Movie Nation

“The Equalizer” serves up Denzel Washington at his coolest.
Eyes weary with experience but still taking it all in, skull shaved to hide the advancing years, he still carries himself with that feline stride — the greatest, most masculine movie star walk since John Wayne’s.
He’s almost too cool for this film based on the ’80s TV series starring Edward Woodward as an ex secret agent who uses his retirement years to make the world a better place, righting one wrong at a time. Washington’s “Training Day” director treats him worshipfully, reminding us just what a treasure this Oscar winning screen hero has been for the past thirty years.
Robert McCall is a meticulous man, from the way he neatly shelves concrete mix at the home improvement warehouse store he works in to the ordered, spare apartment of shelved books and freshly-washed dishes where he lives.
He brings his own tea bag, carefully wrapped, to his favorite Boston diner when he can’t sleep, a place to read “The Old Man and the Sea” or some other novel from the list of 100 greatest books in English.
And he notices things. Like the fresh black eye that aspiring singer/teen hooker Terri’s wearing. We’ve seen he’s helpful guy, physically coaching an obese colleague to prep him for a physical for a security guard job. He tries to help Terri (Chloe Grace Moretz). And that’s when we discover the past this fastidious, working class man has been hiding.
“Got to be who we are in this world,” he says with a shrug. He sizes up a room full of Russian mobsters, the camera catching the engraved knife one thug is fingering, the bottle next to another, the corkscrew a tattooed, muscle-bound bartender is using. If we’ve seen the Robert Downey Jr. “Sherlock Holmes” movies, we know he’s working out the geometry of a brawl. We what’s coming. And it’ll be bloody.
Washington’s McCall rarely lets us see pangs of guilt, a promise he made to not return to the life of violence. And he never lets us see McCall lose his cool. He gives bad guys –crooked cops, the Russian killer (Marton Csokas) tracking him down — folksy options.
“When you pray for rain, you’ve got to deal with the mud, too.”
The villains, as they do in such morality tales, never do what’s good for them, never take the option that won’t leave them with a corkscrew in their windpipe.
Through it all, Washington’s stillness is emphasized, so much so that the film slows down just to make sure we appreciate the presence and the talent behind it.
And Fuqua, building on material even thinner than last week’s slightly inferior Liam Neeson vengeance-thriller “A Walk Among the Tombstones,” draws this out, announcing “Equalizer” as a franchise in the making.
Which is a shame. He almost turns Denzel, an invited, warmly embraced dinner guest into that guest who doesn’t know when to leave.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, including some sexual references
Cast: Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz, Marton Csokas
Credits: Directed by Antoine Fuqua, written by Richard Wenk, based on the TV series. A Columbia Pictures release.
Running time: 2:11

“Good People” is the cinematic equivalent of a page turner, a thriller that leaves no thriller trope unused, no melodramatic stone unturned, no foreshadowing un-shadowed.
Heck, it’s even got bad guys driving a Jaguar — just as the TV commercials promise.
But a good cast, some solid if gruesome action beats and a short running time mean we’ll stick with it, turning those predictable pages right up to the grand predictable finale.
James Franco and Kate Hudson are an American couple trying for a “fresh start” in London. She’s a school teacher, desperate to get pregnant. He’s a contractor/laborer who has spent their last cent restoring his grandmother’s run down house. His business in Chicago went bust, she had a miscarriage, so they moved.
But they’ve sublet the basement of their apartment to a thug, a guy who double-crossed the wrong people while robbing a Euro-drug lord (Omar Sy) of his “Liquid O” — heroin. When the double-crosser dies, the couple finds the body. And his cash stash.
That means the drug lord, who calls himself Genghis Khan, is making threats. The psychotic mobster (Sam Pruell) whose brother was one of those double-crossed and killed in the robbery is making more threats.
And the cop (Tom Wilkinson) who has been warned away from pursuing those assorted villains by his possibly corrupt boss is sure these Americans know more and possess more than they’re letting on. The cop’s daughter died of a drug overdose, by the way.
That’s a big feature of this script, based on a Marcus Sakey novel — that need to wholly motivate everybody involved. Khan wants revenge, Jack (Spruell) wants the cash, Anna (Hudson) needs in vitro fertilization money and Tom (Franco) needs to get them out from underwater, financially. And the cop wants closure.
Danish director Henrik Ruben Genz (“Terribly Happy”) can’t hide his cards and rarely even tries to. He’s stuck with a script that has “Promise you won’t kill us,” maybe the silliest line ever uttered to a murderer, but that features some dandy threats, some by the villain who doesn’t drive the Jaguar.
“Don’t you know when you find a pot of gold, there’s always a monster guarding it?”
Omar Sy stands out in this cast, smacking his lips with every Genghis Khan pun. He is “expanding my empire,” he cracks. Spruell is frightening in every second of screen time.
The beatings are fierce, the blood flows and everybody acts exactly the way characters in thrillers act, with undue bravado, blind lust for cash and easily disregarding the pain of this broken nose or that flesh wound.
Silly stuff, but you can’t help but turn the page to see if your guess as to how this all will come out is as on the money as you just know it is.

