APOCALYPSE; MEOW

Opening:

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga--In the unlikely event that I'm ever asked to take the "Colbert Questionert" on Late Night, my answer to the question "Favorite Action Movie?" will be George Miller's 1981 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. It would probably be on the list of my twenty or thirty favorite movies, all-time. So any later chapter in George Miller's postapocalyptic Down Under car chase franchise has a lot to live up to.

This fifth entry is a prequel, offering backstory on the one-armed warrior played by Charlize Theron in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. Turns out that Furiosa was abducted, as a child, from a "place of abundance" into the Wasteland, a vast desert region inhabited by gnarly motorcycle-borne pirates shuttling between three horribly symbiotic fiefdoms: The Citadel, Gas Town and The Bullet Farm.

The Citadel, a water source, is presided over by the masked warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and filled with his bald, pale, mindlessly loyal followers the War Boys, who recall the acolytes of Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian. Gas Town refines the fuel that the Wasteland's countless motor vehicles burn; The Bullet Farm provides the munitions.

Furiosa is dragged into this miserable world as a girl (Alyla Browne) and ends up in the clutches of the gabby nomadic biker chieftain Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), who more than earns her grudge against him. Over the more than two-hour run of the movie, the grown-up version of Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) is carried along through Miller's lengthy showcase chases and battle scenes, which have the feel of movements in a symphony.

I saw this film in IMAX, with a large screening audience, and what I noticed is that every time one of Miller's mad, headlong, thundering action sequences wound down, the crowd was left quiet, mesmerized. The term "gripping" gets thrown out a lot in describing movies, but Furiosa truly grips. I liked but didn't love Fury Road; this one still falls shy of Road Warrior for me, but it's a majestic piece of filmmaking nonetheless.

There's no director quite like Miller. His action scenes are staged with an epic sweep but also with a macabre slapstick intricacy. His view of humanity seems deeply jaundiced; he's forever showing us people taking cruelty and indifference to their fellow humans to horrifying extremes, yet he does it with a casual humor, as if to say, of course we're capable of this.

Yet somehow this bleak outlook doesn't come across like cheap, sophomoric cynicism, and it isn't depressing. Partly this is because he always shows us decent human values struggling to hold on in this world, but it's also because the generous-hearted Miller imbues his characters, even the deplorable ones, with so much personality and grotesque glamour.

Taylor-Joy, with the jolting anger that takes over her almost inhumanly urchin face, fits the role perfectly. As her love interest, driver Praetorian Jack, handsome Tom Burke has a valiant and sympathetic appeal. But it's Hemsworth, his eyes wounded and his tone aggrieved every time somebody has the temerity to resist him, who really engages with the audience. The final clash between Dementus and Furiosa, featuring some of the best dialogue from the script (by Miller and Nico Lathouris), gets at the impulse to avenge with a subtlety that few action movies attempt. 

There can be little doubt that Miller's films have contributed to the dangerous illusion that many people, especially young men, seem to hold: that the collapse of civilization would be cool and liberating and fun. He should probably be censured for this, but it sure makes his movies exhilarating.

The Garfield Movie--Another origin story; this computer-animated yarn starts by tracing the humble beginnings of the indolent, lasagna-loving housecat from the calculatingly marketed comic strip by Jim Davis. Turns out that as a kitten, Garfield, voiced here by Chris Pratt, was left in an alley by his feral father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) and met his devoted human Jon (Nicholas Hoult) when he saw him through the window of an Italian restaurant. His overeating is a psychological overcompensation for early want.

The rest of The Garfield Movie concerns our hero and his exuberant canine pal Odie getting abducted by the cronies of the Persian cat Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), who has a grudge against Vic. Somehow it all leads to an attempt to steal milk from a commercial dairy, and an alliance with a glowering, lovelorn bull (Ving Rhames, who's pretty funny).

