CURRENT EVENTS

Opening today:

The American Southwest--It's hardly breaking news that the American Southwest is full of breathtaking views. But The American Southwest, the generically-titled documentary opening here, is also full of breathtaking views. Written and directed by veteran nature photographer and filmmaker Ben Masters, the movie traces the route of the Colorado River from its source in the Rockies down through the Grand Canyon all the way to its now appallingly dry delta in Mexico.

The overarching point of the film is that humans have, in a very short time, screwed up this great waterway. "From its headwaters to the border, the Colorado is diverted, divided and dammed," says narrator Quannah Chasinghorse, in her measured, lulling tones. "Its water is impounded, evaporated and subjugated." We're also firmly reminded that "The seemingly limitless amount of snow [the source of the river's waters] is actually finite and quantifiable."

It's a compelling, even alarming message, and hopefully a call to arms, but happily The American Southwest isn't a downer to watch, partly because it isn't just gorgeous vistas; it has a lively cast of characters. Along the river's southerly route, Masters, working with partner organizations like American Rivers, Northern Jaguar Project and The Peregrine Fund, gives us passages of truly jaw-dropping wildlife footage.

We see beavers industriously creating their own dams; cuthroat trout struggling upstream to spawn like salmon; a young condor trying to get home after a tentative--and unintentional--early attempt at flight; jaguars marking their mating turfs. Some of these episodes have an amorous flavor: a hilariously frustrated, randy young elk tangling with a wily older rival; a romcom-like courtship between two Mojave rattlesnakes.

My favorite sequence depicted the lives of salmon-flies, swept downstream in their larval stage only to have to fly back upstream as adults to lay their eggs. The scenes of the larva, buffeted around helplessly by river currents beyond their control, may remind some of us of own lives.

Still in the multiplexes:

Caught Stealing--After trying to channel Elvis in 2022, Austin Butler played a beautiful love object with no discernible personality, on purpose, in 2023's The Bikeriders. It's nice to see him playing a guy, just a guy, in his latest, Caught Stealing. He has a nice sympathetic manner as a standard movie hero with a history in this blood-splattered crime yarn directed by Darren Aronofsky from a script by Charlie Huston, adapting his own novel.

Butler plays Hank, an East Village bartender in the late '90s. A functional alcoholic, Hank is haunted by a tragedy which ended his promising baseball career before it started. But he's not a bad sort. He talks by phone to his beloved mom every day as they follow their beloved San Francisco Giants; his sexy girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz) is fascinated by him; and he agrees to cat-sit for his punky neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) when Russ tells him he has to go home to London for a family emergency.

This last kindness is what gets him in trouble; he soon finds himself targeted both by gangsters—Russian, Puerto Rican and Hasidic—and by the cops, in the form of an engaging NYPD detective (Regina King). Gruesome misadventures ensue, while Aronofsky evokes the period of mohawks and studded leather jackets and answering machines and pay phones and car cigarette lighters, and Shea Stadium.

The cast is strong, not just Butler, Kravitz, Smith and King but Griffin Dunne as Hank's boss and Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio, impressively underplaying the deceptively mensch-y Hasidic triggermen. Even Carol Kane turns up briefly, which is usually enough for a recommendation all by itself.

Caught Stealing is ultimately just standard mayhem from the Robert Rodriguez or Guy Ritchie playbook, and I suppose my investment in it was weakened a little every time a likable character got killed off. Butler kept me rooting for him until the end, however. So did the cat.

CRATER LOVE HATH NO MAN

Opening in theaters today:

Asteroid City--In Golden Age of Television black and white, a stentorian TV host (Bryan Cranston) tells us that we're about to see a documentary about the writing and staging of a new play. The drama in question is titled Asteroid City, and it's set in a tiny desert community near the impact crater from an ancient meteorite. It's the Cold War mid-'50s in this, Wes Anderson's latest; mushroom clouds blossom in the distance from the occasional nuclear bomb test.

Soon we shift to color, and to a stylized milieu that looks like Midcentury travel-poster art of the southwest. A large roster of characters assembles in Asteroid City, many of them for the convention of the Junior Stargazers, an organization of youthful science prodigies and inventors.

At the center of this ensemble, insofar as it has a center, is a bereaved young photographer (Jason Schwartzman) who hasn't yet broken the news to his kids that their mother has passed on; he's one cabin over from a movie star (Scarlett Johansson) with whom he bonds, as do his son and her daughter. Along with these familial tensions, the gathering sees military intrigues, scientific experiments, quarantine and even alien close encounters.