MPAA Rating: R for bloody violence and language
Cast: James Franco, Kate Hudson, Tom Wilkinson, Omar Sy, Sam Spruell
Credits: Directed by Henrik Ruben Genz , written by Kelly Masterson, based on the Marcus Sakey novel. A Millennium release.
Running time: 1:26

“Believe Me” has cynical, snarky frat boys who think nothing of stealing, drinking and chasing other guys’ girlfriends. It has them conning gullible true believers with a fake Christian charity, mocking the conventions of modern worship and the naivete of those attracted to it.
It has profanity.
“Christians HATE swear words,” the frat boys discover, “but LOVE swearing.”
This is not a Billy Graham brand faith-based film. It hides its intent behind a PG-13 edge. And if it’s not convincing as either a find-one’s-faith parable or clever spoof of pop Christianity, at least it’s relevant.
Sam, played by Alex Russell (“Carrie”), is a fresh-faced pledge chair of his college fraternity, a guy headed to law school if his financial aid comes through. Nick Offerman (“Parks and Recreation”) plays the bottle-in-his-desk financial aid officer who gives him the bad news.
“Son, stop thinking about your dreams being crushed as a BAD thing…Think of this as the first day in the rest of your pathetic life!”
An evening church service gives Sam inspiration. They’re raising money for missionaries…to go to Hawaii. If Christians can be talked into sending pretty coeds to the island paradise, they can be suckered into anything, he reasons.
With several of his financially-strapped frat brothers, Sam invents a charity to provide fresh water for African villages, “Get Wells Soon.” He and his mates — Miles Fisher, Max Adler and Sinqua Walls (“Shark Night 3D”) — put on a show, make their pitch. And despite being clumsy and insincere, they score.
What’s more, veteran pitchman Ken (Christopher MacDonald), who runs a touring crusade, sees them and hires them to take their message all over the Bible Belt. On that tour, from Atlanta to Dallas, we see Tyler (Walls) emerge as the conscience of this con job, with pretty tour manager Callie (Johanna Braddy) and diva Christian rocker Gabriel (Zachary Knighton) as the only two insiders these crooks have to fool as they skim the offering plate.
The presence of Offerman, whose disdain for organized religion drips off the pages of his self-help auto-biography, “Paddle Your Own Canoe,” suggests this script might have looked like “Saved!” or “Leap of Faith,” hard-nosed satires of the Christian Industrial Complex. But the frat boys are never as rowdy as that description suggests. And their lack of concern about stealing suggests the belief that non-Christians have no clue about the difference between right and wrong.
What works, sometimes hilariously, are the “God Squad’s” power-point presentations to each other, salesmen showing their market research to reveal how to pass for true believers and fleece such believers out of their cash.
What do you do with your hands in mid-praise? There’s “the gecko” (arms stretched out at your side), “the straight jacket,” “the Shawshank” (raised up high) or “the casual five,” in which you look like “you’re high-fiving God.”
Buzzwords and phrases in sermons and prayer can quickly close the sale — “Father, Lord…Father God, Creator.”
But the cynicism is rarely sharp enough and the conversion story arc is clumsy. And frankly, the young cast is not rowdy or charismatic enough to match such vets as Offerman and MacDonald, who walk off with their scenes without even trying.
It takes a leap of faith to make “Believe Me,” notorious for an unconventional marketing strategy that seemed to offer money to critics for writing about it (not me), into anything other than a pulled punch of a comedy. It’s a “nice try” that probably won’t please either Christians or those who come to laugh at them.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language.
Cast: Alex Russell, Johanna Braddy, Miles Fisher, Christopher MacDonald, Zachary Knighton, Nick Offerman
Credits: Directed by Will Bakke, screenplay by Michael B. Allen, Will Bakke. A Gravitas release.
Running time: 1:33

