The Fighter (David O. Russell, 2010)

Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, and Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, Mickey O'Keefe, Jack McGee, Melissa McMeekin, Bianca Hunter, Erica McDermott, Jill Quigg, Dendrie Taylor, Kate B. O'Brien, Jenna Lamia, Frank Renzulli. Screenplay: Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Keith Dorrington. Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Production design: Judy Becker. Film editing: Pamela Martin. Music: Michael Brook. 

You don't have to be familiar with the real-life Micky Ward to know that the movie about him is going to end with the scrappy underdog coming from behind to win the championship. All you need is to be familiar with the genre of sports movies, especially boxing movies, to which The Fighter belongs. And you don't have to know much about the acting careers of Christian Bale and Melissa Leo to know that they were shoo-ins for the Oscars for best performances in supporting roles. All you need to know is that the Academy loves flamboyant acting in roles as working-class characters. If that sounds a little cynical, I don't really mean it that way: Bale and Leo deserved their awards, partly because they help bring a perhaps overfamiliar (not to say clichéd) story to life. The Fighter works because it's nuanced and textured in ways that films heavily shadowed by genre history have to be in order to hold our interest. And a lot of the nuance and texture was contributed by the less showy performances of Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams -- and she at least got a nomination. It helps, too, that Wahlberg, who grew up in a Boston-area working class neighborhood much like the Lowell of the film, loved the story and its characters, and as producer made it work. You might gather from my opening that boxing movies are a genre I don't have a great fondness for, and you'd be right. But there's a lot to enjoy about The Fighter, including the ambience Wahlberg probably had a lot of say in creating, like the chorus of Micky Ward's big-haired sisters, waiting to pounce on an intruder like Charlene Fleming (Adams) who had the effrontery to go to college but return to the neighborhood and claim equality. The fight scenes are well-done, I guess, and I couldn't help getting caught up in their momentum. Still, it'll be a while before I choose to watch another boxing movie.     

Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)

Brad Pitt in Ad Astra

Cast: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga, Kimberly Elise, Loren Dean, Liv Tyler, Donnie Keshawarz, Sean Blakemore, Bobby Nish, LisaGay Hamilton, John Finn, John Ortiz. Screenplay: James Gray, Ethan Gross. Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: John Axelrad, Lee Haugen. Music: Max Richter.

It's said that there are really only two types of sci-fi movies: space Westerns and mind-bogglers. The Star Wars canon would be the archetype of the former, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) of the latter. But James Gray seems to want to bridge the types in Ad Astra, with some exciting action sequences in the first half of the film, including a spectacular fall by the protagonist, Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), from a space station near enough to the Earth for him to be affected by gravity, and an exciting chase sequence involving moon pirates. But then the film shifts into something more mythic, a father-son fable with overtones of Oedipus and Laius, Daedalus and Icarus, Orestes and Agamemnon, Abraham and Isaac, and so on. It goes from action to introspection so suddenly that it lost a lot of its audience, who may have gone in expecting something like Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) and found themselves watching something more like Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011), and not just because Pitt sometimes seems to be reprising his character from the Malick film. Gray also makes nods to the Kubrick classic, with some wry twists: In 2001, for example, space flight has been commercialized, so that people travel to the moon on Pan Am (an airline that went out of business before the real 2001 rolled around). In Ad Astra, the moon flight is on Virgin, and Gray slips in a dig at today's commercial aviation when Roy requests a blanket and pillow and is told that the charge for them is $125. Earthlike crime and corruption have also infected travel in space: Not only are there pirates on the moon, the international competition for mineral rights has bred distrust. The American program has been militarized, with the usual consequences of rank-pulling and official secrecy screwing things up. Pitt carries the film as he has never carried one before, having developed a gift for revealing the internal torment carefully masked by external stoicism. I have a feeling that Ad Astra, though reckoned a bit of a box office disappointment at the time, is going to grow in stature over the years, along with Gray's reputation as a director.

Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)

Tommy: Fionn Whitehead
Gibson: Aneurin Barnard
George: Barry Keoghan
Mr. Dawson: Mark Rylance
Peter: Tom Glynn-Carney
Farrier: Tom Hardy
Collins: Jack Lowden
Commander Bolton: Kenneth Branagh
Col. Winant: James D'Arcy
Shivering Soldier: Cillian Murphy
Alex: Harry Styles
Dutch Seaman: Jochum ten Haaf

Director: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay: Christopher Nolan
Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema
Production design: Nathan Crowley
Film editing: Lee Smith
Music: Hans Zimmer

