I dare you to watch the first 10 minutes of Almost Famous and not keep watching. It’s impossible. The music, the mood, the personal details – it all coalesces into a magnetic and believable story. Cameron Crowe found success creating characters that weren’t like anybody else. From Say Anything to Jerry Maguire, he poked at our weaknesses and indulged our sentimental side. It gives me no pleasure to say that his latest, Aloha, captures none of the magic of his earlier films. The plot is a jumble of half-baked ideas, the romance is schmaltzy and the Hawaiian setting is an excuse for tired exoticism.

Aloha begins with a voice-over from Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper), a defense contractor working on a project involving satellites and capitalism. He’s a likable enough guy, but the details of his life and job are not entirely clear. He’s back in Hawaii for the first time in thirteen years and as luck would have it, his ex-girlfriend Tracy (Rachel McAdams) and her impossibly perfect hair are on the tarmac waiting for him. Any shot at wooing Tracy is marred by the presence of her husband John (John Krasinski), their young son and their (hmm) thirteen year-old daughter.

Crowe blows through Tracy and Brian’s mindless dialogue and introduces us to Allison (Emma Stone), the bubbly Air Force pilot assigned as Brian’s partner. In addition to helping Brian oversee the satellite launch, she bats her eyelashes and invites him to drink peppermint tea. If one things makes Aloha watchable it’s Stone. She’s like an over-caffeinated Greta Garbo in military gear.

When Brian was a boy, he says that stared at the universe and saw “the future.” The sentiment is repeated multiple times, but the observation remains cloying and shallow. Instead of exploring what Brian actually learned about the universe or his place in it, the film dwells on a forced romance between Brian and Allison. They wander through an open-air market holding hands but we don’t actually hear what they’re saying. They supposed to be “cute” and that’s pretty much it. Tracy and John have a strain in their marriage, but their drama disappears as soon as it arrives.

Bill Murray sleepwalks through his role as Carson Welch, a billionaire who looks and acts astoundingly like Bill Murray. Welch is supplying the money for the satellite, but he seems more interested in pot brownies than lunar takeover. Alec Baldwin shows up as Brian’s hot-tempered boss, and his comic chops are a welcome relief.

Aloha is a mainstream comedy, so it comes as no surprise that the film’s depiction of Hawaiian culture is sheer romanticization. Before the movie even came out, Hawaiians objected to the use of the word “aloha,” which erases the word’s deeper meanings. The appropriation is most evident during Brian and Allison’s visit to a protected reservation. The land and its people serve as a backdrop for their fantasies about the “natural” and “free” life of native Hawaiians.

The film’s climax is a hodgepodge of clichés that end happily and far too easily. Brian is supposed to be in the midst of a crisis but his issues aren’t relatable or even clear. Allison and Brian are attracted to each other but their relationship seems like a fling. Their union isn’t the predestined romance that’s necessary for a satisfying love story. The script has moments of wit, but they’re drowned out by mawkishness.

From Jeff Spicoli to Jerry Maguire, Cameron Crowe’s best protagonists have quirk, wit and catchphrases like “Show me the money!” As Gilcrest, Bradley Cooper is smiley and overconfident. He doesn’t have the spunky charm of Tom Cruise (Jerry Maguire) or the sleepy cuteness of John Cusack (Say Anything). Sure, he has the looks of a romantic lead, but there’s something too perfect about those dreamy blue eyes.

Cameron Crowe is an unfortunate example of a director who triumphed young and now resorts to shortcuts and rehashes of his earlier work. He’s proven his potential. He just needs more than good-looking stars and oceanfront views to make his films worth watching for more than ten minutes.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse for San Francisco. Attacked by towering monsters and overrun by damn dirty apes, the City by the Bay hasn’t fared too well lately at the movies. But S.F. hasn’t seen anything like this most recent onslaught of devastation that only a rippling mountain of muscle like Dwayne Johnson can overcome. San Andreas drops the strongest earthquake of all time on the city, one that’s rendered in spellbinding 3D. If you haven’t already gotten enough of seeing the Golden Gate Bridge get jacked up in epic ways, this movie is for you.

Disaster porn is a tricky business. San Andreas took some flak for pimping its CGI destruction while thousands of lives were being lost last month in quake-shattered Nepal. Films have been pushed back due to major tragedies before. But then again, this is 21st century America, a place not known for the length of its collective attention span—recent disasters will likely do little to quell the hype that has built for San Andreas.

Following the disaster film formula, San Andreas revolves around a core group, most of whom are family. Ray (Johnson) is a rescue helicopter pilot who’s on the outs with his wife, Emma (Carla Gugino), largely because they lost a daughter to a rafting accident (those’ll get ya) years earlier. As a result, the otherwise affable Ray evidently shuttered up his soft spots. Meanwhile, their other daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario), makes a stop off in San Francisco where she meets a cute and charming British guy (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) and his even more adorable little bro (Art Parkinson)—just in time for a series of devastating earthquakes to split California in two.

From there, we get to see Johnson pilot a couple of choppers and a small plane, tandem parachute with his almost-ex-wife into AT&T Park (and make a killer baseball-themed sex joke), steal a truck and drive a boat through waterlogged skyscrapers. Paul Giamatti is also thrown in there (largely to frequently take off his glasses and rub his forehead in consternation) as a Caltech-based seismologist who invents a methodology for predicting earthquakes on the same day California is hit by an unprecedented one.

Of course, San Andreas falls into the disaster porn trap of giving us only a few characters to follow while they’re otherwise surrounded by hordes of screaming destruction fodder. Other than all being affluent and good-looking, there’s not much reason why these half dozen or so people at the core of the film warrant any specific attention. Their family backstory is perfunctory and almost laughably cheesy by the end, especially when the requisite CPR-against-all-odds starts up and the “Don’t quit on me!” and “I won’t lose her, too!” gems get busted out.

Above the other disaster films it borrows from, San Andreas owes a great debt to Titanic, especially when a tsunami turns San Fran into soup. The tandem skydiving serves as an almost literal “I’m flying, Jack” moment, bodies tumble from great heights, massive barge propellers serve as deadly perils and there’s plenty of held-breath heroics. We even get a cowardly, rich asshole who puts himself ahead of the women and children. For the drier action, we’re given cars/trucks/helicopters/planes crashing and protagonists repeatedly pulled from wreckage at the last possible instant before it collapses.

This should add up to a train wreck, but instead San Andreas proves to be effective-enough popcorn fare. Director Brad Peyton does fine work with the outright impressive 3D visuals, having transcended his previous résumé of shitty sequels in weak PG-rated franchises. With a movie this over-the-top in its iconic carnage, it’s a disappointment that they didn’t find a way to involve Alcatraz, if only so critics could land a few “the Rock at the Rock” jokes. And this is also probably the point where I should admonish you for your willingness to spend $15 on San Andreas in 3D when you could be donating that money to the victims in Nepal. But, there’s a place for technical wonders/brainless eye candy. So do what you want, I’m not your mom.

What would you do if you could see the future? The competent low-budget thriller Time Lapse follows three twenty-somethings who are investigating the mysterious disappearance of a neighbor when they happen on a huge contraption that shoots out a Polaroid at 8pm every night. The lens is pointed at their living room window, and though at first they don’t understand what they’re seeing, they soon realize that the camera takes a picture 24 hours into the future.

For a generation used to instantly capturing images on their smartphones, the time spent waiting for a Polaroid print to develop is almost as mysterious as looking into a crystal ball. Like the similarly low-key It Follows, this film watches technologically savvy 21st century youth face their elders’ antiquated machines, and each of the film’s three main characters responds to this glimpse of the future in their own way.

Finn (Matt O’Leary) is an artist struggling with a creative block, but the future Polaroid shows Finn his next painting before he paints it. Jasper (George Finn) is thrilled that tomorrow’s Polaroid shows a note listing the results of tomorrow’s horse races; he’s this film’s version of Back to the Future‘s Biff Tannen, using his secret knowledge to get rich. Callie (Danielle Panabaker) is Finn’s girlfriend, and she seems to be simply swept up by the future, riding along on whatever Finn and Jasper need to do to make the images they see into their actual futures.

Most films with a voyeuristic element are contrived; chances are if you’re peeking through any given window, you won’t find anything particularly exciting. The clairvoyant Polaroid occasionally captures something salacious but is mostly a conduit for messages from the friends’ future selves. But their meanings aren’t always easy to parse.

Time Lapse is the first feature for writer-director Bradley King, and his simple narrative conceit is a clever way to devise a science fiction film that doesn’t need much in the way of special effects, the sole effect being the charred body of the professor who created the fortune-telling camera. The camera is a simple device but a meaningful one, at once a cautionary tale for a generation used to instant gratification and a sad commentary on a generation uncertain of their future.

