“THE ICEMAN” My rating: B-

106 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Michael Shannon’s trademark creepiness is put to good use in “The Iceman,” the story of real-life mob assassin Richard Kuklinski, who by the time he was arrested in 1986 was believed to have been responsible for at least 100 murders.

Though originally nicknamed The Iceman for his cool, unemotional work methods, Kuklinski also avoided the authorities by dismembering and freezing the bodies of many of his victims, which made it impossible to pinpoint the time and cause of their deaths.

Ariel Vromen’s film begins in 1964 with the dry, stolid Kuklinski wooing Deborah (Winona Ryder), the neighborhood virgin. He’s totally respectful of her — to the point that he cuts the throat of a barroom pool player who makes fun of her no-sex-until-marriage attitude.

At this stage, though, Kuklinski is a mere amateur. His day job is working in a film lab duplicating porn reels, which is how he encounters mid-level Jersey mobster Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta).  Roy recognizes talent and before long Kuklinski has a full-time gig murdering people.

What’s interesting about “The Iceman” is not so much the mayhem — there’s relatively little depicted — but Kuklinski  himself. Talk about a compartmentalized life!

Winona Ryder

He convinces wife Deborah and their two daughters that he works in foreign currency. That explains the nice suits and house in the ‘burbs. And for many years he’s able to maintain his ruse, playing the loyal family man and good neighbor.

But things get dicey after he defies Roy and goes into business for himself with a freelance hit man (Chris Evans, all but unrecognizable with beard and shaggy hair). Such disloyalty cannot go unpunished. Before long his beloved family is in the mob’s crosshairs.

Shannon does an unexpectedly effective job of putting us in Kuklinski’s shoes and making us feel the threat as his world begins to close in. Perhaps we identify with him more than we should.

And director Vromen has assembled a deep cast, enlisting David Schwimmer (hysterical in Fu Manchu, ponytail and two-tone late ‘70s workout suit), James Franco, Stephen Dorff and Robert Davi.

It’s a minor crime saga, but a solid one.

| Robert W. Butler

Ernst Umhauer and Fabrice Luchini

“IN THE HOUSE” My rating: B (Opening May 17 at the Tivoli and Glenwood Arts)

105 minutes | MPAA rating: R

It’s not a thriller, exactly, but the French release “In the House” has a way of toying with its audience that reminds of Hitchcock at his most perverse.

And when it’s all over you’re not exactly sure what you’ve seen. Which is exactly the point.

On the outside, anyway, the latest film from writer/director Francois Ozon (“Under the Sand,” “8 Women,” “Swimming Pool,” “Potiche”) doesn’t seem particularly threatening.

It begins in a French high school where middle-aged language arts teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini) finds himself once again confronted by a crop of bonehead students who would rather doze than contemplate Flaubert.

Assigned to write essays on how they spent their weekend, the young dullards respond with four-sentence “compositions.” But there is one ray of hope in this dreary bunch, a young man named Claude (Ernst Umhauer) who turns in a provocative paper about going to the home of fellow student to tutor him in math.

On the surface, this seems  unremarkable and innocent.

Yet Germain senses something disturbing and compelling in Claude’s penetration of a pristine suburban home that he has often dreamed of entering.  Claude may be there for a legitimate reason — to tutor his mathematically-challenged classmate Rapha (Bastien Ughetto) —  but he’s also an interloper, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who takes advantage of the situation to spy on the lives of his economic betters, to violate their privacy.

Emmanuelle Seigner, Ernst Umhauer

Still, the kid has a way with words, and Germain becomes his writing coach.

This is not entirely teacherly altruism. Truth is, Germain’s life is a gray as his wardrobe and he gloms onto Claude’s weekly reports with the intensity of a stay-at-home mom absorbing a TV soap opera. He even shares Claude’s essays with his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), who finds them rather sinister.

The kid certainly exhibits a twisted impishness. He’s scathing in his depiction of the thick-headed Rapha and his father, Rapha Sr. (Denis Menochet), both of them crazy for American basketball. And his feelings for Rapha’s home-décor obsessed mother (Emmanuelle Seigner) are — how shall we say? – inappropriate.

