolan is still interested in the relative experience of time, but it’s grounded more in Einstein than in Freud.  It is the high science-fiction followup to Inception that I wanted from Transcendence, but Wally Pfister – Nolan’s frequent cinematographer – gave us more an impression of than a exercise in Nolan’s brainy auteurism.  Interstellar doesn’t just look like a Nolan film (as Transcendence did); it thinks like one, and it even feels more deeply than Nolan films usually do.

The heart of the film – and indeed, it has one – comes from McConaughey’s love for his daughter, and The New Yorker couldn’t have been more right when they dubbed this stage of his career “The McConaissance.”  There’s a moment in the film where I thought to myself, “This is the same guy from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days?”  I wouldn’t be averse to seeing McConaughey join the troupe of Nolan staples, as Michael Caine has (and, to a lesser extent, Hathaway).  Nobody in the film is bad – Jessica Chastain continues to be reliably compelling in everything from Zero Dark Thirty to Mama, and John Lithgow does crotchety-old-man quite well.  McConaughey, though, is the emotional center of the film, perhaps a step in the evolution of a filmmaker who’s been accused of being a sort of cinematic Tin Man.

Interstellar is Nolan at his biggest and most expansive, his longest film to date but also his most emotional, leading to a few misty-eyed moments.  I don’t think it’s his best – Inception is still a masterpiece, and The Dark Knight is just consummate filmmaking – and it is a little bit long, though I struggle to see what could have been cut from a movie as tightly crafted as this one.  What it undeniably is, though, is another strong creation from a big-budget auteur with an unmistakable vision and a profound understanding of the value of cinematic spectacle.  Your eyes may mist, but they’ll be wide in astonishment.

Interstellar is rated PG-13 for “some intense perilous action and brief strong language.”  Like most Nolan movies, Interstellar is entirely bloodless; there are a few explosions, fistfights, and tidal waves, including one very successful jump moment.  Two F-bombs are heard, and there is a pervading sense of just how dangerous space travel is.

Monday at the Movies - April 14, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, two spooky offerings on tap.  Coincidentally, both feature a character named Annabelle/Annabel – one a creepy doll, the other Jessica Chastain.

The Conjuring (2013) – Though the words “from the director of Saw” might give viewers pause, the truth is that James Wan actually turns in the strongest work of his career with this retro-exorcist horror film that both unsettles and goes for the full jump moment.  Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor play a married couple who move into a seemingly haunted house; as the supernatural occurrences grow more dire, they contact paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) to banish the malicious spirits possessing their home.  Usually typecast as milquetoast, Wilson musters up instead a stalwart and defensive skeptic pushed beyond his expertise.  Farmiga, who’s doing career-best work over on AMC’s Bates Motel as Norman’s loopy mother, plays a very convincing empathy who connects with the demonic spirit in frightening ways where the disquiet is superbly evident on her face.  Fortunately, The Conjuring suffers from none of the overacting or hacky clichés that often plague horror films; while the film does venture into moments we’ve seen before, the execution really sticks the landing in terms of genuinely unnerving the audience.  I’ll be honest and disclose that the exorcism subgenre of horror freaks me out more than most (second only, perhaps, to home invasion narratives), and the success of The Conjuring is that it’s immersive in the way of the best horror films – that is, it successfully eclipses your surroundings to the point where you’ll forget there’s a real world outside the film, allowing the mounting dread and inevitable punctuations of fright to pervade into your soul.  While I’m not sure that lightning can strike twice in these cases, I’ll be in line for The Conjuring 2 (2015).

Mama (2013) – Hitchcock famously said that the true terror is in the anticipation and not in the bang; by his logic, Mama is a highly successful horror film, but the rest of us will likely find ourselves disappointed by the way Mama handles “the bang” in the last twenty or so minutes of the film.  Jessica Chastain and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau star as the adoptive parents of two girls found in a feral state five years after their father abducted them, though it quickly becomes apparent that the girls’ invisible friend “Mama” has sinister intentions for the new parents.  Where The Conjuring crafted a compelling climactic possession sequence, Mama fails maintain its momentum at its narrative summit, in part because it discloses too much about the supernatural goings-on.  Mama is at its best when the spidery phantoms are unexplained, when the film’s visual language tells us that something is viciously awry (as in one brilliantly directed moment depicting what seems to be the girls at play – until we realize that one of the figures in the playroom isn’t human).  I even forgive the film its disclosure of who/what Mama really is, though what it does with that reveal leads it into some bizarre territory that takes a hard left from deft horror into something more at home in a Guillermo del Toro fantasy tale.  Chastain is gifted as Annabel, playing against type as a wannabe punk rocker; she’s suitably distressed by the haunting happenings, and her burgeoning affection for the girls is engaging.  But Mama forsakes its scarier moments when it sprints toward a conclusion that conforms to its own internal logic but is, beyond the borders of the film, likely to leave audiences asking, “Whaaa?”

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Monday at the Movies - September 2, 2013

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies” – this week, we review two films that are really quite draining in an entirely delectable sense.

