Roma (2018) ****

It took a while to get motivated to watch “Roma,” even though it's been streaming on Netflix for weeks. The black-and-white, Spanish language Oscar-bait has been described as director Alfonso Cuaron's love letter to Mexico City, and touted for telling the story of a maid/nanny, an “indigenous woman who is usually in the background.” Sounds like a real snooze-fest, right? Well, truth be told, the movie does start out pretty slow, but you gotta ride it out, because it's actually really good.

We meet Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a maid for a moderately-wealthy doctor and his family. She cleans and looks after the kids and gossips with her co-worker, Adela (Nancy Garcia Garcia), the cook. It's hard to guess these girls' ages, but they are probably only around 20 years old. They are loved by the family's four children, but for the parents, they mostly exist in the background of family life.

That's the point Cuaron is trying to make in “Roma.” Here, the focus is on Cleo's life, and the doctor and his wife, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), are in the background of her life. While their upper-middle-class marriage is falling apart, Cleo is lovingly raising their kids and spending her free time dating shifty guys from the slums. I don't want to give away any more of what little plot there is. There isn't some sinister plot or big twist. This is really just a slice-of-life kind of story. It's a tale of two seemingly very different women (Sofia and Cleo) pulling themselves through adversity and supporting each other. The strength is not in the minimal plot, but in the incredibly natural performances of the actresses.

Roger Ebert once said that movies are “a machine for generating empathy,” and “Roma” does just that. It allows us to really experience Cleo's life, including the love she has for Sofia's kids, and the love they return to her. (Alfonso Cuaron was raised by a nanny like Cleo, which he gives as a reason for wanting to tell this story.) Star Yalitza Aparicio had no prior acting experience. Her job is admittedly made easier by the fact that, as an indigenous woman, Cleo is naturally rather stoic and unexpressive. All the more remarkable, then, that she is able to make us feel so much. Marina de Tavira is also excellent as a wife picking herself up after being abandoned by her feckless husband.

Cuaron uses black-&-white film to stunning effect in “Roma.” The film doesn't take us to majestic vistas, but the cinematography makes ordinary places look stunning. An especially beautiful scene involves Sofia's extended family fighting a wildfire in the countryside.

“Roma” is not for everyone. It's an artsy, slowly-paced, foreign language film. If you dig this kind of thing, though, you will not want to let this film slip past you.

4 stars out of 5

Annihilation (2018) **

“Annihilation,” by writer/director Alex Garland (“Ex Machina” “28 Days Later” “Never Let Me Go”), is pretty good science fiction up to a certain point. That point occurs about 20 seconds into the film, which opens with a meteor burning through the atmosphere and striking the ground near a lighthouse. It's decent stuff. Then we switch over to biologist Lena (Natalie Portman) giving an obnoxiously pretentious pre-med lecture, and the film is really all downhill from there.

Lena, we learn, is mourning the loss of her missing-in-action, military husband, Kane. Then, mysteriously, Kane shows up at their house, disoriented and sick. On the way to the hospital, Lena and Kane are kidnapped and taken to a government facility near the lighthouse where the asteroid landed. From a remarkably forthcoming psychologist (Jennifer Jason Leigh), we learn that for 3 years, a shimmery force field has been slowly spreading out from the site. They can't see or detect anything beyond “the shimmer,” and every team sent in to investigate has simply disappeared. Kane is the first person to come back out, and he has no memory of anything, and seems to be dying.

Lena volunteers to join the psychologist and 3 other female scientists on a mission into the shimmer. There, they experience time disorientation and progressive mental deterioration as they explore an apocalyptic landscape of beautiful and dangerous genetic mutations.

There's no reason this couldn't be a fun concept, but with “Annihilation,” a talented director and cast somehow managed to create a complete dud. First and foremost, Lena sucks all the joy out of whatever room she's in. Even in flashbacks of her life before Kane disappeared, their relationship seems mostly stale and miserable. Jennifer Jason Leigh's character isn't exactly brimming with personality, either. Tessa Thompson is talented and gorgeous, but she's totally wasted here.

