Iron Man 3

Can you name a third film in a franchise that was better than the previous two films? You’d probably have to go deep — A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, perhaps? — but Iron Man 3, despite my misgivings as someone who yawned through Tony Stark’s first two adventures, turns out to be deft summer entertainment, cheerfully amoral (I’ll get to that) and lightly coated with terrific little bits of comedic business. The difference here, it’s clear, is director/cowriter Shane Black, whose scripts for Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout still hold up as winking macho fantasies. Black doesn’t take much seriously unless it involves a hero trying to rescue or avenge his loved one. Everything else is fair game, all in fun, the clatter and concussion of action tropes as syncopated as the dialogue.

Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is up against some heavy hitters this time: exploding, supercharged assassins — juiced up with some form of nanotech called Extremis — who do the bidding of a shadowy, preening terrorist known as the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). The Mandarin, probably the most durable of the rather forgettable rogues’ gallery in Marvel’s Iron Man comics, is sort of tossed aside in this movie, in a wittily cynical fashion that almost reads as subversion. Black doesn’t take mustache-twirling supervillains seriously either. Mostly, the movie is a matter of Stark up against amputee war vets whose exposure to the putatively healing Extremis has made them aggressive and vicious. Someone in a bad mood might find Iron Man 3 unforgivably callous and thoughtless, especially after the events in Boston, where we saw real terrorism, real explosions, real amputees.

But the combination of Shane Black and Robert Downey Jr., which worked a treat in 2005’s little-seen but well-loved Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, wants only to put you in a good mood — especially if you were there for the ’80s and ’90s action bonanzas from which Black emerged. Right down to its holiday setting — every scene is sprinkled with festive (and patriotic) Christmas lights — Iron Man 3 is a slick late-’80s throwback, with a bad guy (Guy Pearce) whose mullet and glib smile recall Val Kilmer’s Chris Knight in Real Genius, except this real genius is bent on domination via manipulating the terrorist market. (Kilmer, of course, was also Downey’s co-star in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.) Black expands his boys’ club a bit, though — one of the more fearsome Extremis brutes is a woman (Stephanie Szostak), and even the unfortunately named Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), Stark’s loved one, gets to administer some beatdowns. Iron Woman!

If the thought of William Sadler and Miguel Ferrer — two character-actor favorites of the action era this movie fondly references — as President and Vice-President puts a spring in your step, welcome to Iron Man 3. (I wish Black had time to throw in Michael Ironside or Tom Atkins, just for me.) The rapport between Stark and fellow armor-wearer James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) likewise calls back to Riggs and Murtaugh. The action, framed by legendary cinematographer John Toll, is clear and crisp and satisfying, harking back to the days when directors felt it was important for us to see what was happening to whom, and where. (I’d advise skipping the 3D on this one — it works just fine in plain old 2D, and the colors most likely pop better.)

Downey is as blithely smug as he usually is in these hefty franchise events, but with Stark suffering Post-Avengers Stress Disorder, Downey has something new and likable to play: the current reality of gods and monsters has tweaked Stark’s head a little — he’s no longer the biggest kid on the block, and he’s a bit more humble. Technology, too, smacks him down to size, and at the end, after a symbolic fireworks show casting off tech support he no longer needs, we feel that Stark has grown up, left his toys behind. While we wait for the loud climax we have diversions in the form of witty banter between Stark and various admirers (including a fatherless kid who’s around just long enough not to wear out his welcome), and Guy Pearce and Ben Kingsley making meals of their sinister dialogue, and Rebecca Hall, looking like an odd amalgam of Liv Tyler and Scarlett Johansson (Betty Ross! Black Widow!), as a botanist and former Stark one-night stand. The theme of the movie seems to be that the past — whether a woman scorned or a nerd snubbed at a New Year’s Eve party — will come back to bite you, and that extends to ghastly experiments on war veterans and destructive technology that can be used against its maker. For all its snark and lighter-than-air pyrotechnics and aesthetic, the movie has a bit more going on under the hood — or helmet — than it’ll get credit for.

Zero Dark Thirty

Kathryn Bigelow has directed excellent movies before, but Zero Dark Thirty deserves to be remembered as the film that established her as a master, worthy of inclusion in the ranks of the great filmmakers. Zero Dark Thirty runs two hours and thirty-seven minutes, and there is not one inessential moment in it, not one inelegant shot. It goes forward at a steady, easy pace, trusting us to keep up, spanning eight years of the manhunt for Osama bin Laden without losing a step. It also spends roughly its first hour focusing on squalid failure — the efforts on the CIA’s part to torture information out of detainees. The torture doesn’t work; it doesn’t lead to any intel that stops numerous subsequent attacks or that leads to bin Laden. People who claim the movie is pro-torture must have wandered into a different theater, or gone into the film determined to find justifications where there are none. In the actual film that I saw, the CIA gets nowhere until they stop torturing detainees.