It’s not that easy to reverse-engineer your next 24 hours based on a photograph taken 24 hours from now, and what they see in the future is unsettling. The riches that Jasper acquires from his no-lose betting gets him in trouble with a bookie (Jason Spisak), and if the future makes him rich overnight, that wealth also accelerates Jasper’s disintegrating character. Callie, who seems like a passenger for the film’s first acts, grows more and more in control. The film then becomes not so much science fiction as a young adult chamber drama about what happens to three friends when something changes their lives. Competently acted and directed, Time Lapse isn’t a cinematic revelation, but it does see the future—a sobering picture of the future of today’s young people, flailing in a society that seems to give them limited options.

The paparazzi may have led to the death of Princess Diana, but those pesky photographers cemented the legacy of Anita Ekberg. The Swedish-Italian actress, who died in January at the age of 83, only inhabits a small portion of Federico Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece La Dolce Vita, yet the image of the busty, blonde actress cavorting in Rome’s Trevi Fountain with star Marcello Mastroianni is the scene considered the film’s most indelible, even outdoing the opening shot of a helicopter carrying a statue of Christ the Laborer over various Roman landmarks.

Ekberg, who was born in Sweden in 1931, began as a model in her teens, eventually winning the Miss Sweden title. She came to the United States to compete for the Miss Universe title in 1951 and though she didn’t win the competition, her looks earned her a contract with Universal Studios and small roles in films such as Abbott and Costello Go to Mars. In fact, Ekberg was more famous for her dalliances with leading actors than her roles on-screen. She was linked with everyone from Errol Flynn to Frank Sinatra to Yul Brynner.

Her acting career languished but she frequently appeared in gossip columns. Ekberg also used her impressive bust size to her advantage, appearing in nudie magazines and various publicity stunts that served as precursors to today’s “accidental” nip-slips. In 1956, she appeared in Playboy magazine in various tantalizing semi-nude photos. But slowly, Ekberg found her way into television and film roles, landing a new home at Paramount Studios, which cast her in five different films in 1956, including its lavish adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Acting talent was always secondary to Ekberg’s looks and Paramount cashed in on her blonde bombshell physique, advertising her as its own Marilyn Monroe.

Ekberg had finally arrived when in 1960 Fellini would cast her in her defining role as Sylvia Rank, a Swedish movie star who comes to Rome on a publicity tour. And despite her appearance in what is considered one of cinema’s most iconic scenes, Ekberg is absent for most of La Dolce Vita, though she burst through its early frames like a force of nature, she is just one in a series of women wooed by Mastroianni’s disaffected journalist Marcello Rubini.

A withering critique of high society and the idle, bored people who live vampiric existences floating from one source of pleasure to another, be it the next party or the next lover, La Dolce Vita is teeming at its sardonic seams with the thrumming life force that defined the director’s work. In a year of other landmark films ranging from Breathless to Psycho, La Dolce Vita won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and even performed well at American box offices, despite this country’s (still present) aversion to unconventional filmmaking and subtitles. For Ekberg, who co-starred with Bob Hope in Paris Holiday and Sterling Hayden in Valerie, it would be the biggest role of her career.

Before Sylvia appears in the film, we learn a good deal about Marcello, a man who used to be a great writer that now earns his keep writing for a gossip column and hanging around with a group of gadfly photographers, including one named Paparazzo, whose name, according to film historian Gary Giddins, was “borrowed from a tavern keeper in George Gissing’s 1901 travel memoir of Southern Italy.” It is a moniker that has stuck, transcending its source material even.

Marcello is a womanizer and although he has a jealous girlfriend in Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), he sleeps with the rich and elegant Maddalena (Anouk Aimée) in the home of a prostitute the two drive home one evening. Sex is an empty experience for the people in La Dolce Vita, something Fellini returns to again and again over the film’s ample running time. At a party near the end of the movie, Marcello and some others cajole a recently divorced woman into performing a striptease and then impassively look on as she removes her clothing. These are characters with nothing else to do and so filled with self-loathing that even the death of two small children is nothing more than fodder for the gossip columns.

This is likely why Ekberg’s appearance is so well-remembered. She is not one of these impotent hucksters and sluts, but the incarnation of perfection, the unattainable woman who Marcello attempts to seduce, but ultimately cannot. Fellini leans heavily on the satire during Ekberg’s sequences, as we follow her arrival to flashbulbs on an airport tarmac, to a race to the top of St. Peter’s that leads her entourage breathless, to a party in a piazza where another American actor insults Sylvia, sending her tearfully into Marcello’s arms and the Trevi Fountain. Ekberg’s Sylvia may be completely vapid, a cypher for the men who control her artistically and romantically, but that doesn’t stop Marcello from falling for her, at least until their evening together ends in daylight and she’s on to the next stop of her tour.

Ekberg would continue making regularly making films until the early ‘70s, but never scaled the heights of La Dolce Vita. She was considered to play Honey Ryder in Dr. No but lost the part to Ursula Andress. She would appear in two later Fellini films, including Intervista (1987) where she reunited with Mastroianni. Even though Fellini gave Ekberg her best role, she was unthankful until the end, even saying in one interview that the director owed her his success. In her later years, Ekberg suffered from a variety of ailments and money woes before finally succumbing to illness on January 11, 2015 in Italy.

Director Andrew Bujalski, known for his hyper-authentic, low-budget 16mm comedies about unexpected subsets of American life, enters the world of mainstream actors, digital cameras, and not-as-low budgets with the romantic comedy Results, but the lo-fi auteur’s most distinct qualities remain firmly intact. The fifth film by the 37-year-old director is unmistakably his, though it’s glossier and perhaps a bit more conventional than the others. Rather than diminish his voice or alter his style, such convention actually widens the director’s reach, opening up new images and scenarios in which the director imbues his own idiosyncratic flourishes. As much as Results feels like a departure, it also feels like an incredible leap forward, a film that’s both the inverse and a spirited advancement of Bujalkski’s previous work.

Fans of the director will feel right at home in the film’s circuitous narrative and talky, character-driven set pieces. Set in the suburban enclaves of the director’s hometown of Austin, Texas, Results follows a love triangle between feisty personal trainer Kat (Colbie Smulders), her entrepreneurial boss Trevor (Guy Pearce), and Kat’s client Danny (Kevin Corrigan), a well-to-do, out of shape former New Yorker living in a sparsely furnished mansion following a divorce. The script is filled with stops and starts, misdirections and anticlimaxes, but it holds together beautifully, indicative of the characters’ fumbling lives and seemingly paradoxical desires. Though their behavior is confusing and often inscrutable, each character is searching for nothing more than happiness, a simple feeling complicated by other uniquely human behaviors like selfishness and vindictiveness. The characters lives are complicated insofar as they make them complicated, and their happiness is a matter of recognizing that they are, in fact, happy, even if they take a while to admit it. For Bujalski, one of American cinema’s smartest and most wry observers of social behavior, the pursuit of happiness it about the pursuit itself.

Single and rich, Danny joins the Power 4 Life gym, a small business owned by Trevor, the Aussie expat hoping to turn his modest operation into a global corporation. Kat, Power 4 Life’s most popular trainer and Trevor’s former fling, gives Danny private at-home lessons, and he quickly falls for her. Her affections stirred, the skittish Kat gives Danny a shot but quickly backs away, leaving him confused and mildly vengeful, so he partners with Trevor to help grow Power 4 Life, which confuses and annoys Kat. At its core, Results is about the way people navigate each other’s personal space, a notion lyrically communicated by the sweaty, handsy world of personal fitness, and these shaggy-dog scenarios–in which people get too close and back away only to get close again–reverberate throughout the film, the director’s way of playing the indie rom-com by his own rules. His films have an undoubtedly modest quality, but Bujalski remains a highly formal director, orchestrating geometric pivots in perspective and flow with elegant slight-of-hand. But where similar narrative strategies built to wondrous conclusions in Funny Ha Ha, Beeswax, and the masterpiece Computer Chess, the denouement here is the sort of shoehorned, improbable quick-fix he previously resisted.

Rushed though the end may be, the characters depart with a feeling of hope, and Bujalski’s brand of sentiment-free optimism is as fresh and welcome as ever. Said optimism once came from the radiant, impossibly down-to-earth performances by his non-professional actors, but his cast of pros acquit themselves nicely. Pearce, known for playing smoldering and enigmatic types in Memento and L.A. Confidential, brings newfound humor and vulnerability to a character struggling to carve his own path in the world; Smulders also plays against type, subverting her nice-girl appeal with attitude and neuroses; and the Walken-esque Corrigan, playing the film’s most traditionally Bujalksian character, anchors the story with humor and pathos. Bujalski’s direction is in lock-step the performers, enough that they seem to be the film’s focal point, but as is the director’s wont, the personal stories are part and parcel with the film’s impeccable craft.