You don’t have to know Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” to get something out of “Days and Nights,” Christian Camargo’s adaptation of it set in rural New York in the Reagan Era ’80s. But considering how unclear the relationships are, how opaque the symbolism, how self-consciously theatrical the whole all-star affair is, understanding Anton would help.
Elizabeth (Allison Janney) is a famous actress, Peter (Camargo) is her famous filmmaker lover. They take the train from Manhattan to upstate, where they weekend in the country home of sickly Herb (William Hurt). Jean Reno is Louis, Herb’s doctor.
Eric (Ben Whishaw) is Elizabeth’s son, a would-be multi-media artist who resents Peter and lusts for Eva (Juliet Rylance), a frustrated local beauty whom he is using in his latest blend of music, dance, narration and video. She longs to escape the sticks, and if Eric can’t manage that, perhaps cozying up to Peter will help.
Alex (Katie Holmes) is a new mom, trapped in the country, married to Stephen (Mark Rylance), a state ornithologist who is monitoring an eagle’s nest on the property and warning the others of changes in the climate.
Mary (Cherry Jones) is married to the daft, gun-happy Johan, played by Michael Nyqvist of the Swedish “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”), a guy whose malapropisms and quick dismissal of incidents, accidents and injuries wear on everyone.
“Johan, WHY do you have to do that?”
“What?”
“APPEAR.”
It’s 1984, and Ronald Reagan’s TV scary “Bear in the woods” TV ads are on TV and Herb, when he’s not being pushed around the estate in a little red wagon by the local children, dances to Supertramp.
Frustrated people start coupling or re-coupling, or at the very least getting under each other’s skin. Eric and Eva put on their show, to Elizabeth’s catty derision. She also mocks Peter’s possible interest in Eva, and Eric takes out his frustration over this with one and all.
Camargo has dabbled in a little symbolism of his own in adapting this — the eagle-Reagan Era connection. An actor (“The Hurt Locker”, TV’s “Dexter”) turned director, he’s the blandest presence on screen, here. Janney is beautifully caustic and vain, Whishaw is properly infuriating, Hurt is colorfully daft and Nyqvist all but steals the movie with his bemused, fractured line readings and droll arched eyebrow at all these artsy city folk.
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Define…hurt.”
The sylvan setting and short bursts of dramatic interplay are more interesting than coherent in this brief, undeveloped adaptation. All I could think of watching it was how many equally pointless indie films have seemed to come into being simply because some filmmaker had access to “a country house.” As Chekhov did.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, adult situations
Cast: William Hurt, Allison Janney, Christian Camargo, Katie Holmes, Ben Whishaw, Jean Reno, Michael Nyqvist
Credits: Written and directed by Christian Camargo. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:31

