Lady Bird, 11/8/16, BPM (Beats Per Minute), Last Flag Flying, A Bad Moms Christmas

Lady Bird

11/8/16

BPM (Beats Per Minute)

Last Flag Flying

A Bad Moms Christmas

Another relatively strong crop of films as we enter the season of Oscar hopefuls:

The Meddler, Elvis & Nixon, Hockney, A Hologram for the King

The Meddler

Elvis & Nixon

Hockney

A Hologram for the King

Capsules on a light late April week of movies:

Tammy

I apologize in advance to anybody named Tammy, but…

The Big Wedding

How sad is it that Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, and Susan Sarandon have made a movie together, and that that movie is "The Big Wedding," a crude, cynical comedy with a couple of chuckles at most. Its oversexed humor comes off not playful and horizon-expanding but crass and desperate.

The Company You Keep

What a cast. What a fucking cast. Get this: Robert Redford. Shia LaBeouf. Julie Christie. Susan Sarandon. Nick Nolte. Chris Cooper. Terrence Howard. Stanley Tucci. Richard Jenkins. Brendan Gleeson. Brit Marling. Sam Elliott. Anna Kendrick. Usually only Woody Allen can assemble so many talented actors willing to take scale to work with him, but Redford's called in a lot of chits and the results are enormously entertaining. What a pleasure it is to see every important role in a picture filled by someone with whom we feel an immediate connection and who can be counted on to deliver the goods.

Snitch

Now that awards season has passed, if you're looking to turn your brain off and kill 95 minutes, you could do worse than Dwayne Johnson's new action vehicle "Snitch," in which the Rock, a construction company owner whose son faces a mandatory minimum of ten years after accepting delivery of a FedEx package containing his best friend's huge stash of Ecstasy, volunteers to entrap a local kingpin and later a major Mexican cartel by running drugs and money across the country and over the border in exchange for D.A. Susan Sarandon's promise to release the kid.

Arbitrage

"Arbitrage" is a well-made and perfectly watchable financial-world thriller that ultimately doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Richard Gere turns in a solid lead performance as Robert Miller, a Wall Street wizard who, it turns out, made a big bet on a Russian copper mine that's dried up. To plug the hole, he borrows $400 mil from a fat-cat crony, finesses the books, and goes on with the show of success. Meantime, he cheats on his philanthropically minded wife (Susan Sarandon) with a would-be French artist who ends up dead one night under circumstances that, if made public, could imperil the life-saving acquisition of his firm by a conglomerate. Tim Roth tightens the screws as the police detective who believes Miller was involved in the death and "shouldn't get away with it just because he's on CNBC."

Robot & Frank

The near-future fantasy comedy “Robot & Frank” stars Frank Langella as a senile septuagenarian ex-con who lives by himself in a small rural town in New York. His successful son, Hunter, resents having to drive from the city and back every weekend, and his daughter’s off doing research in Turkmenistan, so one weekend Hunter brings a health-care robot to clean and cook for Frank and attend to his well-being. The first half-hour of this slight, 90-minute movie consists largely of crotchety Frank trash-talking and attempting to disengage Robot (“I don’t have an off switch, Frank”) before an idea occurs to him.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

After 2010's hidden gem "Cyrus," the Duplass brothers (Jay and Mark) return to the director's chair with the equally offbeat but less incisive and overly coincidental "Jeff, Who Lives at Home." Jason Segel achieves a certain honesty and likableness as the title character, a 30-year-old virgin and social misfit who's not quite agoraphobic but mostly stays in his mother's basement and watches "Signs" over and over. Ed Helms shows commendable range as Jeff's Porsche-driving brother, whose marriage is falling apart, and Susan Sarandon has seldom been more believable than as the mom who tells her AIM secret admirer she's old and getting flabby, but who's actually youthful in her openness to new possibilities. (Rae Dawn Chong also impresses in a rare meaty part; she hasn't had this much screen time since, oh, say, "The Squeeze.") The main problem is that, for a mumblecore movie, way too much happens in its 83 plot-heavy moments; coincidence piles on coincidence until the truly preposterous climax, which may make you laugh out loud. It's fine to wonder whether there are no accidents, and every wrong-number phone call has cosmic significance, but if there's no normal, quiet time for the magic moments to break up, they sort of lose their magic, don't they?