Her Smell (Alex Ross Perry, 2018)

Elisabeth Moss in Her Smell

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Dan Stevens, Cara Delevingne, Agyness Deyn, Gayle Rankin, Eric Stoltz, Ashley Benson, Dylan Gelula, Eka Darville, Amber Heard, Virginia Madsen. Screenplay: Alex Ross Perry. Cinematography: Sean Price Williams. Production design: Fletcher Chancey. Film editing: Robert Greene. Music: Keegan DeWitt.

Sometimes the opportunity to watch good actors act is almost the only thing a movie gives us. (That's true, I'm afraid, of a lot of the Meryl Streep oeuvre.) Certainly it's the chief thing the punk-titled Her Smell offers: Elisabeth Moss tearing up the screen as a self-destructive rock star. But we've seen the story before and Alex Ross Perry has nothing novel to give us in his version of it. Moss's Becky Something collapses at the peak of her career, leaving a broken marriage, an infant, and a mountain of lawsuits, including those by her producer, Howard Goodman (Eric Stoltz). She sobers up -- the film doesn't show how -- and retreats into seclusion. But the ever-forgiving Howard persuades her back for a final gig at a concert featuring the many acts he has produced over a 20-year career. Is she strong enough to make it? Her long-suffering bandmates and her ex-husband (Dan Stevens) have forgiven her trespasses, but they still have some doubts about her continued stability. She is something of a head case where it comes to New Agey guidance -- she still, for example, believes in the guru called Ya-Ema (whose real name, someone says, is Alvin), even though he has gone to prison for defrauding her and others. Yet the film has to end with a triumph, and it does. I have no ear for the music in Her Smell, so I can't comment on that other than to say it seemed mediocre, but Moss gives it her all, doing her own singing. But it's her acting we came to see, and that's exceptional.

Good Time (Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 2017)

Good Time (Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 2017)

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Buddy Duress, Taliah Webster, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Barkhad Abdi, Necro, Peter Verby, Erik Paykert. Screenplay: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie. Cinematography: Sean Price Williams. Production design: Sam Lisenco. Film editing: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie. Music: Daniel Lopatin.

Connie Nikas is a hoodlum with no redeeming qualities other than that dogs like him and that, in his criminal way, he's devoted to his mentally challenged brother, Nick. And that he's played by Robert Pattinson, which goes a long way in the raucous, often appalling, frequently hilarious Good Time. Pattinson's performance in the movie, like the later performances of Kristen Stewart, almost makes me want to check out the Twilight movies that brought them to fame -- a fame they've been trying to unburden themselves from ever since by working with highly independent directors like, in Pattinson's case, the Safdie brothers. This is the first film by the brothers that I've seen, and I was driven to check it out by a profile in the New Yorker occasioned by their latest release, Uncut Gems. At the film's start, Nick (played by Benny Safdie) is in a psychiatrist's office, reacting with paranoia and incomprehension to the therapist's questions and his note-taking, until Connie breaks into the session to take him away. The next thing we see, the brothers are robbing a bank. The theft and its aftermath are staged like a caper thriller, but with an overlay of pain because we're aware of how Connie is exploiting his brother for his own ends. And that mixture of pain and comedy persists throughout the film as Connie keeps screwing up and improvising more ingenious ways to get out of what he's screwed up. We can't really like Connie -- he's too much of a hoodlum for that, and he gets too many innocent people swept up in his manipulations -- but we have to have a kind of perverse admiration for his ingenuity. And that's where Pattinson's skill as an actor, reinforced by his good looks, works to keep us off balance. It helps, too, that an even worse hoodlum, Ray (Buddy Duress), gets caught up in Connie's misadventures, serving as a despicable foil. The Safdies and cinematographer Sean Price Williams ground the film's knockabout story in some very real Queens locations.