With A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Roy Andersson brings his “human being” trilogy, which began in 2000 with Songs from the Second Floor and continued with You, the Living in 2007, to a close. Critics who felt that the Swedish writer/director had already begun to repeat himself with the second film may find this third one even more enervating, but there are pleasures here that match those of the first two, even if the format feels somewhat tired.

Pigeon operates under the same rigid formal constraints as its predecessors. It consists of a series of deadpan, tragicomic vignettes, each captured by a stationary camera set-up. The film begins with a pale-faced man gazing at taxidermy birds in a natural history museum, an apt metaphor for the experience of watching a Roy Andersson film. The barrooms, offices and sad, tiny apartments in which the film is set look, when filmed this way, like dioramas. This creates a distance from the characters that often makes them feel like zoo animals under observation. Andersson is a master of defamiliarizing the banal, and the approach he’s developed is a terrific vehicle for his wry observations on the absurdity of the human condition.

In theory, a film with no camera movement could be quite dull visually, but Andersson designs and conceives his shots with an eye toward perspective and depth of field, filling the frame with more information than can be taken in in a single viewing. So much of the pleasure in his films comes from the meticulous placement of bodies in door-frames, actions glimpsed through windows and the surprising spatial relationships between seemingly disconnected scenes.

Indeed, the film works best when the individual segments feel knitted together, as when the sound of a tap-dance class carries over into the background of another scene, or when two lovers from one scene are seen breaking up in a restaurant soon after. The question with Andersson’s films is always whether the pieces add up to a cohesive whole. Pigeon, more than the other two films, has something like an arc built into it, provided by two down-on-their-luck salesmen who pop up every ten minutes or so. The two men are hawking novelty items—including large vampire teeth, a bag of laughter, and a horrifying rubber mask they call Uncle One Tooth—all in the name of “helping people have fun.” But both men utterly lack the gift of salesmanship, let alone the joviality required to advertise such items, and their stolid, simple sales pitch becomes a running gag. The relationship between these two characters turns out to be the most moving and well-developed of any in Andersson’s oeuvre. It’s not enough to qualify as a plot, but nobody familiar with Andersson would expect one.

Yet the film is also full of striking set-pieces that stand alone on their own merits, especially those that dip into surrealism. At one point, the army of 17th-Century King Charles XII inexplicably shows up and marches endlessly across the frame, while their leader reposes in a bar with a glass of mineral water. There’s also an amusing flashback that’s presented as a musical number. But while Andersson is always performing a tonal balancing act, some of these episodes are too disturbing to be funny, and stand out awkwardly as a result. Near the end of the film Andersson delivers two of his most upsetting sequences, and they feel out of place in a film that normally buoys its despair with whimsy.

It would be silly to want a filmmaker as distinctive as Andersson to change—imagine asking the same of Wes Anderson, or Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. But while a director’s style is often intrinsic, form is not. Andersson could have learned something from Richard Linklater’s films with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy; in the final installment of his “Before” trilogy, Before Midnight, Linklater maintains the elements that made the first two films work so well, but by adding new characters and removing the constraint of time, tweaks the formula enough so that it doesn’t feel stale.

Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor has the distinction of being the first film in the trilogy, and its apocalyptic setting sets it apart. Pigeon, though it offers many of the delights we’ve come to expect from Andersson, ultimately feels like little more than an alternate version of You, the Living. There are worse films to rehash.

Fifty years after Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on ‘Camp’”, camp has become a signifier for all things exaggerated, tacky or slightly off. From Ed Wood to John Waters, camp has evolved into a narrative genre unto itself. It even has its own section on Netflix. Yet it remains a prickly concept. As Sontag wrote, “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.” I feel the same way about The Price of Gold, a feature-length episode of the television documentary series 30 for 30, about the 1994 scandal surrounding Olympic skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. A comprehensive retelling of events, The Price of Gold is as compelling as it is campy.

Tonya Harding was one of the best skaters in the nation but she wasn’t the typical ice princess. She was a frizzy-haired girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Her rival was Nancy Kerrigan, an American darling with sleek hair, designer costumes and a stable family. On January 6th 1994, Kerrigan left the rink and got whacked on the leg. The perpetrator turned out to be a friend of Harding’s husband. The media descended on Harding, who continued on to the Olympics and left a trail of sensation in her wake.

If, as Sontag wrote, “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural,” competitive ice-skating meets the requirement. There is nothing natural about a woman in a tutu spinning in circles on frozen water. It’s a sport with a degree of stylization that borders on the absurd. The hairdos are poofy and the costumes are more suited to a beauty pageant than a high-stakes sports arena. Camp is also about androgynous bodies and Tonya and Nancy’s athletic figures go against traditional ideals: feminine beauty combined with killer muscles, bedazzled dresses over quads that could cut a brick.

Director Nanette Burstein delves into Harding’s backstory and exposes all the right juicy bits. Harding’s father lost his job and young Tonya often skated without food in her stomach. Harding’s mother was an alcoholic and beat her daughter whenever her routines were less than perfect. According to Harding, “She told me I was fat and ugly and that I’d grow up to be a waitress.” When her mother appears in archival footage, she looks like a long lost Beale of Grey Gardens. With a fake fur coat and a parakeet on her shoulder, she is a real life Mommie Dearest, blurring the line between tough love and child abuse.

If camp loves anything, it’s hot-tempered women. Whether it’s a diva’s tantrum or a drag queen’s catwalk, camp lives in transgressions of femininity. Tonya Harding defies feminine civility with her aggressive, unapologetic manner. When her lace breaks at the Olympics, she bursts into tears. “It was a mess, a complete mess,” she says. She suffers a pitiful loss and blames the lace. In the end, Harding’s tragic flaw is her inability to take responsibility. Rather the smear her, The Price of Gold suggests that we all have a little Tonya Harding inside us. We do things without thinking and when we don’t feel good about it, we make excuses.

Apart from the human drama, the fashions in The Price of Gold are a joy to behold. We get neon Scrunchies, side ponytails and nylon zip-ups à la MC Hammer. During the footage of Harding and Kerrigan’s skating, we get to see the advertising that circles the rink. Ads for Reese’s, VISA and Little Caesar’s appear like a time capsule into Clinton-era consumer culture.

The Price of Gold is a campy gem but it’s also a smart critique of professional ice skating. Burstein depicts it as a snob sport and exposes the way its judges care as much about image as they do about ability. Burstein thoughtfully shows the media’s blatant exploitation of events. The scandal was a dream for CBS. They made a TV movie and covered it nonstop because the more they covered, the better the viewership would be for the Olympics. As Harding declares to the camera, “The media doesn’t care about anything except themselves and their paycheck.”

The attack on Nancy Kerrigan happened in Detroit, 20 minutes from my home in the suburbs. I was too busy playing Ninja Turtles to register what happened, but discovering the story now, I am as entranced as the public was 21 years ago. The Price of Gold touches on the single-mindedness of the star athlete, the cyclical nature of violence and the mass media’s translation of news events into hot button headlines. The Vaults of Streaming Hell are dark place but sometimes a piece of gold emerges from the rubble.

With Bridesmaids, Paul Feig entered a new phase of his already impressive career. His first hit film (after extensive directing for TV) was a female-centric response to the male-targeted gross-out comedy. Subsequently, Feig directed two more comedies that feature Melissa McCarthy and other funny women in prominent roles usually reserved for men. The latest of these, Spy, is certainly admirable in that regard, but the film, like many American comedies of the last decade, is far too long—at two hours, it overstays its welcome by at least 30 minutes.

McCarthy plays Susan, a mild-mannered CIA agent relegated to a desk, where she feeds instructions and information into the earpiece of field agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law). After a leak that compromises the identity of every field agent, the unknown Susan volunteers to step in and complete Bradley’s mission. It turns out that Susan aced training 10 years ago, but she was kept out of the field by a competitive Bradley. Nothing about the plot is particularly funny; it’s just a vehicle for gags and one-liners and extended riffing, not to mention some underwhelming action set-pieces. The spy elements are played straight, and the story is at once highly convoluted and totally uninteresting. Spy only really manages to be clever when Susan repeatedly stops outside forces from killing or otherwise compromising her targets, which would prevent her from completing her mission of finding the nuclear device.

What’s most frustrating about Spy is how it constrains much of its talented supporting cast, saddling them with functional, expository dialogue (especially in the case of Allison Janney’s CIA Director), or otherwise giving them little to do (as with Law or Bobby Cannavale as the villain). Rose Byrne has garnered praise for her role as a spoiled socialite, but though she gives her all—as she did in the much funnier Neighbors—Feig seems to have mistaken sheer unpleasantness for humor, and her character is intensely grating.

