Movie Nation

“The Judge” dawdles, lingers, takes sidebars and recesses — much like a celebrity trial in which TV cameras have been allowed into the courtroom.
A bloated all-star melodrama with none of the lean, mean legalese of a John Grisham adaptation, it’s a showboat’s movie cast with a lot of actors each promised “a big, cool scene.” And when those scenes of love, family, sex, illness and autism, small town life and courtroom confrontation show up, Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall, Vera Farmiga, Billy Bob Thornton and Vincent D’Onofrio swing for the fences.
The trouble with that is, the script has shortened these fences to Little League range.
Downey stars as Hank Palmer, hot-shot Chicago attorney to the rich and infamous. He’s “not encumbered” by the limitations of truth, honor or reputation, he admits. Which is one big reason he’s estranged from his father, a legendary small-town Indiana judge.
But when mom dies, Hank has to fly home. His little girl (Emma Tremblay, all pasted-on perkiness) wonders if grandpa’s dead, too.
“Grandpa Palmer’s dead to ME,” Hank riffs. That’s how Downey plays things these days, his antic banter has become a trademark, like Jimmy Stewart or Jack Lemon’s stammering, like Will Smith’s “Oh HELL no.” It’s a crutch.
Watch him trot it out when he reunites with his Carlinville, Indiana brothers. Autistic Dale (Jeremy Strong) and ex-jock Glen (D’Onofrio) need reminding that their ogre of an old man threw things at them.
“But he threw things at us to get our attention, NOT to draw blood,” Glen jokes. And rationalizes.
Hank cannot reconnect with the harsh, self-righteous judge (Duvall). And then the old man, who has grown forgetful, is accused of killing somebody with his car. He needs the ethically suspect wiseacre to remind him that if “You don’t talk, you walk.” Because grumpy dad is determined to use a local rube who moonlights as an antiques dealer (a goofy Dax Shepard) as his lawyer.
The case gives Hank the excuse to recall the charms of the redneck but picturesque mill town where he grew up, the ill-tempered locals (watch him mockingly size up a mob, “Sherlock Holmes” fashion) and the girl he left behind.
Vera Farmiga plays the shapely, country gal old flame, Leighton Meester is her hot-to-trot grown daughter. Yeah, they’re both eyeing the rich out-of-town attorney.
The story lurches from awkward yet funny seductions to autistic guy jokes, into death and divorce, disease, the indignities of old age and shattered dreams. Big secrets are suggested and revealed. Almost everybody has one.
The great Janusz Kominski (“Saving Private Ryan”) photographed this, and it is simply gorgeous — one immaculately framed composition after another. Even the home movie footage flashbacks (Austistic Dale hides behind an old eight millimeter silent home movie camera) are beautiful.
And some of the scenes have spark. But it’s always a showy sort of spark. Billy Bob Thornton plays a lean, feral prosecutor brought in to bring down the city slicker. Naturally, the movie makes a big deal out of his fancy folding chrome water cup. Downey is always engaging, even when he’s trying too hard. Duvall still has that “Great Santini” tantrum-tosser in him, and D’Onofrio and Farmiga are reliably real.
But the script wastes a lot our time.There’s zero tension to the courtroom scenes, and a weird illogic hanging over every abrupt lurch in tone or character behavior. Hank left 20 years ago, but graduated from high school in 1989. Downey and Farmiga are plainly in their mid-40s, D’Onofrio even older. That chronology doesn’t work in the movie for reasons that will be obvious if you see it.
Director David Dobkin (“The Change-Up”) is plainly more at home with the funny stuff, as are his under-credentialed screenwriters. If they’d edited the movie that way, the dramatic failings wouldn’t have stood out so much.
As it is, this “celebrity trial” of a movie so overstays its welcome that nobody will care about the verdict when the jury renders one on “The Judge.”
MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall, Billy Bob Thornton, Vera Farmiga, Vincent D’Onofrio
Credits: Directed by David Dobkin, written by Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:21