They marched into battle — the oldest were teenagers — in parade order, and charged the enemy like the schoolboys they were. And when the smoke had cleared, there were shoes — sucked off their feet in the mud, torn from bodies yanked by cannonballs, minieballs and bayonets.
“Field of Lost Shoes” is about one of the more storied minor battles of the Civil War, when cadets from the Virginia Military Institute were hurled into action to stop a Union invasion of their corner of the Shenandoah Valley. It’s a sentimental, sometimes moving affair, an old fashioned and conventional young-men-at-war film. It is also at times a reminder of how hard it is to manage a decent Civil War movie on a limited budget, and how hard it is, even today, to tell a Civil War tale untainted by revisionism.
Seven friends, six upper classmen and a freshman “Brother Rat” (Nolan Gould), study and drill at the elite school up until the day in May of 1864 that they’re summoned to save General Lee’s flank by marching from Lexington to New Market.
John Wise (Luke Benward) is a governor’s son. A descendant of Thomas Jefferson (Parker Croft) is in their ranks, the artistic Moses Ezekiel, “our resident Jew” (Josh Zuckerman) is the best shot.
Sam Atwill (Max Lloyd-Jones) falls in love with a local girl — played by Mary Mouser. Lauren Holley plays her mom.
The boys haze, tussle, talk about honor, debate the merits of the conflict and make deals with the kindly slave (Keith David) who runs the school bakery. Old Judge is wise.
“Old men make the promises. Young men got to pay’em.”
Eventually, the young men are called to do just that.
The younger players are adequate, and “star” casting helps in some other instances. Jason Isaacs is a properly droll General Breckinridge, the former vice president who took up arms for the Confederacy.
“Wake up, Yankees. Time for breakfast!”
But a mere look-alike plays Lincoln, Tom Skerritt is decades too old to manage the bluster of U.S. Grant. David Arquette does a lot of shouting as a Union artillery officer.
The battle itself is nicely staged and grimly personal. Hand to hand combat in the mud is not a pretty affair.
But even though the film is not revisionist, it comes darned close. Cadets sympathetically help slaves at every turn, even though this was the patrician class that insisted upon the war and the preservation of that “peculiar institution.”
Wise’s father, Gov. Henry Wise, is painted as anti-slavery, anti-secessionist. This is patently false. Governor Henry Wise was a rabid secessionist, even though his son became a post-war moderate in Virginia politics.
“Soul Surfer” director Sean McNamara may not have had the budget to deliver the scope and sheen of a Technicolor epic. This is no “Red Badge of Courage,” more a small scale “Gettysburg.” But he and his cast serve up enough lump-in-the-throat moments to ensure “Field of Lost Shoes” will at least go over in Daughters of the Confederacy meetings from this day forward, especially in the Old Dominion.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for war violence and some thematic elements
Cast: Luke Benward, Jason Isaacs, Max Lloyd-Jones, Keith David, Lauren Holley, David Arquette, Nolan Gould, Tom Skerrit, Mary Mouser, Josh Zuckerman
Credits: Directed by Sean McNamara, written by Thomas Farrell and David Kennedy. An Arc Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:35