But enough of that. The movie, written by Mark Boal (Bigelow’s collaborator on The Hurt Locker) based on his interviews with many figures involved in the manhunt, is structured almost like a police procedural: We know whodunit, but how can we find him? A lot of the film is talking heads in offices, but Bigelow keeps the scenes tight and urgent. The protagonist, the fictionalized Maya (Jessica Chastain), has worked for the CIA since the ink was barely dry on her high-school diploma. Bin Laden becomes her white whale, though we’re given no evidence of any personal injury done to her by al-Qaeda; we also avoid the usual dull scenes where Maya has to balance her job and some relationship. She is defined entirely by her obsession, her determination, and her intelligence. Maya appears before us as the sort of literary blank slate we can project ourselves onto. We share her frustration; we share her revulsion at the torture performed by her CIA associate (Jason Clarke), who otherwise seems an amiable sort (he eventually opts for a desk job, yearning for something “normal”).

Other than some truly shocking moments of terrorism here and there, and the nail-biting raid on bin Laden’s compound, Zero Dark Thirty is not an action film, yet Bigelow and Boal let their characters reveal themselves through action, or action not taken, or action expressed as decision. Maya herself is not going to the Abbottabad compound to plug bin Laden in the head personally, but sending Navy SEALs in to take him out is still her responsibility (“Bin Laden is there,” she tells one of the soldiers, “and you’re going to kill him for me”). There’s a great deal of strategy, digital espionage, even bribery. Like Zodiac, the movie feels like a thick book packed with fascinating data and anecdotes, though getting too hung up on what’s literally true on the screen is pointless. It’s still a movie.

Maya is a tough cookie, but by casting the pale, red-haired, rather fragile-looking Jessica Chastain, Bigelow makes the unstressed point that not all strong women are built like Lucy Lawless; they come in deceptively frail packages, too, and Chastain seems almost recessive at times, but then, at a moment of high frustration, her Maya lets fly with a volley of vituperation at a stonewalling higher-up. She may look waifish but you don’t want to get in her way. The men around her, and some of the women, are nonplussed by Maya’s absolute certainty that she’s right. Unlike the male bureaucrats surrounding her, she doesn’t worry about covering her ass. She’s a hero, but Bigelow and Chastain also establish that Maya’s very certainty in this murky moral universe is a little inhuman. Battle not with monsters, as they say.

Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t stand to the side and say “Torture is bad.” It assumes we know that, and it suggests that even if torture worked perfectly it would — or should — still weigh heavily on the American soul. In the climactic raid, we see men and women, bin Laden’s accomplices in hiding him — willingly or unwillingly, who can say? — shot down in front of their shrieking children. It’s ugly stuff, and those who want to see bin Laden ventilated in full gory Django Unchained retributive glory will be disappointed — it happens mainly offscreen. A key theme in Bigelow’s work has always been the ambiguities attached to violence and the mechanisms, psychological or artificial, people use to distance themselves from the hurt they’re causing. In that respect, Zero Dark Thirty feels like Bigelow’s magnum opus, the big one she’s been working towards for the last three decades. It links nicely with her previous films, like Hurt Locker, of course, but also the dystopian sci-fi thriller Strange Days and even Blue Steel, a cop movie about a woman trying to bring a psychopath to justice. Here she has delivered an epic that is thoughtful but isn’t sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought; it is robust, physically exact — it hums with the special electricity of smart people doing what they do best, although doing their best often leads to failure anyway. Not in Bigelow’s case, though.

Django Unchained

Like most of his other films, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained feels like a summing-up, a resuscitation of forgotten subgenres, another thick volume of The Portable Quentin Tarantino — which, given the writer-director’s penchant for lengthy movies, isn’t quite portable. But that’s okay: the time always flies, and Tarantino gives us a lot of movie for our money. Django Unchained is another historical revenge epic on the order of Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious Basterds, in which the insulted and injured get bloody satisfaction; in this case, the wronged party is Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave passing through antebellum Texas. Django encounters a bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), and the two men become partners, Django assisting Schultz on various jobs until Schultz decides to help Django rescue his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from a Mississippi plantation.

Previous Tarantino revengeploitation (Kill Bill, etc.) was set in made-up, stylized worlds, but this movie and Basterds unfold against real-life backdrops of cruelty (and deep collective shame), so Django Unchained has sparked considerable controversy. Some African-Americans take issue with a white filmmaker’s using slavery (not to mention “the n-word”) so freely in service of a popcorn movie. Others find it empowering, as their ancestors also found blaxploitation cathartic in the ’70s. I’ll just say that the movie is structured as a spaghetti-western Niebelungen, in which the dragons this Siegfried must slay are slave owners and all the hillbillies and Uncle Toms who enable them. Django’s journey brings him to Candyland, an elaborate plantation run by the noxiously self-satisfied Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Hanging on his master Calvin’s every casually racist word like Gollum is house negro Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), who can tell straight away that Django and Schultz aren’t really there to buy “the right nigger” for mandingo fighting.

