Movie Nation

He must have joined “The Agency” with an eye toward excitement, exotic locales and danger. But in Capetown, a backwater as far as foreign intrigue goes, agency newcomer Matt Weston is stuck — a one-man show, running a never-used “Safe House” in the C.I.A.’s real-estate portfolio.

“I’m staring at four walls all day,” Matt (Ryan Reynolds) complains to his boss.

Until the day he plays host to America’s “most notorious traitor,” a sell-to-the-highest-bidder rogue named Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington). Frost doesn’t want to be a “houseguest.” And a lot of ruthless and violent people want to get their hands on him in the worst way.

That’s the set-up for “Safe House,”  a pulse-pounding secret agent variation on the “Everybody’s out to get you” thriller formula. Well-cast, well-acted and brilliantly shot and edited, it’s a thoroughly entertaining peek into spycraft and the spies who practice it.

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American movies have a long tradition of insisting that characters have an arc, that we see signs of “growth” between the moment we meet someone on screen until the closing credits. We like to understand “motivations,” the things that draw lovers together after the movie has spent a lot of time keeping them apart.

The French drama “Rust and Bone” runs roughshod over those traditions. An unconventional romance that isn’t particularly romantic, it’s about two damaged people who are pulled together, even though the attraction is hard to pinpoint, the “growth” too insignificant to measure.

Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) is poor and jobless, begging, borrowing and stealing his way to the south of France with his five year-old (Armand Verdure) son. He tells his sister (Corinne Masiero) that the boy’s mother used the kid to smuggle drugs. So Ali has come to stay with her, pick up assorted jobs working security, maybe train and get in a few kickboxing fights.

He is impulsive, irresponsible and rough with the kid. His lovelife consists of the odd pick-up, one-night-stands that don’t even last a night.

Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) is an orca trainer at a French Riviera Marineland park. She rarely smiles and seems to take pleasure in nothing.

The connection between Ali and Steph is hard to figure. They met when he broke up a fight that had a guy hitting on her, and hitting in, in a nightclub. He drove her home, told her she dressed like a prostitute and insulted her boyfriend. Naturally, when there’s an orca accident and she loses her legs, she gets around to calling Ali. Here’s a brusque brute who may appeal to some oddly Gallic sense of macho, but who, if nothing else, won’t pity or coddle her. He treats her like every other woman, like she’s lucky to be around him, that he’s going out, going swimming, etc. And if she wants to sit and sulk in the chair, that’s fine. But he’s going.

Ali slips into the brutal underworld of bare-knuckle mixed martial arts fights. No rules, no medics, with gambling money providing the purses. His son is never more than an inconvenience to him, and Steph isn’t even that.

Even after they’ve become intimate, it’s intimacy without kissing — strictly therapeutic sex so she can see “if things still work.” For some reason, she is drawn to his bloody sport. Perhaps the shock of the violence makes her feel again.

The Oscar-winning Cotillard, who is Angelina Jolie-thin for this film, is getting a little Oscar buzz for her performance in what is essentially a movie stunt, here. Yes, the movies have gotten very good at erasing legs below the knee. Yes, she’s convincing in the wheelchair, or wearing prosthetic limbs.

But her performance gives us so little that there’s not only no arc to follow, there are too few moments of great empathy to connect us to her. Her return to Marineland offers an emotional highlight that is out of character with the rest of the movie.

Schoenaerts has to play Ali as even more of a mystery, a man who has no moral compass, no sense of responsibility and yet some strange compulsion to be a friend to this damaged woman. It’s impossible to gauge any growth in him, either.

This film, from the director of “A Prophet,” maintains a palpable tension between the characters. We’re never quite sure what explosions they’re capable of with each other. But “Rust and Bone” doesn’t earn the ending it delivers. And whatever its other merits, it never overcomes that lazy initial “Let’s skip over what draws them together” handicap.

Sometimes a “subtle” connection is one the filmmaker never got around to working out himself.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, brief graphic nudity, some violence and language

Cast: Marion Cotillard,  Matthias Schoenaerts

Credits: Directed by Jacques Audiard, written by Craig Davidson, Jacques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain. A Sony Pictures Classics release.  

Running time: 2:02

“Ruby Sparks” is the great romantic gem of the summer, a diamond in the rough that bends genres, tickles the fancy and trips up expectations.

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In the late 18th century, as America was on the cusp of revolting to free itself from the tyranny of arbitrary rule by people born to the privilege and laws, medicine and freedoms constrained by religious superstition, Europe was, state by state, wrestling with many of the same issues.

It was The Enlightenment, The Age of Reason, and if it’s a sketchy historical period for most Americans, the Danish drama “A Royal Affair” makes a stately, entertaining way of bringing us up to speed.

It’s a tragic romance, a tale of idealism, usurped power and reform ahead of its time, of palace intrigues, madness and forbidden love.  And aside from the odd detail here and there, it’s mostly true.

In the 1760s, young princess Caroline (Alicia Vikander) has been groomed in Britain to marry handsome King Christian VII of Denmark. She’s heard he loves the arts. She arrives only to learn she has been misinformed.