The other comedic leads are given much more freedom to ad lib. Jason Statham delivers a wonderfully self-effacing comic performance as an agent who takes everything he does to an outrageous extreme. The film’s funniest scene has Statham listing his accomplishments, which include reattaching his own severed arm and parachuting off a skyscraper using nothing but a raincoat. His character, however, is extraneous to the plot.

What made The Heat work in spite of its shortcomings was the chemistry between McCarthy and her co-star, Sandra Bullock. Here, McCarthy has a lot of people to play off, but she mostly goes it alone. Her best friend, Nancy (Miranda Hart), plays an increasingly prominent role in the film’s second half, but she’s not a foil for McCarthy so much as an equal partner—and their dynamic quickly becomes shrill. As for McCarthy herself, she becomes a much stronger presence as the film progresses, eventually transforming into the brash foulmouth we know so well.

All in all, Spy is exactly what we’ve come to expect from the people involved. Rodent feces are accidentally consumed, CGI vomit spews in slow motion, Jason Statham falls down and crude one-liners are delivered like a pillowcase full of bricks swinging at your head. But as in The Heat, Feig proves hopelessly inept at genre fare; the action half of this action-comedy is loud, excessively violent and never engaging or suspenseful—or even visually interesting. Within reason, it’s fine to put funny people in front of a camera and just let them go, but there’s value in crafting a tight, balanced screenplay, too. Lacking that, Spy’s success is intermittent, and ultimately not worthwhile.

Werner Herzog jumped on a seven-foot cactus after shooting wrapped on his second feature, Even Dwarfs Started Small. When one of the cast members was injured in a fire, the director promised “If all of you survive this shooting … I will do the big cactus leap.” For many filmmakers, this baptism by cactus would be more than enough proof of their dedication to art. Herzog was just getting started. If production work on his first features was no picnic, his next film would be his most dangerous—and greatest—yet.

Herzog’s aesthetic vision and physical dedication is evident from the first majestic frame of Aguirre, the Wrath of God. On Christmas Day, 1560, Spanish conquistadors in search of El Dorado descend a mountain path in the Andes. The camera seems to float above the travelers as they navigate narrow steps carved into the side of a mountain. Men carry supplies, cannons and animals up and down the valley as fog settles and gives the impression that the expedition has come down from the heavens. It’s one of the great opening scenes in cinema, and the setting was no special effect; Herzog took his cast and crew on location to the Andes, Machu Picchu and Amazonian tributaries.

The film’s narration is taken from the fictional diary of Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro), a monk who hopes to convert the natives to Christianity. But dreams of conversion and conquest are dashed by the quintessential Herzog landscape and madness as the crew descends from the heavens into hell.

Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is second in command to Don Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra), but when Ursúa decides the river is too dangerous to continue, Aguirre orders him shot, and the bug-eyed star takes command. This was the first of Kinski’s storied collaborations with Herzog, and a third of the film’s modest budget went to the actor’s salary. Herzog frequently tells people that he calls every grey hair on his head Kinski, and acknowledged that he may be the most difficult actor in the world to work with, but from his first appearance in the film, the Kinski presence is unmistakable. Fresh off a botched tour where Kinski appeared as an angry Jesus (you can see footage of this in the documentary My Best Fiend), the actor was in the perfect megalomaniacal mood to take on this crazed character. Was he ever not an insane genius? Kinski needs only to slightly contort his grotesque features into a menacing sneer to make himself known, so commanding was his presence that you can tell that his fellow cast members, including the young woman playing his daughter, were genuinely afraid of him.

The legend that Kinski performed under gunpoint is a lie, but it’s not that far from the truth. Herzog famously promised to shoot the actor when he threatened to quit and leave the set. “I told him I had a rifle – it was actually his Winchester [that Herzog had confiscated from Kinski] – and that he would only make it to the next bend in the river before he had eight bullets in his head. The ninth would be for me.”

Herzog wrote the script in a kind of fever, composing it on a drunken bus trip with his Munich football team. “I typed the whole thing almost entirely with my left hand because with my right I was trying to fend off our goalie sprawled on the seat next to me. Eventually he vomited over the typewriter. Some of the pages were beyond repair so I had to throw them out the window. There were some fine scenes lost because I couldn’t remember what I had just written. They’re long gone.”

Aguirre was shot with a single camera, but the footage Herzog and cameraman Thomas Mauch shot does not feel at all compromised by the difficult production. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Herzog plays with the notion that the human head remains conscious for a few moments after decapitation: Aguirre overhears one of his men threaten to join the Indians and orders that the man be decapitated; an executor comes as the would-be defector counts to 10, and after the head of the condemned flies off, it says its last disembodied word:” Ten.”

The film ends as magnificently as it begins, the camera circling Aguirre left alone on a raft, the sole survivor of the expedition, tormented by monkeys that have climbed on the skiff. Herzog had hired natives to wrangle monkeys for the scene, but they ended up selling them to Americans, so Herzog showed up at the airport and pretended to be a veterinarian claiming the monkeys didn’t have their papers. He used the monkeys for one unforgettable scene and released them back to the jungle. The director put himself and others in danger in the name of art, then released them to their lives, as changed as the cinema that he imposed his mighty vision upon. His Spanish conquistadors were no match for the natural splendor and terror of the Amazon, but Herzog was, and he conquered cinema.

Jude (Adam Driver) and Mina (Alba Rohrwacher) meet in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant in less than desirable circumstances: he has not done much to help the place’s stench, and the doors are stuck closed, leaving them alone with the aforementioned odor, mock-hopelessness and each other. It’s anything but a meet cute, but it certainly seems to function as one; shortly thereafter, they are sleeping together, getting married, and preparing to raise their first child.

At this early point in the story, Hungry Hearts is shaping up to be a rather innocuous film, elevated by director Saverio Costanzo’s dramatic staging and the performances of Driver and Rohrwacher. But this romantic-comedy in the making is, as the anti-meet cute at the beginning warns us, anything but what it appears to be.

Instead, it becomes a thriller about mental illness, with Mina deciding she does not trust doctors to take care of her prenatal child. It seems at first to be a minor roadblock—she isn’t eating as much as she should and doesn’t like ultrasounds—but it quickly becomes more than that. Following a narrative ellipsis in which the child is born, the real story begins: Mina is horrendously overprotective, refusing to take her son outside in the first seven months of his life and feeding him only plant products, resulting in stunted growth.

The sociological concerns of the story repeatedly come to the forefront, with the health benefits (and lack thereof) of veganism, vegetarianism and of listening to doctors recurring at multiple points because Mina, seduced by fortune-tellers speaking of an “indigo child” and by notions of purity that make even Carol from Safe look like a slob, adheres staunchly to her values regardless of the danger they pose for the nameless son. She is the mother, she repeatedly reiterates, and therefore she knows what’s best. Jude loves her but tries his damndest to take control, and again the gross-out intro is recalled as foreshadowing: their relationship is toxically claustrophobic, and their only hope of escape is if Jude is able to get hold of someone who can help them. With each of these values and shortcomings tied to female hysteria, Hungry Hearts borders on the misogynistic.

The film places our sympathies firmly with Jude, departing from his point of view mainly to show the harm that Mina inadvertently does to their child, and even when he hits her, the impression left is that he is basically a nice guy who would never really hurt her. Hence – in a crucial moment – we are led to believe that he was not responsible for a serious fall that Mina takes (the camera, for its part, obscures the action) and that she uses the presumed accident to cast him out—a decision the audience knows will kill the child and, as such, calls for an apparently sympathetic bout of vigilantism.

Serious social issues are treated ludicrously—the number of preposterous plot developments are countless, but, I suppose, should be accepted for the sake of the film. Perhaps more significantly, they are inflected with the semantics of psychological thrillers and horror films, most noticeably in the score and use of high-angle distortion lenses, the latter of which becomes an unrelenting stylistic tic after a particularly dramatic reveal. If not for the ridiculousness of the message and the lack of realist grounding for the plot developments Hungry Hearts would be offensive. You have to ask what led Costanzo to take issues of vegan parenting and overprotective mothering into such unexpected generic territory.

While the unexpectedness is commendable, you get the sense that Costanzo is less interested in reconfiguring and reworking genres than with hammering home political/sociological agendas. Indeed, the film’s total lack of a world that does not pertain directly to the narrative—whatever happens in the timely ellipses, Jude’s profession, the name of the son, Jude’s mother—attests to a film dedicated to propaganda without aestheticism.

On a more positive note, Costanzo’s New York is not like the New York shot by so many microbudget independent filmmakers working in that city, and although his fisheye lens is overdone and too on-the-nose, he deserves credit for his handling of the film’s visuals.