Admirable as Pratt is as an easygoing onscreen star, his voice struck me as a bit generic for this character, after being performed in earlier iterations by such distinctive voices as Bill Murray and Lorenzo Music. But he's not bad, and the movie has imagination and a snappy, propulsive comic precision, not to mention a catchy theme song by Jon Batiste. It's inconsequential but slickly-made fun, and when it was over, I'll admit I went out for lasagna.

DINO EXIT

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Jurassic World Dominion--Before discussing this supposed finale to the Jurassic Park series, I should offer my usual disclaimer: I'm a lifelong dinosaur geek. A movie with dinosaurs starts at as much of an advantage with me as, say, a movie about fighter jets does with a military aviation buff.

So take this into account this when I tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed Jurassic World Dominion. Which I did.

The premise here is that dinosaurs have become a regular fact of contemporary life, usually as a danger or a pest. The movie begins with an enormous Mosasaur ruining the day of a commercial fishing boat, and from there director Colin Trevorrow, working from a script he co-wrote with Emily Carmichael, serves up one sequence after another of Mesozoic mayhem, as the revived reptiles cause traffic accidents, harass children, intrude on industrial sites and so forth. The beasts are also, of course, poached, illegally bred and otherwise exploited by humans.

The plot mixes the characters from the recent chapters, like Chris Pratt's raptor whisperer and Bryce Dallas Howard's Jurassic Park administrator turned dinosaur-liberation activist, with the heroes from the first film, Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum. Pratt and Howard are attempting to recover their adoptive daughter, the cloned child of a deceased JP scientist, as well as a young velociraptor, the offspring of Pratt's beloved Blue. Both have been kidnapped by a bio-engineering firm headed by creepy CEO Campbell Scott, and spirited off to an isolated research facility and dinosaur preserve in the Italian Alps.

Meanwhile Dern, startled by an invasion of locusts the size of baguettes that are decimating crops across the U.S., also suspects that the bio-firm is scheming, in the words of Simon Bar Sinister and Tears for Fears, to rule the world. She recruits her old pal Neill to help her infiltrate the facility, where Goldblum is gadfly-in-residence, and get proof. Eventually both sets of characters, along with an extremely glamorous pilot (DeWanda Wise) and a handful of other sympathetic parties, converge.

Along they way they are menaced by dinosaurs and other genetically-engineered perils. Raptors stalk our heroes through the streets and over the rooftops of Malta like assassins in a Bourne thriller. Dimetrodons chase them through amber mines. A giant flying Quetzalcoatlus attacks a plane in midair. Monstrous Giganotosaurus and sentimental favorite Tyrannosaurus Rex brawl like Japanese kaiju.  And that's aside from the worst outbreak of giant grasshoppers since 1957's The Beginning of the End.

Best of all, maybe, is an eerie, dreamlike sequence in which Therizinosaurus, a beast that resembles an enormous downy pheasant with claws like giant salad forks, towers over Howard as she lowers her pin-up-beauty face into a swampy green pool. This scene is a good example of a strength that has benefitted the whole series but is particularly pronounced in Dominion: the superb sound effects. For all of the movie's visual effects splendors, it's the sounds of the creatures, from the enveloping yet somehow muted bellow of the T-rex to all of the distinctive squawking and hissing and clucking and chittering of the others, that really make them scary.

On the downside, with as much objectivity as I can muster as a sucker for dinosaurs, I must note that the dialogue in Dominion seems bland and inexpressive; even Goldblum has to push his comically diffident delivery harder than usual to wring laughs out his lines. And the story is so unnecessarily scattered that the movie loses momentum at times.

Trevorrow is an admirably free-wheeling talent; he made 2015's Jurassic World a wild ride. With a tighter, more streamlined rescue-mission plot, this one could have been similarly edge-of-the-seat. On the other hand, if it was a tighter movie, it might have lost some of its eccentricity, and therefore some of its magic.

A LEGO UP

Opening this weekend:

 

Whenever the subject of Legos comes up, as it does more and more frequently in popular movie reviewing, I feel the need to mention that I never had Legos as a kid, or particularly wanted them. Nor have I played with them as an adult. Even so, I've enjoyed all of the Lego movies I've seen.