Then there's the “science” in this film. I was okay with the mixing of plant and animal DNA going on inside the shimmer, and I wish they had explored those possibilities more. I was mostly willing to go along with the ridiculous footage of dividing cells that Lena views through her portable microscope. But when Thompson's character explains that the shimmer is “diffracting” genes the same way it diffracts light and radio waves, I was ready to bail.

What you basically have here is a less trashy version of the movie "Species," and that's not a complement. “Species” also wasted some great actors on a ridiculous film, but at least it had all those Natasha Henstridge nude scenes. “Annihilation” could have used some of that, assuming that a better script, acting, and direction weren't an option. This film actually got a lot of good reviews, but I think it's a bore. That meteor in the opening scene is the high point.

2 stars out of 5

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) ****

Queen is one of those bands that it's easy to take for granted. Their music has been around my entire life, and even now, at any given moment, I guarantee you there's a Queen song playing on a classic rock station somewhere. I can remember my delight at discovering certain of their songs, like “Fat-Bottomed Girls” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” while other songs, like “We Will Rock You,” just feel like they have always been out there in the background somewhere.

A music biopic is a great way to showcase an old artist's music and get you to take a new look at it, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” is one of the best I have seen. Much like 1991's “The Doors,” the film gives us access to moments of creation for songs that are so ubiquitous that we may have assumed they always existed.

The film starts with Freddie Mercury fortuitously meeting guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor right after they lost the lead singer of their struggling band. Impressed with his voice, they offer Freddy a spot, and the rest, as they say, is history. Re-dubbed “Queen,” after Her Royal Majesty, the band slowly worked its way to the top with its unique, operatic, rock stylings.

As much as the music, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is about Freddie Mercury, presenting his life as a constant struggle against loneliness and isolation. He was the child of Farsi Zoroastrians from Zanzibar. His people were a religious minority chased out of Iran by the Muslims, so there is basically nowhere on earth where Mercury could truly fit in. Growing up in England, people simply called him a “Paki.” Later in his life, his homosexuality made him an outsider.

Speaking of Mercury's sexuality, there has been some bitching among the chattering class that the film glosses over his gayness or is homophobic in some way. I'm not sure what movie they were watching. For most of the film, Mercury is as openly gay as any artist was allowed to be in the 1970s and 80s, and the movie concludes with him entering into a relationship with his long-term partner Jim Hutton. I guess you just can't satisfy people who are obsessed with identity politics.

For the rest of us, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a true delight, reintroducing great music and great musicians. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll bang your head!

4 stars out of 5

Blackkklansman (2018) ****

Director Spike Lee has never been known for subtlety, and he isn't about to start being subtle now, in his story of Ron Stalworth, the real-life black cop who infiltrated the KKK. Based on Stalworth's book, “Black Klansman,” Lee's film is as bold and in-your-face as any of his work, and, in case you wondered, Lee does change the story quite a bit for dramatic effect.

In real life, Stalworth (played by John David Washington), the first black officer on the Colorado Springs police force, responded to a recruiting ad for the local Ku Klux Klan chapter. Using his “whitest” voice, he spouted racist rhetoric about blacks and Jews, and ingratiated himself with the chapter president. He then got a white officer to pose as Ron Stalworth to meet and join the group. The two gathered intelligence on the Klan, including the involvement of several active military personnel. They also became quite friendly with National Grand Wizard David Duke, much to his eventual embarrassment.

