The Sisters Brothers (Jacques Audiard, 2018)

Cast: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rebecca Root, Allison Tolman, Rutger Hauer, Carol Kane. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, based on a novel by Patrick DeWitt. Cinematography: Benoît Debie. Production design: Michel Barthélémy. Film editing: Juliette Welfling. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

An American Western filtered through Gallic sensibilities, The Sisters Brothers was a box-office flop, but it remains one of the more intriguing movies of recent years. To its credit, it gives John C. Reilly another chance to show what a remarkable actor he is when he's given more than just a backup role to play; he somehow sends even such charismatic performers as Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed into the background when he's on screen. Full of quirky dialogue and unexpected situations, the movie's chief flaws are that it feels a little longer than necessary and the narrative is occasionally more elliptical than necessary.    

Rogue One (Gareth Edwards, 2016)

Felicity Jones and Diego Luna in Rogue One

Jyn Erso: Felicity Jones
Cassian Andor: Diego Luna
Galen Erso: Mads Mikkelsen
Saw Gerrera: Forest Whitaker
Bodhi Rook: Riz Ahmed
K-2SO: Alan Tudyk (voice)
Chirrut Îmwe: Donnie Yen
Baze Malbus: Wen Jiang
Orson Krennic: Ben Mendelsohn
Governor Tarkin: Guy Henry
Bail Organa: Jimmy Smits

Director: Gareth Edwards
Screenplay: Chris Weitz, Tony Gilroy, John Knoll, Gary Whitta
Cinematography: Greig Fraser
Production design: Doug Chiang, Neil Lamont
Music: Michael Giacchino

It takes a lot of work (and money) to sustain a myth. Rogue One, the first of the standalone (i.e., not an official Star Wars episode) films based on George Lucas's corpus of myth about a galaxy far away and a long time ago, doesn't really stand alone. It's there to plug a hole in the larger Star Wars narrative: How could the Empire have been so careless as to leave a critical vulnerability in the Death Star, so that Luke Skywalker could take advantage of it as easily as he used to bullseye womp rats in his T-16? It was, of course, an inside job, a bit of sabotage by an engineer named Galen Erso. So what we have in Rogue One is essentially Star Wars: Episode 3.5. I've got no problem with that, except that it hardly seems worth two hours and 13 minutes or $200 million to fill a plot gap. It also feels like a waste of a splendidly capable cast to create vivid and heroic characters only to kill them all off by the end of the movie. Or to reanimate (literally) an actor who died in 1994 to give the illusion of continuity between films: If we can accept that James Bond can be played by many actors, or that the entire crew of the Starship Enterprise can be "rebooted" for a new series of Star Trek films, why shouldn't we accept that someone other than Peter Cushing could play Grand Moff (here he's just a general) Tarkin? There's something macabre about superimposing a dead man's face on a live actor's, and I hope Guy Henry got paid well for playing Tarkin from the neck down. These objections aside, Rogue One is a well-played war movie, with just enough resemblance to real wars to make it somewhat unsettling: The scenes in the capital of Jedha have an eerie similarity to recent news footage coming out of cities in Syria and Iraq, and the combat in tropical Scarif evokes any number of war movies set in Vietnam or in the South Pacific during World War II. In fact, Rogue One may be the most visceral and depressing film in the Star Wars canon.

Watched on Netflix

Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014)

That an actor as good as Jake Gyllenhaal, still in his 30s, should have to resort to transformative tricks to get a noticeable role is regrettable. Ever since the Brits learned to do American accents that don't sound like they're talking through their noses while chewing gum, young American actors have had it hard. Why should producers take a chance on a Yank when they can hire a Hiddleston or a Cumberbatch or one of the Dominics (Cooper or West)? So you're doing a TV series about a Russian spy pretending to be an American? Naturally you hire Matthew Rhys, a Welshman. Want a fresh face? Check out RADA or that young guy who just got raves playing Hamlet in Bristol. What's an American actor got to do to get a break? If you're Matthew McConaughey trying to avoid getting cast in another rom-com, you lose 47 pounds and win an Oscar. Or if you're Gyllenhaal, you lose all the muscle you built for the turkey Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Mike Newell, 2010), let your hair go long and greasy, turn yourself into one of the more fascinatingly repellent characters in recent films and get the best reviews you've had since Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005). Nightcrawler is a solid drama with a satiric edge, in which Gyllenhaal plays Louis Bloom, a sociopath who roams the streets of Los Angeles at night, listening to a police scanner for reports of shootings, fires, car crashes -- anything that comes under the TV news rubric, "If it bleeds, it leads." He films whatever gore he can worm his way past police lines to witness, then sells it to a local TV news outlet. There are semi-legitimate, better-equipped outfits doing this sort of thing, but they have some scruples. Bloom has none; his amorality is hair-raising. This was the first film as a director for Dan Gilroy, who also wrote the screenplay, and it has a terrific cast supporting Gyllenhaal. Rene Russo plays a TV news producer whose ethical standards are only a shade higher than Bloom's. She makes Faye Dunaway's Diana Christensen in Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976) look almost namby-pamby. Riz Ahmed plays Rick, a homeless kid whom Bloom hires as an assistant and abuses and profoundly exploits. After his turn in HBO's miniseries The Night Of (2016), Ahmed is in danger of getting typed as a wide-eyed patsy. Bill Paxton, one of those actors whose presence always helps make a film better, plays an older and more experienced TV news freelancer who shows Bloom the ropes and winds up getting sabotaged for his efforts.