2017's The Lego Batman Movie was my favorite, an on-the-money spoof of torturous, "dark" superhero flicks. But 2014's original The Lego Movie was a charming, funny, unpretentious meditation on conformity versus individualism.

Now we get the sequel to that film, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, directed by Mike Mitchell from a script by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Matthew Fogel, and set, appropriately, five years after the events of The Lego Movie. The locale, once again, is the vast Lego metropolis of Bricksburg. The name has since been changed to "Apocalypseburg," however, after an invasion of cutesy but lethal aliens has reduced the town to dystopian wreckage. Even so, our hero Emmet (Chris Pratt) remains as upbeat and cheerful as ever.

When aliens abduct Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), Lego Batman (Will Arnett), and several of Emmet's other friends, taking them to the distant "Systar System," Emmet follows, intent on rescuing them. Along the way, he meets Rex (also Pratt), a tough guy space mercenary—with a crew of dinosaurs!—who helps him summon reserves of gritty resolve.

This is only the beginning of the plot's twists and turns. Like its predecessor, Lego Movie 2 is a dense and complex piece of storytelling. It's almost—though maybe not quite—as seamlessly thought through as the original, yet it flies along with effortless speed and precision.

As before, much of the comedy derives from the limited range of motion available to Lego figures, and there were gags that went over my head. I don't know why, for instance, sequences of numbers appear onscreen when the characters are building some new contraption, but I'm guessing this involves the technical side of Lego-building. There are also endless, and amusing, references to pop culture classics starting with Planet of the Apes and 2001 and carrying on through Jurassic Park and the Lord of the Rings movies up to the most topical industry gossip, and even a quick nod to RBG.

The voice cast also helps, from Pratt's openhearted sweetness as Emmet and his jaunty Kurt Russell-like swagger as Rex, to the tough but soulful heroine of Banks to Arnett's growl as Batman. Most hilarious here is Tiffany Haddish as Queen Watevra Wa-Nabi of the Systar System; her blossoming romance with Batman made me feel protective of both characters.

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column online at Phoenix Magazine, with reviews of What Men Want and The Isle, plus a preview of the Greater Phoenix Jewish Film Festival. Also, check out my review of the Broadway version of Disney's Aladdin, playing through February 17 at Gammage Auditorium.

RIP to brilliant, funny Albert Finney, passed on at 82.

THE CHANGING OF THE GUARDIANS

Opening this weekend:

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2—Back in 2014, I was delighted by Guardians of the Galaxy, a Marvel movie based on a comic I had never read. I don't think I had ever even heard of it prior to the movie version, and this comparative obscurity has been a sign of success, for me, among Marvel productions. Some of their most charming efforts have been adaptations of their less prominent titles, like Ant-Man or Dr. Strange. Possibly the less-familiar characters afford the filmmakers more creative latitude then icons like Spider-Man or the Hulk.

In any case, Guardians of the Galaxy the First was driven along by a sensational soundtrack of '60s and '70s pop hits, sourced from the "Awesome Mix Tape" in the Walkman of goofball Earthling hero Peter Quill. More importantly—though only a little more importantly—the movie had a droll sense of incongruity between epic space action and the petty bickering of the title heroes, a motley crew of thrown-together interstellar mercenaries.

They're all back for Vol. 2: In addition to Peter (Chris Pratt), there's the sensible, green-skinned Gamora (Zoe Saldana), the burly, inappropriately mirthful Drax (Dave Bautista), the talking racoon Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and Baby Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), an endearing juvenile cutting of the talking tree from Part One, jointly parented by the other Guardians. Michael Rooker is also back from Part One, as Peter's scurvy space-marauder stepdad. 

