LET'S TWIST AGAIN...

Opening this weekend...

Twisters--This isn't a look behind the scenes at the raw, fiercely competitive world of people who play the Milton Bradley party game. No, this is a pretty belated sequel to Jan de Bont's Twister, the 1996 adventure yarn about storm chasers. It follows roughly the same plot template: A midwestern heroine with a personal grudge against tornados tries to devise a way to combat them. In '96 this role was played by Helen Hunt; here it's a waif called Daisy Edgar-Jones.

After an opening tragedy while she's trying to deploy the "Dorothy" technology from the original film, our meteorologist heroine withdraws to New York. Five years later she's tempted back into storm chasing in her home state of Oklahoma by an old crony (Anthony Ramos) with new high-tech charting equipment and a crew and budget. He wants her tornado whisperer skills in helping them get close enough to get the essential data to figure out how to dissipate a tornado in progress. She reluctantly agrees to join them for a week.

She and her new colleagues finds themselves in competition with a rowdy, showboating band of YouTube storm chasers, led by the cute, cocksure cowboy Glen Powell. They look like insufferable clowns, but as our heroine trades banter with him and gradually gets to know him better, and to learn more about his motives...Well, you can forecast where this is heading.

I guess I wasn't aware that Twister, which also starred Bill Paxton and Jami Gertz, was such a beloved film that there was a burning desire for a sequel. I remember thinking it was okay, if a little CGI-ersatz, and that the "bad" meteorologist in the black SUV played by Cary Elwes was a little corny. I enjoyed it, but certainly didn't feel any great need for another chapter.

The new film, directed by Minari's Lee Isaac Chung from a script by Mark L. Smith, has the same merits as the original, and the same weaknesses. The storms and the destruction they wreak have the sterile, unreal quality of wall-to-wall CGI effects. I'm not sure what the alternative would be; it's hardly fair to ask the cast and crew to work with actual twisters. But the tornado that sucked Dorothy up to Oz in 1939 has, for me, more physical menace than the virtual twisters here.

That said, Chung handles the big showpiece action scenes excitingly, and he keeps them coming. Edgar-Jones, Powell, Ramos and the other actors are amiable enough, though the dramatic and romantic side of the film isn't much more substantive than that of, say, a Hallmark holiday movie--Powell looks like he'd be a natural for those.

All throughout Twisters, it's continually exasperating to see that, in the midst of what we're told is a record-setting tornado outbreak, the small-town Okies are still going to rodeos and street fairs and baseball games. At one point our heroes even seek shelter from the storm in a movie theater which, this being a Universal picture, is showing the original 1931 Frankenstein. If they must get flattened in a theater, at least they get a worthwhile flick.

VAN FICTION

Opening this weekend at Arizona Mills IMAX...

Nomadland--Frances McDormand is Fern, a widow left adrift after her gypsum mining village in Nevada becomes a ghost town. She wanders the western states in her beloved van, which she calls "Vanguard," following seasonal work, and connects with the subculture of van and RV nomads with a hub in Quartzsite, Arizona. She works cleaning state parks or in the kitchen at Wall Drug in South Dakota, at a beet harvest in Nebraska, at an Amazon facility in Nevada. She makes friends; a fellow nomad named Dave (David Strathairn) might even be a love interest, although Fern is cautious in such matters.

Scripted and directed by Chloe Zhao, this adaptation of Jessica Bruder's nonfiction book feels like a true original, heartwarming without sentimentality, maybe a hair slow but beautifully acted and shot. McDormand and Strathairn are the only two professional actors that I recognized; most of the rest of the cast, including "vandwelling" YouTube guru Bob Wells, use their own names and play themselves, with great warmth and poignancy. This gives the movie the quality of a documentary, but with a movie star presence at its center.

And it need hardly be said that McDormand is wonderful; Fern is another of her classic sensible yet frayed at the edges creations. She gets across Fern's aching sadness at finding herself at such a cosmically loose end, but she also shows us the exhilaration she feels at her independence. Whenever Fern is tempted with an offer of permanence, her instinct is to move on. Maybe when Kris Kristofferson observed that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, Fern's lifestyle is what he meant.

Also opening today...

Minari--Lee Isaac Chung wrote and directed this autobiographical chronicle of a Korean family struggling to start a farm in rural Arkansas in the early 1980s. Dad Jacob (Steven Yeun) is an expert "chicken-sexer" (able to quickly determine the sex of chicks at a hatchery and sort them). He's dragged his family from California to the south, to the horror of his pretty, pious wife Monica (Han Ye-ri), because he wants to start a produce farm specializing in Korean vegetables and fruits for what he perceives as a growing immigrant market in Dallas and Oklahoma City (the title refers to an herb popular in Korean cuisine).

The couple and their two young children, Annie (Noel Kate Cho) and David (Alan Kim) are eventually joined by a mischievous, fun-loving Grandma (Youn Yuh-jung), who doesn't seem to David to act like a grandma is supposed to. There's also a showcase role for Will Patton, as a religiously ecstatic, tongue-speaking farm hand trying to help Jacob realize his dream.

This may be the best film I've seen so far this year; a contemporary take on the early-'30s dramas about ordinary people up against agricultural and meteorological fate, like Murnau's City Girl or Dovzhenko's Earth. As in those films, the antagonists are largely elemental: water, fire, health. But Minari's characters aren't emblematic; they have a psychological subtlety and reality, and their passions and priorities also drive the conflict. The story-telling is simple, but the problems these people have with the land, and with each other, are anything but.

The Mauritanian--The title character, played with disconcerting charm by the Algerian-French actor Tahar Rahim, is Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who was held at Guantanamo Bay for a decade and a half, and tortured, without ever being charged with a crime, on suspicion of having been a recruiter for 9/11 terrorists. Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley are the pro bono lawyers working to free Salahi under habeas corpus, and getting stonewalled by U.S. intelligence. Benedict Cumberbatch is the Marine officer assigned to prosecute Salahi, who finds himself equally stonewalled.

Directed by the capable Scotsman Kevin Macdonald, this is another of the surprisingly large class of political dramas like The Report or Official Secrets or Fair Game, which remind us of the constitutional outrages of the W. Bush administration, as well as the failure of the Obama administration to rectify most of them. Macdonald sets a unhurried pace, and generates a steadily waxing sense of almost Kafkaesque fury and horror. It's a well-acted, compelling movie and it can boil your blood. And it should.