Trying to catch Broomhilda in a lie, Stephen asks her why he’s scaring her. “Because you’re scary,” she replies, and indeed he is; Jackson atones for many easy Samuel L. Jackson Auto-Pilot performances with a creepy, cobra-like menace. Tarantino has always been an actor’s director, evident here from so many people willing to drop in for tiny roles; at times the movie is an anthology of character actors from exploitation or TV. Foxx’s Django is iconic and stoic except where his beloved Broomhilda is concerned, while Waltz’s Schultz, familiar with violence up to a point, is gradually sickened by seeing firsthand the ruthless machinery of the slave economy. DiCaprio doesn’t overdo Candie’s sadism; in fact, in order to be sadistic you have to have some awareness that what you’re doing is wrong, and Candie, born into his position, sees nothing evil in it. It’s the water he’s always swum in. Someone like Stephen, who should see the evil but overlooks it out of expedience, is far more treacherous.

Starting with Kill Bill, Tarantino became a born-again action director, and the many shoot-outs here are staged with over-the-top gusto, with blood spurting and misting and puddling. When we’re supposed to enjoy the brutality, we do; when we’re not (say, when Candie unleashes dogs on an escaped slave), we don’t. Tarantino’s use of violence here seems fair and organic: If you profit from human misery, your death will be a joke to energize the audience. Tarantino’s great theme, hooking into his preoccupation with revenge sagas over the last decade, has always been “Actions have consequences.” When this is applied to America’s guilty past, Django Unchained comes to feel like an act of radicalism, which connects it to Tarantino’s obvious influences here, the sardonically political spaghetti westerns of Sergio Corbucci (The Great Silence and the original Django).

Other than showing off the first Django (Franco Nero) in a cameo, Tarantino’s Django shares no particular plot overlap with Corbucci’s, any more than his Inglourious Basterds cribbed its narrative from Enzo Castellari’s. The soundtrack is gratifyingly eclectic and defiantly anachronistic; Ennio Morricone and Jerry Goldsmith consort uneasily with Rick Ross and Jim Croce, and somehow it all works. As always, Tarantino is like a kid playing you his favorite albums and movie clips, but as he’s gotten older, with this and Basterds, he seems to have concluded that all his passion and enthusiasm should be put to use for grindhouse-history lessons — that is, history as seen through the filter of grindhouse, not the history of grindhouse, though it’s that too. The movie takes its time and stretches its legs and lets people reveal character through monologues. It also knows when to blow people sky-high for a laugh and when to step back in revulsion when other people who don’t deserve it are butchered. The tension between the two forms of violence may be the key to the movie’s controversy, but it also makes Django Unchained the season’s most vital filmmaking, bringing all of cinema’s manipulative possibilities to bear on a cracking good tale.

Promised Land

As message movies go, the anti-fracking Promised Land (opening December 28) is neither a firebrand nor a puppyish Oscar-chaser. It’s becalmed, downright mellow at times. Unlike other position-paper films like Traffic and Syriana, which packed so many characters and subplots they seemed more like agenda delivery systems than like drama, Promised Land is relatively underpopulated and simple. Steve Taylor (Matt Damon) is a hotshot sales rep from a massive natural-gas company. He swings into rural Pennsylvania, accompanied by senior rep Sue Thomason (Frances McDormand), to get the townspeople to sign off on drilling on their land. Steve waves lots of (potential) money around: these down-on-their-luck farmers need the cash injection. Things look good for Steve and Sue until an environmentalist, Dustin Noble (John Krasinski), wheels into town. Dustin brings stories of other farms, such as his own, that said yes to fracking and sealed their own doom.

Damon and Krasinski wrote the screenplay (based on a story Krasinski worked up with novelist Dave Eggers), and it’s consciously non-insulting. The rural people are never hung out to dry as naïve clods or rednecks; many of them, like local teacher Alice (Rosemarie DeWitt) and gun-shop owner Rob (Titus Welliver), speak with a quick, sardonic wit. We’re never made to feel that the farmers and homeowners need to be protected from their own stupidity by crusading liberals. Steve and Sue are damn good salespeople, making their offer sound like the only sensible thing to do. Some folks, like science teacher Frank (Hal Holbrook), aren’t so sure about that.

The movie is also careful to humanize Steve and Sue, who are not nefarious villains twirling their mustaches but people trying to close a sale. They lie, or at least misrepresent the truth, but so do most salespeople, especially those working for major corporations. I’m not excusing what real-life Steves and Sues do and the human cost of what they do; my point is that the movie isn’t structured to give us someone easy to hate, so there’s some complexity involved. The film allows surprisingly little time for anti-fracking chat; it’s more interested in the community and what’s at stake, and we meet and get to know a number of the people. Director Gus Van Sant and his cinematographer Linus Sandgren dwell on the beauty of the landscapes. We see for ourselves what might be ruined, feel for ourselves the generational ties to the soil. The filmmaking is smooth, unhurried, unassertive. The message isn’t crammed down our throats; it sneaks up on us.