The story this time has Peter, whose late mother was an Earth woman, at last meeting his alien father, Ego, the humanoid incarnation of a protean planet. Ego is played with effortless geniality by Kurt Russell, under a godlike mane and beard. Sylvester Stallone turns up in a small role as well, but those hoping for a Tango & Cash reunion (are there any?) will be disappointed; Stallone and Russell have no scenes together.

There's a lot to like about this sequel, directed, again, by James Gunn. It retains the strong acting of Part One, and it's maybe even more visually imaginative and lush—I especially liked the shiny, Plasticine look of Ego's planet. The plot, which suggests elements of Lem's Solaris blended with one of David Mitchell's fevered fantasies of narcissistic, predatory immortality, had promise as well.

On the whole, Vol. 2 is reasonably entertaining, but it suffers from sequel-itis. It's too long and too grandiose, the pacing is slack, and gags which worked beautifully in Part One because they were silly throwaways are played self-consciously here, and too many of them go thud. This extends, alas, to Peter's second "Awesome Mix Tape," which, though another superb collection, is unwisely brought center stage in its psychological importance to our hero.

That said, it's hard to disapprove too much of any movie paying such heartfelt tribute to the 1972 Looking Glass hit "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)." After the two Guardians soundtracks and the use of "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys in last year's Star Trek: Beyond, someone may get an interesting term paper out of the symbiotic affinity between space opera action and nostalgic radio standards.

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU

Opening today:

Passengers—Jim and Aurora are passengers on the ultimate red eye, a huge, luxurious interstellar ship on a 120-year voyage to a colony planet. Both of them are awakened from their pods way too early, with ninety years of flight left—Jim first, Aurora about a year later.

They can’t figure out how to put themselves back to sleep, but since Jim’s played by Chris Pratt and Aurora is played by Jennifer Lawrence, it isn’t surprising that they find a way to pass the time. The course of true love doesn’t run smoothly, however, and neither does the spaceship, and eventually perils arise that require derring-do and sacrifice.

This science-fiction romance, directed by the Norwegian Morten Tyldum from a long-postponed script by Jon Spaihts, is lavish and visually elegant. The ship, which resembles a giant corkscrew as it twirls its way through the void, is like a high-end shopping mall, spa and resort on the inside. As solitary confinements go, it’s above average.

And Pratt and Lawrence are rather visually elegant, too. But their characterizations are flat and uninteresting. About midpoint, Jim takes an action that makes it hard to like him, but it’s also just about the only true interpersonal drama that Passengers offers.

The dialogue is most of the problem. Michael Sheen appears as a robot bartender, spouting mindless platitudes in the grand tradition of his profession, and this would be droll if most of Jim and Aurora’s lines weren’t equally banal.

Passengers is cleverly imagined, and it has its moments, like a scene involving a swimming pool and the loss of gravity, that show some sci-fi panache. But overall, it’s slow going, the sort of film that’s only worth watching, say, on a long flight. And even then, only if you can’t get to sleep.

The Phoenix Film Critics Society has announced its 2016 award winners! La La Land led the field, taking seven awards, and Manchester by the Sea, Hell or High Water, Moonlight and Hacksaw Ridge were also among the winners.

Clearly most critics got more out of La La Land than I did, but I was glad to see Linus Sandgren honored for that film’s superb cinematography.

Check out the complete list of winners here.

BULLETS AND BABIES, DELIVERED

Opening this weekend:

The Magnificent Seven—In Rose Creek, some years after the Civil War, poor farmers hire a gunslinging warrant officer to defend them against the mining kingpin who’s trying to run them off. The gunslinger scrapes together six comrades, and they try to prepare the town for the attack of the mining man’s goons.

This variation—it’s only a remake in its broadest outlines—of the 1960 guy-movie classic from John Sturges (itself a reworking of Kurosawa’s 1954 Seven Samurai) has an entirely ersatz atmosphere. It feels like something staged daily for tourists at Old Tucson Studios, except that, like Lawrence Kasdan’s 1984 Silverado, it’s full of big-name actors.