I really wish I liked this movie better than I did. Anderson is a one-of-a-kind comedic artist, and his 1998 Rushmore is one of my favorite films of the last thirty years. His debut feature Bottle Rocket is a gem as well. Most of his subsequent films have been brilliant but uneven; the best of them, like The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, have been flawed near-masterpieces, dazzlingly imagined and acted but marred by heavy-handed touches of sour violence and labored narrative conceits.

All of this is regrettably at work in Asteroid City. It has a beautiful look, the title setting is beguiling, there are patches of funny dialogue (by Anderson and Roman Coppola) and strong visual gags. The cast is without peer for current Hollywood prestige, glamour and chops. The star power is almost too abundant to name; check the poster above for the listing. It's the sort of bunch that only Woody Allen used to be able to command. But all of this, alas, falls short of overcoming Anderson's misguided habits.

Most ruinous is the frame story, about the play. It looks great, but it distances us from the main story while adding no perspective on it that I could see, is of minimal amusement in itself, and diffuses the later part of the picture into hazy anticlimax. But even within the Asteroid City story, Anderson strikes a curiously flat tone. Deadpan is a wonderful comic technique, unless everybody's deadpan, and then it just becomes monotonous.

A couple of the actors, like Liev Schreiber, Tilda Swinton, Hope Davis and Steve Carrell, manage to escape the Jack Webb Sound-Alike Contest and texture their performances a bit. And Tom Hanks, as Schwartzman's dour father-in-law, somehow finds a tone that's fully in keeping with the movie's style but also seems entirely naturalistic. Hanks seems to be indestructible.

PAST, TENSE

Opening today: 

 45 Years—Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay are Kate and Geoff, a rural English couple with no kids, a week away from their 45^th anniversary. One morning Geoff gets a letter from the authorities in Switzerland, telling him that the body of his previous girlfriend Katya, who was lost in a fall from a mountain 50 years earlier, has been found, preserved in a glacier. He tries to hide the extent to which the news rattles him, and Kate tries to be understanding, but it gradually becomes clear how significant the earlier relationship was to him. The marriage is shaken, just as it approaches the victory lap.

Andrew Haigh directed this quiet, incremental drama, based on a story by David Constantine. It’s mainly a showcase for the leads, especially Rampling, who’s been Oscar-nominated. She’s superb, and Courtenay’s just as good, and the movie is worth watching just for their brilliantly shaded duet.

But while the idea—that any marriage, no matter how long and durable, can be upended—is provocative, Haigh doesn’t seem sure where to take it. And this is understandable. Neither melodramatic tragedy nor sappy sentiment seems right for it. So the story goes for ambiguity, and it must be admitted that Rampling is able to give us a lot of intriguing ambiguity without even having to speak. Even so, the movie, worthy as it is, ultimately doesn’t satisfy. It has the feel of, say, a New Yorker short story—impeccably executed, maddeningly unresolved.

The 5^th Wave—Aliens invade Earth and start exterminating the human race in a series of “waves.”: First they shut off the power, then they cause massive flooding, then a plague, and so forth. We see this from the point of view of Cassie (Chloe Grace Moretz), a self-described ordinary Ohio teenager, struggling to reunite with her little brother.

Based on a novel by Rick Yancey and directed by J Blakeson, this young-adult Apocalypse begins pretty entertainingly and grows more free-wheelingly ludicrous as it progresses. At times the dialogue seems almost like a parody of the morbid-and-maudlin teen genre, and some of the vets in the cast, notably Liev Schreiber and Maria Bello as gung-ho military types, seem to be playing it a little tongue-in-cheek as well. A tough girl (Maika Monroe of It Follows) even gets a barracks speech that’s pretty close to the “Psycho” scene in Stripes.

Perhaps because of this sense that nobody’s taking it too seriously, I found The 5^th Wave more likable, on the whole, than most of the Twilight-Hunger-Games-Maze-Runner stuff. There’s little more to say about it except to note…the hair.

Talk about waves. Everybody’s hair, but most notably Moretz’s hair, and the hair of Alex Roe as the hunky mystery man who rescues her and binds her wounds, is mesmerizingly well-styled. It’s the end of the world as we know it, but Pantene, TRESemmé and blow dryers still appear to be in use.