Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015)

How can there be, by current count, 24 James Bond films? (Not counting the 1967 spoof version of Casino Royale, which had no fewer than five directors, including John Huston.) Why has the series not run its course by now? It has survived regular cast changes, including its central character, who has been played by six different actors: The current Bond, Daniel Craig, had not even been born when the first film in the series, Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962), premiered. Even recurring characters have been recast: M, Miss Moneypenny, and Q have each been played by five actors, and M underwent a change from male to female when Judi Dench took over the role in GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995), though the part reverted to male (Ralph Fiennes) at the end of Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012). Yet the series has retained a reassuring familiarity, even to the point of typically beginning with a spectacular action sequence that almost certainly can't be topped in the remaining parts of the film. In Spectre, Bond is in Mexico City, where he shoots a bad guy, setting off an explosion that has him scrambling to escape from the building's collapsing façade, then chases another bad guy escaping from the rubble onto a helicopter, on which they struggle for control as it careens wildly over the crowds celebrating the Day of the Dead in the Zócalo. Then come the credits and another Bond-film staple, the thematic pop song: This one, "Writing's on the Wall," sung by Sam Smith, who co-wrote it with Jimmy Napes, won an Oscar. And then it's down to the usual business: chastisement by M (Fiennes), gadgets by Q (Ben Whishaw), and pursuit of the villains seeking control of the world. In Spectre there are two: One, Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott), is trying to take over control of intelligence services all over the world, while the other is a familiar figure from earlier Bond films, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), who is in cahoots with Denbigh. (Blofeld, who had been a regular supervillain in the Sean Connery era, was absent from the Bond films after 1983 because of copyright litigation that was settled before Spectre, which takes its title from Blofeld's global criminal organization, was filmed.) There are also vodka martinis, shaken not stirred, to be quaffed, and "Bond girls" to be bedded -- although in recent years, Bond's sex life has become less wildly promiscuous and the women have become more complex characters. In Spectre, one of them, Madeleine Swann, is played by Léa Seydoux, a more than capable actress who sometimes seems to be fighting against the limitations of the role, trying to make Madeleine a more interesting figure than the screenplay allows. So to return to the original question: Why do we still gravitate to the Bond films when there are more novel action-adventures to be had? The series has been so frequently imitated -- Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible movies are virtually indistinguishable in formula from Bond films -- that maybe imitation suggests the answer: We crave the familiar, but we also relish the small surprises when the formula is tweaked. In Spectre, for example, M, Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), and Q all get out of the office and into the field for a change. Spectre is not quite as satisfying an outing as Skyfall, and there are signs of fatigue in Craig's performance, suggesting that his term as Bond has run its course -- though he has reportedly signed on for the next one. But longevity can be its own reward: We have become so comfortable with the formula that it still excites people to speculate about the next James Bond -- Tom Hiddleston? Idris Elba?

Big Eyes (Tim Burton, 2014)

It's a great idea for a movie: the downfall of a hugely successful artist who took the credit for the work done by someone else. It allows a filmmaker to explore such topics as fraud, the difference between capital-A Art and works that are just popular, the nature of value when it comes to works of the imagination, and in this case, the relationship between men and women. Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) persuaded his wife, Margaret (Amy Adams), to let him pass off her work -- paintings of large-eyed waifs -- as his own. The trouble with the movie is that it never quite decides what it wants to say about any of the important issues it raises, other than that Margaret Keane was a victim of the male-dominated society of the 1950s and '60s. It doesn't even settle on the issue of whether Margaret's paintings were mawkish kitsch or actual works of Art, though I think it rather smugly assumes that viewers will be smart enough to have decided on the former. But it complicates this position by starting with a quote from Andy Warhol proclaiming that the Keane art is "terrific! If it were bad, so many people wouldn't like it." And it turns the critics of Keane into pretentious snobs, represented by the gallery owner (Jason Schwartzman) who resents the fact that the Keane paintings outsell his rather arid, minimalist abstractions, and by John Canaday (Terence Stamp), the New York Times critic who prevents a Keane from being exhibited at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. So what we are left with is Margaret Keane, the victim who finally has the courage to turn against her monstrously manipulative husband and become a hero. That she is a hero in the cause of women's rights is presumably fine. But is it also fine that she becomes a hero by asserting her right to profit from making bad art? I don't think either screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski or director Tim Burton have decided for themselves. So we are left only with Adams's terrific performance as Margaret, which could have been bolstered by a fuller backstory, and Waltz's somewhat overdone performance as Walter. What Burton does best in his movies is milieu, especially when he can caricature it, which he does here, with a little more restraint than usual, in his portraits of the business of art in the 1960s. And he gets us into the head of Margaret Keane: When she is grinding out big-eyed paintings for Walter she goes to a supermarket and hallucinates the clerks and customers as big-eyed grotesques. But the movie probably should have gone more in one direction or another: Either into a realistic portrayal of the relationship of the Keanes or into a more vivid and surreal lampoon of the art world. Trying to do a bit of both undermines the film.