San Diego Reader January 5, 2017 55


Arrival — Denis Villeneuve’s latest is an artier — certainly moodier and less entertaining, thanks to Amy Adams’s deeply inward protagonist and a blue-gray palette designed to contrast the barren present with the fruitful past — version of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. That is, it’s an alien-landing movie in which the alien landing is revealed to be not the point, but rather, the thing that helps to reveal the point. There, the revelation was that faith is possible because things really do happen for a reason. Here...well, there’s no sense in spoiling things, but there’s a reason why Adams’s opening voiceover states that she’s not sure she believes in beginnings and endings. It might have helped if the story had spent more time considering the ostensible issue: how to communicate with aliens who write with (admittedly captivating) coffee- cup stains? (Did nobody think to draw a pictograph? How do both sides make the leap from concrete to abstract? Etc.) Also maybe the actual issue. Because... everyone dies eventually? And spouses shouldn’t keep life-or-death secrets from each other? 2016. — M.L. ★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


Assassin’s Creed — The titular creed states that, unlike most people, Assassins know that nothing is true and every- thing is permitted. It’s hard to imagine true believers in such a creed turning around and saying that their own lives are worth nothing and all that matters is the protection of the Apple of Eden (which holds the key to free will), since neither of those statements can be true if nothing is true, and abuse of said apple surely falls under the “everything” in “everything is permitted.” And yet, there they are, the Assassins, sacrificing themselves and their loved ones, jumping off buildings with their wrist switchblades rampant, and taking on entire armies of authori-


tarian Templars. Go figure. No, don’t — figuring is very much beside the point here. And besides, you might miss how good-looking the movie is, from its dusty, sun-baked rendition of 15th-century Spain, to its surprisingly fun rooftop parkour chase, to its battling-ghosts-of- the-past special effects, to its buffed-out star Michael Fassbender. Miss that, and all you’re left with is an over-cast video game movie. Directed by Justin Kurzel. 2016. — M.L. ★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


Cameraperson — At the outset, cinematographer Kirsten Johnson asks us to consider this collection of footage she shot for various documentaries as her memoir, because while only a few actually depict her personal life (as mother to twins and as daughter of an Alzheimer’s sufferer), she says that “these are the images that have marked me and leave me wondering still.” (It is not difficult to see why, but in case you need help, there’s a scene wherein a woman who counsels victims of a mass rape in Serbia wonders, “How do we free ourselves of these stories?”) Johnson’s camera works hard to bear witness to the struggling world — an aspiring boxer, a busy Nigerian midwife, an Alabama single mother seeking an abortion, a Muslim family in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing, and more. But it works almost as hard to find life amid the death and love amid the ruins, to understand what makes the struggle worthwhile. Put briefly, she earns her juxtapositions of wildflowers and barbed wire. By the end, it’s clear that the arrangement of scenes has been thoroughly artful, and that Johnson is quite justified in her initial request. 2016 — M.L. ★★★ (DIGITAL GYM)


Certain Women — Don’t expect Certain Women’s tale of four disparate Montana women whose lives crisscross to end


with the quartet comfortably telescop- ing in one central locale. The opening section, involving Laura Dern as a lawyer whose male client places more faith in the judgment of a man than a woman, is fairly standard stuff. But then Dern sud- denly finds herself in the role of hostage negotiator, and it isn’t until she breaks free of the network drama constraints that filmmaker Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy) turns in the direction of exploring a favorite theme: where closeness lies within people. She comes to the conclusion that the odd connections one forms with strangers in passing is frequently stronger than the ones found in intimate relationships. A moonlight horseback ride between infatuated student (Lily Gladstone) and beleaguered teacher (Kristen Stewart) is at once this year’s most romantic and heartbreaking scene. Beautifully filmed and performed — the opening sequence using mirrors and doorframes to fuse the torsos of two characters to form a whole — is stunning, but in the end, the overall concept left me in the dark. 2016. — S.M. ★★★ (DIGI- TAL GYM CINEMA)


