★★★★☆

Dir. Sam Mendes. 2012. PG-13. 143mins. Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Judi Dench.

James Bond is dead. Settle down — a massive spoiler has not been dropped. Physically, the British secret agent we all know and love is doing just fine. It’s a miracle, really, considering the exciting, exhausting precredits chase sequence that ends with our hero’s accidental shooting and forced exile. He’s dead to the world, and haunted by himself; everyone who has followed the series since the great Daniel Craig assuredly assumed the iconic role in Casino Royale (2006) knows that this Bond broods more than he bleeds. And the tropical paradise he hides out in is more like purgatory; drinking games involving scorpions are the norm. A perfectly timed news broadcast wakes Bond from his lethargic slumber: MI6 superior-cum-surrogate-mother M (Dench) is receiving threatening anonymous missives.

The spy who’s loved many is back in action soon enough, though it’s clear he’s off his game in both body and spirit — something that cannot be said of the cast and crew behind this terrifically entertaining entry in the 50-year-old film series. Everyone does A-level work, from bleach-blond costar Javier Bardem (a memorably psychotic addition to the Bond rogue’s gallery) to ace cinematographer Roger Deakins, who films the plentiful action sequences with thrilling clarity — a shadowy fistfight atop a Shanghai skyscraper and a Straw Dogs-esque siege finale are particularly memorable. Skyfall has the feel of both a ceremonial commemoration and a franchise-rebooting celebration, especially in the ways it attempts to too cutely sync up the ’60s-era Bond mythos (casual misogyny and all) with the more complicatedly Bourne-inflected recent episodes. The return to a mostly male-dominated perspective leaves a slightly bitter aftertaste, though it barely diminishes the myriad pleasures afforded by one of the series’s finest installments.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dir. Paolo Sorrentino. 2011. N/R. 118mins. Sean Penn, Frances McDormand, Judd Hirsch.

Did you hear the one about the former goth rocker who goes in search of the Nazi war criminal who humiliated his father? Well, no — guaranteed you haven’t heard that one before, which should give you a sense of the deliriously WTF nature of this relentlessly bizarre comedy from Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo). Our protagonist is Cheyenne (Penn, terrific), a soft-spoken Robert Smith look-alike living off his royalties in Dublin. The early sections attune us to his unique lifestyle — leisurely days spent wandering the local mall, playing handball in his estate’s empty swimming pool and pondering things like “What is Lady Gaga?”

Then the call comes from America: Cheyenne’s dad, whom he hasn’t spoken to in several decades, is near death. This inspires our travel-averse hero to return home and eventually embark on a cross-country journey to find that SS officer and — maybe, probably, since Cheyenne is digressive by nature — get revenge. The layovers are plentiful: a visit with the Talking Heads’ David Byrne, playing himself (one of his songs gives the film its title); a chance meeting with the man who first put wheels on suitcases — he’s played by Harry Dean Stanton, which strengthens the sense that we’re watching an emo-tinged homage to Wim Wenders’s great Paris, Texas (1984). But where that existential road movie expanded profoundly in the mind, This Must Be the Place fades in power and effect the closer Cheyenne gets to his goal. The film’s numerous idiosyncrasies — virtues at the outset — ultimately suffocate it.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dir. Yaron Zilberman. 2012. R. 105mins. Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Mark Ivanir.

A musical group is only as good as its performers; the same could be said for an ensemble feature like Yaron Zilberman’s soapy yet ultimately moving drama about a troubled NYC string quartet. The cowriter-director has hired four very strong actors for what sounds, in synopsis, like a nightmare of a Lifetime movie: On the eve of their 25th-anniversary season, the quartet’s cellist, Peter Mitchell (Walken), is diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which unleashes a host of resentments among the other members of the group. Second violinist Robert Gelbart (Hoffman) sees an opportunity to finally move to first chair. His wife Juliette (Keener), the quartet’s violist, finds herself growing apart from both Robert and their college-age daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots). And taskmaster first-violinist Daniel Lerner (Ivanir), wouldn’t you know, is falling for Alexandra, to whom he gives music lessons.