Promised Land is good drama at a time when good drama is scarce at the movies (generally these days we look to TV for that). It’s rarely grim; it flows with the easy-going humor of smart people talking to each other, and that sets the movie’s rhythm, too. The tempo is very rural, laid-back. Steve’s crisis of conscience is established mostly wordlessly. He and Sue both find attractive, funny people to spend time with (when they’d only planned to be in and out of town in a few days). Damon and Krasinski get a lot of comic mileage out of their scenes together; Dustin Noble (the name is a bit much, and is probably meant to be) approaches activism as prankish performance art, like Jim from The Office needling Dwight. But if Steve has unexpected layers to him, so does Dustin. Something he says to Steve — “Do you have what it takes?” — reverberates darkly later on.

I came to Promised Land with a bit of a dutiful heavy step: oh, man, an earnest Hollywood-liberal drama. I’m a lefty myself, but as I’ve said before, I don’t enjoy feeling as if I were in a choir being preached to. I want to be told a good story, spend time with well-written and interesting characters, be surprised. Promised Land checks off all those boxes. It ends up saying nothing more radical than that natural gas may be a decent alternative to oil and coal, but that fracking for it can be a brutal and destructive way to go about getting it, and that short-term windfalls of cash won’t make up for ruining the soil that gives you what’s left of your livelihood. At its base it really only advocates for looking very closely at any offers made to you and anything given to you to sign, and also looking very closely at the people making the offers and handing you the papers, and the corporations behind the people.

Cloud Atlas

If the massive, vaultingly ambitious Cloud Atlas could be whittled down to one old-Hollywood concern, it might be this: At the end of the picture, do the guy and the girl get together? This is a tricky proposition in this case, because there are six guys and six girls, in six different times and places, all of whom, we are led to surmise, are the same guy and girl in different stages, and sometimes they don’t even meet each other for so much as a how-do-you-do. Cloud Atlas, based on a widely cherished cult novel by David Mitchell, spans centuries and the globe without breaking its stride, intercutting between each of its sextet of tales and arriving, finally, at its big takeaway: Love is good. Freedom is good. Truth is good. The opposites of those things are bad, and the pursuits of those things are the only constant in an ever-changing, ever-hostile world.

Well. Yes. It would take a preternaturally grumpy viewer to object too strongly to this life-medicine, though, because it’s administered so skillfully and passionately, with a complete disregard for the cynics in the balcony. I think the tipping point in Cloud Atlas determining whether you will love it or hoot at it is a top-hatted imaginary demon with greenish skin, exhorting a character to do vile things in the name of self-preservation. I grew to look forward to that fellow, and I sighed a little and became restless when the movie flicked over to the futuristic “Neo-Seoul” segments, which feel the most like a dystopian fantasia by the Wachowski siblings (of The Matrix). Sure enough, they directed those segments, as well as another futuristic story and one set in the 19th century, while Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) handled the ’30s, the ’70s, and 2012. Which shows, I guess, that Andy and Lana Wachowski are uncomfortable with present day, present reality, and Tykwer can work quite well without spaceships and laser blasts.

Taken all in one two-hour-and-52-minute lump, Cloud Atlas is never boring; I checked the time at one point, saw that we had about an hour to go, and settled back, relaxed and happy to get more. As pure cinema — a term I overuse, but can’t avoid when discussing this thing — the movie is a vast banquet table stretching to the vanishing point, though we’re never allowed to linger over any one tasty dish before it’s removed and replaced with an entirely dissimilar platter. Mitchell’s novel was structured symmetrically, or palindromically (it’s a word now), the first story leading into and appearing in the next, and so on, and then the narrative doubled back on itself. The movie shuffles the deck — the effect is simultaneity, not continuity. Each reality the film shows us — a notary on a ship, a rent boy working as an amanuensis to a composer, a journalist uncovering shenanigans at a nuclear power plant, a publisher trapped in a nursing home, a clone seeking freedom in futuristic Korea, a post-apocalyptic tribesman in Hawaii — unfolds, for us, at the same “movie time,” in apparently different dimensions.

The fun part, despite clucking from the politically correct, is watching the same actors — Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant — appearing as different characters of sometimes different races. Hanks gets to be heroic (or at least morally conflicted) in some segments and diabolical in others; my favorite of his incarnations was “Dermot Hoggins,” a pugnacious Irish writer who chucks his least favorite literary critic off a roof. Hanks and Halle Berry appear to be destined for love — the “guy and the girl” who get together at the end of the picture — though in a couple of the stories they make no more than a nodding acquaintance, perhaps because in those realities Hanks isn’t worthy of love yet. Karma seems to be one of the many ideas bubbling to the surface here. In his six identities, Hanks starts out rotten, becomes merely sleazy, then conflicted, then violent, then an inadvertent motivator of freedom fighters, and then, after many visitations from Hugo Weaving as the aforementioned top-hat demon, finally a hero deserving of Halle Berry’s hand.