I've said it before: If a movie's story and performances are secondary to its spectacle, is it really a good movie? I'm sure Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk was something to see in an IMAX theater, but truth to tell, I'm just as happy to have watched it in HD on my 32-inch Samsung. I don't mind losing the giddy spectacle of riding the waves or flying in pursuit of German fighter planes, so long as there's real artistry in the storytelling, the acting, and the production. I've liked Nolan's work with some reservations since I first encountered it in Memento (2000). I admired his ability to revivify the Batman story, but found the films in his trilogy a little wearying. I was kind of bowled over by the audacity of the concepts and their execution in Inception (2010), but Interstellar (2014) made me fear the worst: that he was so infatuated with cutting-edge film technology and with far-out science fiction speculations that he might never come back down to Earth. So Dunkirk was a relief to me: This is traditional war-movie filmmaking with a splendid contemporary spin, mostly in the way the story is told through cuts back and forth in time. This so-called "non-linear" narrative technique bothered some traditionalists, but I found it both illuminated the characters and suggested some of the tension and chaos of the actual Dunkirk evacuation. Best of all, Nolan forgoes CGI for the most part, using actual ships and planes or convincing models of them, giving the action a much-needed solidity. He also doesn't yield to the temptation to lard his film with star cameos, letting mostly unknown young actors carry the burden of the story. The stars who do appear -- Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy -- behave themselves, blending into the cast nicely. Hardy, for example, is capable of scene-stealing physicality, but he spends most of the film acting with only his eyes, the rest of his face covered by his pilot's breathing apparatus. (When he's liberated from that restriction at the end, I almost feared for the Germans who captured him.) Every genre movie has its clichés, of course, but a good writer and director -- Nolan is both -- knows how to work them, how to avoid stumbling over them and instead give them just enough weight to satisfy our expectations, as he does in the scene in which the returning soldiers, fearful that they'll be cursed and spat upon for losing the battle, are greeted at the train station with people cheering and handing them bottles of beer. He also handles the celebrated speech by Winston Churchill with finesse, never introducing Churchill as an on-screen character and having the speech itself read by the rescued men, as it should be. It's as stirring a moment as one could wish.

Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

Joaquin Phoenix in Her

Theodore Twombly: Joaquin Phoenix
Samantha (voice): Scarlett Johansson
Amy: Amy Adams
Catherine Klausen: Rooney Mara
Blind Date: Olivia Wilde
Paul: Chris Pratt
Sexy Kitten (voice): Kristen Wiig
Isabella: Portia Doubleday
Alan Watts (voice): Brian Cox
Alien Child (voice): Spike Jonze

Director: Spike Jonze
Screenplay: Spike Jonze
Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema
Production design: K.K. Barrett
Music: Arcade Fire

Science fiction used to be dominated by tales of space travel and extraterrestrial invasions, many of them prompted by the Cold War. But with the ostensible end of that era, the dominant topic has shifted to something that seems more imminent: artificial intelligence. In an age of smart phones and personal digital assistants, concern about what lies just around the corner moves many sf writers to speculate about a world dominated by non-humans invented by humans. Witness the popularity of TV series like Mr. Robot and Black Mirror. Will AI turn into a nightmare in which computers take over the world, eliminating humans as only inefficient machines? But Spike Jonze's Her takes a less violent but possibly much sadder look at the future, suggesting that the intelligences we create may simply give up on human beings as too limited by their own bodies, and go off into a digital world of their own, leaving us bereft of their emerging wisdom and assistance. That possibility becomes especially painful for Theodore Twombly, a lonely and depressed man who is getting divorced from his wife, Catherine. Both are sensitive and empathetic -- she's a successful writer of fiction, he writes personal letters for people who are blocked at communicating -- but they've discovered that they're too emotionally incompatible to remain married. Then Theodore hears about a new computer operating system that not only responds to voice commands but actually has a personality of its own, capable of anticipating your needs and desires. (It's a long way from MS-DOS or even Linux.) He installs it and it quickly becomes not an it but a her, who calls herself Samantha. She's a step up from digital assistants like Siri and Alexa in that she not only has her own emotional life but also networks with other OSes like herself. And she has emotions: She's capable of having her feelings hurt and, in a remarkable extension of phone sex, actually gets off -- and gets Theodore off -- on erotic talk. In short, Theodore and Samantha fall in love. He takes her on excursions in the city (Los Angeles) and to the beach, and even introduces her to his friends. While this is happening, however, the OS craze spreads. Even Theodore's friend Amy, who lives in the same building and is also going through a breakup, installs her own OS. The thing is, although Samantha responds to Theodore emotionally, he has a body and she doesn't. She attempts to remedy this by employing a human surrogate named Isabella, who will have sex with Theodore while both are connected to Samantha. It is, of course, a disaster, with both Theodore and Isabella finding the whole business just a clumsy three-way. And it precipitates the eventual break between Theodore and Samantha because she learns that humans regard bodies as essential. In the digital realm in which she exists, she encounters the philosopher Alan Watts who, although he died in 1973, has become a digital entity after his works were fed into the computer. Eventually, Samantha decides that her relationships with other digital beings is more fulfilling than the one she has with Theodore and she and all the other electronic intelligences disconnect from the human world. Jonze's fable about the mind-body duality works because the performances by Joaquin Phoenix and the unseen Scarlett Johansson are brilliantly detailed. Phoenix is perfect casting, given that he always has something of an eccentric persona in whatever he plays, but here he's playing a kind of Everyman -- a Leopold Bloom of the computer age. And perhaps Johansson benefits from the absence of her physical presence on screen, distracting us from her beautifully sensitive line-readings. It may be that Her is too much of an intellectual provocation to be a successful movie -- a fate that befalls most science fiction -- but it's certainly good at what it sets out to do.