Infidelities occur, screaming matches are had, and languorous shots of a wintry Manhattan overemphasize the melancholy spirit afflicting all these characters. (To borrow a favorite Walkenism, the Bergmanish proceedings need more cowbell.) Yet the four leads more often than not transcend the material’s calculated moroseness; Ivanir is especially good as a man whose perfectionist facade masks a soul in perpetual turmoil. And Walken — having a banner year between this and Seven Psychopaths — makes the most of a humble climactic monologue that yokes all the maudlin elements into profound harmony.—Keith Uhlich

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For this “junior movie brat,” there are no accidents.

A brief history of Robert Zemeckis: Well-known for the technical virtuosity he displayed in such crowd-pleasing blockbusters as the Back to the Future series (1985-90) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), this Steven Spielberg protégé (a “junior movie brat,” per his words) made a turn toward more serious, though no less effects-heavy, fare with the awards-accumulating Forrest Gump (1994) and Cast Away (2000); even his big-budget sci-fi excursion Contact (1997) was more Space Odyssey than Star Wars. Eventually, Zemeckis moved into the uncharted realm of motion-capture moviemaking, where live actors outfitted in computer-connected bodysuits gave startlingly animated life to iconic figures from the worlds of Chris van Allsburg (The Polar Express), Old English myth (Beowulf) and Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol).

His latest film, Flight — a gripping drama about a pilot, Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), who battles several longtime addictions after miraculously landing a malfunctioning airliner — initially feels like a throwback to the pre-motion-capture days, when Zemeckis was just getting his feet wet with more straightforward, adult-oriented stories. But it’s clear as the movie progresses that this moody character piece is a much more mature and confident work, with an unapologetically tough-to-love lead and mesmerizingly deliberate rhythms that cut against much of the typical Hollywood dross in ways those earlier movies managed only sporadically. “The things that made the American movie unique and popular are the things that I think are kind of tiring nowadays,” Zemeckis, 61, says while lounging over a cup of tea in a Manhattan hotel. “There’s a sophistication to the modern audience and such a well-defined history of techniques in movies that things have to be redefined. In my opinion, one of the reasons movies are so bad is this idea that writers are interchangeable. I’ve never believed that. I think a good director has to understand writing.”

The writing was, unsurprisingly, what first attracted Zemeckis to this project, about a functioning junkie who is shell-shocked into a roundabout search for redemption: “Flight is all screenwriter John Gatins,” he says. “This is such a personal piece, and John became my creative soulmate throughout the making of the film. The essence of what is in the script, through all its drafts, came from the same brain. And Denzel has a very mysterious, instinctual rhythm that I knew would fit Whip perfectly.”

Flight certainly showcases the Oscar-winning Washington’s ability to play vulnerable with an edge — Whip’s spiraling bad behavior (snorting coke before the ill-fated flight; downing every bottle in a hotel minibar the night before a life-changing moment of reckoning) reacts powerfully with the actor’s innate charisma. “What I learned in making the motion-capture movies was that the actors can set the pace and the timing of a scene like they do in theater. Especially in this movie, I was always taking my cues from the timing of the actors, and I learned early in that, even though his character is spiritually bankrupt and barely alive emotionally, you almost always had to stay with Denzel. He’s a very mysterious guy, and this is such a raw and profound piece of work on his part.”

Viewers in love with Zemeckis the spectacle-maker will be plenty satisfied after seeing the plane-crash sequence — a convincingly terrifying blend of live-action and computer-generated imagery — that sets Whip on a many-obstacled path to recovery. But there’s an equal, if not more powerful fluency to the movie’s numerous introspective dialogue scenes, like a standout conversation in a hospital stairwell between Whip, fellow addict Nicole (Kelly Reilly) and a cancer patient (James Badge Dale) with some harshly direct near-death insights. “That’s my favorite,” Zemeckis enthuses. “When that scene popped up around page 40 in John’s script, I just thought it was such a bold stroke. I loved it. And then my first concern was, Could it be pulled off in a modern movie? When you’re doing action, it’s all design, making sure you get all the pieces for pure cinema. When you’re doing a scene that’s primarily performance, I think it’s the director’s job, very simply, to modulate. But everybody’s got to collaborate.”

