Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016)

Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner in Arrival

Louise Banks: Amy Adams
Ian Donnelly: Jeremy Renner
Col. Weber: Forest Whitaker
Agent Halpern: Michael Stuhlbarg
Capt. Marks: Mark O'Brien
Gen. Shang: Tzi Ma

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Screenplay: Eric Heisserer
Based on a story by Ted Chiang
Cinematography: Bradford Young
Production design: Patrice Vermette
Film editing: Joe Walker
Music: Jóhann Jóhannsson

Like his film Sicario (2015), Denis Villeneuve's Arrival seems to be torn between two aims that don't merge comfortably. On one hand, it's a fairly conventional first-encounter sci-fi thriller, with plucky good guys at odds with the bureaucracy and the military, and an 11th-hour, 59th-minute rescue of the world from self-destruction. On the other, it's a provocative exploration of some big ideas about language and time and the nature of humanity. Villeneuve's natural inclination seems to be toward the latter, which may be why so much of the film is dark -- not just tonally, but visually, so that we only begin to see much of the action in full light toward the end. Cinematographer Bradford Young's cameras seem to be stopped down to the point that I often had trouble discerning what's happening. Presumably this gradual emergence into light is a metaphor for the illumination that comes to linguistics professor Louise Banks as she learns to communicate with the aliens and to understand not only why they are visiting the Earth but also what it means for her own life. It's a good, chewy film with some fine performances, and I welcome any sci-fi movie that makes its audiences work to comprehend its ideas. But I also wished for more exploration of those ideas, and how Banks and physicist Ian Donnelly, our heroes, came to arrive at them. The film stints on dramatizing the process of discovery for the sake of building suspense and making some obvious points about media hysteria. It gets in a nice dig at conspiracy charlatans like Alex Jones, and even at certain cable news outlets, as when Louise tells her mother she shouldn't be watching "that channel." But I wanted more specifics on how the teams of linguists and mathematicians began to decode the language of the heptapods, a close encounter of the word kind. Still, any movie that valorizes thought is welcome in these days of comic-book-based blockbusters aimed at the gut.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Both the title and the film are overlong, but it's hard to see how either of them could have been trimmed. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a lingering, subtle meditation on the nature of celebrity set in an era long before the arrival of social media thrust celebrities like Donald Trump into our daily lives. Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck give memorable performances in their respective title roles -- Affleck received a supporting actor Oscar nomination, although his role is surely larger than Pitt's -- and they're well supported by Sam Shepard as Frank James, Mary-Louise Parker in the thankless role of Jesse's wife, Sam Rockwell as Robert Ford's brother Charley, and Jeremy Renner, Garret Dillahunt, and Paul Schneider as various ill-fated members of the James gang. There's also a cameo by former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville as the governor of Missouri who precipitates the assassination. It was only the second feature directed by New Zealander Andrew Dominik, who wrote the screenplay based on a novel by Ron Hansen. There's a bit too much lyric profundity in the screenplay, as in the voiceover by the narrator (Hugh Ross), who tells us about Jesse James: "Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified." That's a hard description for any actor to live up to, but Pitt does a good job of it in perhaps the best performance of his career. Since the title pretty much gives the plot away, the film wisely concentrates on exploring the characters of James and Ford, who meet when the latter joins the James gang for a train robbery in Blue Cut, Missouri. Ford has worshiped James since boyhood, and in one splendid scene James taunts and teases him into revealing the depths of his infatuation. Ford has memorized everything that could possibly link him to James: They both have brothers whose names contain six letters, for example. This is homoerotic hero-worship at its most intense -- and eventually, most deadly. The movie was filmed in Canada, with superb, Oscar-nominated cinematography by Roger Deakins. The score is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and Cave himself plays the saloon singer who taunts Ford with "The Ballad of Jesse James," which refers to "the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard" (James's pseudonym).

Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015)

One of the things that make me think Tom Cruise is smarter than his involvement with Scientology suggests is that lately he has been willing to surround himself in his films with actors who are more appealing than he is. In the case of Rogue Nation, they include Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Rebecca Ferguson. He has also shed the tendency to flash the famous toothy grin on any occasion, though his Ethan Hunt in this film doesn't have much to grin about. As the movie begins, the Impossible Missions Force is about to be disbanded and its members labeled "shoot to kill" by CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin). It's a good premise for a thriller, if perhaps an over-familiar one: Make your good guys the target not only of the bad guys but also the other good guys. So off we go on a round of stunts that don't bear summarizing, but McQuarrie's script and direction keep the gee-whiz response pumping for an enjoyable couple of hours. Some critics thought the chief villain, a rogue MI6 agent named Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), wasn't villainous enough, but I have liked Harris's work since I first noticed him as Cesare Borgia's gay henchman Micheletto on the Showtime series The Borgias (2011-2013). He underplays in Rogue Nation, and the decision to dye his hair blond was probably a mistake, but I thought his subtlety was an effective contrast to Cruise's usual tendency to overplay. It has to be said that, at 55, Cruise is just beginning to be a bit implausible in his action sequences, especially the one at the film's beginning that has him leaping onto the wing of a cargo plane and clinging to it as it takes off, Perhaps it's true that he still does his own stunts, but in this golden age of camera tricks and CGI, that seems unnecessary: Audience are going to think it's faked anyway. There may in fact be a nod or two in the movie to Cruise's aging: After the extended underwater swim, Hunt has to be resuscitated, and there are a few moments, played mostly for comic relief by Pegg, when Hunt's disoriented state becomes a matter for concern. A sixth M:I film is evidently in the works. It will be interesting to see whether age plays more of a factor in it.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015)

