Bad Santa 2, Miss Sloane, Allied, Lion, Rules Don't Apply, On the Map, Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened

Bad Santa 2

Miss Sloane

Allied

Lion



Rules Don't Apply

On the Map



Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened 

Quick capsules on a mostly quite good week of movies:

Two Days, One Night, Song of the Sea, Predestination

Two Days, One Night

Song of the Sea



Predestination

Two overrated art films and a gender-bending time-travel paradox headline the first week of 2015:

The Immigrant

James Gray's "The Immigrant" is just as generic and uninspired as its title, and looks like it was shot through pickle juice.

The Best Films of 2012: #7

"A Prophet" director Jacques Audiard returns to my top ten with his new film "Rust and Bone," a major achievement featuring four or five of the most powerful scenes of the movie year. Marion Cotillard, in her strongest and most feeling performance since "La Vie en Rose," plays the tough and scrappy Stephanie, an orca trainer at a French Marineland, who loses both her legs in an accident during a routine set to Katy Perry's incongruously upbeat "Firework." I will never forget the scene in which Stephanie awakens from her long sleep, alone in a hospital bed very late at night, and discovers for the first time that she has no legs. The scene is a living nightmare, pierced only by Stephanie's otherworldly wail.

Hyde Park on Hudson, Rust and Bone

Hyde Park on Huudson

Rust and Bone

There's almost no substance at all to the weightless and pointless "Hyde Park on Hudson," about King George and Queen Elizabeth's war support-seeking visit to the New York home of a philandering FDR (Bill Murray) and an Eleanor (Olivia Williams) who lived separately from him but not apart. Through an accident of history, the story is told by a distant cousin of FDR's (Laura Linney) who became one of his conquests, driving with him out to a lavender-flowered field and giving him a hand job (from somewhere I heard the voice of Bea Arthur: "I swear I thought I was setting the parking brake"). Murray manages to contain himself enough to have a couple warm-fuzzy chats with George (Samuel West), but Linney's Daisy Suckley is such a nothing character (with no evidence of any thoughts or ideas in her head), and Linney herself such a standoffish actress, the entire weekend takes place at a remove, never developing any comedy-of-manners momentum or historical gravitas.

Little White Lies

An enjoyable, if fluffy, evening at the multiplex began with “Little White Lies,” a sort of French “Big Chill” by Guillaume Canet, writer-director of “Tell No One.” After Ludo is critically injured in a motorcycle accident as the opening credits end (Jean Dujardin, choosing an odd follow-up to his “Artist” Oscar, gets the Kevin Costner part), his friends, who’d been about to depart for their annual month of vacation at the beach house of Max (François Cluzet) and Véro (Valérie Bonneton), decide to go ahead with just a fortnight of fun in the sun. The camarades include Gilles Lellouche as the overgrown man-child Eric, Benoît Magimel as the handsome osteopath Vincent, and Marion Cotillard as the much loved and desired but intimacy-phobic Marie.

The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan's trilogy-concluding "The Dark Knight Rises" assaults the viewer with the unrelenting bass thump of a Hans Zimmer score (which also marred "Inception"), its queasily violent vision of a downtrodden Gotham held hostage by an unremarkable villain, and endless, nothing-special scenes of hand-to-hand combat, CGI effects, and green-screen projections. At 165 bloated minutes, it's boring beyond belief.

"Contagion": Come on in, the water's fine...

Steven Soderbergh would seem to have the right impersonal, clinical detachment required to make "Contagion" taut, gripping and seminal - the kind of issue movie that makes the cover of Time magazine. (Certainly the thought of a biological weapon such as the film's mutant bat-pig virus strain is deeply frightening.) Unfortunately, cinematizing even the most epidemic subject matter involves some choice of characters through whom to tell the story, and Soderbergh has created several uninteresting ones.