The contents of the essays are enacted on the screen, yet even as we watch we know they can’t be trusted. How much of this is real, and how much made up by Claude to please his teacher/mentor?

For all his dull exterior, Germain becomes  fiercely invested in Claude’s saga.  When Rapha’s parents threaten to suspend the tutoring sessions if their kid doesn’t ace his next math exam, Germain slips an advance copy of the test to Claude. He’s that desperate to keep new installments in the story coming.

Adapting Juan Mayorga’s play, Ozon plays with his audience in the same way that Claude seems to be playing with Germain.

For example, there’s the everything-perfect house Rapha and his family live in.  It looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before in a French film.  In fact, it might be part of a Hollywood back lot set, home to desperate housewives or Wally and the Beaver.

There are a lot of ideas kicking around here: class conflict, family dynamics, voyeurism, storytelling, manipulation. Plenty of issues, but no real resolution.

Which is OK. Most films feel obliged to spell everything out. “In the House” finds satisfaction in confusion.

| Robert W. Butler

“STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS” My rating: C+

132 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Well made and amusingly acted, there’s really nothing you can say against “Star Trek Into Darkness,” except that in the end it really doesn’t matter.

As is usually the case with franchise movies, the pleasure comes in being reunited with old friends. As for actually learning anything, for taking away an emotion or a thought or an idea…well, that’s the purview of other, less busy movies.

J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” reboot three years ago was a hugely clever prequel that introduced us to those iconic characters as young people. Much of the fun came in seeing Kirk, Bones, Spock and the others as Starfleet cadets feeling their way toward maturity.

But to tell the truth, I cannot remember the plots of any of the many “Star Trek” movies I’ve seen over the decades. One had whales, I know, and another had the Borg. Spock died in one of them and came back in another.

But were there messages in any of them? If there were they quickly evaporated. These were momentary diversions — a few laughs, a whole lot of special effects. Nothing to stick to the ribs or the brain.

And so it  is with “Star Trek Into Darkness.”

Though no Trekker, I recognize that Abrams and his writers (Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof) are having fun mucking about with the mythology of the series. Indeed, the entire movie may be viewed as a prequel to “The Wrath of Khan.”

Benedict Cumberbatch

The picture starts with a prequel that has no real purpose save to gets things off to a spectacular start, the same way each James Bond picture opens with a big chase or impossible stunt.

In this case Kirk (Chris Pine) and his crew have been sent to observe the primitive tribal inhabitants of a remote planet.  But Kirk, in all his hubris, has decided to save these poor benighted oafs from the volcano that is threatening to blow up their world. In doing so he violates the  Prime Directive, which holds that Start Fleet shall not become involved in the development of alien civilizations.

“Into Darkness” centers on a renegade Star Fleet officer named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch, PBS’s Sherlock Holmes) who blows up a secret Star Fleet facility in London and then manages to kill most of the high command.

Kirk follows this mysterious fellow into Klingon territory, where he learns his foe’s true identity, not to mention some uncomfortable truths about his own commander, a Star Fleet admiral (Peter Weller) who serves the same purpose here as Gen. Jack D. Ripper did in “Dr. Strangelove.”

One of the interesting things about “Into Darkness” is that Cumberbatch’s heavy, who exhibits superhuman strength and intellect, has been so wronged that his murderous ways are almost excusable.  God, but those Brit actors make for great, multi-dimensional villains.

Anyway, Spock (Zachary Quinto) is amusingly inscrutable, Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is foxy, Scotty (Simon Pegg) is anal and Bones (Karl Urban) says stuff like, “Dammit, I’m a physician, not a…”

It’s a diverting but forgettable two hours at the movies. In fact, I’ve already forgotten most of what happened.

| Robert W. Butler

“THE GREAT GATSBY”  My rating: B-

143 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Let’s admit at the outset that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is above all else a literary masterpiece, which is to say that its power derives from the transformation of the written word into mental images and emotional  reactions.