Again, most of this is shuffled together so smoothly that it never confuses and nearly always engages. As photographed by Frank Griebe and John Toll, it’s a gift for the eyes, and though Cloud Atlas is perhaps not the intellectual/emotional one-two punch it seems to want to be, it’s nonetheless made for endless replaying on Blu-ray and at midnight screenings (the few still extant). In isolated bits it feels major; other bits force us to agree to go along with them (the makeup department kept very busy here, and sometimes it’s like playing spot-the-actor in something like The List of Adrian Messenger). The cast and the filmmakers are committed at the highest level, and good old Hugo Weaving gets to chew scenery as a variety of evildoers, including a forbidding nurse (yes, a female nurse). Given that this is the first major film co-directed by a transgendered woman (Lana Wachowski), it ends its gay love story less cheerily than some will like, while others will shrug and blame it on the repressive time period. The Magical Negro trope pops up in a couple of the segments, too, which may, for all I know, reflect as much on the book as on the filmmakers. Cloud Atlas is too earnest and overarching to be perfect in any way — the literal-minded will gather dozens of flaws to cackle over. But in such a timid time for entertainment in general and movies in particular, I have to respect the beauty of the attempt. It isn’t a masterpiece but it sure has masterful pieces.

Premium Rush

Premium Rush moves like New York City — fast and hard, with nary a backward glance. The movie is about Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a NYC bike messenger tasked to deliver an envelope. This envelope contains something very much desired by Detective Monday (Michael Shannon), a corrupt cop who wants to intercept it before it reaches its destination. Wilee is probably named after the luckless cartoon character, but he’s more like the Road Runner, with the cop as the coyote. Most of the city cops in the film, including a bike cop Wilee consistently stymies, are annoyances or obstacles. It’s an eerie coincidence that Premium Rush opened on the same day that New York City police, trying to take down a gunman, ended up wounding nine bystanders. New York’s finest, indeed.

Apart from its unintended ironies, Premium Rush is a fat-free thriller with breathtaking high-speed bike chases — we’re told the footage is unfaked — through busy Manhattan streets. Professional stunt drivers can almost do flashy, bone-crunching car chases in their sleep, but what must really require nerve-racking attention are the many scenes here in which cars are always braking within inches of hitting a bicyclist. There’s a lot of subtle yet thrilling car choreography here, reminding us that sometimes it’s more exciting when you see two or three near-simultaneous accidents narrowly averted.

Wilee is a great bicyclist, eschewing gears and even brakes; he relies on his legs and his instincts, and we see the latter at work at several points when Wilee has to make a split-second decision which way to go, and his imagination plays out various scenarios (if you go this way, you hit someone’s stroller; if you go that way, you’re gonna fly over someone’s hood). It’s as if Wilee’s got a rapid-fire GPS in his head that steers him to safety — in most cases. The director of Premium Rush is David Koepp, who’s primarily a screenwriter but has made a few interesting films, chiefly his directorial debut The Trigger Effect. Here, Koepp just takes us for a ride, no subtext required or desired. It’s a trim piece of work, maybe his best, because it isn’t bogged down and it knows how to sketch characters on the fly. In the minimalist-thriller race, I’ll take this over the pretentious Drive in a New York minute.

It helps that the Road Runner and the coyote are impeccably cast; Joseph Gordon-Levitt is accessible, smart, athletic, everything a young action hero needs to be, while Michael Shannon, born in Kentucky and raised there and in Chicago, almost single-handedly brings a ’70s New York flavor to the movie. (Detective Monday isn’t always eating a sloppy, garlicky sandwich, but spiritually he is.) There’s more New York irritability, desperation and unchecked pride in Shannon’s performance than in the entirety of the Taking of Pelham 123 remake from a few years ago. Shannon usually plays suffering saps in indie films (and is great at it), but here he’s clearly having a great time and shares it with us. The movie doesn’t stop there, surrounding Wilee with a crew of colorful support, including Dania Ramirez as Wilee’s ex-girlfriend and fellow bike messenger and Aasif Mandvi as his dispatcher. Everyone in the film has New York fever, and every damn time you see a cop he always interrupts himself to hassle someone over something small.