Here’s how you make a movie about Jimi Hendrix without the participation of his fractious/litigious estate.
You frame it within a brief window, just when his fame was blossoming. The film opens in 1966, when he was an anonymous side man playing New York clubs, and ends just before his incendiary breakthrough performance at the Monterrey Pop Festival in 1967. That lets you avoid legal action from his family, which wasn’t going to be portrayed in a flattering light.
And since that family didn’t grant music rights, for performance scenes you recreate traces of a few of his great early cover songs, “Wild Thing,” and a memorable blast through “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
Maybe “Jimi: All is By My Side” is as good a Jimi Hendrix bio-pic as we’ll ever get, at least so long as there are legal entanglements strangling the late guitar god’s legacy. It’s not as giddy or all-encompassing as “Great Balls of Fire” or “Get On Up.” This is more a sketch, just one telling chapter in his life, rather like what “Backbeat” did with the early Beatles.
“All is By My Side” is an artistic overreach for Oscar winning screenwriter John Ridley (“12 Years A Slave”), turned writer-director here. He strains to set the scene, peppering the film with news footage of Mod London, the TV shows of the era including those where bands such as The Animals performed. He rarely finds the pop art in this florid, musically inventive Sgt. Pepper’s era.
But he scored one great coup landing Andre Benjamin, Outkast singer and sometime actor (“Be Cool”) as Hendrix. He’s older than Hendrix ever was — close to 40, when Hendrix died at 27. But he nails the voice, the laid-back flower child vibe. This is the Hendrix of flaky TV appearances, dreamy sci-fi idealist and free spirit with only hints of the drink that made him a mean, abusive drunk, or the drugs that killed him at the peak of his fame.
Ridley tells the story mainly through the eyes of the British women who entered Jimi’s life. Linda Keith (Imogen Poots) is a posh, spoiled Brit model who frets that the only thing anyone will remember her for is being Keith Richards’ girlfriend. But she knows genius when she hears and sees it, even if Jimmy, as he was then-known, was just a sideman for R&B singer Curtis Knight, picking at his bad complexion and snapping gum in between show-off solos.
Keith urges reluctant people in the business to check Hendrix out, finds him a manager and nags him to take the stage “like you actually want to amount to something.”
Andrew Buckley plays Chas Chandler, who quit as bassist for The Animals to bring Jimi to Britain and spends his last dime making him a star. Burn Gorman makes a feral impression as later manager Michael Jefferey, who changes “Jimmy” to “Jimi.”
Hayley Atwell is Kathy Etchingham, the short-tempered working class groupie who became Jimi’s steady girlfriend, much to the chagrin of Linda Keith.
But it is Benjamin who pulls this film out of its formulaic rut with his mastery of the Hendrix onstage mystique and offstage patter in that sort of quizzical Dylan-Meets-Andy-Warhol voice. They’re auditioning drummers for The Jimi Hendrix Experience, but Mitch Mitchell may be too intense.
“You can’t knock a cat for bein’ fierce!”
British bobbies (cops) hassle the inter-racial couple, Jimi and Kathy, for walking hand-in-hand.
“What are we about? Nothing. EVERYthing.”
Interviewers are mesmerized by him – “When the power of love takes over the love of power, that’s when things will change.”
Whatever the film’s other virtues, Benjamin’s Hendrix makes sure we all “look at that pimp with the backwards guitar” every moment he’s on screen.

MPAA Rating: R for language including sexual references, and some drug content
Cast: Andre Benjamin, Imogen Poots, Hayley Atwell, Burn Gorman
Credits: Written and directed by John Ridley. An XLrator Media release.
Running time: 1:57

The Hungarian World War II film “The Notebook” makes for a grim but utterly fascinating parable, a tale of compassionate, city-bred twins who teach themselves the cruelty they need in order to survive the horrors of war.
The pre-teen boys — whose names we never learn — are inseparable. That’s why their mother (Gyöngyvér Bognár) refuses to split them up even though their father (Ulrich Matthes) says “twins are too conspicuous in wartime.”
So in the last summer of the war, she takes them to the Hungarian countryside, to the border farm where her estranged mother (Piroska Molnárnt) eeks out an existence.
The lads — played by Lazlso and Andras Gyemant — silently witness the hatred the two women have for each other, tearfully watch their mother leave and begin a grueling existence there. The locals call the old lady a witch, and we can believe it. She slaps them, calls the kids “swine, idiots, bastards” and locks them out of the house that first night.
But they learn to do chores and how to handle the old lady. They train themselves to not flinch at pain by having violent slap fights. They learn to steal from a neighbor girl they call “Harelip.” They find a soldier in the woods, and resolve to fast as long as he did, without dying as he does. They practice being deaf and being blind, to sharpen their connection.
They force themselves to forget the mother that they’re sure has forgotten them. And they practice cruelty, on each other, chickens and the old witch.
The boys — who regard grandma, the pedophile SS officer who takes over part of the farm, the amoral priest and other hateful locals with the same emotionless scowl — are a chilling pair. Whatever one thinks of the predilections of boys of that age, we totally buy kids turning into what these lads become in the horrors of war.
The beatings they endure are hard to watch, the deaths they witness are both expected and unexpected. And their behavior is sometimes as illogical as their mother’s.
Everybody thinks granny poisoned granddad. Yet this is who Mom leaves them with?
“The Notebook,” in Hungarian with English subtitles, benefits from a spare, percussive score that underlines the sudden bursts of violence. The effects are simple, obvious and effective. Air raids consist of shadows of planes, the roar of engines and fake-looking bomb blasts.
There is rough justice to this tale, based on an Agota Kristof novel. But there’s just as much injustice, a kind of heartless expediency that only writers who need to illustrate how war hardens children could dream up, and that only children forced to imitate the most recent adult behaviors they witness — carnal, venal, racist or kind — would find acceptable.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent and sexual content, nudity and language
Cast: László Gyémánt, András Gyémá, Piroska Molnárnt
Credits: Directed by János Szász, screenplay by János Szász, András Szekér and Tom Abrams, based on the Agota Kristof novel . A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 1:52