 In short, the magic is all in our heads.

Let’s also admit that every effort to film “Gatsby” has, to a greater or lesser extent, failed. 

The good news is that Baz Luhrmann’s new version fails less than most. In fact, there are moments when his “Gatsby” flirts with actually being good.

This could be a minority view. A recent advance screening of the film ended with at least one audience member – probably  a fellow critic — loudly booing Luhrmann’s efforts . Kansas City audiences are notorious polite; in 40 years of reviewing this was a first.

There were moments in this film, particularly in the early going, where I was tempted to boo, too…or at least roll my eyes and brace myself for the worst.

But despite some missteps and overstatement, Luhrman’s “Gatsby” accomplishes  something no other film version has come close to. It makes the mysterious Jay Gatsby a recognizable human being — not just a symbol of American upward mobility and can-do determination,  but a flesh-and-blood figure of real yearning and pain and hope.

This happens for two reasons. First, after a breathless, bounce-off-the-walls opening hour, Luhrmann slows things down, lets his story breathe, and lets the feelings of Fitzgerald’s story to come through.

Second, this “Gatsy” works because Leonardo DiCaprio is so good in the title role.

The key is vulnerability. DiCaprio zeroes in on Gatsby’s childlike aspects. Here’s a character who has achieved incredible wealth and worldliness (apparently through criminal enterprise) but who remains a love-struck adolescent when it comes to the woman who got away.  DiCaprio’s Gatsby is simultaneously naïve and foolish and weirdly heroic.

Carey Mulliagan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire

Unlike Robert Redford’s stiff misfire in the 1974 version, his Gatsby is someone we can identify with, an individual undone by his emotions, a man enslaved by an impossible love, a mix of cool confidence and desperate insecurity. 

DiCaprio is so good that the film flounders when he’s not onscreen…which is the first 30 or so minutes.

That’s when we’re introduced to our narrator, bland Wall Street bond salesman Nick Carroway (Tobey Maguire), his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and her brute of a polo-playing husband, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton).

Nick has managed to rent a house on Long Island next door to the castle-like abode of Jay Gatsby, a reclusive millionaire (and alleged gangster) who throws unbelieveably lavish parties. Daisy and Tom live across the bay on the “right” side of the tracks, as it were.

Luhrmann and his co-writer, Craig Pearce, take some big chances here. They’ve invented a bookending device in which Nick is drying out in a sanitarium for alcoholics. Part of his therapy is to write a journal, and his jottings become the story of Gatsby and the happenings which, evidently, drove the former tea totaler to drink.

Periodically we return to Nick’s therapy sessions with a kindly shrink (Australian acting great Jack Thompson, all but lost in a nothing role); unfortunately, these passages bog down the real story, that of Nick’s friendship with Gatsby and the latter’s doomed love for Daisy.

Moreover, Luhrmann gets cute by having Nick’s written words materialize on screen, swirling around him like cigar smoke. It’s a way to get Fitzgerald’s writing into the movie, sure, but it’s almost painfully literal.

And there is absolutely no reason why this film needed to be in 3-D. It’s not only unnecessary, it’s a distraction.

Much has been made of Luhrmann’s love of visual excess (i.e., “Moulin Rouge”) and his use of modern hip-hop behind “Gatsby’s” cacophonous Jazz Age party scenes. But the frenzied kineticism the filmmaker brings to these bacchanals is really quite appropriate; they’re all about drunken chaos, after all, and the modern music has been so skillfully blended into the overall soundscape that it doesn’t sound anachronistic.

Occasionally Luhrmann’s zeal for zip goes overboard. Gatsby and Tom Buchanan drive souped-up roadsters that fly down Long Island’s two-lanes with the roar of jet fighters…these sequences are heavy on CGI and in fact feel a bit cartoonish, like outtakes from “Speed Racer.”

Indeed, the film’s reliance on computer-generated settings gives it an unreal feel which I found more offputting than magical.