Likewise, Driver’s turn is particularly pleasurable; he and Rohrwacher were awarded at the Venice Film Festival. To the overwhelming majority of us he is the boyfriend of Hannah on Lena Dunham’s Girls. His performances since then, including a memorable role in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, have never been able to shake off that role, and he has come off as the guy who does his (very funny) thing very well. Save for the opening scene and a scripted outburst or two (when Jude discovers his wife’s misdoings), he sheds his prevailing image and succeeds as a dramatic actor. All this means that Hungry Hearts is not without its merits, and, in a small handful of scenes, it’s even not without its thrills, but neither helps to shake off the sour feelings caused by both the politics and the lack of aesthetic scope.

So far this summer, the scoreboard reads Aussie post-apocalypse one, dinosaurs zero as Jurassic World arrives DOA at your local cinema this weekend. The first Jurassic film since 2001, this franchise would have been better served remaining extinct rather than polluting the multiplexes with yet another loud, stupid and completely boring movie. Of course, the second and third installments already felt tired, meaning the good people at Universal Pictures would need to come up with a way to make Jurassic World bigger, badder and better than the lifeless sequels that led the franchise to its demise 14 years ago.

First step: choose a young, hot director who had a modest hit with a well-regarded indie film. It worked with Gareth Edwards, who was handpicked after the moderately successful cheapie Monsters to helm the Godzilla reboot last year, steering that monster to a domestic gross of more than $200 million. So for Jurassic World, the studio godheads tapped Colin Trevorrow, whose 2012 film, Safety Not Guaranteed, earned rave reviews for its quirky time travel premise. Unfortunately, it also kind of sucked and as Trevorrow makes the leap to the big time, he has made a movie completely devoid of the folksy charm of his prior one, probably completely overrun by the suits more concerned about making Jurassic World just vanilla enough to please everyone.

Next, bring in a hot, young star. After his star-making performance in Guardians of the Galaxy, Chris Pratt is poised to become this generation’s Harrison Ford. Too bad his character here, an ex-military employee at the new Jurassic World park tasked with training its velociraptors, is written to prevent Pratt from playing up to the charm that made his Peter Quill such a hit. Here, he simply glowers, runs from dinosaurs and pushes the film’s more helpless characters behind him as they slowly back away from the CGI creatures.

So now we have the hot new director who can’t really flex his indie muscles and the hot new star who is given a dead-end role. Now what? The big premise in Jurassic World aptly sums up what is exactly wrong with the film, actually. As Brontosauruses and T. rexes grow passé, the people behind Jurassic World are constantly looking for new ways to reinvigorate the park and prevent attendance from falling. You can’t simply repackage the same slop over and over. Sound familiar? So, to keep the tourists coming, the park’s scientists splice DNA from one creature with the DNA from another to create brand new dinosaurs. That is until one of their creations gets loose and starts murdering people.

There you have it, the old dinosaurs that filled us with wonder back when the first Jurassic Park came out in the ‘90s just aren’t cool anymore. That’s a pretty bad sell for a film predicated on its ability to inspire awe, wonder and terror. Hey guys, these old dinosaurs ain’t shit anymore, so we have this fucking dinosaur to compensate. Good thinking. You know what else sucks? For a park established on millions and millions of dollars in investments, why do all of its telecommunications crap out at precisely the wrong time? If you have a park filled with dinosaurs and a bunch of kids looking at them, you don’t really want any dead zones, do you?

Pair all this with a leaden script (including a scene where a dying dinosaur meant for tears can only inspire laughs), and you have one lifeless film on your hands. George Miller already staked out the summer’s best movie in Mad Max: Fury Road, throwing down the gauntlet for all the other blockbusters to come. Jurassic World doesn’t even come close. Put this franchise back in amber and throw away the key.

The post Jurassic World appeared first on Spectrum Culture.

The original Police Story is one of the great action movies, a showcase for Jackie Chan’s multi-hyphenate talents that produced the purest expression of his Buster Keaton-does-action approach. Slapstick gags and elaborate stunts do not coexist, they are one and the same, fluid demonstrations of Chan’s physical prowess and comic timing. But Chan has come a long way since 1985, including a long, ignominious tour of America that saw his stunts watered down and his foolish persona reduced to self-parody, and the Police Story sequels reflect the actor-director’s increasing visibility and the popular trends of the day. New Police Story, released a decade ago, reflected Chan’s desire to overcome the clownishness into which his broad humor had calcified, and now comes Lockdown, a film so deathly serious one can scarcely see how it could ever share the name of its lighthearted progenitor.

Lockdown begins with Chan’s Zhong, no longer a spirited Hong Kong cop but a weary Mainland officer, heading to meet his estranged daughter, Miao (Jing Tian). Chan’s erstwhile bubbly personality is long gone, replaced by the buzzed haircut of a Chinese cop and weary eyes. Now in his 60s and no doubt dealing with the residual aches and stiffness from his innumerable stunt injuries, Chan naturally lends some weight to an over-the-hill cop long past his glory days, but soon the film heaps on enough maudlin male tragedy to sustain a Chris Nolan trilogy. On the phone with Miao, Zhong drops clunky, expositional references to the fact that she has not been home in six months, and his miserable utterances are matched by the cold, metallic color palettes that dominate the film.

By the time the action kicks off, it…doesn’t, really. Miao’s boyfriend, Wu Jiang (Liu Ye), reveals a vendetta with her father and uses her as leverage to force Zhong to play along with his cryptic games. Wu seals off the nightclub where they all are, but instead of sparking a Taken-meets-Die Hard building rampage, the film immediately slows to a crawl for a nominal hostage thriller led by negotiation and standoffs. This is a significant come-down from classic Chan vehicles, but it could still have worked as a tense show of the actor’s more dramatic chops. Instead, the endless talking scenes unfurl as interminable teases of the villain’s motive, manipulated to seem complex by simple delay instead of complications in information. That leaves a great deal of screen time devoted to nothing in particular, forcing constant repetition of the same hackneyed moral debates and assignations of guilt that would have sounded stale coming out of characters in 1950s B-movies.

Occasionally, and through no fault of anyone’s own, something happens. At one point, when Zhong finds himself forced into a cage fight with a henchman, the film even becomes an enjoyable showcase for Chan’s toned-down stunt work. The fight is a nasty thing, devoid of the theatrics or comedy of the performer’s earlier work, favoring instead fashionable brutality, but Chan can still tussle and take a pounding. But even that scene suffers from the atrocious, frantic editing that propels the film’s action. It’s the kind of choppy cutting typically used to gloss over the obvious use of stunt doubles, CG and inexperienced actors in Hollywood films, and entirely unworthy of the honed physical acumen of one of the greatest screen martial artists of all time. The problem of the chaotic editing is compounded by how much of the film’s action is shown in brief flashbacks, as if even in this film’s world, entirely divorced as it is from its nominal predecessors, Chan can only seem impressive in the past.

To be clear, Lockdown is not a failure because it does not live up to the standard of a 30-year-old classic that could not be matched at this point even if Chan specifically set out to top that film’s manic charms. The actor’s decision to turn more toward drama is filled with possibility: slowed action stars tend to reveal talents never previously appreciated, often grappling with their own thoughts on middle age in the guise of their characters. But this is a Police Story movie only insofar as someone slapped that name onto the feature in the hopes of generating more box office, and if Chan left Hollywood in disgust at being reduced to a caricature in service of clichéd and cynical stories, surely movies like this can only show things are as bad back in the Mainland. Surprisingly, this inert picture nonetheless features that most blessed of Chan staples, an outtake reel, only instead of the classic displays of physical risk taken, these clips show Chan mainly goofing off after flubbed takes. Even so, these are the most invigorating moments of the entire movie: images of a smiling, joking Jackie Chan bouncing around with the giggles after a mistake or just deliberately messing with his younger costars are more than just the only consistently entertaining stretch of the feature. They’re also a reminder of how and why the charismatic fighter became one of the biggest stars in the world in the first place.

Kaspar Hauser appeared in Nuremberg one day in 1828, unable to speak but for one sentence, clutching a handwritten note that was the only clue to his identity. The text of this note, written in broken German, appears verbatim in Werner Herzog’s 1974 film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, the original title of which is Every Man for Himself and God Against All. The film sticks to the documented facts of the Kaspar Hauser case—a legend well-known in Germany—but brings out its philosophical resonance, mostly avoiding speculation about the man’s mysterious circumstances.

When Hauser learned to speak, he was finally able to describe the first 16 years of his life, spent locked away in a windowless room removed from any human contact, tethered to the floor and unable to stand, food appearing in his cell while he slept. But the location of his imprisonment and the identity of his captor remain unknown. The film begins shortly before Kaspar’s release—his keeper gives him a few of the basics he’ll need in the outside world, teaching him to write his name, how to walk and to repeat the phrase, “I want to be a horseman like my father once was.” And then Kaspar is dropped off in the town square in the early morning to be found and taken in. All of the information on which this section of the film is based comes from Hauser’s own account, but what happens next is well documented by those who cared for him.