Premium Rush might be purer if we never knew what was in the envelope, but we find out it can lead to a little boy’s freedom. On one level that’s kind of a bummer — do it for the kid! — but on another level it adds some warmth and urgency to the chase. And the movie keeps going at a clip; the editors, Jill Savitt (who’s cut most of Koepp’s films) and Derek Ambrosi (making his feature debut), can take a well-earned bow. This is the kind of low-expectation late-summer film that can all too often fall under the radar but delivers more honestly and forcefully than most of its warm-weather predecessors. Watching Wilee and his cohorts bob and weave in and out of bleating traffic while Michael Shannon hilariously chews the scenery (minus one tooth) offers, if not pure cinema, at least pure entertainment.

Moonrise Kingdom

Since at least Rushmore, Wes Anderson has not made movies so much as storybooks in motion, and Moonrise Kingdom may be his purest storybook yet. The movie teems with characters yet is modestly scaled; like Anderson’s previous film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, it doesn’t employ the super-wide compositions that had been Anderson’s trademark. It looks boxier, homier, warmer. Everything is at a slight, sly remove, indicating that this isn’t serious business — it’s storytime, nobody’s in real danger, and things will end as they should. Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola construct a story about true love, and because that love is between two 12-year-olds, it’s not complicated, which it usually is in Anderson’s films — it’s innocent, optimistic, almost anarchic. These kids aren’t tragic lovers, though; we feel that they’re in benevolent hands.

Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) ditches his Khaki Scout troop to be with Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), who likewise runs away from home. They meet in a field and take off for the woods, pursued by various worried adults: policeman Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), who keeps the order on the island of New Penzance; Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton); and Suzy’s parents, Walt and Linda (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand). There is some complicated love here: Captain Sharp and Linda are uneasily ending an affair. But they don’t see themselves in Sam and Suzy, which is a relief — Anderson isn’t that obvious. The adults just want the kids to be safe back home — although Sam, an orphan whose most recent foster family has decided not to invite him back, doesn’t really have a home.

Sam and Suzy are described as “disturbed children,” though they may simply be responding to their environments. Suzy’s parents are troubled (and she has three brothers to contend with); Sam’s parents are dead. Moonrise Kingdom is set in 1965, when the generation impacted by Dr. Spock had kids of their own and sought to understand them via pop psychology. As the movie presents it, though, it’s simple: Sam and Suzy are unhappy alone and happy with each other. They sit in a tent while Suzy reads aloud from various storybooks; they dance on a beach and have their first kiss. Their journey is quietly idyllic, and the young actors play the kids deadpan enough that they’re never insufferable. Anderson never oversells the beauty; his regular cinematographer Robert Yeoman provides his usual immaculate symmetrical compositions, with characters always framed dead center, surrounded by the retro tackiness of the mid-’60s.

Moonrise Kingdom works up to an apocalypse of sorts — a hurricane approaching New Penzance. Its arrival coincides with that of a lady from Social Services (Tilda Swinton), amusingly named only Social Services, who wants to put Sam in an orphanage. Social Services is this storybook’s villain, worshiping rules and bureaucracy, ready to ruin Sam’s life without even having met him. Swinton is in let’s-have-fun mode here, and the others in the cast — especially Willis and Norton — seem relieved to be a part of something with some substance, something childlike but not childish. Like Spike Jonze’ Where the Wild Things Are, the film is about kids but is not really a kids’ movie.

In the summer of big, expensive superhero flicks, Moonrise Kingdom evokes awe, wonder and the magic of escapism in a much smaller and more precious way. It does Wes Anderson good to get outside: filming around Narragansett Bay, he inhales some fresh air and gets out of the rectangular confines of his past work. If Anderson’s films have been about anything, it’s the importance of breaking out of damaging routines: unhappy adults come to a crossroads and decide a change is needed. Here, in the first scenes, we see what it might be like to grow up inside a Wes Anderson film. Like their earlier adult counterparts, the kids grow to embrace mess, feeling, life outside the manicured interiors. They also have their whole lives ahead of them, which makes this Anderson’s most honestly hopeful work yet.

The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods destroys itself. You don’t see very many movies do that, especially movies that open on 2,800 screens. It shows you the machinery inside itself, and then blows up the machinery. It’s a horror movie about horror movies; it destroys horror movies, too. It’s a bit on the cold side, as a lot of clever films are. It’s a semester of horror tropes packed into 95 tight minutes, with sidebar snark about bureaucrats. It’s the work of two wise guys — writer-director Drew Goddard and co-writer Joss Whedon — sitting in the back of the classroom, snorting disdainfully about the cheap stuff horror movies scare us with but also admitting that the cheap stuff is fun. The Cabin in the Woods has too much on its agenda to be truly scary (though it has its moments), but it’s the most fun I’ve had at a horror film since Trick ‘R Treat, which also toyed with horror clichés. It’s a big gift bag handed to horror fans with a cheerful invitation to root around inside.