Animators may use the same digital computer-assisted palette the world over, but the world is still diverse enough that distinct styles and sensibilities exist outside of the Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks/Sony orbit.
“Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart” is a Franco-Belgian production adapted from a novel and concept album by Mathias Malzieu. It’s a Tim Burtonesque fairy tale romance — dark — set to innocuous, forgettable Franco-pop. And it is entirely too weird to have ever been made in Hollywood.
The film sets itself apart within moments of the opening credits. In 19th century Edinburgh, on the “coldest day on Earth,” Jack is born to a mother who leaves him with the tinkerer/midwife Madeline (Barbara Scaff). The ice has frozen his heart on birth, but Madeline conjures up a cuckoo-clock heart that will keep him ticking.
When he’s old enough to go outside, Jack (Orlando Seale) is given three solemn rules.
“Never touch the hands of your (clock) heart.” “Keep your temper under control.” “Never fall in love.”
Madeline is particularly insistent on the last of those.
“One short kiss, a brush upon your lips, could be your last!”
Naturally, the ten-year-old Jack does all of these on his first day at school.
Jack is bullied by Joe (Harry Sadeghi) and takes a tumble for Joe’s girl, the enchanting Miss Acacia (Samantha Barks). That leads to a duet, and a confrontation that forces Jack to flee town with this mission. He will find this Acacia again, no matter how many years pass or borders he has to cross.
The animation is generally surreal, and by introducing the secret hero of “Hugo,” the famous French fantasy filmmaker Georges Melies (Stephane Cornicard) as a character, the animators have an excuse to toss black and white footage at us, visit an amusement park and show us fanciful trains and carriages and an entire sequence, set in Andalusia, animated in origami fashion.
But the inexpressive characters are like something out of a direct-to-video Barbie movie from the ’90s — plastic, immobile. And like another Belgian animated film released this month, “Thunder and the House of Magic,” there is no humor in the story or the telling of it.
The songs add nothing and the story, simple as it seems, wanders through a clutter of explanations, mis-directions and the like. So kids of a certain age, who will stare at anything that’s been animated, may be hard pressed to do much more than stare.
And adults, who will stay five pages ahead of the tale, start to finish, aren’t treated to anything as interesting as the film’s production design. There’s no humor and no pathos. “The Cuckoo-Clock Heart”, pretty as it is, lacks any heart at all.

MPAA Rating: PG for scary images, suggestive material, some language and smoking
Cast: The voices of Orlando Seale, Samantha Barks, Barbara Scaff, Stephane Cornicard
Credits: Written and directed by Mathias Malzieu and Stephane Bela. A Shout! Factory release.
Running time: 1:38

There was a time when the tall, thin brunette Michelle Monaghan walked the catwalks of high fashion, appearing in shows from Milan to Hong Kong and on magazine covers of the late ’90s.

