There are few phenomena more fascinating in Hollywood than a sophomore slump. And for Norwegian director Morten Tyldum, who was Oscar nominated for his first English language feature (the brilliant biopic The Imitation Game), the fact that his follow-up flail is Passengers (D) must be some cosmic poetic justice of miscalculation. In terms of extremes, there’s rarely been as handsome a physical production – all art deco parlors, digital automats and infinity swimming pools overlooking a galaxy – so sullied by such a misbegotten story. (Note: I’m not sure if something is a spoiler if it’s laid out in a movie’s first twenty minutes, but this film is different than advertised; so read on at your peril). The tale of a lonely mechanic (Chris Pratt) accidentally awakened from hypersleep and adrift as the only man left in a spacecraft on a near century-long voyage who wakes up a sleeping beauty (Jennifer Lawrence) to keep him company knowing full well that reanimating her is sentencing her to death has to be the worst Meet Cute in the history of cinematic love stories. Pratt employs his goofball everyman humor in an attempt to wrestle likability from an impossibly written character. His unfortunate portrayal is akin to Bill Cosby making his Pudding Pop funny-face while readying a shiny platter of roofies. Lawrence fares only slightly better as an author who gets more than she bargained for; after Joy last year, we’ve come to expect this prized actress to cook up a holiday turkey. Unsure of whether it’s an Adam and Eve story with the betrayal placed before the couple could even discuss it or Titanic with rohypnol instead of the blue jewel, Tyldum’s “very special episode” riff on sci-fi is a colossal catastrophe of an idea. The two to three times when the movie’s tone careens into romantic montage or adventurous befuddlement are rare respites in a tale not unlike Dr. Lecter’s drug-hazed final act of seduction in Hannibal. Careers will survive this, and the two principal matinee idols are gorgeously filmed, but Passengers isn’t what space pioneers meant when they promised to boldly go where no one has gone before.
OK, I feel like I’m critiquing a Hallmark card with pop-up sentiment, decorative flourishes and a never-ending travelogue of treacle. Equally affecting and head-scratching, Garth Davis’ Lion (C) traces the journey of an orphaned boy in India adopted by parents in Tasmania and his quest as a twentysomething to find the brother and mother so long separated from him. The film’s tonally dissonant halves (cute kids for an hour, melodramatic adults for an hour) don’t add up with much clarity. Dev Patel isn’t particularly compelling as the adult protagonist, and his obsession (aka Waiting for Guddu) doesn’t completely translate into sustained empathy. Nicole Kidman gets a few poignant moments to shine as the adoptive mother; it’s a lived-in performance amidst all the artifice. Given the themes of abandonment, it is curious how Rooney Mara’s character kinda drops out of the picture. There are several tearjerking moments that don’t feel particularly earned and others that simply feel reductive. And there are times when the whole enterprise feels like an overlong Google Earth commercial or a protracted public service announcement. Overt symbolism about the gulf between the poor and the privileged abounds. This true-life story might roar into the Oscar race, but it’s extremely labored and incredibly on the nose.
Fences (B), the movie directed by and starring Denzel Washington based on the play by August Wilson, is a work of profound acting and themes. It’s a treasure to have the celebrated piece of theatre documented as a film, but Washington as director missed some opportunities to steer it into fully satisfying or cinematically creative territory. For those unfamiliar with the story, it’s a bittersweet 1950s family drama about a larger-than-life Pittsburgh sanitation worker (Washington), his wife (the luminous Viola Davis) and the siblings, friends and children who live in the shadow of the man of the house. In a time and place in need of heroes, Washington’s character – living on the downward slide side of a minor baseball career – hits the harsh ceiling of his promise and struggles with how to successfully channel his charisma into effective relationships. Washington is in full command of his acting craft with a non-self-conscious portrayal of a man who is often hard to love. Wow, he is a mighty actor! Davis also masters a showy role as a long suffering spouse and does a delightful slow burn coming into her own. The film is best viewed as a showcase of impeccable performances; and the drama is deeply affecting. The subject matter presents challenges to “open up” since it is largely staged in a home and a yard. While the choice not to expand beyond this vista is true to the work, it also feels a bit stifling. The film is certainly recommended and is sure to get tremendous recognition for its heartfelt subject matter and characters.