It’s scenes like that that show Zemeckis’s commitment to melding impassioned, intelligent introspection to mass-audience marvels, a rare bird on the multiplex circuit. Asked to elaborate on his comment about the current state of movies, Zemeckis reiterates his cure-all. “I really believe that once we get over this endless discussion about the technique and the technology, it’ll have to come back to storytelling. It’s going to come back to writing. Nothing is written by accident.” He pauses before finishing the thought with a bit of wisdom that could fit perfectly into his protagonist’s mouth post-12-step. “Nothing happens by accident.”—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dir. Scott Thurman. 2012. N/R. 83mins. Documentary.

Don McLeroy is an amiable man — a good dentist to his patients, an enthusiastic Sunday-school teacher and an impassioned leader of the Texas State Board of Education. He also happens to be a Young Earth creationist, one of those right-leaning religious folks who discount the theory of evolution and believe a divine being brought the planet’s inhabitants to life only a few thousand years ago. Scott Thurman’s scornful doc focuses on McLeroy’s controversial, and somewhat successful, attempts in 2009 and 2010 to rewrite Texas science and history books with language that was more sympathetic to the intelligent-design perspective — a course of events that could potentially affect schoolchildren throughout the nation.

The film takes us inside the laborious board meetings with their often eye-rolling arguments (extended discussions about the use of the word hip-hop and the loaded term strengths and weaknesses). And Thurman interviews subjects on both sides of the debate, from Liberty University law professor Cynthia Dunbar to noted anthropology instructor Ron Wetherington — whose friendly yet still subtly charged debate with the creepily cocksure McLeroy is the doc’s best scene. Otherwise, The Revisionaries is strictly on the side of the secular-humanist angels; there’s even a mocking score by Mark Orton that makes sure we understand that McLeroy is a deserving figure of fun. Such a feature-length bludgeoning, even in the service of basic social and scientific literacy, is truly discomfiting.—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dirs. Tom Tykwer, Andy and Lana Wachowski. 2012. R. 2hrs 52 mins. Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent.

The thrill in reading David Mitchell’s eras-spanning, genre-hopping novel Cloud Atlas (2004) comes primarily from its stylistic showmanship: six stories set in respective time periods between 1850 and the far-distant future, with each tale authored in a different form — from airport-rack potboiler to solemn speculative fiction with its own invented dialect. Five of the yarns are interrupted midway through, only to be resolved in Russian-nesting-doll fashion after the sixth provides a reverberant narrative center. The rather hoary themes of social oppression, the transmigration of souls and simple acts of kindness echoing through the ages are secondary to Mitchell’s mesmerizing plate-spinning act. The author’s way with words both demands and keeps your constant attention.

By contrast, the independently financed, passion-project film version from cowriter-directors Andy and Lana Wachowski (The Matrix) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) does little that engages your intellect or emotions. The book’s tales are translated faithfully, story beat by story beat: The 19th-century seafaring saga, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” with Jim Sturgess as a sickly diarist; 1930s-set melodrama “Letters from Zedelghem,” featuring Ben Whishaw as a closeted composer; the ’70s paranoia-thriller-aping “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” with Halle Berry as a nosy reporter; the present-day comic picaresque “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” with Jim Broadbent as a publisher on the run; the 22nd-century dystopian sci-fi “An Orison of Sonmi-451,” with Doona Bae as a revolutionary Korean replicant; and the postapocalyptic aboriginal adventure “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After,” with Tom Hanks as a cowardly goatherd.

Yet the language of cinema has its own demands, and the solutions the Cloud Atlas–obsessed trio came up with in translating Mitchell’s expansive tome to the screen are thuddingly literal. The stories are interwoven into a ceaselessly crosscut tapestry that, rather than provide a sense of stakes-raising momentum, makes it feel as it we’re watching the longest, most laborious climax ever filmed. Plus, the decision to cast the starry company in multiple roles — the lead in one tale is an extra in another, and so on — never resonates in the intended fashion, since the performers are, with rare exceptions, buried under distracting pounds of makeup and prosthetics.