Over two years elapse in the film, and Kaspar gradually learns how to speak, and is brought into high society in a scene that recalls an earlier bit when he’s put on display in a circus act. At times, Kaspar’s education plays almost like a slob-versus-snobs comedy: a school teacher attempting to teach Kaspar logic is flabbergasted by his simpler, less elegant solution to a thought problem. But there’s also a beauty to Kaspar’s view of the world, as when he fails to understand that an apple lacks self-determination, and can only fall where it may.

Far more than a simple docudrama, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is, as Herzog stresses in the commentary track on the DVD, highly stylized and aims to explore the deeper truth behind the historical record—what Herzog calls “ecstatic truth.” Herzog notes that the Hauser case is unique; while there have been cases of children raised by wolves—which means that they at least belong to a social order of sorts—Hauser, for most of his life, had no idea that other human beings existed, no concept of language and no contact with the natural world. Left by his master alone in the public square, Kaspar stands, essentially catatonic, seeing everything—a cow, a tree, houses and buildings—for the first time, and the viewer is invited to look at these familiar sights from his point of view. An early shot in the film, of a field of rye undulating in the wind, expresses the often-unnoticed wonder of the natural world.

The psychological underpinnings of Kaspar’s—to put it mildly—confused state are manifold. Catatonia may aptly describe Kaspar’s demeanor in the early going, but it doesn’t accurately convey what’s going on inside. He doesn’t respond to a flame brought close to his face, or to a sword thrust next to his head. But not only does Kaspar not know what literally anything is, he missed several crucial stages in his development. The mirror stage, as conceived by Lacan, is when an infant sees itself in a mirror and recognizes, for the first time, that it has a defined physical form, and can be seen externally the way it sees other objects. Until that point, the child is essentially a formless blob, a large eye moving through the world. So the fully grown Kaspar isn’t just neurologically immobilized, but completely lacking in awareness of his own body.

Language acquisition, too, has cognitive ramifications beyond the ability to communicate. Linguists have theorized that language is acquired all at once; this doesn’t mean that a child suddenly knows every word, but that the knowledge that, for example, an apple is called an apple, leads to the understanding that every object has a name—and it is only via language that humans know that a tree is a tree, or that a car is a car. So it’s not just that Kaspar has never seen a tree before, or that he doesn’t know what it is; he can’t even differentiate a tree from anything else.

Bruno S., a street musician with an unusual, troubled history of his own—and, along with Klaus Kinski and Kurt Raab, one of the New German Cinema’s most fascinating and idiosyncratic performers—brings an incredible physicality to the role of Kaspar. His eyes bug with fear and confusion, and his uneasy gait generates a few moments of genuine, if subdued, physical comedy. The fact that Bruno S. is by no means a trained actor aided him in the role of this ultimate outsider, but the commitment he shows in the film is truly exceptional; his performance—if forced to call it that—is simply great, without needing the qualifier “for a non-actor.”

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is one of only two precious films Herzog made with Bruno S., but the director has continued to find talent and beauty in unusual places. It’s part of what defines his cinema; while many of his contemporaries imbued their films with social criticism—and this film has elements of class-based satire—Herzog is a true Romantic, strongly attracted to the natural world and the most elemental aspects of the human condition. Only his fourth narrative feature, Kaspar Hauser is a masterpiece.

Are we in a post Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl age? Certainly, the trope and its name have entered the mainstream lexicon, and a number of films—(500) Days of Summer), Ruby Sparks, and The Pretty One to name a few—have tried to address or subvert the trope in one way or another, although each has arguably succumbed or indulged in the trope in the process, inadvertently becoming exactly what it tried to criticize.

Enter Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Its self-consciousness in telling a story defined by an MPDG, if not its awareness of the trope itself, eclipses its predecessors. The film unfolds in retrospect, with Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann) reciting in voiceover what we will soon learn is his college admissions essay, about how he floated through high school making parodies of his favorite films with his friend Earl (RJ Cyler) before having his path-of-least-resistance modus operandi upended when his mother forced him to spend time with Rachel Kushner (Olivia Cooke, the “dying girl” of the title) after she is diagnosed with leukemia. The story follows the trajectory you would expect, with mildly-amusing quip after mildly-amusing quip ensuring light entertainment. Greg is the insufferable, self-deprecating narcissist you would expect him to be and Earl is the clichéd black friend from a bad neighborhood who says things like “dem titties” repeatedly, a characterization that has rightfully caused a mild stir. Together, the two move on from “The 400 Bros” and “Brew Vervet” to making something original for Rachel, a task that Greg’s ironic shield and perfectionism are not well-suited for (as for Earl, he’s mostly sidelined here). And Rachel? Well, she’s the dying girl, and by dying, she shows Greg a lot about how to live.

Except—and this is the film’s most provocative element—Greg does not really change. His retrospective voiceover/essay has the same defeatist tone that he had before meeting Rachel, and the post-it note he includes when sending his essay and film to college showcases the exact characteristics the narrative of him and Earl and the Dying Girl is supposed to have helped him grow out of. With a bit more self-awareness and distance, Greg would be less of a stock character than the very idea of that character in and of itself, and the audience could critique the way he appropriates the life of a girl with cancer to suit his causes. Unfortunately, the film does not play that way, and the final act—a poorly written mess that leaves countless plot questions—instead depicts Greg as finally understanding that Rachel is an actual person rather than a character in his life. So why don’t his essay and his own storytelling reflect that? It’s an element of the film and an unanswered question that helps make Me and Earl more than a generic Sundance film noteworthy primarily for flattering the audience into feeling intelligent, a trait they will then reflexively ascribe to the film for appealing to them so handsomely (countless films are referenced, but only Established Classics; don’t expect any experimental films, lesser-known art-house fare, or popular films to be elevated to the same level as Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog). Unfortunately for the film, it’s also the primary element that makes it fail even on its own terms. The film is completely at odds with itself, indulging in what it criticizes without ever appearing to realize it.

Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung deserve credit for a handful of impressive long-takes, particularly near the beginning of the film, when Greg’s mother is first telling him about Rachel, and idiosyncratic framings give something to think about during the story’s lulls, but the MVP Award is shared by Brian Eno and Nico Muhly, whose score is simultaneously subtle and powerful, making emotional the film’s most hackneyed and improbable moments. Still, it’s hard to redeem a film that seemed to shoot itself in the foot from conception. Whether this is to be blamed on Jesse Andrews– who adapted his own book–or Gomez-Rejon, I cannot say, not having read the book. Still, I suspect both could have done better.

Movies should begin with questions, not answers. The best ones present believable characters in imagined situations while leaving room for audience interpretation. The Fourth Noble Truth has good intentions but lacks curiosity. It begins and ends with a solution (Buddhism) and the rest is empty space.

Aaron (Harry Hamlin) is an arrogant movie star. After smashing the windows of car, he’s ordered to attend mediation sessions with Rachel (Kristin Kerr). They sit cross-legged in Rachel’s living room and she tells him that life is full of “psychic suffering.” If he lets go of his desire, his unhappiness will fade away. A romance grows between them but it’s a graceless courting of two people who do not belong together.

The Fourth Noble Truth has the visual simplicity and awkward tone of a G-rated porno. The script is so bland that it sounds like filler. The film’s locations have as much personality as a two-star hotel room and the costumes are best described as blah. Rachel dresses like a yoga mom and Aaron sports the V-neck and leather jacket of every male actor in Hollywood. Broken into chapters named after Buddhist principles, the plot is structured like a manifesto, turning the film into one long Religious Studies lecture.

The film projects its vision of Buddhism so unquestionably that we have no choice but to resist. It’s not hard in light of the rudimentary way in which the religion is communicated. The film’s embrace goes so far as to suggest that terrorists would stop being terrorists if they meditated a little, a notion that’s as inaccurate as it is distasteful.

Hamlin and Kerr might be fine actors but they don’t get the chance to show it. Hamlin imitates a playboy half his age (he’s 63) while Kerr recites her lines with the breathy voice of an amateur therapist. Both performers are stunted by a dull script and limited backstory.

I hope circularity is a Buddhist belief because The Fourth Noble Truth ends where it began. Aaron seeks the same physical gratification he sought from the start. Rachel and Aaron mend their differences, but their romance isn’t remotely convincing. Aaron actually says to Rachel, “I like you because you don’t give me what I want,” which is itself a harbinger of disaster, but Rachel’s crush on Aaron is equally shallow. She likes him because he’s a movie star. That’s pretty much it.