Scene after scene (almost every scene, really) recalls some earlier western. A surprising number, starting from the opening town meeting in the church, bring to mind Blazing Saddles—there’s even a “beans scene,” though it lacks audible flatulence. There are nods to Kurosawa, too, notably a major borrow from Throne of Blood.

None of which is to say that this Magnificent Seven isn’t entertaining from beginning to end. Director Antoine Fuqua evokes the tidy, almost abstracted flavor of the genre at its most allegorically suggestive, and he gets terrific performances from his stars. 

Denzel Washington plays the gunslinger, roughly the equivalent of the Yul Brynner role in the earlier film. Chris Pratt is the wisecracking cardsharp, Ethan Hawke is a desiccated, war-shattered Southern gentleman, Byung-hun Lee is his knife-slinging traveling companion. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo plays a Mexican fugitive, Vincent D’Onofrio is a shaggy tracker, and Martin Sensmeier rounds out the Seven as an outcast Comanche.

Washington is poised and commanding, an authoritative axis around which the other six revolve. It would be easy to miss how quietly skilled he is, because his costars are so flashy—Pratt a likable wiseacre, Hawke shaky and soul-wounded, Garcia-Rulfo bright-eyed and vulpine, Peter Sarsgaard a study in twitchy mannerism as the creepy miner boss.

Lee and Sensmeier are less developed, but both of them are physically impressive. The only truly original characterization, however, is D’Onofrio, his voice croaky from disuse, his manner oddly guileless.

If I had a quibble with the movie—on its own corny terms—it’s that I was disappointed that Washington’s character had an old score to settle with the villain. Part of what was touching about the 1960 version is that Brynner and his cronies came to care about the locals, without the need for any backstory.

Storks—Last weekend we had Bridget Jones belatedly expecting a baby; this weekend we have a saga of the avians traditionally in charge of delivering it. Like Arthur Christmas a few years back, this is another animated film that derives its comedy from literalizing a folklore motif—probably, in this case, a cover story to avoid telling kids where babies come from.

The birds have a history in Warner Brothers animation. In the Looney Tunes of the ‘40s and ‘50s, the stork (voiced by Mel Blanc) was a depicted as a bleary-eyed, hiccupping drunk, presumably having been unable to decline offers of cheer from delighted new parents, and the result was mis-delivered babies.

In the new film, from Warner Animation Group, the birds have shifted their delivery operations away from babies to consumer items, a la Amazon.com. The movie follows the quest of an up-and-coming stork, Junior (voiced by Andy Samberg) and Tulip (Katie Crowne), a human who grew up among the storks when she went undelivered to her family, to deliver a baby unintentionally produced at the request of a boy who wants a little brother. It’s a surreptitious delivery, as Junior knows that word of the screw-up would endanger the promotion he’s been promised by the corporate honcho stork (Kelsey Grammer).

Even though the story obeys, through Tulip, the standard animated kidflick trope of the misfit struggling to fit in, the adventures which ensue are quite off-the-wall and hard to summarize. Probably the funniest element of the film is the wolf pack—the Alpha and Beta are hilariously voiced by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele—able to organize itself into bridges and boats even more ambitious structures. As she flees, Tulip notes that she never saw this behavior in the nature shows.

Storks is so stuffed with peculiar ideas that some of them inevitably misfire. There’s a sense of equating babies with consumer products and procreation with acquisition that feels a little unsavory, even though it’s probably unintentional. But overall this is one of the more unpredictable and funnier animated features in awhile.

There’s a Lego short subject before the movie, by the way, a martial arts spoof called The Master in which the title character (voiced by Jackie Chan) clashes with a chicken. It’s good for a chuckle.

THE WORLD IS MORE THAN ENOUGH

RIP to an all time great, Christopher Lee, departed at 93. More on him later, of course.