It's a great story, and Spike Lee gussies it up with some dramatic flourishes, including a bomb plot, and making Stalworth's partner (Adam Driver) Jewish. Like I said, Lee isn't known for his subtlety. Fortunately, the stellar cast is good enough to make up for most of the film's excesses. Washington (son of Denzel) and Driver are funny and convincing. Laura Harrier, who plays Stalworth's love interest, is cute as a button, and Topher Grace plays a spot-on David Duke. The best performance, however, may come from Jasper Paakkonen, who is absolutely chilling as a Klansman who is suspicious of Stalworth, adding some menace to the operation.

It's always hard for me to tell if Spike Lee understands that race relations are a two-way street, if he is just suspicious of whites and sympathetic to blacks, or a little of both. The film includes a long speech by Kwame Ture, who warns his young, black audience that a race war is coming, mirroring the race-war talk of the Klan members. Ture encourages violence against “racist, white cops,” and the film includes examples of abusive policemen who make it easy to sympathize with that stance. You get the feeling, though, that Ture wouldn't mind much if his audience just used “cops” as shorthand, or maybe even “whites.” Later, Harry Belafonte appears as activist Jerome Turner, describing a horrific lynching to a group of black students, and his talk ends with chants of “Black Power” intercut with scenes of Klansmen chanting “White Power.” Is Lee suggesting that black radicals and white radicals have some things in common? It doesn't seem characteristic of Lee, but seeing these scenes juxtaposed makes me wonder.

Then again, Lee finishes up the movie with footage of the 2017 Charlottesville, VA riots, including the deadly car attack, making it pretty clear where his sympathies lie. For me, the overt political message turns this from a 5-star film to a 4-star one. The music, costumes, script, and performances are stellar, but the sermonizing undermines the outstanding source material. Given a great story like Ron Stalworth's, Lee could have made a shorter, better, more powerful movie, and the racial message would have spoken for itself.

4 stars out of 5

The Fighter (2010) ****1/2

This is another awards-season film from several years ago that I let slip by me. My mistake. David O. Russell's “The Fighter” is a boxing classic on par with “Rocky.” The film is based on the life of welterweight boxer “Irish Micky” Ward, but if, like me, you aren't familiar with Ward's career, I would suggest watching the movie before reading anything about him.

The film tells the story of Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and his half-brother Dicky Eklund. Dicky (Christian Bale) is also a boxer, a local legend known for having once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard. Dicky is a mess now, a skinny crack addict with bad teeth. He is supposed to be helping his brother train, but he is completely unreliable. Ward doesn't fare much better with his manager, his mother, Alice (Melissa Leo), who seems mostly interested in getting what she can for herself and Dicky out of Ward's fights.

Ward is on a string of losses, partly due to poor management and training, when he meets Charlene (Amy Adams), a bartender and college dropout. Alice and Ward's sisters immediately dislike Charlene, partly because she is just slightly classier and smarter than them, mostly because she threatens their control over him and his career. Under Charlene's influence, Ward starts to realize that what his family wants may not be what's best for him.

I don't want to give away any more of the story. It's too good. I don't know how much poetic license Russell took with Ward's life, but he crafted one hell of a story. Christian Bale is an amazing actor, unafraid to transform his body for a role. With his skeletal face and bad teeth, he looks as much the crackhead as Pookie from "New Jack City."  Mark Wahlberg is no Tom Hanks, but he uses his limited acting range well. Melissa Leo won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for this role, although it's a bit tougher to appreciate her largely unsympathetic character.

It's a great cast telling a great story about working-class dreams. Comparisons to “Rocky” are inevitable. Both films tell the story of a boxer fighting his way up from the bottom with the help of a good woman. “Rocky” has the more rousing narrative arc, while “The Fighter” is more realistic, which makes sense given that the latter film is based on a true story. It's amazing how satisfying a story Russell creates without straying too far from the facts. “The Fighter” should join films like “Rocky” and “Raging Bull” in the pantheon of great boxing movies.