Cabin starts out mysteriously, at an antiseptic facility manned by blasé techs. In the first of the movie’s really good jokes, we freeze-frame on a dull shot of two of the techs — played by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford as regular-guy mad scientists — and the movie’s title comes up, in huge, red, screen-filling letters. But where’s the cabin? Where are the woods? It seems designed to confuse the uninitiated. We get the cabin and the woods soon enough, as a quintet of college kids go off for a weekend. Goddard and Whedon sketch them in for us with quick, deft strokes — the jock (Chris Hemsworth), the virgin (Kristen Connolly), the party girl (Anna Hutchison), the stoner (Fran Kranz), the brain (Jesse Williams). They don’t know that they’re in a horror film or that they represent very familiar horror-film types.

That’s about all you should know going in; there are surprises beyond the obvious twist given away in the first five minutes. I can try to be oblique, though. Horror is chaos encroaching on order: when an idyllic summer afternoon drive becomes a nightmare, to quote the opening crawl from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or when the boogeyman comes, as in Halloween. In this movie, the horror is precise and controlled — the horror is order. And eventually, when true chaos arrives to scatter that order, horror fans everywhere will break into a wicked grin, and perhaps laughter. It’s as though the collective ghosts of horror past focused their wrath on the man-children and idiots who have held horror hostage for years with boring, derivative stories, remakes, sequels: this is the Whedon film that should be called The Avengers. And maybe it’s just me, but I thought David Julyan’s score kept threatening to turn into Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” otherwise known as the ooh-spooky pipe-organ music from 1962’s Phantom of the Opera and a hundred others.

Aside from how it plays roughly and relentlessly with what we expect from a horror film, does Cabin work as, well, a horror film, or is it a meta-essay like Funny Games? Goddard and Whedon aren’t into punishing the audience for what we came to see, what we want to see; that isn’t their game. They would, however, like us to think about why we come to see and want to see certain things in a horror film — why horror filmmakers work so hard to appease our base appetites for destruction. Their project goes deeper than a comparatively shallow exercise in deconstruction like the Scream franchise. That said, yes, the movie does work as an example of what it’s examining; it’s a bit like Alan Moore’s Watchmen that way, in that it looks under the hood while acknowledging that the rusty, oily engine still runs, otherwise why bother looking at it? People still stupidly isolate themselves and die violently, and that still works our nerves the same old way.

Chronicle

Found-footage movies are hot, and superhero movies are hot, so I imagine Chronicle — a found-footage superhero movie — being an easy pitch to the studio. The surprise is how serious and emotionally true the film turns out to be. Chronicle follows three high-school boys who stumble upon some sort of glowing object down a deep, dark hole; their proximity to it gives them telekinetic powers. The events are videotaped by Andrew (Dane DeHaan), a mopey kid with a miserable home life. Andrew’s cousin Matt (Alex Russell) and the popular kid Steve (Michael B. Jordan) at first have fun with their newfound abilities, making things — and eventually themselves — float around. But things get dark fast. This amazing power has been delivered into the hands of three basically good kids, which is fortunate for us all, but Andrew is beginning to crack.

Spurred on by rage, grief and panic, Andrew begins to do dumb, destructive things. Many in the audience may question why he doesn’t do this or that. In response I can only quote a nifty line from Stephen Hunter’s novel Dirty White Boys, describing a scared guy who freezes at a bad moment: “His mind was full of spiders and firecrackers.” Andrew is dealing with an alcoholic dad — a firefighter on disability — and a dying mom, whose much-needed pain meds his dad can’t begin to afford. This is stark stuff for a teenage superhero movie. It explains Andrew’s gradual transformation into a supervillain, and the good-hearted Matt and Steve, who have less complicated lives, try and fail to pull him back from his worst instincts. Why should Andrew try to do good — or try not to do evil — in this world? All it’s ever given him is pain.

Chronicle was made for $15 million by two 26-year-old newcomers — director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis (son of “Master of Horror” John Landis), who concocted the story together. It’s a fine calling card, with echoes of Akira as well as standard superhero-origin tales. Set in Seattle (but filmed primarily in Vancouver), the film looks glum and realistic — workable and believable soil out of which the fantastic can flower. The young actors swing from exuberance to fear with ease. After a while, Andrew’s camera is held aloft telekinetically so that we can see more; I wasn’t always convinced that the camera would be catching certain events so clearly, but by the climax, where the action becomes both exhilarating and terrifying, I didn’t much care.