Collateral Beauty — The passage of two years after his 6-year-old daughter’s death finds grieving advertising exec Will Smith addressing letters to Love, Time, and Death. Reasoning that two years is adequate time to suffer, his callous co-workers and purported BFFs (Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, and Michael Pena) employ a private investigator to prove that Smith is mentally unsound. Borrowing a page from Gaslight, the trio of well-intentioned backstabbers goes about hiring the services of unemployed actors (Helen Mirren, Keira Knightley, and Jacob Latimore) to personate the three abstractions. Screenwriter Allan Loeb (The Switch, Here Comes the Boom) wrings gallons of ancillary anguish with-


out finding so much as one iota of the genuine emotion needed to pull off some- thing like this. Scrooge Smith’s suffering is palpable, but the pathos-paved road to redemption is littered with a few Tiny Tims too many. This leaves ample room for the A-list stars to suffer in colossal closeup. Audiences will mourn the pass- ing of 97 minutes. David Frankel directs. 2016. — S.M. ● (IN WIDE RELEASE)


Doctor Strange — As a Christian allegory, director Scott Derrickson’s entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe is impressively thorough. Proud and worldly neurosurgeon Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, cockily joking even as he fumbles with his accent) is cast down from his throne, seeks healing from a keeper of ancient spiritual wisdom and power, comes to believe in a world beyond his senses, learns that strength comes from humility, and finally finds that he’s been subtly recruited into a titanic struggle between good and evil. (The bad guy promises nothing less than eternal life.) There’s even tension between natural law and personal conscience! As a movie, it’s silly (jump scares for laffs, etc.), sloppy (lots of talking about mystical real- ities that turn out to be largely arbitrary) and spectacular (as in spectacle, as in trippy, kaleidoscopic, reality-bending spe- cial effects). The silliness and sloppiness don’t detract from the ultimate goal, how- ever, because the ultimate goal is a certain sort of dazzling, feel-good entertainment — and the addition of one more chapter to the continuing saga. 2016. — M.L. ★★ (AMC FASHION VALLEY; AMC MIS- SION VALLEY; REGAL OCEANSIDE)


Fences — There’s only one fence in director and star Denzel Washington’s presentation of August Wilson’s play about an outsized personality and the world he finds himself squeezed into: the


pine-plank job that trash man, father, and former Negro Leagues baseball star Troy Maxson builds around his backyard over the course of the film. But the plural is no accident: it points to that single fence’s many uses and significances: to keep loved ones in, to keep enemies out, to mark a man’s personal achievements and limitations — the reach of his power and the limits imposed upon him. It’s a lot for a plain wood fence to bear; happily, the real work here is done by the film’s fine cast (including Viola Davis as Maxson’s long-suffering wife) — and even more, by Wilson’s words, which do more to define the territory than any fence ever could. Your best bet is to let those mel- lifluous, multitudinous words bewitch, bother, and beguile you; then maybe you won’t notice the stagey presentation, slight story, and occasional emotional overreach. 2016. — M.L. ★★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


Hacksaw Ridge — Director Mel Gibson’s first film since 2006’s Apocalypto is visceral proof that the years haven’t done much to change him, at least as a filmmaker. He still loves outliers isolated by their beliefs, in this case a real-life Seventh-Day Adventist named Desmond Doss who wants to serve his country but won’t carry a gun. (The conviction turns out to be as much promise as principle, a fact Gibson would have done well to make clear sooner in the story.) He still knows how to deliver uplift after breaking the viewer down with sorrow and horror. (In this capacity, Hugo Weaving very nearly steals the film as a ruined veteran of the Great War.) And to paraphrase A Christmas Story, he still works in blood and guts the way other artists might work in oils or clay. When your protagonist is a World War II medic during the campaign to take Okinawa, you can make a poetry of corpses (and near-corpses)


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