Opening wide today:

Jurassic World—Near the beginning of this summer blockbuster, one of the bigwigs at the title theme park complains that the public is no longer impressed by live dinosaurs, that kids don’t see them that differently than they’d see an elephant. It is, after all, twenty-some years since the disastrous events of Jurassic Park the first, so in the timeline of the franchise we’ve all had time to get blasé about giant extinct reptiles.

It’s hard not to sense that behind this is the dilemma of the filmmakers—back in 1993, Jurassic Park gave us CGI/animatronic dinosaur scenes so convincing that, at the time, they seemed almost like documentary footage. Between that and the dazzling showmanship of director Steven Spielberg, the original swept us briskly past logical and logistical gaps and stodgy, banal dramatics.

But two decades and two (enjoyable) sequels later, how to revive the franchise? Both the movie and its characters use the same approach—build a better dinosaur. And by better, of course, they mean more badass.

The premise is that Jurassic World is now up and running, funded by a gushy billionaire (Irrfan Khan), as a major international tourist attraction, with dinosaur petting zoos and boat excursions and a Sea World-style show with a mosasaurus leaping for a hanging shark like a porpoise leaping for a sardine. It also has, for that matter, a Starbucks and a Pandora jeweler and a gallery sponsored by Samsung—this movie has more product placement than Clueless, and to a similarly disingenuous satirical point.

Anyway, in response to the public’s yawn about dinosaurs, the park’s geneticists (led by B. D. Wong from the original film) have created a 50-foot tall genetically-engineered dino-hybrid monster dubbed Indominus Rex. This toothy titan breaks free, kills people and other dinosaurs, sets other creatures free in the wake of his destruction, and generally unleashes pandemonium.

So, how is it? Look, I’m a dinosaur geek, so it’s hopeless asking me for a balanced view of a dinosaur movie. But I remember being intrigued by the choice of the director, Colin Trevorrow, whose only previous feature was the sweet but low-key romantic comedy Safety Not Guaranteed. He seemed like an offbeat choice for a special-effects-bloated spectacle.

He was just the right choice, as it turned out. He has a peculiar sense of humor and, better yet, no significant sense of decorum, and after setting us up with a relatively straight-faced opening quarter, he starts putting funky little spins on notions from King Kong to the Japanese monster flicks to the earlier films in this series, and he gradually lets the movie go crazy. In a good way.

He even gives us a villainous corporate creep (Vincent D'Onofrio) who thinks the velociraptors would make excellent American soldiers. I seem to recall something like that in the Weekly World News years ago.

The showpiece dinosaur scenes have a buoyant exuberance that's really fun. The one in which the two boys, riding in a transparent observation sphere, are bounced around like a pinball between a herd of panicking ankylosaurs is ready made to be a ride in Universal's own theme park.

But Trevorrow's nutty sensibility may be best displayed in the way he handles his leads. Bryce Dallas Howard starts out as a stereotypical lacquered career woman who doesn't show enough interest in her visiting nephews (the boys in the ball). As she spends more time in the company of hunky dinosaur trainer (yes, dinosaur trainer; you read that right) Chris Pratt she accrues glamour until, by the time she's leading a T-Rex with a traffic flare, she's like a de-victimized Fay Wray. It would be retrograde if it weren't for the sense that it's a put-on.

As for Pratt's brawny raptor whisperer, he gets to ride a motorcycle and lead a pack of four voracious female predators. It's been a while since a leading man has had it this good.

Opening today at Harkins Camelview:

The Farewell Party—Yehezkel, an inventor and good-heartedly meddlesome neighbor, lives in a Jerusalem retirement home. With the help of a couple of friends from the building—and to his wife’s horror—he develops a Kervorkian-style euthanasia machine and uses it to put a man out of the misery of a protracted terminal illness (with the man’s wholehearted consent). Word gets around among the geriatric community, and pretty soon people are approaching Yehezkel and pals asking for the same service.

This Israeli film, co-directed and written by Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon, may sound grim, and it certainly has its heartbreakingly poignant moments. But it’s not a downer at all—it has at least as many sly, ironic laughs as it has tears. Although it seems firmly in the right-to-die camp, the film is fully awake to the thorny complexities that come along with this right, and employs them for both comic and dramatic power.