But when she transitioned to acting for TV and the movies, she remembered where she came from.

“I really appreciate playing grounded people,” the Winthrop, Iowa native says. “I have working class roots.” Dad was a factory worker and Mom ran a day care center. So, don’t just doll Monaghan up and plop her in the plot. Give her character a real job, teacher or doctor, truck driver or soldier.

“It’s not a conscious thing to do, finding working class characters to play. I just am drawn to people I recognize.”

In films such as “Gone Baby Gone,” “Trucker” and her latest, “Fort Bliss,” she reminds herself and viewers that “real people” come in all shapes and sizes. Strip off the makeup, put the hair in a bun under a helmet and she becomes Sgt. Maggie Swann, an Army medic –divorced — with a small son who barely knows her when she returns from a long deployment in Afghanistan.

“You get this resolve that comes from your sense of responsibility when you play someone like this,” Monaghan, 38, says. “Me coming off believable as a soldier for ‘Fort Bliss’ was something that I took very seriously. Getting approval from these people in the Army I got to know, and having approval from the Army to shoot at Fort Bliss itself means that you want to get her right. I’m representing the female experience in the infantry. Very intimidating.”

A brisk 21 day shoot meant she could not leave the character behind for long. The posture and comportment of a soldier became her daily life. She went through medic training “so that I would understand what Maggie is supposed to be good at. You get a small glimpse into the intensity and the focus when you do that.”

She talked to women who serve in combat units — 200,000 women have those jobs in today’s Army “and like 40% of them are mothers.”

And quite aside from the externals — saluting, developing a soldier’s gait, the way one takes off a cap or dons a helmet — Monaghan, a mother of two small children herself, got a peek into the world of the oft-deployed soldier-parent.

“A lot of people come home emotionally suppressed,” she says. “It doesn’t serve you to be emotional when you’re Down Range” in a combat zone. “You have to be focused. It’s not easy to flip a switch. It’s a generalization to say so, but loved ones at home have a hard time understanding that, especially from women soldiers.”

Variety’s Justin Chang notes that Monaghan “gives a typically fine, flinty and effortlessly moving performance” in “Fort Bliss,” so her close study of her subject shows.

Women soldiers have to appear as tough, or tougher than the men serving with them, Monaghan notes. That’s appealing, because “I’m tough. Most of the women I know, women in my life, are tough — multi-dimensional, vulnerable, nurturers. We don’t have the opportunity as actresses to show those different sides of ourselves. We’re typically depicted in just a couple of different ways.”

One of those ways is as an object of romantic desire. In one of the more severe moments of whiplash her post “Mission: Impossible III” and “Source Code” career has offered, she went from “Fort Bliss” combat fatigues to the world of romance novelist Nicholas Sparks for “The Best of Me.”

“All that emotional restraint of being a soldier? Let it ALL hang out!” Monaghan laughs. Few might see “Fort Bliss,” but audiences often flock to movies from the novels of America’s most popular romance novelist. And “The Best of Me” (Oct. 17) could be no different. It’s about two high school sweethearts — Monaghan and James Marsden) who stumble into each other when they visit their hometown, promises love and tears. Monaghan had to abandon Regular GI and get her swoon back for co-star James Marsden (“Enchanted”). Did it work?

“All I can say is, bring some tissues!”

He made a big impression in “Zero Dark Thirty,” and the Venezuelan hunk has dazzled in such films as “Carlos,” built from the German TV series about the infamous terrorist, and in a “Bourne” movie here, a “Wrath of the Titans” there.

Edgar Ramirez takes on his most daunting role yet in “The Liberator” or “El Libertador,” the film biography of the liberator of South America, the George Washington of the South, Simon Bolivar.

He’s Bodhi in the remake of “Point Break,” and boxer Robert Duran in the bio pic “Hands of Stone.”

I have some questions about the film and his role in it to ask, but as always, I’m looking for suggestions from readers. Questions for Edgar? Please comment away, and thanks for the suggestions.