“Kill the Messenger,” the film about journalist Gary Webb’s shocking newspaper stories that connected the Reagan Era CIA to America’s crack epidemic, shows just how hard it is to film investigative journalism as a drama, and get it right.
The film about a reporter destroyed by a story that turned out to be one of the great scoops of all time feels muted, more compelling than riveting.
But Jeremy Renner dazzles as Webb, giving him both the swagger of a guy willing to take on the C.I.A. and its media friends, and the nervous worry that he’s in over his head.
His editor at the San Jose Mercury News (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) warns him — “We’re not the L.A. Times.”
“We’re not SMALL time, either,” Webb fires back.
Webb had already broken the first stories on police seizures of private property in drug cases when a drug dealer’s girlfriend (Paz Vega) approached him. The film shows Webb cleverly feeding questions to her beau’s defense attorney (Tim Blake Nelson) as the lawyer goes after a highly-placed informant in the dealer’s trial.
“You thought you were getting a piece of cheese,” the Latin drug moll purrs, “I just gave you the mouse!”
That makes the twitchy prosecutor (Barry Peppers) blink, and that points Webb to other low-hanging fruit, all of whom point to the Central Intelligence Agency providing planes and guns to the people then-President Reagan praised as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers,” opportunists who flooded America’s inner cities with cocaine.
The street dealer (Michael K. Williams, excellent) complains that he couldn’t “keep up with the supply.”
“You mean demand.”
“No. SUPPLY.” The cheap coke through Nicaragua, where Reagan’s Col. Oliver North was funding an insurgency against the leftist government, meant that poor Americans could afford cocaine. The crack epidemic began.
Oliver Platt plays the paper’s managing editor, the one who complains that “this was ten years ago” (the movie is set in ’96-97), but who relishes “The Big One” that Webb breaks.
Then the story turns, showing how Webb’s well-financed, well-connected competition — The Los Angeles Times and especially The Washington Post — used their C.I.A. sources to attack the story and Webb personally.
Director Michael Cuesta (“L.I.E.”) ratchets up the energy by chasing Webb with a jumpy hand-held camera, playing up Webb’s touchy meetings with government insiders (Michael Sheen), an imprisoned Nicaraguan drug lord (Andy Garcia, oozing charm) and a Ray Liotta character that seems inspired by Donald Sutherland’s Master Conspirator in Oliver Stone’s “J.F.K.” That bit of the tale makes it seem that we’re seeing all this through Webb’s increasingly paranoid eyes.
The personal cost to Webb and his family is also squeezed in, with Rosemarie DeWitt as the wary as a wife who is leery of her husband’s obsessions and mistakes and Lucas Hedges is good as the adoring son who sees Dad’s flaws for the first time.
Like the “Dark Alliance” stories themselves, “Kill the Messenger” feels leaky and a little incomplete. A screen version of a scandal with real people in it, naming some names and changing others, is never going to wholly satisfy.
But Renner’s performance — beginning with bluster and descending into twitchy paranoia — sells it and makes us fret for every “messenger” suddenly the target of the spotlight himself.

MPAA Rating: R for language and drug content
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Platt, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta
Credits: Directed by Michael Cuesta, written by Peter Landesman, based on books by Gary Webb and Nick Shou. A Focus Features release.
Running time: 1:46

He first gained notice in the U.S. in “The Wire,” as a detective on that seminal cops-and-drug-dealers show.

In his native U.K., he’s done lots of films and TV, with “The Hour,” a melodrama set in the world of early British TV journalism, stands out.

Then of course he was the vulpine villain Theron in “300,” where I first paid close attention to him.

Dominic West plays Jonathan, a jaded, cynical gay actor/activist who can be the life of the party in “Pride,” the new historical dramedy about gay activists who joined Welsh miners and created an historic political alliance that changed Britain.

Questions for Mr. West? Comment below.

Say this for Ryan Philippe’s “Catch Hell.” It may be a nasty, low budget exploitative genre thriller.But it’s as timely as the latest batch of stolen celebrity cell phone photos, as pointed as every Hollywood type’s nightmares about movie making in Louisiana, which has filmmaking incentives so generous it has water-logged the geography of movie making in America.
Philippe co-wrote directed and stars in “Catch,” so it’s easy to read a lot into this performance, a low-maintenance, low wattage but still recognizable movie star reduced to making a low-budget film in Shreveport.
“I am TOTALLY regretting taking this job,” Reagan Pearce (Philippe) gripes to his agent after enduring stares the moment he gets off the plane and idiotic backslapping from the rube producer who is behind his latest cinematic shot in the dark.
“What the hell happened to my CAREER, man?”
He can’t land the lead in James Cameron’s latest and is in desperate need of a “game changer,” the agent answers. That’s why he’s in Louisiana.
So he suffers the no wi-fi “finest hotel in town,” gets up early and clambers into the van that will take him to the set. Within minutes, he realizes this van isn’t going to the set, that guys (Ian Barford, Stephen Louis Grush) who are plainly homophobic, who freely use the N-word and who don’t know “P.A.” stands for “production assistant” are not from the film. And they have violence in mind.
“I’m Diane’s husband,” the older one (Barford) growls. As violins quiver on the soundtrack, the beatings begin. The shackles come out and Reagan is locked in a shack in the middle of the swamp, with only the in-bred Junior (Grush) and gators for company. Well, Junior AND his psychotically-enraged uncle who has access to compromising cell-phone photos and messages to his wife, some distant conquest Reagan may not even remember. He is going to pay for that.
“Catch Hell” has physical torture and sexually explicit mind games. It has a star who seems resigned to his fate and willing to give up and savage bumpkins straight out of “Deliverance” ready to take out their hatred of Hollywood and Hollywood values on him.
That description gives this simple, ferociously feral thriller more depth than it deserves.
Philippe the director handles the torture scenes and the set-up well enough. But he spoils suspense, shows his hand too early and never strays from a fairly conventional, if explicit, kidnap and torture narrative. The soul searching of “Buried” is missing from the performance, the sense of paying for one’s sins is mentioned, but never felt.
That makes “Catch Hell” nothing more than the sort of exploitation film that Reagan Pearce has signed onto, in desperation, one that he and we realize will be no game changer for the movie star on screen or the one behind the camera.