4.5 stars out of 5

The Wild Bunch (1969) ****

It took me a little while to get into Sam Peckinpah's gritty, Western classic. This tale of aging outlaws trying for one last score doesn't immediately provide you with anyone to root for. The outlaws are not your Butch and Sundance kind of gentleman robbers. Pike Bishop (William Holden), Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), and their gang are mostly crude, callous, and bloodthirsty. Some of the gang are racist towards Angel (Jaime Sanchez), the Mexican member of the crew, and suggest double-crossing him. When an injured gang-member can't ride, they give him a quick death and ride on. These men do have a code of sorts, but they abandon it, and each other, when it suits them.

The men assigned to catch these outlaws are no better. A bunch of filthy, greedy bounty-hunters, they carelessly engage in a gunfight while the outlaws are surrounded by innocent bystanders, slaughtering more townspeople than robbers. When the fight is over, their only concern is to claim bounties and pick over the bodies for loot. The only decent one among them is Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), a former outlaw who has agreed to hunt his former partners in exchange for parole.

As the movie went on, though, I began to appreciate these characters, with all their flaws, and to see why the film is considered a classic. The flaws in these characters translate into an unusual level of realism for films in the sixties and even today. It's fun to watch outlaws like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but real train robbers were probably socially maladjusted, unreliable, racist killers like the Wild Bunch. Real bounty hunters probably weren't much better than the outlaws they hunted, either. Both were ready to kill for money at the drop of a hat.

Time is running out for all of these men. The West is becoming less wild by the day, and they are looking down the barrel of a future that has no place for rugged gunslingers on horseback. In Mexico, the men see an actual motorcar, and on the trail they discuss the new flying machines they have heard about. In most westerns, the coming of the modern world would be treated as a sad thing, but as Sam Peckinpah presents these men, it will be hard to mourn them when they go the way of the dinosaurs.

Peckinpah also intended “The Wild Bunch” to be a commentary on the Vietnam War. In Mexico, the outlaws find themselves in the middle of a civil war that they cannot understand, much less control. When a village is plundered, you can flip a coin to decide if the attackers were government troops or Pancho Villa's revolutionaries. The outlaws are well-armed, on good horses, but in the Mexican desert, the indigenous locals can take them unawares at any time.

Having established his characters' many flaws, Peckinpah eventually gets us to root for them when they support Angel in his efforts to protect his Mexican village. We also come to like these outlaws a little through the intimate moments we spend, seeing them laugh or struggle with what conscience they have. In these moments of chit-chat and humor, “The Wild Bunch” anticipates movies like “Pulp Fiction,” where crime and action are mixed with moments of genuine conversation, where every line doesn't feel scripted. In the end, Peckinpah allows the Wild Bunch, even the worst of them, to have some honor.

“The Wild Bunch” won't charm you immediately like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (which also came out in 1969), but stick with it, and you'll see why this film deserves its reputation as one of the great Westerns.

4 stars out of 5

Inception (2010) ****1/2

“Inception” won a bunch of awards a few years ago, but somehow I never got around to seeing it. I think I got the idea that it was all special effects, and no story. I guess compared to the typical Oscar movie, it doesn't quite fit in. No one is gay, no one is sexually abused, and it isn't about the Holocaust. It turns out to be a crackin' heist movie, though, and I'm glad I finally watched it.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a peculiar kind of thief. He and his team hijack the dreams of their victims in order to steal secrets. It's complicated just getting access, as they have to be physically wired to the sleeper during the dream. They typically co-opt something like a dental anesthesia, or else they have to slip sedatives into the victim's drink, then hustle them off somewhere the team can get some alone time. Once in the dream, they manipulate things to get people to reveal their secrets. The highest-value, corporate targets are prepared to defend against dream assaults, so getting their secrets requires elaborate, dream-within-a-dream scenarios.

This can be heady stuff. The process of repeatedly waking up, only to discover that one is still dreaming, can be hard on the psyche. Cobb has spent a lot of time in dreamland, and he carries some demons that make his job even harder.

