Big Eyes (2014)

Burton's 'Eyes': Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams paint
themselves into a corner in "Big Eyes."

"Big Eyes"

⭐⭐⭐

The curious story of the artist Margaret Keane—whose hundreds of paintings of small, lonely children with enormous, melancholy eyes became a strange sensation in the 1960s—is recounted in “Big Eyes,” an uneven but intriguing tale directed by Tim Burton from a script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski.

The film opens with the just-divorced Margaret (Amy Adams) leaving town with her young daughter seeking a new life in San Francisco. But there’s a paucity of opportunities for a single mom who’s never held a job—a function, the movie underlines, of a male-dominated society—and Margaret ends up desperate, going to small art gatherings in the park and selling her paintings for pocket change.

Enter the smooth-talking Walter (Christoph Waltz), a fellow ostensibly struggling artist out of France, who falls for Margaret at just the right time (her ex-husband has threatened to take custody of their daughter) and, after the new couple is hastily married in Hawaii, uses his raffish wit to worm her work onto the lucrative pop art scene.

There’s only one problem: Walter steals credit for Margaret’s paintings, seduced by sudden celebrity and taking advantage of a public more inclined to believe the next hot artist is a stylish European man and not a housewife from Tennessee. Margaret finds out and is angry and appalled, but continues to paint for him in secret when money and lavish possessions begin rolling in—slaving away with her brushes and canvasses in shadowy, isolated rooms like a character from “Flowers in the Attic.”

But an empire so rooted in subterfuge is bound to collapse. As years go by, the charade eats away at Margaret, who feels something personal to her has been turned into a lie; while Walter finds it increasingly difficult to explain work that he has nothing to do with. The pair finally settles their feud during a preposterously silly courtroom scene.

With Margaret Keane, Burton has found a character with which to explore some distinctly feminist themes while still, thanks to the weird imagery of the paintings themselves, indulging his penchant for the strange and unusual. The most nightmarish scene takes place when Margaret is at the grocery store and the faces of fellow shoppers have all turned into bug-eyed versions of themselves, as though her art had suddenly come to life to haunt her.

Overall, the movie works despite being a bit of a mess. Adams’ sensitive, plucky heroine is easy to root for and the best reason to watch, but counterpart Waltz overplays his hand as the smarmy villain and grinds into obnoxiousness. This isn’t vintage Burton—more “Dark Shadows” than “Ed Wood”—and the tone wavers clumsily between seriousness, caricature and outright farce, but “Big Eyes” still remains an entertaining mix of dark comedy and social commentary.

Clouds of Sils Maria (2015)

Star Powered: Juliette Binoche (foreground) and
Kristen Stewart (background) in "Clouds of Sils Maria."

Clouds of Sils Maria

⭐⭐⭐½

In “Clouds of Sils Maria”—the title is a reference to a majestic cloud phenomenon that takes place within a valley of the Swiss Alps—Juliette Binoche plays Maria Enders, a highly accomplished, somewhat supercilious film and theater actress, now in her forties, faced with the chance to work with an acclaimed stage director in a remake of a story she did many years earlier. The story, called Maloja Snake, told of a lesbian relationship that develops between Helena, an emotionally damaged older actress, and Sigrid, her cruelly manipulative younger assistant.

But complications cause Maria to hesitate. Indeed, when she first performed Maloja Snake, she played the role of the youthful, empowered Sigrid to such significant fanfare that it launched the career of what was then an 18-year-old ingénue. Now, the director wants her to play the more fragile and victimized Helena, a switch she reluctantly agrees to even though it plunges her into a soul-searching examination of the past and present.

For Maria, the role of Sigrid reflected a position of vitality and strength. The difficultly she faces in taking on the mature woman’s role suggests not just a desperation to hold on to her past and a fear of growing older—it’s also a reflection of the artistic landscape itself naturally tilting towards youth.

Meanwhile, Kristen Stewart plays Maria’s whip-smart, hard-working assistant, Valentine, who keeps her up to date on the latest scuttlebutt in the industry while helping her navigate changes in technology. Valentine encourages Maria to play Helena, but then is pulled into her boss’s strange, whirling existential crisis when she rehearses the play reading Sigrid’s part.

A multilayed, mesmerizing study of behavior, acting and the changes that impact people through time, “Clouds of Sils Maria” was expertly helmed by the French writer/director Olivier Assayas, who seems to delight in toying with fundamental questions about psychology and artistic interpretation. Is Maria succumbing to age by playing Helena? Does she become jealous of Valentine for “becoming” Sigrid? Does Maria’s reading of Helena’s part alter the tone of the material? These and many more are explored to teasing and tantalizing effect.

But perhaps the greatest pleasure of the film is watching two sublime actresses—Binoche, the beautiful, commanding French actress still at the peak of her powers; and Stewart, the largely misunderstood but discerning and increasingly formidable young star—trade tense moves, facial expressions and bracing pauses in a classic game of on screen chess. Moreover, Chloe Grace Moretz also impresses in her few scenes.

There’s a paucity of movies with interesting roles for women, but “Clouds of Sils Maria” is not one of them.

A Ghost Story (2017)

Casey Affleck is the specter at the center of "A Ghost Story."

"A Ghost Story"

⭐⭐⭐

Written and directed by David Lowry, “A Ghost Story” features a young couple, played by Casey Affleck and Roomey Mara, living in a modest, one-story house in a sleepy, nondescript suburb close to Dallas. We don’t learn much about them and they don’t say a whole lot, but the laconic lovebirds gain our affection, as they snuggle up adoringly in bed, waking only to check out mysterious noises coming from the piano in the living room.