(Read Roger Moore’s INTERVIEW with Ryan Phillippe).
MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, sexual violence, profanity
Cast: Ryan Philippe, Stephen Louis Grush, Ian Barford
Credits: Directed by Ryan Philippe, written by Joe Gossett, Ryan Phillippe. A Phase 4 release.
Running time: 1:38

“Automata” is yet another “Blade Runner” knock-off, a sci-fi dystopia about robots getting too smart for humanity’s own good on an already sun-cooked Earth.
The novelty in this, which owes as much — cinematically — to “I Robot” as it does the rainy perpetual darkness of “Blade Runner,” is that the robots are actual gadgets instead of animated characters. The humans are interacting with, shooting and flirting with tactile, metal things with gears and servos that aren’t covered up with human skin.
Jacq (Antonio Banderas) is a claims adjuster/trouble shooter for a robotics corporation. It is 2044, and the human race has been reduced to a few million, planet Earth having been baked and irradiated by a misfiring sun. The robots, “Pilgrims,” were first needed to build all the shields to keep out the sunlight and radiation, to stop the deserts from spreading further. Humanity has retreated to cities and grown utterly dependent on them.
Fine, so long as robots obey their two protocols. They can harm no life. They cannot alter themselves or other robots. Simple, right?
People try to scam their warranties, looking for payouts. Jacq checks out the robots to ensure that they haven’t broken those two rules — one grabs a knife to keep Jacq from stabbing himself.
“Stop! Sir! You are putting a human life in danger!”
But he spies evidence that somebody or something is violating that second protocol. Jacq is “burnt out.” He is married with a baby on the way. But the boss (Robert Forster) wants to get to the bottom of these “altered” automata.
Dylan McDermott plays a seemingly psychotic cop who shoots any robot that gives a hint that it’s not quite right. Melanie Griffith — Mrs. Banderas, until recently — plays a “clock maker” (robot tinkerer) who builds sexual escort robots that look like Melanie Griffith.
The automata themselves have a familiar design. They have the functional, flat metal faces of the robot in the animated “Iron Giant.” Except for the ones who look like Melanie Griffith. None of them, alas, have enough humanity to them to make us care if some of them are acting more human.
“To die, you have to be alive first.”
The production design here is mostly deserts and a city with huge, anti-radiation balloons hanging over it, cheap clear-plastic raincoats and the scavenged/repaired cars and trucks of a world no longer designing new ones. Banderas gamely slogs through this story fully aware that it’s not really about the acting. McDermott is the only player who makes an impression.
Co-writer/director Gabe Ibáñez steals from good films, but doesn’t add much to their themes or content. The only viewers who aren’t 45 minutes or more ahead of this tedious affair are the ones skipped the 30-plus years of science fiction films that it is built from.
MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and some sexual content
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Dylan McDermott, Melanie Griffith, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, Robert Forster
Credits: Directed by Gabe Ibáñez, screenplay by Gabe Ibanez, Igor Legarreta and Javier Sánchez Donate. A Millennium release.
Running time: 1:50