And good grief, is it well acted. Every member of the cast, led by bourekas star Ze’ev Ravach as Yehezkel, is effortlessly vital and convincing, and they have an ensemble chemistry that’s tense and crisp and more sexy than you might expect. There’s no patronization of the aged here. These people aren’t cute oldsters, nor are they tragically venerable—the word for them is cool. I wanted to hang out with them.

DEBUNKER MENTALITY

New this week:

Magic in the Moonlight—Colin Firth plays Stanley, an English stage magician, in this latest from Woody Allen, set in the late ‘20s. Stanley buries himself in the disguise of a stereotypical Chinese—he looks like Henry Brandon in Drums of Fu Manchu—and performs his spectacular tricks in high style, to the strains of Stravinsky or Ravel or Beethoven. But, like many of his trade, he doesn’t buy into magic in any sense beyond the theatrical. He’s a hardcore nonbeliever when it comes to the metaphysical, and he’s sneeringly contemptuous of faith in any form.

Stanley is invited to the south of France to debunk Sophie, a young American clairvoyant played by Emma Stone, who has enchanted a wealthy American family there. Sophie’s manner is corny and unconvincing, but her revelations are startling, and Stanley finds his skepticism beginning to waver.

It’s a perfectly good set-up for a romantic comedy, and, as usual with Allen’s work in this mode, there’s much to like in the movie. The period detail and settings are sumptuous, Firth and Stone are funny, and the supporting cast is full of capable types like Simon McBurney, Marcia Gay Harden, Jacki Weaver and Eileen Atkins, who’s especially good as Stanley’s doting aunt. Also memorable, as the ukulele-strumming rich kid infatuated with Sophie, is Hamish Linklater, who seems to be flawlessly channeling the young Bradford Dillman.

But Magic in the Moonlight isn’t quite magical. It starts off wonderfully, and for about a half-hour looks like it’s going to be a real gem. And Allen does come up with some inventive flourishes. But the dialogue dithers and dawdles, and the romantic connection between Firth and Stone never becomes urgent or convincing. Allen’s movies don’t always come off, but I can’t remember one, at least in the last twenty years or so, that was this uneconomical.

Guardians of the Galaxy—This is the movie with the talking raccoon you’ve been seeing TV ads for recently. It’s based on some Marvel comic series I never read, and is about a motley quintet of minor league space fugitives who band together under that rather grandiose title.

Chris Pratt, excellent in Moneyball and as the voice of the everyman hero of The Lego Movie, is the earth-born leader, a bland, less-than-brilliant ladies man with a fondness for ‘70s-era soul-funk-pop connected to a trauma he suffers in the film’s prologue. Zoe Saldana is the gorgeous and much smarter green-skinned warrior-woman, and Dave Bautista is a literal-minded strongman seeking revenge. There’s a guileless ambulatory tree voiced by Vin Diesel, and Bradley Cooper is the fast-talking raccoon. There’s a talking raccoon in this movie.

The villain is a standard, growling Darth Vader type. The McGuffin they’re all chasing, called “The Orb,” is staggeringly uninteresting, and the long, explosion-filled climactic battle is almost—but only almost—as tedious as the similar finales in the Thor and Iron Man movies and The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the other superhero flicks of recent years.

But I still found Guardians of the Galaxy, co-written and directed by the gifted James Gunn, very entertaining, because of its central joke: The unassuming, colloquial manner of these characters against the backdrop of all this cosmic bombast. It would be hard for me to dislike any movie in which the hero dances to “Come and Get Your Love” on the surface of a distant planet under the opening credits. Or, for that matter, a movie with a talking raccoon. Did I mention that this movie has a talking raccoon?