Gareth Edwards’s Rogue One (B) is the Star Wars film that puts its titular wars front and center with a Dirty Dozen style assemblage of warriors embarking on a strategic mission. This first standalone film outside the typical trilogy format is graced with whiz-bang visuals and bursts of muscular action, some of it a little too self-conscious as if the special effects folks came up with too many of their own ideas. The actors don’t embarrass themselves as they did in the prequel trilogy (I suppose this counts as a prequel too, just really close to the action of the original 
Comedians gathered in their cubicle lair, but hijinks and laughter were so rarely there in Will Speck and Josh Gordon’s amateurish lark Office Christmas Party (C-). Granted it’s hard to maintain an anarchic spirit for a full feature film even with talented actors (last year’s listless Sisters was similarly tedious), but this Party rarely gets the proper spike in its egg noggin. T.J. Miller and Jennifer Aniston play sibling opposites battling over the family business; Jason Bateman and Olivia Munn are technologists repairing botched client relationships and a misbegotten corporate social; and Courtney P. Vance is the strait-laced prospect sniffing out signs of lively office culture as the holiday shindig gets out of hand. Each member of this ensemble is phoning it in like a conference call. The reliable Kate McKinnon has some amusing moments as the HR lady, and Jillian Bell steals the show as a trigger-happy pimp who prompts some of the party fouls. Mostly it’s a wall to wall gag fest, with fewer of the pratfalls delivering the goods. Even the pranks involving sex, flatulence and drug-induced delirium – usually surefire bets in this kind of comedy – fail to land. As moviemakers, Speck and Gordon are babes in toyland squandering shiny objects all around them. Their potential watercooler wonderland becomes a bit more like entering your time-sheets.
The big draw for Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (A) is a triumphant and buzzed-about performance by Casey Affleck, but the film is such a brilliantly realized and sustained study of grief that it should be hailed as a superb film overall buoyed by this superior lead. Let’s get to that performance first: The less-known Affleck is note-perfect fully inhabiting an indelible character, a man of few words but remarkable expression. As a loner with anger management issues, he captivates for the duration of the film. This is easily a Marlon Brando On the Waterfront or Streetcar Named Desire level role in the strong and silent type with swirls of rage mold. The film is a modern return-to-hometown tale with mysterious flashbacks that deepen character and traces the stories of fathers who overcome their demons to be strong figures for their families. Lonergan lovingly photographs an austere New England environment in which his drama unfolds. He finely observes his characters, including Michelle Williams and Gretchen Mol as frustrated mothers, Kyle Chandler in a noble portrait of brotherhood and Lucas Hedges in a natural performance as a teenager. It’s a great companion piece with another 2016 film about unlikely dads, 
Haunted characters inevitably return to the scene of the crime, and in Tom Ford’s stunningly realized neo-noir Nocturnal Animals (B+), its principals traverse a tragic, twisty journey to discover the inescapable character traits vexing them through adult life. Ford photographs both a posh Los Angeles modern day story and a Texas-set film-within-the-film with an almost dreamlike clarity. The actors radiate an arch intensity in flashbacks and flash-forwards over a blissfully dense old-Hollywood Abel Korzeniowski score. This amped-up storytelling style benefits shape-shifting Amy Adams as a wealthy but lonely art curator a bit more than intense-in-any-role Jake Gyllenhaal as a novelist and star of his own shattered American pastoral. Shining in more straightforward supporting performances are Michael Shannon as a plainspoken Texas detective, Aaron Tayor-Johnson as a wild-tempered roadside ruffian and a nearly unrecognizable Laura Linney as a headstrong matriarch. Packing a punch within a puzzle, Ford’s tone poem is part romance, part revenge thriller, part requiem for one’s soul; and it’s consistently absorbing and affecting. In the tradition of Mulholland Drive, In the Bedroom and Fargo, it’s a film for those who love the form. The curious finale is sure to spark conversations among cinephiles.