Drive (2011) – Here’s a movie that’s way more intense than I was expecting.  In Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, Ryan Gosling plays a stunt driver, moonlighting as a getaway driver, who becomes embroiled in the underworld after falling in love with his neighbor (Carey Mulligan).  I don’t really know what I thought I was getting into; I’d only heard rave reviews, and I’ve never seen a Gosling performance I didn’t like.  But Drive is such an oddball captivating flick, its glacial pace tempered by Refn’s keen cinematographic eye – the result is something closer to There Will Be Blood than 2001: A Space Odyssey.  All this is not to say that the film is boring; rather, Refn directs the daylights out of some car chases without resorting to shaky cameras or even quick cuts, relying on the natural tension of the narrative and a well-placed close-up on Gosling’s steely stare.  Drive is undeniably Gosling’s show (Refn’s direction, though, giving a run for his proverbial money), but an astounding array of supporters – Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, and Albert Brooks as a spooky mobster sans eyebrows – fill out the film with that who’s-who delight enjoyed by moviegoers such as myself.  But boy, is this a violent flick, with some of the most jarring violence I’ve seen in movies recently – and, remember, I loved Django Unchained.  But Refn’s use of violence is sparse, used to jar and interrupt and not to delight; essentially, it does what violence actually does in real life, which makes it all the more effective and/or disturbing.  Drive, then, comes highly recommended.

Take Shelter (2011) – Is there any working actor more intense than Michael Shannon?  He’s always wound tighter than Taft’s bathtub, but when that simmer boils over it’s explosively good fun to watch.  Take Shelter might have been a dull picture with any other front man, but Shannon does fantastic work in an Oscar-snubbed lead performance as Curtis, a family man haunted by nightmares of an impending apocalypse.  As his behavior becomes increasingly obsessive and erratic, Curtis risks alienating his wife (Jessica Chastain), who’s especially worried about the fate of their deaf daughter and what will happen to the family if Curtis’s burgeoning psychosis threatens his own employment as a construction worker.  This is not a movie where much happens; instead, the film relies on the capable performances of Shannon and Chastain, who are more than believable as beleaguered Midwestern spouses.  The film is undeniably Shannon’s, his clairvoyance/psychosis (depending on how you read the film) taking a clear toll on his wellbeing as he grimaces and twitches in quiet moments before squinting into the horizon or, in one of the film’s strongest moments, unleashing his manic frustrations on his friends.  While she stands in a long shadow, Chastain is the emotional anchor of the film, the audience’s point of interaction as voice to a thousand doubts and frustrations; I don’t know where she came from all of a sudden, but her work in the past few years (particularly Zero Dark Thirty) demonstrates that Hollywood needs more of her kind of actress.  More indie than blockbuster, Take Shelter flew low enough under the radar that more people ought to see it – especially those of us needing a little more intensity from General Zod.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!  And don’t forget that this Saturday is the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month...

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

After the surprisingly deft Hurt Locker cleaned up at the Oscars a few years back, Kathryn Bigelow’s next project had everyone’s attention, and the topicality of Zero Dark Thirty – both political and awards-season – has everyone talking all over again.  And rightly so, because Zero Dark Thirty is another smartly crafted thriller dissecting the effects of war on the human psyche.

Jessica Chastain stars as CIA investigator Maya, who’s sent to Afghanistan during the early days of the manhunt for Osama bin Laden.  After a stint with a torturer (Jason Clarke), Maya picks up a lead on bin Laden’s location and pursues it, even against the advice of her superiors.  The film culminates with a tense and cathartic retelling of the predawn raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where American forces finally caught up to bin Laden.

In many ways, a review of Zero Dark Thirty necessarily must weigh in on the controversy of torture, which some contend is endorsed by the film.  I disagree, though; it seems instead that the film takes a documentary approach to the issue, demonstrating that, yes, torture happened, sometimes with beneficial results and sometimes without.  The film doesn’t make blanket statements about the efficacy of torture, though its moral opposition seems evident; the opening scenes depict an intense interrogation that emphasizes the desperate dehumanization of the act glibly elided over by 24 and others.  Instead, the film argues that bin Laden’s capture was effected by the rugged determination of one agent.

That the film is inspiring such fervent debate, though, suggests something about the caliber and fertility of the art; our willingness to interpret and engage with this work tells me that Bigelow has crafted something rather dense and significant, the stakes of which involve the way we remember our own past.  (Perhaps, even, the film is neutral to the point of permitting us to read our own prejudices onto it.)  As a piece of art, then, Zero Dark Thirty is important in the same way that The Hurt Locker was – it’s fresh and relevant, and it asks us to consider if we as a people have changed over the last ten years.

