Black Mass                
                                  zero subjective stars

Hyped as Johnny Depp's return to relevance, a commentary on his pirate franchise and his  mostly quirky recent roles, Black Mass gives Depp the opportunity to play an extremely evil real-life villain. As Jimmy 'Whitey' Bulger, a South Boston gangster with a relish for strangling, shooting and beating victims to death, Depp gets to do serious drama.  Bulger  had a childhood friend who became a local FBI agent and helped facilitate his rise from thug to kingpin. He also had a brother who rose to become a respected politician.  A nice setup for a true crime gangster flick.

The cast is strong from Kevin Bacon as a lead FBI agent to Benedict Cumberbatch as a social climbing Boston politician.  Still, this film is anchored by Depp's ambitious, bloodthirsty thug and it lives and dies on those terms. 

 In the first ten minutes or so my brother-in-law and I turned to each other and said "What's up with his eyes?  He looks like a vampire alien."  And I spent the rest of the film trying to determine exactly why with Depp's light blue contact lenses looked so sketchy.  Makeup overkill.

That was a pain, but I could have overlooked it had the story unravelled more creatively.  In this telling, Bulger's no more than a psychopathic robot.  We're not privy to how or when he became homicidal and the few moments where he expresses genuine humanity don't make him any more cuddly.  And that's the ultimate flaw, a main character without evolution.  Nor do the writers throw in much fashion sense or music from the 70's and 80's, no disco boots or bad synth pop. The mood is somber.  It's a gangster movie with brutal killings, intimidation and corruption; there's really nothing to do but watch Bulger kill enemies, and more often, friends for 120 minutes.    Is Depp convincing as a killer? Yes, he's very unpleasant, but he's not really required to stretch much in this one.  

Good performances, good direction, nice cinematography and very lackluster writing.  

Ex Machina

Another in the metastasizing genre of films exploring artificial intelligence,  Ex Machina is sharply written in places and beautifully shot.  The special effects that render the female robot (Ava) are elegantly realized, suggesting a human skeleton encased in glass and light.

A mid-level employee (Caleb) at a Google-like corporation is seemingly picked at random to deliver a Turing Test ( a test of the ability of a machine to impersonate human traits) to the company's latest AI creation.  Promptly delivered by helicopter to a remote bunker in what looks like Alaska (actually Norway), Caleb engages in a battle of wits with the company's megalomaniacal genius.  Suffice it to say that Ava's gender is not accidental and the film begins to suggest a creepy take on the Pygmalion myth.

When I say creepy, it's creepy in the film and also of the film.  Is this a film about AI or about duplicity between the sexes? Certainly it's both, which might have been interesting, but the AI part of the equation is more convincing than the films gender stereotypes.   While the ending sugarcoats what has preceded it, appearing to give Ex Machina a feminist slant, too much garden variety misogyny has rolled under the bridge to make it palatable. 

On the plus side, the acting is quite good, especially Oscar Isaac's turn as Steve Jobs on steroids.  Ex Machina is shot very precisely and well edited.  The main set, a camera infested high security bunker, all glass and concrete,  is almost a character on its own.  It is certainly a well made film and much of the dialogue concerning consciousness, human and otherwise, is sharp and interesting.  What nags at me is the prime conceit of a male creator shaping his feminine creation.  Not much of a brave new world.

Wild Tales     **  (Two Subjective Stars)

     Pedro Almodovar is listed as a producer on this Argentinian film and his fingerprints aren't hard to detect.  Wild Tales is a collection of highly imaginative revenge themed stories that are steeped in black humor. From road rage to wedding parties run far off the tracks, the acting is uniformly good, superb in places, and the editing and choreography of some of the tales is honed to a fine edge.  Highly recommended if your taste in amusement runs to the shady side.

Leviathan

       Russian's entry into the Best Foreign Film category is a tale of moral putrefaction so it's no shock that the deepest rot has set in at city hall and the local Eastern Orthodox church.  When an artist paints a target on priests and politicians, they had better bring either a fresh, or a very incisive eye to the fight.  The director and co-writer, Andrey Zvyagintsev, brings some of the necessary to Leviathan, but he also delivers a ponderous grandeur that flattens his effort.

       Set in a forlorn if majestic village near the Barents Sea and bathed in gloriously bleached cinematography, Leviathan suggests both nature's and God's mercilessness.  Throw in some swirling Philip Glass and it's easy to overreach. 

      Against this backdrop, the film's characters are well realized members of the working class.  They drink vodka like spring water, have meaningless sex, shoot at portraits of past Russian despots and seem predestined to early graves. It all feels like Russia fighting a gruesome hangover from communism.  And some of this is wry and sad in a tangible way.  A teenager hangs out in the ruins of a church learning to drink.   A policeman knocks off a fifth of vodka and his wife asks nonchalantly if he's good to drive.  Of course he is.  And when they shoot at portraits of fallen leaders, one vodka swiller opines that Yeltsin is unworthy of the honor, having been such a small time dictator.

