Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007)

James McAvoy and Keira Knightley in Atonement

Cast: Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Benedict Cumberbatch, Vanessa Redgrave, Juno Temple, Brenda Blethyn, Harriet Walter, Jérémie Renier, Alfie Allen, Patrick Kennedy, Daniel Mays, Nonso Anozie, Gina McKee. Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, based on a novel by Ian McEwan. Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey. Production design: Sarah Greenwood. Film editing: Paul Tothill. Music: Dario Marianelli.

Atonement -- and I'm speaking here of Joe Wright's film and not the novel by Ian McEwan on which it's based -- tries to have it both ways: It provides both a happy ending in keeping with the lush, romantic production and a bleak surprise ending perhaps truer to the epic wartime sequence that interrupts the romance. But by doing so it demonstrates that what may work on the page as a provocative fable doesn't entirely work on screen. Both film and book ask a key moral and aesthetic question: Can art provide both truth and justice? Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan as a child, Romola Garai as a young woman, Vanessa Redgrave in old age) seeks redemption for a lie, but in the end she thinks she has achieved it by lying again, by writing a work of autobiographical fiction that is untrue to what actually happened. That moral conundrum comes as a kind of surprise at the very end of Wright's film, but it's anticipated on every page of McEwan's novel, a trick that can only be pulled in literature, where the unreliable narrator is a familiar device. There's a problem, too, in visualizing McEwan's story, where both the opulent country-house setting and the portrayal of the Dunkirk retreat, with its celebrated long traveling shot, tend to overwhelm the narrative and the depiction of the characters of Briony, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), and Robbie (James McAvoy). The actors, fine as they are, keep getting upstaged by the images. It's what it was called at the time, an "Oscar-bait" movie, and it won for Dario Marianelli's score, and picked up nominations for best picture, for Christopher Hampton's screenplay, Ronan's supporting performance, for Seamus McGarvey's cinematography, and for art direction and costumes.

Black Mass (Scott Cooper, 2015)

Having long ago effaced the stigma of being a teen heartthrob on the TV series 21 Jump Street (1987-90), and having earned three Oscar nominations, Johnny Depp no longer has to prove himself as an actor. But his recent career has been marked by disastrous flops -- Alice Through the Looking Glass (James Bobin, 2016), Mortdecai (David Koepp, 2015), The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski, 2013) -- and too much reliance on the Pirates of the Caribbean series. Black Mass is a partial redemption for those failings, mostly because Depp becomes the best reason for seeing it. Apart from Depp's cruel and icy portrayal of Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, there's not enough heft and momentum to Scott Cooper's film. It takes a fascinating story of the interrelationships between Bulger's mob, the FBI, and the government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and reduces it to a routine and often derivative gangster movie. Cooper and screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth borrow shamelessly from GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) in a scene in which Bulger playfully terrorizes a colleague in the same way Joe Pesci's character -- "What do you mean, I'm funny?" -- frightens Ray Liotta's Henry Hill. The film often seems overloaded with good actors -- Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard, Jesse Plemons, Adam Scott, Julianne Nicholson -- in parts that don't give them enough to do. And while it was filmed in Boston, it misses the opportunity to capture the Boston neighborhood milieu in which Whitey, his politician brother Billy (Cumberbatch), and FBI agent John Connolly (Edgerton) grew up, something that was done to much better effect in films like Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, 2003), Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck, 2007), and even Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997). Still, the cold menace projected by Depp's Bulger is haunting, enhanced by the decision to provide the actor with ice-blue contact lenses that pierce through the shadows and give him an air of otherworldly surveillance.

Star Trek Into Darkness (J.J. Abrams, 2013)

I'm not a Trekkie. I never watched TOS* when it was first on TV, and only got hooked on TNG* when it went into re-runs. I don't speak a word of Klingon. But I can do the "Live long and prosper" hand sign, so I guess I can pass among those who aren't really hardcore. In fact, when I learned that J.J. Abrams, the rebooter of moribund franchises, was going to make his first Star Trek film (2009), I was neither appalled nor intrigued, as a real Trekkie would be. Only one of the movies featuring the cast of TOS was really very good: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986), aka "the one with the whales." And even then, it was the script that made William Shatner in rug and corset trying to recapture the old Capt. Kirk swagger even plausible. Fortunately, it will take a few more years before the new cast -- Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, John Cho, and Anton Yelchin -- need their own reboot. The great charm of Star Trek has always been its ensemble work. No one watching the series either on TV or in movies really cares that much about the story. It's the interplay of characters -- the bromance of Kirk and Spock (heightened to near-homoeroticism in the Pine-Quinto version), the grumpiness of Bones McCoy, the devotion of Scotty to his engines, and so on -- that makes the creaky old sci-fi clichés come to life. Throw in some in-jokes for longtime fans, such as the Tribble in this film, and you've got a surefire hit. The remarkable thing about the cast of the Abrams films is that they so far have transcended the paint-by-numbers quality of the plots and managed to make the CGI effects secondary to the humanity. Benedict Cumberbatch is a far more terrifying Khan than Ricardo Montalban with his rubber pecs ever was. And I admit that I teared up a bit seeing Leonard Nimoy in what turned out to be his farewell cameo. No, this is not a great movie, but there is great shrewdness in its casting.

*If you're reading this entry, I assume you don't have to be told that this is Trekkiese for Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation. But if you're reading this footnote, I guess you do.