There are three reasons to see Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen (C+): the continually wondrous Hailee Steinfeld doing her darnedest with the film’s frustrating and frumpy front-woman role, Woody Harrelson in an understated supporting part as her high school teacher and part-time consigliere to her darkest impulses and newcomer Hayden Szeto as her awkward admirer. Much of the film’s content feels like a ho-hum homage to Sixteen Candles minus most of the comedy; in the pantheon of cinema, however, Edge does correct a blemish of Sixteen by casting Asian-American actor Szeto as an attractive and full-developed love interest. Steinfeld’s character’s central conflict involves her brother (Blake Jenner, playing his usual milquetoast Golden boy) starting to date her one best friend (an amenable Haley Lu Richardson). Most of the movie feels like a series of unfortunate first-world problems for a central character who purports to be an old soul. Her disdain for fellow millennials just seems like an excuse for the screenwriter to write wittier zingers for her character than her classmates. Compared to John Hughes classics or even turn-of-the-millennium high school comedies such as Clueless, Ghost World or Mean Girls, this entry just doesn’t deliver many revelations or comedy gems. Steinfeld gives it all’s she’s got, but she’s filling awkward shoes.
Co-directors John Clements and Ron Musker have animated quests with more Herculean tasks, drawn crooning crabs making a bigger undersea splash and created caves with greater wonders than the adventure afoot in Moana (C+), their mostly adrift Disney Polynesian epic wannabe. It’s quite enchanting to look at, at least for the first act; and newcomer Auli’i Cravalho brings lovely life to the brave and modern title character. Coupled with a goofy demigod convincingly acted and sung by Dwayne Johnson, the heroine embarks on an ill-conceived odyssey marked by listless villains, average banter and misbegotten mishaps. There’s one good song (of seven) played several times in the film, a propulsive anthem by Hamilton‘s Lin-Manuel Miranda called “How Far I’ll Go,” but alas its prescient title begs the answer “too far” or “not far enough.” The most inventive use of tattoos since Memento and a creative battalion of Mad Max style pirate ships cannot lift the story to the gravitas to which it sometimes aspires. Bogged down in bluster and with story conceits which fail to differentiate it in the Disney kingdom canon, the film is barely better than its makers’ Treasure Planet and The Great Mouse Detective. The co-directors have found unexpected box office success but might have been better off leaving this journey in the bottle.
Every couple of years, directors as diverse as Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, John Sayles, John Carpenter, Robert Zemeckis and Christopher Nolan add to the pantheon of films addressing making contact with alien life. The notion of actually communicating with interstellar visitors, so memorably celebrated in five iconic music notes in the finale act of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, sets the stage for serious modern films tackling this task of translation, but Denis Villeneuve’s cerebral science fiction drama Arrival (A-) radically riffs on a familiar tune with a stunning viewpoint and sustained atmosphere that remixes a well-worn genre. The Canadian director follows successful crime thrillers Prisoners and Sicario with an all-out orchestra to the outsider, exploring what it means to be imbued with preternatural power to alter the course of human events or perhaps even bend time if only the universal ability to understand one another is possible. After twelve mysterious UFOs begin hovering over world cities, the U.S. military recruits a linguist masterfully played by Amy Adams to assist in making sense of alien communication. What follows is a deliberately paced, at times puzzling and consistently revealing opus on the phenomenon of language and science as bridge builders to deeper understanding and community. Adams thoroughly dominates the film and is engrossing and believable in showcasing her convictions and discoveries. Jeremy Renner is successful at playing her supporting scientist, the kind of role typically reserved for a love interest, but there’s scant time for romance when the world is at stake. The film’s effects – striking and unusual – buoy a thinking person’s meditation on big issues of international and cosmic collaboration. The kindest accolade of all is that the film inspires a desire for repeat viewing and discussion.