Werner Herzog’s 2003 documentary Wheel of Time is a much better film about Buddhism. Bearing witness to ceremonies in India and Austria, that film provides a window into a massive population’s rituals of worship. The Fourth Noble Truth contains none of the reverence, respect and due attention Herzog paid to his 2,500 year-old subject. Instead, Noble Truth delivers a watered down, celebrity-friendly endorsement of feel-good “Buddhism.”

The word Buddhist comes from “budh,” or “to awaken,” which is the opposite of what this does. Its vapid characters and simplistic ideas are a full-body bore. That being said, writer/director Gary T. McDonald put care and effort into this film. The editing is clean, the shots are lucid and his style is unpretentious. If anything makes The Fourth Truth bearable it’s the sympathy McDonald seems to have for his characters. If only we could feel it too.

It is difficult to fathom why a new film of Madame Bovary needed to be made now, in 2015, but it’s even harder to connect it to the woman behind the camera; though Sophie Barthes competently steers this lavish, gorgeously designed production to the middle of the road, it hardly seems like the work of the same director as 2009’s Cold Souls, an amusing but overly derivative existential comedy starring Paul Giamatti. Perhaps given more time, a broader directorial sensibility will emerge, but at the moment, Barthes’ only trademark is casting Giamatti—though, because this fine actor rarely gets roles worthy of his talent, that’s almost enough to justify her career so far.

Mia Wasikowska plays Emma Bovary, the dissatisfied wife of a country doctor, Charles (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), in early 19th Century France. The film glosses over Emma’s stint in a convent, which in the novel is key to understanding why she marries Charles in the first place, and instead moves straight into their unhappy marriage and Emma’s dalliances with a legal clerk (Ezra Miller) and a marquis (Logan Marshall-Green). Giamatti plays Homais, a pharmacist who encourages Charles to undertake a risky surgical procedure for the sake of his status; Rhys Ifans plays Lheureux, a merchant who entices Emma with fine goods redolent of the luxurious lifestyle for which she longs, then turns the screws on her when her debt piles up.

As expected, Barthes’ take on Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece conflates characters, streamlines the plot and reworks the diegetic chronology; but while most literary adaptations do this to some degree, many of the choices here render the story much less compelling. Flaubert’s genius lies in his ability to evoke for the reader conflicting feelings about his characters. One way he achieves this is via extended or momentary shifts in point of view, which would be hard to preserve onscreen. Yet Barthes’ very conception of Charles Bovary misses the mark. In the novel he’s hapless and boring, but absolutely devoted to Emma. He dotes on her endlessly, and she despises him for his weakness and lack of higher aspirations. This film goes a much less interesting way with the character—as portrayed by Lloyd-Hughes, Charles is earnest and, in his relationship with Emma, distant, which saps much of the nuanced conflict from their relationship.

Most damningly, the film is so staid in its pacing and tepid in tone that the full force of Emma’s longing never comes across. Emma Bovary, a character defined by passion, is carried away by her romantic fantasies—but here, she mostly just seems bored, even when she’s doing what she wants. Part of the problem is the limited extent to which a character’s inner life can be conveyed without a narrator to dip into her consciousness; but the bigger issue is that the reworked story undercuts the significance of several major events. In the novel, Charles’s botched surgery on a clubfoot destroys his reputation just as Emma begins to consider renewing her devotion to him. Barthes shows so little interest in Charles as a character, or in exploring the complications of his and Emma’s relationship, that this portion of the film, if excised entirely, would hardly be noticed.

Lacking an original, or even a faithful take on the novel, Madame Bovary repeatedly gives rise to the question: Why bother?

Kay (Karen Colston) is a woman so desperate for guidance in life (or perhaps so completely suggestible) that when her neighbor and part-time amateur tea leaf reader tells her that she is destined to be with a man who has a question mark on his head, she breaks up an engagement over a loose curl hovering ever-so-delicately above a mole on her fiancé Lou’s (Tom Lycos) forehead. Such a setup, steeped in the mystical yet indicative of wickedly comical sensibilities, is hardly what you would expect of the Jane Campion responsible for the likes of The Piano and Top of the Lake. But no one would call her debut feature Sweetie uncharacteristic.

Making the jump from short films to features, Campion filled this tragicomedy with wall-to-wall inventiveness for the sake of inventiveness, the sheer playfulness expected of a first film. And that manifests itself in carefully curated compositions, skewed framing and the characters themselves. Neurotic Kay has nightmares about trees and uproots her garden sapling (Lou’s chosen gauge of their relationship’s health) in a midnight frenzy. Lou, in contrast, is a soft-spoken practitioner of transcendental meditation who barely mentions the fact that Kay has slept in the guest room ever since a brief cold gave her the opportunity for a little freedom in their relationship.

Both are happy simply to call this rocky time a “nonsex phase.” But, as the title suggests, the film abruptly shifts focus from the uptight Kay to her childlike and emotionally unstable sister, Dawn, aka Sweetie (Geneviève Lemon). With the arrival (more accurately, invasion) of Sweetie, the film settles on a more tragic tone and reveals itself to be a much more familiar, if off-kilter story about a dysfunctional family. As female leads in a Campion film go, Kay and Sweetie are just as complex, just as troubled as all the others. The difference here is that the selfish and boisterous Sweetie dominates her sheepish sister, and Kay doesn’t know how to fight back.

Through the cinematography of Sally Bongers, we see a world that is, in every respect, just a little off. Oddly angled shots, especially overhead shots from bedroom ceilings and rooftops, present these settings in ways both familiar and unsettling. And static shots frequently have characters contrasted in the extreme foreground and extreme background yet flattened within the frame, together physically but clearly in different mental spaces. Even the dialogue is delivered in a pseudo-mechanical style, the characters seeming uncertain of their own desires.

In Kay’s world, Campion emphasizes structure within the frame (those regimental lines of her precious porcelain horses), giving us insight into Kay’s ideal rather than her reality. But most striking are the truly comic cutaways peppered throughout, not least at Kay’s mother’s dude ranch. Again, those regimental lines appear, as Kay cuts four cowboys’ hair simultaneously, their chairs aligned diagonally in front of a perfect row of pastel-colored outhouses. But the most bizarre visual non sequitur shows two cowboys practicing their galloping dance steps in unison, their boots kicking up red dust with every step.

Eccentric and quirky only begin to describe this story. Every moment of the film is unexpected, a collection of disjointed and equally “out there” scenes and shots whose patent weirdness recalls David Lynch just as its comic technical sense predates Wes Anderson. Visually, Sweetie is steeped in striking avant-garde imagery. It is dreamy and mystical while maintaining a narrative inevitability. For Kay, these events are completely out of her control. From the instigation of her relationship with Lou to Sweetie’s derailment of her life, Kay makes few impactful decisions. Sweetie may be more outlandish than its successors, but Campion’s focus on women’s psychosexual experiences proves ingrained already, here presented with a playfully demented eye.

Cabbage Patch dolls were once ubiquitous. I have no idea if they are still sold today, but for the demented among you, there now exists Patch Town, a dystopian musical styled like a Russian fairy tale about the disturbing origins of Cabbage Patch Kids. Fetuses born from cabbage heads, they look just like human babies. Naturally, they were discovered in a dank forest by a Russian toy maker and frozen in a cryogenic steampunk cradle only to be distributed by storks and cherished by little girls around the world. Once abandoned by their adoptive “mothers,” they return to the Patch Town Enterprise gulag-factory, are restored to their living state and work the lines, ripping umbilical cords from cabbage heads in slave-like conditions. What’s not to love?

Co-writer and director Craig Goodwill is responsible for the twisted concept, originally an award-winning short film. It is part Toy Story, part Elf but wholly immersive thanks to its Soviet oppression and its lead, Rob Ramsay’s, mop top. Patch Town Enterprise is now run by the deceased toy maker’s jealous son (Julian Richings), referred to solely as Child Catcher. His leadership style involves an inordinate amount of Clockwork Orange-style re-education and strict rules about factory workers singing on the job. One such worker, Jon (Ramsay), battles this pitiable existence with childlike exuberance.

Not all of the mythos surrounding Goodwill’s story makes sense. Patch Town is a factory-town enclosed by barbed wire fences, and cabbage people only leave or return as immobile dolls. Yet the decidedly Soviet town is within driving distance of a contemporary city with normal humans and its own share of slum tenements. Jon, his wife and their black-market baby escape to this new world in the back of a tripped out Hindi van driven by a former cabbage baby (Suresh John). The goal is not only to escape Child Catcher but also to locate Jon’s “mother” (Zoie Palmer). All this while trying to avoid the police (aka the “fuzzy popo”). The story’s structural oddities, however, never take away from the film, but help cement its fairy tale origins.