Christian (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) is bratty, temperamental and immature — an insecure, rude tantrum-tossing fop given to giggling fits. Suggest that his new bride has talent at the keyboard and he’s jealous, ordering her away from the pianoforte and to his side at court.

“Move your fat little thighs and have a seat,” he orders.

He’s a bit mad, but still functional enough to serve the purposes of the entrenched nobility that runs the government and his court, even his scheming step-mother, the Queen Dowager (Trine Dyrholm). Caroline, who has a dewy, mournful Emily Blunt quality thanks to Vikander, is trapped in a miserable marriage, surrounded by enemies.

When the king sets off on a long tour of Europe, Caroline is given some peace. And the king, thanks to the machinations of some exiled nobles who want a friendly voice to wrangle them back onto the court, is given a new physician. Johann Friedrich Struensee, played with smoldering earnestness by Mads Mikkelsen, the villain of “Casino Royale,” is “an Enlightenment Man,” a healer who treats his work as a higher calling, and an atheist intellectual who sees science, not superstition, as a way of treating illness and looking at the world.

Mikkelsen lets us see Struensee work out a means of tempering the king’s crazies. He indulges the monarch’s penchant for prostitutes, drink and brawling. He becomes confidante and confessor and turns Christian into a more reasonable, manageable mess. He could even be a help to the morose Caroline, something he suggests to Christian.

“Make her fun,” the king commands. “I want a fun queen.”

But as the queen and her doctor bond over his seditious enlightenment book collection, we see Struensee provide the queen a kind of fun the king did not have in mind.

Co-writer/director Nikolaj Arcel, who scripted “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” tells this story in a languorous fashion, pausing to let the doctor and the queen find their chemistry on the dance floor, then expressing it in the queen’s chambers. He takes the time to show the slow, idealistic machinations of the queen and her doctor, who took more and more power at court and used it, high-handedly, to bring Denmark into The Enlightenment.

That sluggish pace allows us to savor the performances, the meticulous sense of place and time, and the dread that builds in the back of the viewer’s mind. This will all come to tears, we just know it.

“A Royal Affair,” told mostly in Danish, with English subtitles, is a lovely history lesson, but a film without the spark of invention that makes this modern parable feel modern. “Anna Karenina,” for instance, clips along while “Affair” saunters, beautifully costumed actors having a leisurely gambol on the palace grounds. But Vikander, Mikkelsen and Følsgaard, who makes for a king just self-aware enough to understand the injustice, cruelty and scheming unfolding around him, make this history both riveting and tragic, and a story relevant in any age.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content and some violent images

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Mads Mikkelsen and Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Trine Dyrholm

Credits: Directed by Nikolaj Arcel, written by Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel, based on the historical novel by Bodil Steensen-Leth. A Magnolia release.  

Running time: 2:17

“Robot & Frank” may be the oddest credit in Frank Langella’s sixty years on stage and screen.

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Most movie musicals, even in the Age of Glee, still face that awkward moment when somebody — say her name is “Sherrie Christian” — riding a Greyhound, bursts into “Motoring” by Night Ranger, and the rest of the bus bursts in to join her for the chorus.

Audiences today titter at that. But you measure the movie by how quickly the audience gets over that and into your musical.

“Rock of Ages,” the big screen version of the jukebox musical set to ’80s “hair metal” anthems and ballads, never does.

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The bland lead the bland through a sea of New Year’s revelers and Times Square product placement in “New Year’s Eve,” Garry Marshall’s bloated all-star follow-up to his “comeback,” Valentine’s Day.

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 Five films, over $660 million at the worldwide box office, you have to hand it to “Resident Evil.” In ten years, it has become, while few who enjoy good films have noticed, the most successful video game film franchise in history.

These movies have kept action-horror hack Paul W. S. Anderson in business and sustained model-turned-actress Milla Jovovich in between her other rare appearances on the big screen.

The movies? To a one, violent, nonsensical bloodbaths, bad on several levels. At least last time, they seemed to spend some money, expand their vision of the combat zone and that resulted in a bigger, more action-packed and by far more successful exercise in first-person shooter mayhem.

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 “To Rome With Love,” Woody Allen’s latest stamp on his European work visa, is a film not without its charms. But they are so few and far between that the film’s raison detre stares you in the face for a solid 100 minutes.

It’s a lame selection of bad bits from late ’90s era Allen comedies cut and pasted to fit the location.

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You don’t think of empathy as something you have to teach your child. They’re born with it, you’d guess. Or life itself will teach it to them.

Laurie Bonner (Anna Gunn) didn’t take that chance. A widow and a single mother of two, she knew others had it even rougher than her, so she encouraged that trait in her kids.

“One day you’re just living your life, and then BAM, you’re struggling.”

One took it to heart. Another, Zach, started filling a little red wagon with hurricane relief supplies.

And as “Little Red Wagon” makes perfectly clear, for Zach (Chandler Canterbury), that was just the beginning.

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