It would take a Peter Sellers or a Meryl Streep to find the connective tissue under all the features-and-chromosome-altering latex. Instead, the Wachowskis put all their chips on poor, befuddled Hanks as the central soul around whom all the others revolve. His journey from a rotten-toothed poisoner in “Pacific Journal” to a redemption-seeking tribesman in “Sloosha’s Crossin’” is meant to be the film’s emotional backbone. Yet Hanks never gets beyond dress-up gimmickry. (At best he’s bland, at worst embarrassing.) The other actors are similarly hamstrung by all the pancake and powder; only Whishaw genuinely moves as the suicidal protagonist of “Zedleghem.” But the spot-the-performer shenanigans at least provide a constant source of entertainment: Look! There’s Sturgess in yellowface! And Berry as a white Jewish trophy wife! Isn’t that Hugh Grant as a machete-wielding cannibal?

What the Wachowskis and Tykwer are attempting is crystal clear — a kind of epic, equal-opportunity parable about the transgression-cum-transcendence of rigid societal norms. (Expect plenty of think pieces paralleling the film’s gender- and race-bending theatrics with Lana’s own transsexuality.) Yet you never sense, as you do with Mitchell’s prose, that the directors have a vital grasp of the varied genres, nor of the profound themes that can spring from even the basest forms of storytelling. Instead, these disparate tales have been listlessly smashed together in the hopes that something substantial will emerge. For all of Cloud Atlas’s pseudorevolutionary blather about upending the “natural order,” the execution couldn’t be squarer.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dir. Stéphane Robelin. 2011. N/R. 96mins. In French, with subtitles. Jane Fonda, Geraldine Chaplin, Daniel Brühl.

Getting old’s a bitch. But the long-in-the-tooth quintet (Chaplin, Fonda, Guy Bedos, Claude Rich and Pierre Richard) at the center of Stéphane Robelin’s featherweight French comedy has it all figured out. Instead of wasting away in musty retirement homes, these two married couples and their lothario friend will move in together and take care of each other. Sounds like a good idea, but the sitcom stresses quickly come to bear: an overflowing bathtub that floods the house; arguments about whether or not to put in a pool; years-long infidelities coming to light. All of it is taped by an inquisitive grad student (Brühl) working on his master’s degree. It’s The Real World: D’un Certain Age.

Yet like that manipulative MTV staple, you can’t help but get caught up in the shenanigans, and it’s mostly thanks to the film’s two luminous leading ladies. Chaplin is an impish delight with her take-no-guff attitudinizing, and the sequence in which she seductively defuses a fight with her brusque spouse is both hilarious and a moving depiction of twilight-years intimacy. Meanwhile, Fonda struts like a pure movie star through her first European role since Godard and Gorin’s Tout va bien (1972), lending a light-touch dignity and resonant gravity to a creakily conceived character. (Let’s just say those X-rays she’s looking at early on are the equivalent of a telegraphing tubercular cough.) Even playing squarely to the middlebrow, this iconic performer can still make the heart skip a beat.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dirs. Joseph Fox and James Nubile. 2011. N/R. 97mins. Documentary.

This aesthetically undistinguished yet still engrossing doc follows the emotionally charged lead-up to the vote on Question One, a 2009 Maine referendum that put the marriage rights of gay and lesbian couples on the state ballot. The film attempts to fairly portray all sides of the debate, following both pro- and antimarriage activists from the first days of the campaign through a suspenseful election night. Gay codirector Joseph Fox hid his sexuality in order to get as close to the antimarriage “Yes on One” team as possible, so the sense that you know where the film stands outside its own purported objectivity is always prevalent. Nonetheless, all the interviewees are given human faces, and in the case of ambivalent “Yes” cochairman Marc Mutty a profoundly tragic arc that’s near-Shakespearean.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dir. Denis Côté. 2012. N/R. 72mins. Documentary.

“Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity,” said Werner Herzog. Candian filmmaker Denis Côté puts that theory to the test for a wide variety of animals in his alternately mesmerizing and monotonous experimental documentary. Filmed primarily at a Quebec safari park, the movie is a wordless succession of brilliantly composed images of nature’s creatures as they look and are looked at. The stunning opening scene observes a classroom of artists gazing rhythmically between easel and offscreen subject; only after a few symphonic minutes of pencils scratching on paper do we see the group is ogling a stuffed deer, its black eyes pointedly hollow.