The finale, indeed, makes a lot of what we’ve seen in much more expensive superhero films look stupid. Again, it’s all grounded in identifiable and intense emotions, with untold collateral damage that reminded me of the horrific destruction in an infamous issue of Alan Moore’s Miracleman comic. (If you’re familiar with it, you know what I mean; if not, don’t worry about it.) It’s the first movie since maybe Superman II that made me feel how frightening it might be to get caught between two gods in battle. Andrew, stooped over and burned and wearing a hospital gown, looks like an evil mutant, while Matt is Superman in jeans. The very end is a little facile, and points too eagerly towards a sequel, but that doesn’t seriously lessen the impact of a film that may well give this summer’s The Avengers — whose trailer before this movie already looks so been-there-done-that — a run for its (big) money.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

I’ve never understood people who somehow blame the parents of psycho kids who go on school shooting sprees — especially if the parents hadn’t been demonstrably abusive. Some kids — some humans — are just broken, that’s all; they come out that way, stone cold and unreachable, and it doesn’t matter how much love they get at home. It could be, indeed, that the more love they get from their parents — the more coddling, the more enabling — the harder they calcify into madness. In We Need to Talk About Kevin, the long-overdue third feature directed by Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar), Tilda Swinton plays Eva, the mother of a son who just plain comes out wrong. Nothing she can do helps; she tries and tries to get through to him, but he — Kevin — is intractable and difficult right from the start. He goes way beyond just being a brat. He’s brilliant, and emotionally incomplete, and he seems to decide very early on that his mother is his nemesis and that he will devote himself to putting her through hell.

The movie unfurls in fragments, bouncing around through time, the main signifier being the length of Eva’s hair (in the earlier bits, before her life has completely fallen apart, she has a stylishly short style; later on, it’s longer and lifeless). What we gather is that Kevin, now a teenager, has gone on a school rampage, and that this has destroyed Eva’s life. In flashbacks, we see her living with her son, her clueless husband (John C. Reilly), and her younger daughter in a huge house without many neighbors around. (The remoteness of the house becomes important later.) As a best-selling writer of travel books, Eva can afford the set-up. In the present-day scenes she’s renting a ratty suburban house and toiling as a secretary in a — insult-to-injury here — travel agency. Everywhere she goes, she stands a good chance of being insulted, being physically attacked, or having her property vandalized by the grieving parents of the fellow students Kevin killed. Her life is effectively over. We sense that the only reason she doesn’t OD on a bottle of pills and a bottle of the red wine she’s always chugging is that she needs to hear Kevin — whom she visits in the juvie institution — explain why he did it. As if there could be an explanation.

We Need to Talk About Kevin isn’t the kind of film that provides such a reason. What it does do, with stomach-freezing efficacy, is to swim around inside the pain of a parent whose child is a monster. (Another recent film, last summer’s Beautiful Boy, probed the same sort of wound.) But we also see that Eva is not entirely innocent. I said before that she tries and tries, but some people are cut out to be parents and some are not; some have the patience for a particularly recalcitrant child and some don’t. As it happens, Eva’s relationship with the younger daughter, Celia, seems perfectly healthy, if only because Celia doesn’t smear sandwiches on glass tables or shit herself to spite Eva. It can also happen that parents make all their mistakes with the first kid and are mellower with the subsequent ones. Whatever the case, we’re shown that Kevin gave Eva trouble right from birth, literally from birth. The only time he cuts her some slack is when he’s sick and he develops an interest in the Robin Hood storybook she’s reading to him, which in turn forms an interest in archery.

This is easily the most mainstream film Lynne Ramsay has made, though it’s still far from ready for prime time. A lot of it, thematically and symbolically, is very neat; a little too neat. There are the obvious images of Eva straining throughout the movie to clean up red paint that’s been splattered across the front of her house, with many close-ups of her washing the paint off her hands. Yes, we get it; out, damn’d spot! We also get that every hapless interaction she endures with Kevin marches them both irreversibly towards his massacre. When we see that little Celia has two healthy eyes in some scenes and an eyepatch in others, we tense up and wait to find out how that happened (remembering all the while Kevin’s affinity for arrows). When Celia gets a plump little hamster for Christmas, we wait to see what Kevin will do to it. Some of the plotting mechanisms hark back to Lionel Shriver’s 2003 source novel, which if anything made Kevin even more of a bastard.

Still, what Ramsay does with the material — with invaluable help from the prickly-vulnerable Swinton and a peerless portrait in sociopathy by the 18-year-old Ezra Miller as the teenage Kevin — sticks in the mind and the eye. This is a thriller, after a fashion (some have called it a horror movie; Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells memorably termed it “emotional rat poison”), and it made me wonder anew what Ramsay might have done with The Lovely Bones, which she was attached to for a while before Peter Jackson took it over and stank it up with his heavy-breathing CGI visions of heaven. I wonder, too, if the experience of losing out on The Lovely Bones made Ramsay hungry for another story about murder and familial noncommunication and devastated mothers. This is by leaps and bounds the better film, though not nearly as comforting — we even hear Eva, with suspicious cheerfulness, telling Jehovah’s Witnesses that she fully expects to go to hell — and to recommend it to young or prospective parents would be the height of cruelty. The movie, among other things, gives us to think about how much of parenting is the luck of the genetic draw: some babies come out destined to bring pain to themselves and everyone around them, and not the smallest or largest damn thing can be done about it.