TOXIC CLOUD; TOXIC FRIENDSHIP

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White Noise--Noah Baumbach's adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel begins on the quaint campus of College-On-the-Hill, where mortality-haunted "Hitler Studies" prof Adam Driver lives with his wife Greta Gerwig and their talkative but deadpan blended brood. His wife's pill usage and other academic-life worries are intruded upon when the collision of a train with a tanker truck and the resulting "Airborne Toxic Event" requires the family and their neighbors to flee and take refuge in summer camps, Chinese restaurants and other makeshift shelters. Baumbach's style here seems to pay homage to other directors; the early college scenes suggest the twee formality of Wes Anderson, there's a big dose of the Close Encounters-era Spielberg later on, a hint of Jason Reitman's Juno here or of David Byrne's True Stories there. 

The movie feels large and consequential; there are many funny and fascinating passages, and the '80s period look is colorful. But while the story's elusive ambiguities are intriguing for a while, they gradually start to get irritating, particularly when it moves from the epic-scale first half to the more personal and anticlimactic second half. Still, the cast is strong, Driver is paradoxically both commanding and neurotic in the lead, and Gerwig is a doleful, troublingly erotic presence--at one point Driver's colleague Don Cheadle observes, accurately, that she has "important hair." 

The Banshees of Inisherin--Colm and Padraic live on a bleak island off the coast of Ireland in the 1920s. Artillery fire from the Irish Civil War can be heard from the mainland, but the islanders pay it less attention than they do the trouble that arises when Colm, a fiddler played by Brendan Gleeson, abruptly stops speaking to and socializing with his lifelong companion Padraic, a dairyman played by Colin Farrell. Colm admits, bluntly but without rancor, that he simply finds Padraic intolerably dull, and doesn't want to waste any more time drinking and talking with him when he could be working on his music. He'll still chat amiably with the other islanders, but something about the very presence of the dear, baffled Padraic seems symbolic to Colm of his life being squandered on triviality, and he'll go to extremes to reject it.

The great Martin McDonagh was really on to something here; it starts out as one of the most original, grimly funny and painful takes on friendship in some time. But as the conflict escalates, it's as if the writer-director remembers he's the Martin McDonagh of films like In Bruges and plays like A Behanding in Spokane, and feels obligated to take the story in a gruesome, Grand Guignol direction. It throws the balance off here as it didn't with In Bruges; it sours the movie's comic side and feels psychologically reductive to its tragic side.

Even so, Gleeson and (especially) Farrell are both sublime, as are Kerry Condon as Padraic's sensible sister and Barry Keoghan as his hapless backup friend. McDonagh narrowly missed making a masterpiece here, but these performances are not to be missed.

MADHOUSE PARTY

Opening today at AMC Arizona Center:

Stonehearst Asylum—In this period melodrama, an ambitious young fellow (Jim Sturgess) arrives at the spooky, fog-shrouded title institution, late in 1899, asking to learn the ropes of the new field of psychology. The headshrinker in charge (Ben Kingsley) seems a decent, civilized sort, but soon the new guy realizes that this haven for wealthy crazies harbors a shocking secret.

It won’t be that much of a secret to those who have read Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” on which this absorbing, slyly old-school Gothic is based. But the twists are unraveled skillfully by director Brad Anderson and screenwriter Joe Gangemi, and the cast is hard to beat: Along with Kingsley, there’s Kate Beckinsale and Brendan Gleeson and David Thewlis—scary as the asylum’s enforcer—and even the great Michael Caine.

Stonehearst Asylum hits the tropes of the madhouse scare picture, but the subtlety of the script and of these actors brings this conventional material some troubling moral ambiguity and shifts in sympathy. It’s a small gem—a horror movie with heart.

ACT/BLUE

The standard-issue movie-critic superlatives—“riveting,” “stunning”—certainly apply to The Act of Killing. The trouble is that none of them seem adequate. This is one of the most astounding and challenging documentaries I’ve ever seen, and I’m not ready, after one viewing, to offer more than a few initial thoughts on it.

The title is a grim joke. The film is about murder, but it’s also about the re-enactment—the astonishingly willing re-enactment—of murder by the perpetrators. The focus is on a few jovial middle-aged guys, most notably a certain Anwar Congo, who back in 1965, in the wake of the Indonesian Revolution, killed countless people accused of being Communists on behalf the new regime. Many of these cutthroats were small-potatoes gangsters who came to be regarded as national heroes through their association with the founding of the paramilitary party Pemuda Pancasila (Pancasila Youth). Anwar Congo, a North Sumatran, may have personally killed as many as a thousand people.

This is no typical historical chronicle of a human rights outrage, however. The director, the American Joshua Oppenheimer, uses little in the way of archival photos or footage—maybe none, if memory serves—and I don’t think the names Sukarno or Suharto are ever mentioned. The film takes place very much in the present, in which Anwar and others act out their murders, with no trace of embarrassment and no evident fear of consequence, for Oppenheimer’s camera. These aren’t casual re-enactments, either—they’re staged vignettes, in the style of the gangster pictures these guys love.