Despite his demons, Cobb and his team are the best at stealing secrets, what they call doing extractions. Then, they are hired to do an infinitely harder job, an inception. Businessman Saito wants Cobb to plant an idea in his competitor's head that will lead the man to break up his empire. Cobb and his team (including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy, and Ellen Page) craft a multi-layered psychic attack to achieve the toughest task of their careers.

What follows is one heck of a heist film, with car chases and gun-fights, sprinkled with head-trippy questions about dreams and reality. You do have to pay attention, or you'll miss details, like the nature of dream-time, which are necessary for things to make sense. In truth, it may not all quite make sense, but it comes close enough to be one damned enjoyable action movie. It'll haunt your dreams.

4.5 stars out of 5

Ocean's 8 (2018) **

So first, I'll have to admit that while I've seen the original “Ocean's Eleven,” starring Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack friends, I've never seen the 2001 remake, starring George Clooney, nor any of its many sequels. So why did I watch this spin-off sequel, starring Sandra Bullock as Danny Ocean's shady sister, Debbie? My wife wanted to watch it.

Fresh out of prison, Debbie has a big heist in mind, so she assembles an all-star cast of crooks, including Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Rihanna, Helena Bonham Carter, and Awkwafina. The plan is to steal a priceless, Tiffany necklace full of massive diamonds right off the neck of a movie star (Anne Hathaway) at the Met Gala.

Sounds like fun, right? Well, it is some fun, but not nearly as much as it should be. With this kind of star power, and the standard heist movie playbook to follow, it should be easy to make a decent, entertaining movie. Apparently easy wasn't easy enough for writer/director Gary Ross, who presents the laziest, most half-baked crime story I've seen in a while (which is kind of inexplicable when you consider Ross is known for movies like “Big” and “The Hunger Games.”) These excellent actresses do their best with the material, but there really isn't much to work with. Necklace or no necklace, what Debbie Ocean really steals is a couple of hours of your life.

2 stars out of 5

Touch of Evil (1958, re-release 1998) ****1/2

Orson Welles's last major-studio film, “Touch of Evil”, is known as much for its back-story as for the material itself. Welles is considered a genius today, but in the 50's, he was on the outs in Hollywood. Stubborn and temperamental, he was considered hard to work with and, worse, a bad investment. As revered as Welles is now, and was then among artists, none of his movies turned a profit at the box office. After a decade in Europe, Welles returned to Hollywood to re-write, direct, and act in this film, based on the noir novel Badge of Evil, by Whit Masterson. He was proud of the work,but the studio hacked it up, cutting some scenes and getting another director to re-shoot and re-arrange others. Welles sent them a long letter, detailing the changes he thought should be made, but the film was released as the studio wanted it. Years later, Welles's letter was used to re-cut the film,making it as close as possible to his vision. I loved it when it was released in 1998, and it's now streaming on Netflix.

Charlton Heston plays Miguel “Mike” Vargas, a police officer in what is essentially the Mexican DEA. He frequently works with American cops across the border, and he has just married an American woman, Susan (Janet Leigh). On their honeymoon, Mike and Susan witness a car-bombing on the border. The American police detective sent to investigate, Hank Quinlan (Welles), is a law enforcement legend. He has a long string of solved cases, and while he is fat, decrepit, and racist, he still has a sharp mind. Like many movie cops, he also has a tendency to play fast and loose with the law. In “Touch of Evil,” this isn't presented as a strength, but as the corrupt short-cut that it is, and when Mike Vargas witnesses Quinlan planting evidence on a suspect, he vows to expose him, giving one of the greatest lines in movie history, “A policeman's job is only easy in a police state.”

Mike understands the costs of corruption; his country is rife with it. He does the best he can to see justice done, and one of his big drug busts is coming to trial. The accused drug lord's brother, “Uncle Joe” Grandi, has a plan to discredit Mike, using his pretty, new wife. Desperate to avoid exposure, Quinlan joins in Grandi's plot, crossing a line he has never crossed before.