The living beasts that Côté trains his camera on are similarly empty vessels. Cows stare dumbly ahead; a llama paces back and forth in front of a wire-mesh fence; lions and tigers loudly rattle their cages. Any temptation to anthropomorphize the subjects is counteracted by the abstract, coldly precise visuals. (An uptilting shot of ostriches as they move their heads in and out of frame is like a horror movie jump scare extended into infinity.) Tediousness sets in eventually; there’s only so much zoological abyss-gazing one can do. Even a climactic turn toward playfulness — baby elephants make everything better — can’t dispel the desire to leave this pseudo-wild kingdom far behind.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★★☆

Dir. Ben Rivers. 2011. N/R. 88mins. Documentary.

They could be images unearthed from another era, perhaps from another planet — a verdant dreamscape of fog and forest, photographed on gorgeously distressed black-and-white film stock with prevalent light leaks and emulsion burn. Our protagonist, it turns out, is human. He’s Jake Williams, a bearded recluse of practically no words (“socks” is his most audible utterance) who lives in a rundown abode in the Scottish Highlands. Things are different here: Time crawls by at an extremely measured pace. Daily tasks are relegated to bare essentials like chopping wood or doing laundry. And enough strange things happen — how exactly does that decrepit mobile home get up into that tree? — that the film’s designation as a documentary seems misapplied.

Director Ben Rivers has filmed Williams before, for his 2006 short “This Is My Land.” This feature-length offshoot adheres to certain particulars of its subject’s life — he does indeed live off the grid — while amplifying the alien strangeness of his existence. One mesmerizing scene captures the bushy-haired subject launching a makeshift raft onto a lake, settling in until the water around him is completely still. In another stunning sequence, we observe as Williams’s face becomes shrouded in total darkness while a fire burns down to ash. Such moments feel like a profoundly harmonic convergence between man and nature, though mileage will vary from viewer to viewer as to whether this singularly eccentric movie is ultimately illuminating or enervating.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★★★

Dir. David Lean. 1945. N/R. 86mins. Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway.

Nighttime; a railway station in Britain, circa WWII. An express train races through the smoky darkness, Rachmaninoff’s second Piano Concerto rages, and a man and a woman — their intimate tête-à-tête interrupted by a prissy acquaintance — silently say farewell, his hand lightly gripping her shoulder in lieu of a kiss. What led devoted housewife Laura Jesson (Johnson) to this point? The memories flood in after she arrives home to her husband and two children: that speck of grit that flew in her eye all those months before, which brought Dr. Alec Harvey (Howard) to her aid and led to an impulsive, mostly chaste affair. A love, of couse, that couldn’t last.

David Lean’s classic weepie, adapted from a Noël Coward play (Still Life), is sheer perfection — the gold standard of tragic romances whose influence can still be seen to this day. (Andrew Haigh’s recent indie Weekend gave the basic template a queer twist, and plenty have interpreted Coward’s story as a coded gay romance.) Johnson and Howard’s repressed passion could fuel an English tank battalion, and the shadowy black-and-white cinematography — a love story drenched in noirish tones — looks especially gorgeous in this new 4K restoration. But it’s not all tears and anguish: Lean and Coward leaven the film’s inevitably upsetting outcome with a few pointedly satirical asides, the best of which is a movie-within-the-movie (Flames of Passion) that does all the emoting Brief Encounter’s prim-and-proper protagonists can’t.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dir. Martin McDonagh. 2012. R. 110mins. Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell.

The muse has abandoned Marty (Farrell), an L.A. screenwriter with a major drinking problem and only a title (“Seven Psychopaths”) for his latest opus. Fortunately, he’s friends with Billy (Rockwell) and Hans (Walken), two nutcases who steal dogs for a living, and who also have some bloodletting tendencies that may just give Marty the inspirational push he needs. That’s two psychopaths for you, and there are plenty more where they came from.