Visually and thematically, Patch Town is exceedingly dark, but it counters this with unflagging whimsy and hilarious absurdity. It purposely ticks all the “children’s movie” boxes. Its hero is lovable, cheerful and, at times, just a big kid. He discovers candy and pops a dozen into his mouth, laughing maniacally. And, naturally, his new job in the big city is as a mall Santa. There are also sporadic musical numbers, though perhaps not enough to warrant categorization as a musical (especially since the “songs” in question are too short and have little bearing on the narrative). Patch Town plays like a marketing tie-in movie for Cabbage Patch dolls, only hilariously wrong on so many levels.

Don’t mistake Patch Town‘s endless genre influences or erratic tone as flaws in the design. The film simply reflects the overactive imagination of a child, coherence be damned. And its small budget in no way impedes Goodwill’s high concept. Unabashedly campy and deranged, Patch Town may end in a too-neat finale thanks to our golden boy hero, but the ride is unlike any a beloved children’s toy has taken before.

The Wolfpack is a film shot largely within one fixed location, surveying the cramped, shabby Lower East Side apartment of the Angulos, a nine-member clan trapped within a rat maze of their own making. That captivity owes mostly to the somewhat deranged beliefs of patriarch Oscar, whose Hare Krishna-inspired personal philosophy necessitated keeping his six sons and one daughter safe from the dangers of ‘socialization.’ Having settled in Manhattan during the dark days of the early ‘90s, Angulo appears unaware of the great shifts in the safety and overall landscape of the neighborhood, changes which seemed to herald the erosion of his cult-leader influence, as the growing boys began to boldly venture out of the nest. It’s on one of these forays that the ‘wolfpack,’ dressed in matching Reservoir Dogs-style suits, was discovered by filmmaker Crystal Moselle, whose entrance into the apartment completes the transfer of control, documenting as the once-powerless children become the dominant force in the household.

Yet despite this centralized focus, this is still a movie limited by a lack of access, both to the family itself, the psychological and cultural imperatives that precipitated their situation and the emotional after-effects that result from it. The latter two are largely due to a lack of interest, both in expanding upon the basic outlines of the story and the complexities of unpacking such a thorny state of affairs. Competently but unimaginatively constructed, the film seems more than content to just observe; satisfied with its big scoop, it doesn’t dig or explicate much, settling for cursory interviews with the kids and a basic reconnoitering of the captive world they’ve constructed. Kept inside for the majority of their lives, the boys gleaned their primary impressions of the outside world from VHS tapes and DVDs, granting them a singularly warped view of human behavior. Documenting the results, The Wolfpack lingers over lovingly constructed cardboard props and weird holiday rituals, hoping that these key details will become concrete substitutes for an actual analysis of their circumstances.

These objects also function as the film’s central kernel of hope, demonstrating how, despite being deprived of genuine access to the rest of humanity, these young dreamers built their own window to it. This resulted not only in countless hours of at-home cinema appreciation but pet projects to recreate their favorite flicks, accomplished via the manual rewriting of scripts (copied via closed captions and the pause button), and the painstaking construction of props (among them a fantastic Batman outfit made from cereal boxes and yoga mats), leading to the subsequent Swede-ing of those movies. But while this pat ‘power of cinema’ through-line coasts on familiar clichés about the transformative effect of movies, it mostly ignores the downside of using them as a personality-shaping force. Interpreted this way, the kids’ elaborate efforts at recreation seem like desperate attempts to import fragments of mainstream life into their cloistered world, which underlines more about copying than creating.

Late revelations about some of the older boys’ passage into the outside world seem further manufactured to distract from the looming questions which gather around that passage, and it’s increasingly clear how many details are being left out in order to streamline this narrative. Moselle’s film never gawks, and the affection it exhibits for the boys is clear, but it’s still hard to not be suspicious about its intentions toward the pack. Mostly this seems like the kind of symbiotic discoverer-discovered relationship that’s stretched back throughout the history of showmanship, but the film’s refusal to acknowledge its presence as anything but a documenting force underlines the inherent shadiness of its premise. Attempting to tell this story as a humanist parable free from bad guys, blame or consequences, The Wolfpack does a good job of building up a sentimental connection to its subjects, but never gets close to exploring the full potential of a fascinating topic.

Looking back, there’s something morbid about watching the opening scenes of Tommy Boy. After the hapless Tommy Callahan chugs beers and huffs down bong hits, he falls face first into a coffee table. Less than three years later, Chris Farley would be found sprawled on his living room floor, dead of an overdose. Nevertheless, in addition to being the only memorable film in Farley’s short career as a movie star, Tommy Boy both sums up his comedic genius and exploits his personal flaws—all within the familiar framework of the zany road trip.

Tommy is the kind of schlub who celebrates a bachelor’s degree-clinching D+ with (relatively impressive) fat guy cartwheels. He has lived a privileged life as the son of an auto parts magnate, to the point that he really doesn’t have to grow up. But he’s clearly the archetypical loveable loser, bumbling his way through pratfalls and probable head injuries as he coasts along into the nepotism of a desk job at his dad’s company. When Big Tom Callahan (Brian Dennehy) croaks during the climax of his wedding reception (after he’s been briefly joined in matrimony to a fraudulently-minded Bo Derek), Tommy Boy is forced to hit the road with David Spade’s ultra-sarcastic corporate stooge in an attempt to save the company, and thereby the town.

All in all, the plot is as thin as a shaky “SNL” sketch, even if it gives us the underdog story of someone, against all odds, trying to save hundreds of heartland jobs. Tommy Boy is entirely fueled by Farley’s likeability and his odd-couple mashup with a fastidious Spade. The well-soundtracked, mid-’90s road trip comedy had already landed belly laughs with Dumb and Dumber three months prior, but only one member of Tommy Boy’s traveling duo is dumb, the other is simply a prick. More formulaic than outright copycat, Tommy Boy does steal blatantly from 1987’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles, complete with the freewheeling and affable fat guy paired up with the uptight jerk. Tommy Boy’s good jokes are all crammed in early (the third act is pure cheese), but this isn’t the first or last beloved comedy to go over the top by the end—and not even the only one featuring an obnoxious Dan Aykroyd.

But there’s heart at the core of this movie, even if many of the jokes are mean-spirited. Set in Farley’s Midwest stomping grounds (including notable time spent in his native Wisconsin), Tommy Boy showcases Farley at his most earnest. Like Farley, Tommy loves to party irresponsibly. Like Farley, Tommy hides the lifelong jabs about his waistline behind a happy-go-lucky schtick. Given 20 years of distance, Farley’s Tommy is an even more loveable presence, especially when time has made all the lame fat jokes and Spade’s incessantly condescending snark all the more off-putting. The fat jokes are relentless (there are 19 in all) and seem like supremely lazy writing in retrospect. But for better or worse, there will likely always be a market for lowbrow slapstick about fat guys. Just ask Kevin James.

Tommy Boy’s supporting characters largely hold up two decades later. It’s fun to see Rob Lowe in all his mid-’90s comedic villain glory (“Party on, Wayne!”), though Bo Derek (who’s meant to pass for his mother) is a bit of an odd casting choice at only seven years his senior. Whether he likes it or not, Spade will perhaps always be more memorable as Farley’s sidekick than for much of his own work since. Re-watching this 1995 film now, it’s clear how much of the punchy dialogue has wriggled its way into our lexicon. At this point, many children of the ‘90s still paraphrase Tommy Boy and other mid-’90s comedy quotes in their daily speech, perhaps without fully realizing it (something that’s particularly evident upon revisiting these critically-panned cult classics).

In the film, Tommy gets his shit together to follow in his idolized father’s footsteps. In real life, Farley would go on mimic his own idol, John Belushi—both died of drug overdoses at age 33. In another uncanny coincidence, both Farley and John Candy died before the release of final films set in the 19th century American West. Farley’s tragic end can be hard to put out of one’s mind while watching his comedy bits now, no matter how many onscreen pratfalls the preservative magic of movies allows Farley to continually take.

At the same time, Tommy Boy is a Lorne Michaels-fingerprinted—and therefore likeable but flawed—comedy that encapsulates the kinetically corpulent wonder that was Chris Farley. You can’t help but wonder what might have been for him, once he got ineffectual follow-ups like Black Sheep and Beverly Hills Ninja out of his system. Would he have bestowed upon us a few darkly dramatic gems like those put out by Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler? Like his obvious successor in Melissa McCarthy (she did, after all, just stand in as Matt Foley at “Saturday Night Live”’s 40th anniversary bash), would Farley have transcended the bulbous physical comedy that defined his early career in the same way that she has just done with Spy? Who can say. Due to a troubled life and the excesses of fame, we’ll never know what was deep down inside the fat guy in a little coat.