The battleground for this issue is Maya, a rather unique character in that we know next to nothing about her – no backstory, no character insights, no next of kin.  Yet it’s not a weakness of story, since we learn in a key scene that Maya has no other life beyond her pursuit of bin Laden (which may explain her tears in the final shot of the film).  It’s a credit to Chastain, then, that she manages to make this character compelling in spite of her relative anonymity.  One character remarks that it’s her confidence that sets her apart, and Chastain does well do show the difference between Maya’s performative poise and her inner doubts and frustrations.  It’ll be a well-deserved trophy should she win the Oscar next month.

That the selfsame Academy snubbed Bigelow for her directing duties is a shame.  The film is quite suspenseful and dramatic, with the audience following along with Maya’s investigation.  For a film that has a foregone conclusion, an ending that everyone already knows, Zero Dark Thirty manages to be gripping because Bigelow is an expert at generating that sense of unease in her audience; as with Hurt Locker, danger is around every corner, but Bigelow doesn’t let you know that until she’s ready.

The centerpiece of the film is, perhaps naturally, the Seal Team 6 raid on bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, in which Bigelow crosscuts between standard camerawork and first-person night vision shots that put the viewer in the position of a team member.  Again, the outcome of the raid is inevitable, but Bigelow manages to make the adventure exciting and compelling; indeed, I’m not sure I blinked during the last half-hour of the film.  As filmmaking, it’s among Bigelow’s better work, but as art it’s perhaps cathartic for viewers who felt vindicated after a ten-year manhunt.

The ambiguous note on which Zero Dark Thirty ends asks, “What next?”  Like The Hurt Locker, there is no easy answer – there may not be an answer at all.  A more interesting question, though, might be, “What’s next for Kathryn Bigelow?”  I’m hoping she makes a third war film to round out the thematic trilogy; it’s obvious she has much to say and a gift for knowing how to say it.

Zero Dark Thirty is rated R "for strong violence including brutal disturbing images, and for language."  The torture scenes are quite intense though mostly bloodless; there is a suicide bombing, also without gore, though the raid includes a few bloody gunfire exchanges and a few out-of-focus glimpses of a badly-mutilated body.  The F-word is sprinkled throughout, as are less offensive words.

Monday at the Movies - December 31, 2012

Welcome to Week Forty-Five of “Monday at the Movies,” the final installment for 2012 (and, I think, also the final numbered installment).  We close the year with another arbitrary theme, movies that start with the word “The.”

The Debt (2011) – The Debt barely got any play when it came out under the radar last year, which is both a surprise and a shame, because there’s enough A-list material here – done successfully, to boot – to entertain most audiences.  Parallel narratives reveal what really happened when three Mossad agents (Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, and Marton Csokas) pursued a fugitive Nazi official (Jesper Christensen) and how the experience affected them later in life.  The older agents are portrayed by “big names” – Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds, and Tom Wilkinson – all of whom turn in their usual exceptional work; Mirren and Wilkinson find themselves at moral odds over the truth of their experience, with Wilkinson’s determination matching Mirren’s internal and external scars.  But it’s Chastain who gives the best performance; granted, she gets the lion’s share of the film as the younger Rachel, but her work in The Debt proves why she’s a rising star in Hollywood.  She is tough and vulnerable, holding her own against Christensen’s Dr. Vogel (who’s the smarmiest Nazi this side of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List) as a proper action heroine while also allowing the audience to see just how traumatic her encounter is.  It’s an interesting companion piece to Munich, but director John Madden wisely avoids the preachy moralizing Spielberg deployed in his 2005 Mossad movie (which, coincidentally, also co-starred Hinds).  It’s hard to believe this is the same director behind Shakespeare in Love and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, since The Debt is more intense and more severely compelling than those two (not to denigrate either, of course), smartly playing on the relationship of past to present while brilliantly leading the audience to several premature conclusions.  In short, The Debt is overwhelmingly underrated.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) – After 12 Angry Men, I’ll follow Henry Fonda into any movie, particularly with the expectation that he’ll be playing a character of similar moral fiber (Juror #8 is, after all, one of cinema’s best good guys) – even if I’m not the world’s biggest devotee of westerns.  The Ox-Bow Incident, regarded as a classic, stars Fonda as a drifter suspected of rustling before he gets enfolded into a lynch mob in pursuit of a trio of suspected murderers.  The “plausible doubt” element (familiar to us 12 Angry Men fans) is of course the central conceit of the film, as is an interrogation of the validity of vigilante justice (familiar to us Batman fans).  My father rightly pointed out that the film feels a bit like a Twilight Zone episode, and I think he’s onto something; the film is sans the supernatural, but it includes the morality play aspect and the simplistic cinematography, as well as the cast of character actors in smaller roles.  What’s disappointing is that the film feels a bit like a 22-minute story stretched into 75 minutes, repetitive at times and unfulfilling in others (as in a hasty subplot involving Fonda’s sweetheart).  Perhaps worse, Fonda is criminally underused, likely due to the size of the large supporting cast.  It’s not that the movie is bad – it just isn’t great.  And it suffers by the unfair comparison to 12 Angry Men (which I contend is a perfect film) that I held in my head the whole time I was watching The Ox-Bow Incident.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  Happy New Year, loyal readers!