Hilary “Million Dollar Baby” Swank’s latest transformative performance has her taking on the doomed descent of someone suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. ALS is probably best-known these days as the “Ice Bucket Challenge” disease.
If that’s a glib way of characterizing “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” it suits this “Disease of the Week” film treatment of it — glib.
Swank shows, in gestures and gasping, hoarsening voice, the progression of the illness from that first dropped glass to the moment Kate, her character, realizes that her career as a concert pianist is over.
That’s when she meets Bec (Emmy Rossum), a would-be songwriter, perpetual college student and hard-drinking caregiver prone to one-night stands and tactlessly blurting out whatever thought pops into her head.
Such as this plug for why she should become Kate’s helper-nurse.
“I can’t cook anything. Not even Pop Tarts.”
Even though Kate’s detail-oriented husband (Josh Duhamel) disapproves, this is who Kate wants managing her life and body as she loses control over both. And even Bec’s giggling, clumsy handling of that first time she helps the wheelchair-bound Kate use the bathroom doesn’t change the patient’s mind.
Rossum plays Bec as fiesty, but self-involved and not the sort of young woman who gets all weepy over her employer’s death sentence. The hardest things to believe here is Kate’s decision to hire her and any growing affection between them. They’re quite different, as their attempts at girltalk make plain. Bec is rude, a hard-swearing, unfiltered sort and inept at many of the things Kate needs.
The renowned stage director turn “chick picture” director George C. Wolfe (“Nights in Rodanthe”) has a nice touch with several scenes. We never see Kate’s doctor’s face. He is blunt, professional, distant and anonymous.
“This process only moves in one direction.”
Duhamel is decent at playing the noble heel of a husband, and Rossum is best at playing the gorgeous girl who dresses down, drinks and embodies Kate’s philosophy of misplaced love.
“Why is it that we want the ones who see us instead of the ones who do?”
But Bec keeps translating for Kate, whose inability to breathe is making her hard to understand. Only it isn’t. Swank is close-miked and perfectly understandable. Loretta Devine (“For Colored Girls”) is more vital and wholly believable as a fellow ALS sufferer in just a couple of upbeat but sad, gasping scenes (Ernie Hudson plays her husband).
ALS is a terrible disease, worthy as a cause and as the subject of a movie. But even though its parameters are vividly sketched out here, “You’re Not You” fails to bring us the fear or the tears that this story warrants. It sticks in the mind no longer than it takes you to change shirts after that ice bucket dunking.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexual content, language and brief drug use
Cast: Hilary Swank, Emmy Rossum, Josh Duhamel, Loretta Devine, Ali Larter
Credits: Directed by George C. Wolfe , screenplay by Shana Feste and
Jordan Roberts . An eOne release.
Running time: 1:42

“Meet the Mormons” is a slick, upbeat Church of Latter Day Saints-backed documentary that aims to answer the image of the church and its members “shaped by the media and popular culture.”
A quick montage of pop culture ridicule of Mormons and Mormonism hits on that — “What are you, Mormon?” punchlines from films such as “Fletch,” “Burn After Reading” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” open mockery by the “The Simpsons” and “South Park.”
And the film’s narrator, Jenna Kim Jones, finds New York’s Times Square full of people with “misconceptions” about Latter Day Saints — “Lots of wives. “Lots of kids.” “Racists.”
But “Mormons,” the fresh-faced blue-eyed blond narrator informs us, “come in all shapes, sizes, shapes and colors.”
So the film shows us an African American Mormon bishop and his family in Atlanta. We meet Ken Niumatalolo, Mormon coach of the football team at the U.S. Naval Academy. We travel to Nepal where a native who has converted is helping build schools and water systems, to Costa Rica, where kickboxer Carolina Muñoz Marin trains, with her husband.
We meet a surviving hero of the Berlin airlift and a young man of mixed race, born out of wedlock, now old enough to go to South Africa to do his two years as a Mormon missionary.
Catholic and Baptist relatives in various countries proclaim their tolerance for the converted.
“I’m not pushing my religion on anybody,” Coach Niumatalolo assures the viewer as he notes that he decreed that his team will not do prep work on the Sabbath.
A Sunday school teacher asks a ten-year-old, “How can you dress modestly for the heavenly Father?”
Their wholesomeness is refreshing. Their optimism, and the film’s, is boundless.
But from the cherry-picked “stereotypes” to the sins of omission that follow, “Meet the Mormons” is nothing but propaganda. The film addresses the church’s reputation for “racism” without mentioning the long history in which that was true. The same gloss-it-over approach is used on the church’s sexist, patriarchal heritage.
And nobody brings up the homophobia that stormed out of the closet when Mormon money and organizers pushed California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 — “Proposition Hate,” it was nicknamed.
There have been Mormon-made movies that approach the religion, its history and reputation with a more open mind — Richard Dutcher’s “God’s Army” is the best of those.
But by being, in essence, a wholesome, sugar-coated recruiting film, “Meet the Mormons” — in 250 theaters this weekend — seems destined to preach only to the choir, the most famous of which is in that Salt Lake City Tabernacle.

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements
Cast: Ted Niumatalolo, Col. Gail Halvorsen, Carolina Munez
Credits: Written and directed by Blair Treu. A Purdie release.
Running time: 1:19

(Read a review of “Missionary,” a new Mormon-bashing indie thriller)

Bill Murray’s annual aim for the Oscars? Melissa McCarthy’s redemption for “Tammy”?

Oh I hope so. Kid living with his mom, parents divorced, befriends the engaging layabout who lives next door. Naomi Watts also stars.

“St. Vincent” opens in limited release Friday, wider release in coming weeks.