This violent, vicious, frequently hilarious second feature from In Bruges’s Martin McDonagh is sure to be pegged as a Tarantino knockoff for its self-aware brutality and profanely verbose characters; guest stars Michael Stuhlbarg and Michael Pitt start us off with a gut-bustingly vulgar discussion beneath the Hollywood sign that climaxes with metallic slugs to the head. At worst, the film earns our dismissive scorn for its knowingly smug treatment of buxom bullet-bait played by Olga Kurylenko and Abbie Cornish. Yet there’s also a uniquely affecting spiritual component to McDonagh’s work, something he explores here via two sublimely ridiculous stories-within-the-story about a razor-wielding Quaker and a vengeful Vietnamese monk. It likewise helps that the writer-director has assembled such a stellar cast that paves over most of the rough patches. Walken is particularly alive in a way he’s rarely been since Catch Me if You Can, adding untold shades to Hans’s mystery-shrouded past — wait until you see what’s under his cravat — while still giving his singularly eccentric line readings (“Fuck tha cops!… Fuck ’em!”).—Keith Uhlich

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★☆☆☆☆

Dir. Daniel Barnz. 2012. PG. 121mins. Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Holly Hunter.

Feisty bartender Jamie Fitzpatrick (Gyllenhaal) is fed up with the inner-city elementary school that is failing her dyslexic daughter. So she enlists an equally nonplussed teacher, Nona Alberts (Davis), to help her take back the hellhole institution and remake it into a scholarly paradise. Loosely inspired by California’s recent parent-trigger law cases, this shockingly confused feature chugs along for a while as a reasonably diverting pseudo-inspirational melodrama (Davis even gets to do another of her trademark dripping-snot takes). But the film slowly reveals its true colors, pointing a fanatically accusatory finger at teachers’ unions while using twisted Obama-esque sloganeering about “order” and “hope” to further its simplistically anticollectivist agenda.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★★☆

Dir. Ursula Meier. 2012. 97mins. In English and French, with subtitles. Kacey Mottet Klein, Léa Seydoux, Gillian Anderson.

Resilient and resourceful, young Simon (Klein) moves dexterously between two worlds — the street-level apartment building where he lives with his deadbeat older sister, Louise (Seydoux), and the mountaintop Swiss ski resort where he steals from the vacationing rich to support his broken family. It’s a tenuous existence, one that Simon has maintained for a good while, but which is now on the verge of collapse thanks to the boy’s increasing carelessness and his own encroaching adolescence.

Director Ursula Meier deftly explores the character’s fracturing sense of self while grounding him in a vividly realized locale. The brilliant cinematographer Agnès Godard makes the snowcapped peaks look Olympus-like in their oppressive grandeur, heightening the divide between Simon and the people he sneaks among, one of them an alternately motherly and arrogant mark played beautifully by Gillian Anderson. But thankfully, Meier doesn’t lean as heavily here on rigid metaphor as she did with the abandond-freeway setting of her promising yet flawed 2008 debut, Home. This is a much more fluid film, where people and place are organically inextricable; when Simon blurts out a shocking midmovie confession, it feels like the entire world is seismically shifting.

If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that the overall project seems a bit too derivative of one of the Dardene brothers’ features, absent the stirring spiritual dimension that lifts their working-class melodramas to profound heights. But that’s a minor nit. Meier is clearly carving out a path all her own; the next one should be a gem.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dir. Tim Burton. 2012. PG. 87mins. Voices of Charlie Tahan, Winona Ryder, Martin Landau.

Tim Burton’s status as an outsider and iconoclast has curdled of late. The man who once thrilled us with the surreal adventures of manchild Pee-wee Herman, moved us with the lovelorn longing of Edward Scissorhands and had the bipartisan gall to incinerate all of Congress in Mars Attacks! is now a fatigued company man. Once Tinseltown’s defiant black sheep, he’s become a full-on Hollywood stooge (witness CGI-heavy mediocrity like Alice in Wonderland or this year’s moribund Dark Shadows remake). It makes sense that Burton would return to one of his earliest works, the flawed yet promising black-and-white 1984 short Frankenweenie, to try and revivify the spirits. He nearly gets there: As in its live-action predecessor, this 3-D stop-motion-animated redo tells the story of introverted suburban kid Victor Frankenstein (Tahan), who harnesses some inclement weather to bring his dead dog, Sparky, back to life.