       Leviathan's finer moments are eventually lost to the director's epic vision, which includes allusions to Job, political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the sea, whales etc.  Oddly, the film was partially financed by the Russian Ministry of Culture, which wasn't pleased with the negative view of Russia in the finished product.  Maybe that's progress; it wouldn't have seen the light of day under communism.

What We Do in the Shadows

A searing Kiwi documentary probing the pathos and eros of being vampire flatmates, What We Do in the Shadows is a bit Best in Show and a bit Anchorman.   Four vampires of various ages, from young bad boy Deacon (139 yrs) to elderly, nearly embalmed Petyr (8,000 years) deal with the highs and lows of living a non-traditional lifestyle.  None seem to have any technological skills (they watch a static tv screen).  Most seem to favor Prince-style shirts and jackets when they go for a night out in Wellington.   There are werewolves whose leader chides them for foul language (Don't be swearwolves!), bat fights and communal meetings about chores just like on MTV cribs.  The werewolves, knowing in advance that their pants will rip off during the full moon, judiciously wear baggy sweats so they won't wake up au natural.

It's a great comedy setup and What We Do... delivers for the first 30 minutes.  Since it's a mockumentary it doesn't, theoretically, require a plot, but the hilarity gets a bit thinner as the film winds down.  Still great fun for those of you who think the idea is funny.  You know who you are.  Oh, there is a bit of bloodletting.   Don't worry, it's tastelessly done.

INTERSTELLAR

     Due to the Theory of Relativity,  IMAX decibel levels and its galactic length, the average viewer of Interstellar will age .75 years faster than the non-viewer.   When you're crossing the universe via wormhole, don't lollygag and don't lock the soundtrack at shuttle launch volume.   I liked the movie, but needed cryonic sleep to recover from stimulation overload.

     Too the good, director Christopher Nolan (Memento, Inception, The Dark Knight) went to great lengths to digest and imagine Einstein's Theory of Relativity at work.  Earth is dying for some unclearly defined reason and we need a new world.  A wormhole has appeared, mysteriously, and a few worlds at the other end look promising.   I had fun trying to follow plot through wormholes, event horizons, tesseracts, artificial intelligence and morse code.  Interstellar is a brunch buffet of scifi and melodrama and as such you usually know ahead of time if it's your virtual cup of tea.  Us fans aren't stunned when the film's scientific logic eventually becomes unglued.  "Let's slingshot ourselves around that black hole."   Fine, I didn't always believe Star Trek either.  

     On the flip side, Christopher Nolan's screenplay stumbles into one wormhole that's no longer excusable.  He can't write believable female characters.  I don't expect (or desire) to see frail women mastering relativity and exploring space. We're not in Edwardian England, this is the future and the effect is jarring. Come on dude, hire a woman co-writer, they're out there.

     The big failing of this film, however, isn't it's lousy female characters or it's humorously mystifying plot gyrations (see the blogosphere for more on that), it's the way Interstellar's soundtrack tries to hijack the movie.  Shot extensively in IMAX, Interstellar features loads of breathtaking visuals, but someone didn't trust these to work without thunderous reinforcement from organs, strings and synthesizers.  It's very often relentless.   And since I'm writing subjectively, the music isn't good, it lacks nuance and any sense of discovery.  Remember 2001: A Space Odyssey?  Whether you liked it or not, the music worked and it felt new.  Here the composer strains for that grandeur and achieves grandiosity.  You may enjoy the film despite the soundtrack.   I did, but yikes it was loud. 

Under The Skin      ** subjective stars

     Beautifully shot on small, high end digital cameras, Under The Skin takes place in Glasgow and rural Scotland.  That's the nominal location because this film takes place in mood, more than in space.  Scarlett Johansson is an alien luring men to their deaths for sustenance, but if you're not into sci-fi don't let that meager, albeit creepy, plot line discourage you. What we're watching is life on Earth from the alien's point of view and Johansson does a nuanced job of making that real. 
        As she travels around in a van picking up men, the alien (and the viewer) are gradually  immersed in the stunning beauty and strangeness of nature and humanity.  My sister said the film was more of a poem than a film, by which she meant more experimental than narrative.   That's partly due to the films slower pacing, more Euro than LA.  Instead of plot turns, Under The Skin delivers story through a steady accretion of image and detail.  Better known for the masterful gangster flick Sexy Beast, Jonathan Glazer chose to use unknown or non-actors in most of the subsidiary roles and often used hidden cameras to add to the film's documentary feel.  Johansson and her victims appear in the nude,  a handy marketing tool,  but Glazer's focus is on physicality, not titillation.  There's zero porn factor.

   It's a visual poem about an alien's introduction to Earth.  What stayed with me after the film was  the beauty of the images and a feeling of wistfulness towards life on the planet.