OLD MASTERS AND CUBISM

Opening this weekend:

The Monuments Men—It’s worth remembering that the Nazis weren’t just murderers, they were also thieves, looting and hoarding the art treasures of the countries they occupied. Formed in 1943 to work against this shameless robbery was the Monuments, Fine Art and Archives program, known for short as the Monuments Men, a division of Allied forces made up of artists, restorers, collectors, architects and the like in charge of recovering and returning this incomparable booty.

Out of Robert M. Edsel’s acclaimed nonfiction book on this outfit’s intriguing exploits, George Clooney and cronies have crafted a throwback. The Monuments Men is sort of a benign, high-minded version of the facetious buddy-ensemble military actioners that were popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s, like The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? Like those films, it’s not likely to be regarded as a piece of high cinematic art, and like those films, it’s relaxed and engaging—a guy movie for middle-aged gallery rats. The composer, Alexandre Desplat, even provides a jaunty march theme, a la The Great Escape.

Clooney co-produced and co-wrote the script with his frequent partner Grant Heslov (who has a small role as an army surgeon), and provided the easygoing direction. As an earnest MFAA Lieutenant, Clooney also leads his cast into battle, searching for such prizes as Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna and the Van Eyck Ghent Altarpiece. His followers include Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban and Hugh Bonneville. It may be noted that most of these guys are a trifle long in the tooth for basic training, and Clooney doesn’t hesitate to use gray hair and paunches for their comic value.

But these actors are proven good company, and that’s what they add up to here. Murray and Balaban pair off into a mild comedy team, and Goodman and Dujardin show a pleasing rapport together as well. Damon is particularly good, managing a few sweet, wistful scenes with Cate Blanchett, as his Parisian contact who has secretly tracked the art’s destinations (her character is based on the marvelous real-life Resistance figure Rose Valland), without trying to turn them into feverish drama.

While recognizing its limitations, I enjoyed The Monuments Men a lot. It’s fascinating material, and the cast is tough to beat, and its old-fashioned feel carries, for guys of my age, a nice dose of nostalgia. But I think the real source of its charm may be that it begins as the war is ending—with the Nazis in ignominious retreat, and the shattered ruins of western Europe starting to take a breath. The very fact that the Allies could start worrying about getting art back to its owners was a sign that the good guys were winning.

Because of this, the lackadaisical pace that Clooney sets is almost a benefit. The Monuments Men is no monumental movie, but it’s suffused with a refreshing sense of day breaking after a long and horrible night.

The Lego Movie—Not only did I never have Lego building blocks as a kid, I don’t remember ever playing with them at school or at another kid’s house. Nor did I regard myself as especially deprived by this absence in my toy box. Thus I was an unlikely audience member for The Lego Movie, and thus I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud at a lot of this computer-animated kids' comedy-fantasy, and to walk out of it thinking that I seen something sort of brilliant, even slightly thought-provoking.

In the generic Lego city of Bricksburg, rank-and-file construction worker Emmet, voiced by Chris Pratt, finds himself the object of a prophecy—he’s told he’s “The Special,” the “Master Builder” who can save the (Lego) universe from schemes of the tyrannical President Business (Will Ferrell). The trouble is that Emmet is an enthusiastic conformist who only wants to follow the instructions and fit in.

This leads to a fast-moving and highly complex, but as far as I could tell seamlessly-thought-out, adventure involving everybody from a wizard (Morgan Freeman) to a woman of action (Elizabeth Banks) to a “Unikitty” (unicorn/kitty hybrid) to licensed characters like Batman (Will Arnett, growling amusingly) Superman (Channing Tatum) and the Green Lantern (Jonah Hill) to a villainous Bad Cop with a kindly Good Cop on the other side of his swiveling head (both are voiced by Liam Neeson).

Much good comedy is derived from the limited range of motion possible for rigid Lego figures, and the dialogue is witty too. Yet the movie manages, without so much as a wisp of pretentiousness, to hint at some troubling allegorical resonances about conformity and creativity in human society. The whole thing, if you’ll excuse my saying so, snaps together nicely.