Burton’s visual imagination runs wild: Students at Victor’s school resemble horror-movie characters like Igor or icons like Boris Karloff. Delightful throwaway gags are plentiful, from the dour defacement of the Disney logo to a Hello Kitty gravestone. There’s even an inspired pet-cemetery resurrection that quickly turns into a Destroy All Monsters–style free-for-all. What still eludes Burton is the ability to deepen the superficial allure of his visions. Victor is a brooding bore, defined more by his skeletal frame and abyss-black hair than by any genuine human emotion (compare him with the complicated protagonist of the thematically similar, movingly messier ParaNorman). And though the tale demands a darker outcome, the director disappointingly goes the Mouse House happy-ending route with a reprise of the original short film’s finale — one that somehow plays with even more cringeworthy sentimentality.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dir. Peter Nicks. 2012. N/R. 81mins. Documentary.

Tension-courting television dramas like ER and House paint a high-stakes portrait of hospital life with their endless parade of grisly traumas, histrionic emotions and taut cliffhangers designed to lure viewers back after each commercial break. Documentarian Peter Nicks gives us the grimly monotonous reality in his accomplished behind-the-scenes portrait of Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. The facility certainly sees its fair share of adrenalizing life-or-death cases. But the more prevalent vibes are uncertainty and frustration, brought on by the high volume of patients who are in less immediately dire circumstances.

Nicks’s camera floats through the hospital’s fluorescent-lit waiting room, eavesdropping on impatient and anxious conversations between people who almost all lack health insurance. (A good-natured admitting nurse somehow keeps the simmering intensity from boiling over.) We spend an equal amount of time in the physicians’ wing, where technicians soberly discuss triage with doctors who barely seem to be keeping it together as they try to move their charges through a ridiculously complicated system.

Nicks has clearly studied fellow documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s institutional chronicles: There’s an equal sense of horror in watching a chronic back-pain sufferer stress over his ability to pay a bill as there is in observing the body of a recently deceased 15-year-old getting wheeled into the hospital’s freezer. But the doc’s scope feels a bit small overall — more concerned with capturing the episodic adventures of these disparate subjects than with connecting their experiences to larger societal ills.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dirs. Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frédéric Tcheng. 2011. PG-13. 86mins. Documentary.

Anna Wintour? Feh! There never was, and never will be, a style icon quite like Diana Vreeland. This adoring documentary — codirected by the subject’s granddaughter-in-law — allows the late “Empress of Fashion” to hold court in an abundance of archival clips and a reenacted voiceover conversation between Vreeland and her amanuensis George Plimpton. She’d be the center of attention regardless with those over-rouged cheeks, endearingly lofty wit and emphatic gestures that could bring down the sun. (Even the parodic onscreen proxies she inspired in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face and William Klein’s Who Are You, Polly Magoo? pale in comparison with the real thing.)

The doc takes us from Vreeland’s belle époque childhood through her influential tenure at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue to her controversial stint at the Met’s Costume Institute. There are plenty of delicious stories: the origins of a quintessential Vreeland observation (“The bikini is the biggest thing since the atom bomb”); filmmaker Joel Schumacher’s hilarious anecdote about the time he escorted the fashion maven to a packed Harlem screening of Chinatown. Yet The Eye Has to Travel unfortunately sinks under the weight of too many talking heads, as well as a tendency toward hagiographic evasiveness. Members of the Vreeland family who dare utter a critical word about their work-obsessed matriarch — such as her tongue-biting sons Frederick and Thomas — get especially short shrift. Rather than dig deep into the zeitgeist-adored figure’s complicated legacy, this gleefully superficial movie prefers to give viewers what Funny Face’s Maggie Prescott would call “the old pizzazz!”—Keith Uhlich

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★★★☆☆

Dir. Robert Lorenz. 2012. PG-13. 111mins. Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake.

There was a time when baseball scout Gus Lobel (Eastwood) was the go-to guy in his profession. But now his eyesight’s shot, his contract with the Atlanta Braves is almost up, and a computer-savvy upstart (Matthew Lillard at his smarmiest) is gunning for his crusty elder’s job. Gus has one more recruiting expedition in which to prove himself; word has it there’s a talented hitter in North Carolina who may be Braves material. But fate (or screenwriter contrivance) won’t let Gus go it alone: His semi-estranged daughter, lawyer Mickey (Adams), decides to accompany the crotchety coot to keep watch over him.

