EVERYTHING EVERY TIME ALL IN ONE PLACE

Opening wide in the multiplexes this weekend:

Here--A spot in a living room in an upscale eastern Pennsylvania suburb--that's the title locale of this latest from Robert Zemeckis. It's our static vantage point for, essentially, the whole movie, looking across the room through a picture window that offers a view of the big brick colonial-era house across the street. 

We see the view there before it was a living room--long, long before. As in, we see it during the extinction event that ended the Cretaceous Period, sixty million years ago. We see it as a woodland make-out spot for indigenous lovers (Dannie McCallum and Joel Oulette), and as a burial site. We see it as part of a dirt road leading up to the aforementioned historic manse, which once was occupied by William Franklin (Daniel Betts), estranged Loyalist son of Benjamin (Keith Bartlett).

After the house is built, we get glimpses of the lives of its early 20th-Century inhabitants, like an enthusiastic aviator (Gwilym Lee) whose wife (Michelle Dockery) frets about his flying. They're followed by a whimsical inventor (David Fynn) and his sexy flapper wife (Ophelia Lovibond). This guy is trying to perfect a reclining chair; his working title for it is "Relax-y-Boy." And we see the house's early 21st-Century occupants, an African-American family; Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird are the parents, and Anya Marco-Harris is the beloved housekeeper.

But the movie's main focus is the midcentury family that takes the place over after WWII: Dad (Paul Bettany), a combat veteran and a seething, disappointed functional alcoholic, his sweet, quietly unfulfilled wife (Kelly Reilly), and his oldest son (Tom Hanks), an aspiring artist. The son gets his beautiful girlfriend (Robin Wright) pregnant, so there goes both art school and her college dreams. They move in with the parents, and stay for decades.

So the movie packs in a lot of history (and prehistory), a lot of longings fulfilled and unfulfilled, and cultural references ranging from the Spanish flu to the Spanish Inquistion sketch from Monty Python. But I'll admit that when I realized we were going to be parked in one place for the whole thing--I went in not knowing this--I panicked for a moment.

I needn't have worried. Zemeckis has always been a skillful showman, and while the audacious experiment of Here is by no means an unqualified success, it certainly never bored me. The script, by Eric Roth and Zemeckis, is based on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, and Zemeckis employs comic-book techniques like overlapping inset panels to interweave the various timelines and bounce them off each other thematically. It's an impressive and confident exercise in narrative, and it does carry a cumulative emotional punch.

There are downsides, however. The fixed point of view means that the actors tend to seem a bit far away from us a lot of the time, and when they are brought up into the foreground it somehow feels forced. Zemeckis may have been worried about this distancing too; Alan Silvestri's music, though pretty, is ladled on a bit thicker than it should be, as if to telegraph what we're supposed to be feeling.  

Much more jarringly, though, the people in Here often have an ersatz, CGI "Uncanny Valley" look to them. The leads were taken all the way back to teenaged through some sort of real-time computer tech, and while the results are tolerable, they aren't perfected in realistic terms.

It must be admitted, however, that Hanks and Wright transcend this limitation, especially Hanks. The other actors sometimes feel like cyber-phantoms, but Hanks is so vibrant that he can project his humanity right through the program. And after Apollo 13, Castaway, Captain Phillips and Sully, it's also a relief to see the poor guy stay put.

TO BE OR NOT TO BESPOKE

Opening this weekend:

The Outfit--This gangster thriller takes place almost entirely inside a small, classy shop in '50s-era Chicago run by an English tailor or, as he prefers, a "cutter." The Savile Row veteran makes elegant suits, largely for Chicago gangsters. He also has allowed a slotted box to be installed in his back room, from which the mobsters pick up messages. Some of the envelopes are marked with a symbol indicating that they are from "The Outfit," which causes the recipients to look at each other significantly and hurry off to who knows what intrigues.

The Cutter, whose name is listed in the credits as Leonard but to whom the gangsters affectionately refer only as "English," is played by Mark Rylance, close to the flawlessly made vest as usual. The great actor's bland, unhurried, maddeningly unperturbed line readings potently generate the sense that he's got secrets, potentially dark. He's quietly, politely paternal toward his lovely receptionist Mable (Zoey Deutch), and though she's a bit prickly at his fretting she seems to love him back. Otherwise he appears to have no life but his work. Rylance plays the role with such authority that while we watch him confidently cut and stitch and smooth fabric, we never doubt what we're seeing for second; it feels like watching a documentary.

Trouble starts when two of the hoods, who are looking for a "rat" who has been feeding information to the FBI, show up one night after a gunfight, one of them wounded, looking to English for a hideout and some impromptu field surgery. The twists and turns and bloody violence keep piling up from there, and eventually the boss (Simon Russell Beale in a fine, cliche-free turn) shows up to this messy scene and everybody starts trying to deceive and outmaneuver everybody else.

The director, Graham Moore, who co-wrote the film with Jonathan McClain, plays a lot of this for grim comedy. The style is theatrical, not just because of the single set and small cast but because of the heightened dialogue. With guns pointed at them and all manner of mayhem happening around them, the characters nonetheless launch into heartfelt, reflective monologues about their pasts. If you can accept this conceit, you're likely to find The Outfit is gripping, funny and moving.

Perhaps Moore and McClain push their luck a bit; the film has a twist or two too many. Speaking of his craft at one point in the narration, English observes that perfection, though necessary as an aspirational ideal, is never truly attainable. This movie's last ten minutes or so illustrates this perfectly, but as with one of English's suits, no one is likely to feel skimped.

BEACH SESSION

Now in theaters:

Old--A family of four arrives at a tropical resort and is sent, with other vacationers, to a beautiful secret beach enclosed by cliffs. Weird stuff starts happening almost at once, and before long the crux of the weirdness becomes clear: the guests are aging, at a rate of about two years per hour. The little kids start sprouting into hormonal adolescents; the grownups start to get wrinkles. Worse yet, every effort to leave the beach is repelled by mysterious forces.

This latest from the King of High Concept, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan, is adapted from a 2010 graphic novel known in English as Sandcastle, by French writer Pierre Oscar Levy and Swiss illustrator Frederik Peeters. The movie is like most of Shyamalan's efforts: a brilliant idea, unevenly but fascinatingly executed.

The story unfolds in a dreamlike style of short, disjointed bits of dialogue and oscillating camera movements. There are passages of dazzling originality and twisted, daring wit, dramatizing a familiar feeling: the terrifying and disorienting way that life seems to accelerate toward mortality as we get older.

The attractive cast includes Gael Garcia Bernal--strange to see the kid from Y tu mama tambien turning into an old man--and Vicky Krieps as the Mom and Dad, who are harboring a secret from their son and daughter, not very well. There are also amusing turns by Rufus Sewell as an unbalanced surgeon, Abbey Lee as his trophy wife, Ken Leung as a nurse, Nikki Amuka-Bird as his psychiatrist wife and Aaron Pierre as a rapper known by the stage name "Midsize Sedan." A variety of good actors play the kids at various stages of development, and Clint's freakily beautiful daughter Francesca Eastwood has a brief but striking role as a resort hostess.

The movie thrashes around in its final act, as Shyamalan tries for overt horror effects that are neither very frightening nor very coherent. He also tries to tie things up with a slapdash explanatory finale. This wasn't necessary; the idea was more evocative without this literalism. There's a moment near the end that seemed to me like the perfect, touching point to close the story, but Shyamalan carries on for another twenty minutes or so, unable to let his movie age gracefully.