It's a sordid, twisted plot that doesn't always make much sense, but shot with such style that it doesn't matter. The cinematography is so remarkable that you could watch with the sound off, although you'd miss some great lines from Welles and Heston, not to mention Marlene Dietrich in a small, but pivotal role as a Mexican madame. Janet Leigh's acting isn't impressive, but she's an alluring damsel-in-distress in her pointy bras. Actually, the acting in general isn't what you would call good, but it's stylish as hell.

“Touch of Evil” is a classic, and in the end, it's about what every other noir movie is about. You can't just be a little bit evil. Once you dip your toes into the muck, you get dirty all over.

For some truly great reflections on the film, check out Roger Ebert's review. 

4.5 stars out of 5

Avengers: Infinity War (2018) ***

Well, it's all come down to this. After 10 years of Avengers and Avengers-related Marvel comics films, this is the big showdown. At least, that's how it was billed. If you are one of the handful of people in the free world who haven't seen “Avengers: Infinity War” yet, I think you deserve to come into it knowing that the story does not get resolved in this film. It ends in a cliffhanger, making this just the first part of the final story, with the second half, “Endgame” slated to come out this spring.

So if you've watched any of the Marvel Comic Universe (MCU) films over the years, you know that many of them feature some sort of shiny object, like the Tesseract or that green amulet Dr. Strange wears. It turns out these are called Infinity Stones. They were formed during the Big Bang, and they are incredibly powerful. A giant, bodybuilder of an alien, named Thanos, is collecting the stones so he can carry out his plan to cull the population of the universe by half. Up til now, Thanos and his army have had to go planet by planet, slaughtering half the population at random. With the combined, godlike power of the stones, he would be able to achieve his goal all at once, just by thinking it.

Big stakes. Big enough to bring (almost) all the MCU heroes together? You betcha, and there's some fun to be had in that, although most of them had already met in previous films. All that was really left was to bring Dr. Strange and the Guardians of the Galaxy into the fold and have them butt heads a little with the other Avengers.

Then the fighting starts, and we run into a problem of over-powered villains. Thanos and his minions are so ridiculously powerful, even without the stones, that it seems unlikely the Avengers could defeat them. Once he begins filling that gantlet with powerful stones, it becomes apparent that only the smartest, most coordinated effort by the Avengers could succeed. Unfortunately, the Avengers make one dumb decision after another, basically handing the stones over to Thanos.

Speaking of that gantlet, it sort of symbolizes my complaints about this film, which is just full of wasted potential. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the movie, but this cheesy, stone-covered gantlet looks like something a high-school theater troupe made using a hot-glue gun. The film, itself is full of good actors, but they are forced to make their characters do the stupidest things in order to make the plot of this mess lurch along to where it needs to go.

Now for the good stuff. The acting is actually good. The MCU characters have always been played by a relatively high-talent group, and these actors do the best they can with the material. My man, Peter Dinklage, even has a surprise role.  There's also some decent humor sprinkled through this thing. The best thing about this film, I think, is the villain. Thanos's plan is more evil and destructive than anything the Avengers have faced, but Thanos, himself actually has some humanity (or whatever, since he's not human). His concerns about overpopulation are based on his home planet's decline, and he genuinely believes that his culling makes life better for the people who remain.

The biggest thing to know about “Infinity War” is that it's just Part 1 of the final story. We'll have to wait until spring to find out how they unravel this conundrum, whether all those seemingly dumb Avenger decisions will lead somewhere good. As for the rest of it, it doesn't really matter what I or anyone says about these MCU movies. Some of us are simply compelled to watch them, the same way you are compelled to munch on chips and dip at a party. Sometimes it leaves you feeling bloated and disgusted with yourself, but you know that, come the next party, you'll eventually find yourself at the snack table, shoveling it in.

3 stars out of 5