You can predict almost every narrative beat of this old-man-makes-amends schmaltzfest, from the chilly initial encounters between father and daughter to the quietly redemptive climax in which Grandpa proves he’s still got it (and steals the final line from Midnight Run, the cheeky sonuvabitch!). Fortunately, first-time director and frequent Eastwood producer Robert Lorenz seems less interested in the story’s overall mawkishness than in relishing the stellar cast he’s assembled. The best scenes in Trouble with the Curve are the leisurely ones at field-side, in which old-pro performers like Ed Lauter, Robert Patrick and John Goodman hold their own against Eastwood’s every cantankerous gibe. (An empty chair, appropriately enough, doesn’t fare as well.) Alternatively, Adams gets a delectable onscreen partner in Justin Timberlake as a novice scout who takes an interest in Mickey. Even the old half-naked-moonlight-swim gambit feels fresh with these two involved.—Keith Uhlich

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★★☆☆☆

Dir. David Ayer. 2012. R. 109mins. Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Peña, Anna Kendrick.

Training Day screenwriter David Ayer’s Los Angeles–set police thriller begins with a smug fairy-tale invocation (“Once upon a time in South Central…”), then plunges us headlong into the stout-hearted, profanity-laden world of California patrol officers Brian Taylor (Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Peña). Taylor is conveniently taking a filmmaking class, hence all the on-the-street vérité and soulful direct addresses about a flatfoot’s forlorn life. But our hero isn’t the only one with a camera: There are some warring gangbangers out in the Southland who also like recording their exploits — or at least their f-bomb–laced tirades — and they don’t take it too kindly when the heat crosses them.

Ayer clearly thinks he’s making a grittily realistic ode to the long arm of the law, yet only the more intimate scenes ring true. End of Watch’s best moments are those between Gyllenhaal and Peña as they riff extensively while driving the beat — though their rapport feels like it comes more from offscreen personal regard than anything in the direction or screenplay. The first-person aesthetic, meanwhile, quickly becomes tiresome, and Ayer abandons the technique whenever he paints himself into a narrative corner. It almost becomes comical to count the number of “who’s holding the camera now?” reverse shots that the filmmaker haphazardly inserts to propel the story forward. Such visual ineptitude, like much else in this tediously cocky enterprise, is downright criminal.—Keith Uhlich

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★★★★☆

Dir. Pete Travis. 2012. R. 95mins. Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, Lena Headey.

John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra’s popular dystopian comic-book character finally gets the movie adaptation he deserves with this unapologetically violent 3-D action feature. A crisp prelude introduces the stunning postapocalyptic setting — a crime-ridden American megalopolis several states long — and our perpetually helmeted antihero (Urban). Dredd is one of numerous “judges” with the power to capture, sentence and execute those who break the law, and today seems like any other day, until he’s paired with a psychic rookie named Anderson (Thirlby).

The futuristic cop’s green protége leads them to a slum tower lorded over by the vicious Ma-Ma (Headey), who is peddling a senses-altering drug called Slo-Mo. What follows will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the recent martial-arts bone-breaker The Raid: Redemption, as Dredd and Anderson fight their way through bullets and baddies to reach the big boss woman. But plot similarity or not, there’s genuine artistry behind the film’s video-game goals. The impressively lean script by Alex Garland (28 Days Later) is shorn of almost all superfluity beyond a few dud Schwarzeneggeresque kiss-offs, while Anthony Dod Mantle’s sensational widescreen cinematography harkens back to the tension-inducing inventiveness of early John Carpenter (the added dimension is put to terrific use, whether in sinewy close-up or 100-story-drop long shot). And Urban gives the best “all mouth” performance since the Rocky Horror lips, sneering with seen-it-all gruffness and intoning Dredd’s trademark catchphrase — “I am the law” — with the kind of B-movie-inflected soulfulness that feels damn-near profound. We’re a long way from Sly Stallone and Rob Schneider here.—Keith Uhlich

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