There are two distinct audiences for superhero comic book movies like The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012) and this one, its sequel. One audience is just the casual fan of action movies. The other is the hardcore devotees of the comic books on which the movies are based. Pleasing one audience without losing the other is a hard trick to pull off. The hardcore audience knows the backstories of all the characters and is likely to be turned off by any inconsistencies with the source material. But the audience ignorant of the backstories needs some exposition to get them clued in to who these people are and what they're up to. Whedon is probably the person best qualified to deal with the problem, for one thing because he brings his own hardcore devotees along with him: the fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who trust Whedon to keep them entertained no matter how complicated and absurd the storyline becomes. I don't happen to be steeped in Marvel Comics lore myself, but I've watched every episode of Buffy at least once, so I appreciate Whedon's ability to take me along for an amusing ride. He does this by not taking anything in the Avengers movies terribly seriously. As in Buffy, what you have is a bunch of characters wisecracking through the apocalypse. And fortunately, the producers have enough money to spend not only on special effects but also on a huge cast of likable actors who relish the gags Whedon gives them and have the skill to play it all with the right blend of seriousness and tongue-in-cheek. In the end, the movie seems a little overloaded with stars -- in addition to Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner, there are cameos by Idris Elba, Samuel L. Jackson, and Don Cheadle, as well as the luxury casting of James Spader as the voice of Ultron. Keeping all of them busy squeezes the action sequences into incoherence. That may be why Whedon confessed to feeling exhausted afterward and declined to write and direct the third film scheduled in the series.

Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011)

I recently commented here that I didn't respond particularly well to Gregory Peck because, unlike stars such as Cary Grant and Bette Davis, he never surprised me with a line reading or a facial expression. I think the same is true of Tom Cruise, whose range seems to be limited to intensity: He never seems to unclench. That becomes apparent in this fourth installment of the Mission: Impossible series when he shares the screen with a much more versatile star, Jeremy Renner, who can be both intense and casually self-deprecating. I'm not saying Cruise is a bad actor: I thought his performance in Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988) was superior to Dustin Hoffman's Oscar-winning one. All Hoffman had to do was find a shtick and stay with it; Cruise was the one who had to grow and change over the course of the movie. It's just that he built his career on muscular action and a captivating grin that grew into a rictus as his career thrived. This Mission film is, I think, superior to the first three because it doesn't take on more than it can handle. It turns its heroes -- Cruise, Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton -- into fallible beings who screw up but manage to get on the right course at the last minute. It's all familiar super-action stuff, of the kind we've seen and marveled at ever since James Bond hit the screen. Renner and Pegg especially are instrumental in saving the movie from tedium, especially in their interplay in the sequence when Renner is called on to reprise the famous drop to within an inch of danger that Cruise did in the first Mission film back in 1996. This time, Renner has to do it with no restraint, free-falling until a magnet repels his magnetized suit, and both Renner and Pegg play it for laughs, something that director Brad Bird is skilled at providing. The screenplay (by Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec) tries to build some suspense around a secret that Renner's character, Brandt, is hiding from Cruise's Ethan Hunt, but that's just filler between action sequences.

Kill the Messenger (Michael Cuesta, 2014)

This is a movie that will please no one who has first-hand acquaintance with any of the people supposedly portrayed in it, but the real problem with Kill the Messenger is that it has three great stories to tell and fails to tell any of them well. The first story is the one Gary Webb thought he had broken: the CIA connection to the crack cocaine epidemic. Given the complexity and range of that story, which will probably never be fully and accurately told, it's not surprising that the movie fails to do it justice. The second story is that of the frenzied politics of journalism, a story that probably holds little interest to anyone not involved in journalism and is hard to dramatize because there are so few clear-cut heroes and villains to be found in it. (And in any case, it has been superseded by another story: the slow demise of print journalism.) And finally, there's the story of the way reporter Gary Webb's involvement in the other two stories sent his life into a downward spiral. This is the story the movie chooses to concentrate on, but it does so in such a heavy-handed, cliché-raddled way, particularly with its focus on Webb's relationship with his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) and teenage son (Lucas Hedges), that it doesn't make the tragic impact that it could have. I never met Gary Webb, and when the Sturm und Drang of "Dark Alliance" was taking place in the newsroom at the Mercury News, I was busy doing my thing in a far corner on the third floor back of the Merc's Ridder Park Drive plant. I recall that on the day the first story in the series appeared, a colleague said, "Well, Gary Webb just won us another Pulitzer." That was, of course, before the shit flung by the big papers in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles hit the fan. But it also revealed something about the way Pulitzer fever infected the Mercury News, as it does other newspapers. Webb was a victim of it, as was the Merc. There are things to like about the movie, mostly having to do with its performers, starting with Jeremy Renner as Webb. It's also good to see underused actors like Andy Garcia and Ray Liotta, and while nobody who knows the real Jerry Ceppos would ever have chosen Oliver Platt to play him, Platt does a good job of playing a man caught up in a whirlwind of competing pressures and managing to keep his head.