One day, the soft romance is abruptly shattered when Affleck is killed in a car crash at the end of his own dusty, gravel driveway. They say most accidents happen close to home, but really? Mara goes to the hospital to identify her husband’s body—in an excruciating, subtly powerful scene that notably avoids the usual maudlin trappings—taking one last look before gently covering his head with a sheet.

As Mara walks despondently out of the hospital morgue, Lowry keeps his camera still at the end of the room and—in one of the movie’s several striking visual gestures—holds the shot of Affleck’s lifeless body for several moments, suggesting the dark, horribly incomprehensible, infinite stillness of death.

Startlingly and almost comically, the stillness is interrupted when Affleck’s corpse wakes up and slowly walks out of the room; his sheet suddenly appearing with two black holes for eyes, as if a live-action Charlie Brown finally figured out the scissors and finished his Halloween costume.

Invisible to the living, Affleck’s ghost journeys across town and back to his small house to look in on his grieving wife. Lowry films a devastating, unbroken shot of the couple with Mara sitting silently on the kitchen floor eating a whole pie until it makes her sick, and Affleck’s ghost watching from the edge of the frame—one is a figure seemingly caught between worlds, the other is so deep in sorrow that food no longer has taste or meaning.

Mara finally moves away from the site of her painful memories; however, Affleck stays behind, roaming around the empty house each day as if it were a sad tomb. Time passes, people move in and out of the house, months and years of their lives seemingly unfold in a flash, time no longer feels linear.

Not much happens, but what does is sometimes strangely funny, sometimes mournfully poetic. One family moves away after Affleck pulls a haunted house stunt (a glass of milk floats in the air, dishes crash to the floor); another hosts a wild party featuring a somber, long-winded monologue about memories and death; Affleck looks out the window and begins communicating with a female ghost next door, a sign that there are yet more lost souls in the world.

“A Ghost Story” begins as a tender romance, slips into a quiet tragedy, has notes of suspense, thriller, horror and even comedy before finishing, rather uncertainly and unsatisfyingly, as a peculiar sort of supernatural, time-travel fantasy.

Still, “A Ghost Story” is highly compelling, particularly in the first half, as an achingly painful contemplation of loss. Lowry’s extended takes and long stretches without dialogue make this increasingly ambitious movie seem distinctly small and minimalist, like something plucked from the silent era.

There’s been nothing else quite like it for a long time, and that’s saying something.

Deadpool (2016)

"Deadpool"

⭐⭐

The first few scenes of “Deadpool”—the sometimes funny but often flat, queasy and profoundly cynical new Marvel comics movie—feature the sarcastic, masked vigilante of the title, dispatching a bumbling coterie of enemies using a semi-automatic pistol, a barrage of vulgar one-liners, and enough narcissistic mincing and mugging to suggest the sadistic gang from “A Clockwork Orange.” For anybody who’s ever wondered what would happen if you crossed Ace Ventura with the X-Men and added an R-rating, here’s your answer.

The character was actually introduced in the 2009 film, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” when he was still a human named Wade Wilson, special operations agent turned mutant sidekick of Hugh Jackman and company.

In the new movie, Wilson’s life is upended by a terminal cancer diagnosis, leading to a break up with his gal pal (Morena Baccarin), and a murky meeting with the villainous Ajax (Ed Skrein), a demented goon who promises a cure and delivers pain and torture—injecting Wilson with blueish goo that gives him invincible powers but leaves him looking less like Ryan Reynolds and more like something lurking in the shadows underneath Parisian opera houses.

After an exceedingly gory confrontation with Ajax, Wilson starts preparing for the inevitable third act, donning the whole Deadpool get-up and knocking off the former’s minions one by one. Meanwhile, a pair of X-Men—a walking skyscraper named Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and a surly teenager (Brianna Hildrebrand)—show up now and then when Deadpool needs fresh fodder for his incessant witticisms.

The comedy in “Deadpool” consists largely of random derisive banter, winking references to other movies, and juvenille scatological asides, much of it delivered by the main character either directly, in voice-over narration, or face-to-face with the audience. Some bits score a laugh but most land with a thud, and the direct-address gimmick wears thin.

Tim Miller, a visual effects artist making his debut as a director, pumps up the action with slow-mo acrobatics and bloody close-ups. “There’s the money shot, baby,” Deadpool quips delightedly as a bullet shreds an adversary at a grisly 300-ish frames a second. The screenplay, by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, essentially turns Deadpool into the insult comic of comic book heroes, making him more of a stand-up routine than a fully fleshed out character.

“I had another Liam Neeson nightmare,” Deadpool says, in a reference to the actor’s “Taken” series. Ironically, it’s during scenes when the burned hero stalks the streets looking to capture glimpses of his girlfriend and his former life that “Deadpool” evokes one of Neeson’s other, more obscure movies—the brilliant and underrated comic book style adventure “Darkman” from 1990.

That film also featured a revenge-minded protagonist who uses his wits to ferret out the criminal element responsible for leaving his countenance mutilated and his life in ruins. But what made “Darkman” more emotionally resonant and enduring lies both in the humanity of the hero’s suffering and the edgy, noirish world director Sam Raimi brought vividly to life with expressive camera angles and movements.

“Darkman” was a real movie; “Deadpool” is just an evening at the improv.