Among the many discomforts which The Act of Killing visits on us is one that particularly hits home for those of us in the movie critic and movie buff communities who have long insisted that violence in films has no causal relation to real-life violence. It becomes a good deal harder to be confident of that position after listening to Oppenheimer’s subjects cheerfully discuss the inspiration for their crimes coming from Marlon Brando or Al Pacino movies. It also left me wondering if movies were what allowed these men to dissociate from what they were doing, to see it as unreal.

The Act of Killing is, in a sense, a difficult movie to like, since some of the participants, who play the victims in the re-enactments, are clearly terrified—including some children. It’s disingenuous, after Oppenheimer has filmed children in these potentially traumatic psychodramas, to hear him object from behind the camera when Anwar wants to watch footage from the film with his grandsons.

The result of this viewing is fateful. The last scene of The Act of Killing, which shows Anwar’s reaction when he revisits the scene of his crimes, is, I think, among the most horrifying, heartbreaking, jaw-dropping couple of minutes I've seen in any movie ever. While the movie would still be a unique and shocking expose without it, this scene takes it to the level of Shakespearean tragedy.

To discuss The Smurfs 2 after The Act of Killing seems almost obscene. But the sequel to the 2011 kid movie starring the little blue gnomes created in the ‘50s by the Belgian comic artist Pierre “Peyo” Culliford opens this weekend, and while it’s no classic, like its predecessor it isn’t without a self-mocking wit. In the first film the Smurfs had an adventure in Manhattan; in The Smurfs 2, in a dazzlingly innovative twist, they have an adventure in Paris.

Also like its predecessor, with whom it shares the director Raja Gosnell, Smurfs 2 offers a pretty funny performance by Hank Azaria as the villainous wizard Gargamel. Stranded in our world at the end of the previous film, Gargamel has become a success as a stage magician in the City of Light, and has also created two non-blue quasi-Smurfs, Vexy and Hackus. Through a dimensional portal, the sorcerer abducts Smurfette (voiced by Katy Perry) in order to steal her “Smurf Essence,” with which he can turn his tiny homunculi blue and use them to infiltrate Smurf Village.

The Smurfs 2 was the last film of the great Jonathan Winters, who passed on in April, and to whom it’s dedicated. He provided the kindly voice of Papa Smurf, and he got to intone the movie’s moral: That it doesn’t matter where you come from, what matters is who you choose to be. A platitude, maybe, but some platitudes are better than others, and this one struck me as better than average.

BUCCANEER-PERFECT

You could learn a lot from The Pirates! Band of Misfits. I certainly did. I never knew, for instance, that Charles Darwin was a whiny sort who really just wanted to get a girlfriend, or that Jane Austen and The Elephant Man had a personal connection, or that Queen Victoria was a member of a secret society that enjoyed…well, I don’t want to give too many of the film’s astounding revelations away.

From the hero, known simply as The Pirate Captain, I learned that the best thing about piracy is Ham Night. At one point he also proclaims that the friends you make after you become famous are far better than the ones you had before, and at another point that certain undertakings are only impossible if you stop and think about them. But he too must learn his lessons—most importantly, he learns that you can’t just say “Arrrr” at the end of a sentence and think that makes everything OK.

Voiced by Hugh Grant, The Pirate Captain commands, not very despotically, a crew of sensitive-souled types such as The Pirate With a Scarf (Martin Freeman), The Pirate With Gout (Brendan Gleeson) and The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (Ashley Jensen), who may possibly be a woman in pirate drag and a false beard. He’s really not a bad sort, as pirate captains go, but he has a tragic weakness—for recognition by his peers. His lifelong ambition has been to be named Pirate of the Year, but alas the only award he’s landed so far is “Best Anecdote About a Squid.”

Many of us might regard such an accolade as achievement enough for any career, but The Pirate Captain just can’t give up on Pirate of the Year, an unrealistic goal in light of his lack of booty (in the older sense of the term). When he raids a ship that turns out to be HMS Beagle, The Captain learns from Darwin (David Tennant) that his beloved, unusually large avian mascot Polly isn’t actually a parrot at all, but rather a surviving dodo, and that if the young naturalist could present it to the Royal Academy, it would surely be named discovery of the year.

The Captain is sure that this will somehow be a stepping-stone to Pirate of the Year, so he hoists sail for London.

Adapted from Gideon Defoe’s 2004 book The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists (under which title the film has been released in the UK), this stop-motion Aardman Studios feature was directed by Peter Lord, of Chicken Run. It’s far more freewheeling and absurd than the tense, dramatic Chicken Run, however.

I loved how The Pirates! turned anachronism into a virtue, creating a mash-up of a 19th Century in which Darwin, Victoria, Jane Austen and The Elephant Man all rubbed elbows, and, for that matter, also encompassing the 17th and 18th Centuries, during which, after all, most of the so-called Golden Age of Piracy actually took place. I loved Darwin’s stone-faced simian butler, and the alternately furious and flirtatious Queen (Imelda Staunton), and the movie’s odd, persistent fixation on ham, right down to the Skull and Crossed Hambones on the flag.

Silliness like this—cheerful, defiant silliness as only the Brits, it seems, can do it—is, I think, good for one’s health from time to time, and so is the low-tech, hand-wrought madness of stop-motion animation. Both have become rarities, and their confluence makes The Pirates! a small treasure.