Even before DiCaprio makes an appearance we (along with Nick) are hijacked by the cheating, overbearing Tom and taken to a Manhattan hotel suite for a boozy revel with Tom’s tawdry mistress Myrtle (Isla Fisher) and a couple of cliché-spewing flappers.

About this time you’ll feel you’ve stumbled into a  meeting of Overactors Anonymous.

And in her first appearance, Mulligan’s Daisy seems too simpering, too wan, too spoiled and empty-headed to be anything but maddening.  Of course this is the problem with “Gatsby”…its heroine is unworthy of the devotion showered upon her.

The good news is that once on the scene DiCaprio raises the game of everyone around him. Daisy becomes weirdly loveable, Tom seems less creepy and more substantial (he squares off with Gatsby for a terrific confrontation late in the picture) and Maguire’s Nick becomes less the impartial observer and more a young man seriously disturbed by what he sees going on around him.

Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” is far from perfect. But it captures the subtle shadings of this unfilmable book better than any other cinematic treatment. It may not be triumphant, but it’s a worthy effort.

| Robert W. Butler

“IRON MAN 3″  My rating: C

130 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

It’s official.

I’m too old to be watching superhero movies. Or most of them, anyway.

The itchy feeling that nagged me throughout “The Avengers” came back with double intensity during a preview of “Iron Man 3.”  Basically it told me I didn’t care any more.

I didn’t care about the special effects, the lavish extravaganza of destruction, the fanboy-friendly in-jokes.

The things I do care about in movies are nowhere in evidence or so pushed to the periphery they have no weight or impact. Apparently there’s a rule that a comic book movie can’t have anything like genuine feeling, that this would be a violation of the pact with the audience.

It’s getting to be like masturbation. Something to get you through until the real thing comes along.

This is not to say that “Iron Man 3″ — it was directed by action screenplay writer Shane Black — is terrible.  As an example of the genre it’s pretty solid stuff.  I’s precisely the kind of action-filled eye candy that makes American superhero movies popular around the globe.

It’s just that I don’t care.  I now feel about the whole business like I do about Three Stooges shorts.  The first one is fun. After that it’s…meeeeh.

Part of the problem is that once a franchise gets up and running, it feels stuck.  I found the first “Iron Man” supremely entertaining because  its hero, Tony Stark (delightfully played by Robert Downey Jr.) was a massive dick who by circumstance was forced to become someone better. It was a story about change. Human change.

Now, though, any change in the franchise has nothing to do with Tony but with his toys. Or his enemies.  Tony himself is as frozen as a fly in amber.

A colleague tells me that his five-year-old hates superhero origin stories because they take too long to get to the smashing-things-up part. Five-year-olds are not big on character development. Apparently five-year-olds now make up the bulk of the worldwide moviegoing audience.

I suppose you’ll want to know some details about “Iron Man 3.”

Well, Tony has been tinkering with his  Iron Man suits.  Now the individual parts are “smart” and can fly around the globe to find their master.  If Tony is in Miami and his dismantled suit is in, say, Tennessee, the parts will take off like a buzzing metallic insect swarm, zip across hundreds of miles and reassemble themselves around their master. In any other kind of movie this would be a sorta-interesting gimmick.  Here it’s the biggest deal in the picture.

The villain is a vaguely Islamic, sorta Chinese dude called the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), who has the power to interrupt worldwide communications and pretty much declares war on Iron Man. It’s hard to get a handle on this guy, and a mid-film reveal (certainly the most clever thing in the picture) explains why. I can say no more.

There’s also a small army of genetically engineered baddies who can generate tremendous body heat and, under the wrong circumstances, actually explode in a mini-nuclear fireball. These creeps are led by a mad scientist (Guy Pearce) and they kidnap Tony’s squeeze, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow).

A big chunk of the film finds Tony stranded in small-town Middle America without his usual resources, and he develops a kinda interesting relationship with a fatherless kid (Tye Simpkins) who helps him get his act back together.  The relationship manages to avoid cutesiness because Tony insists on treating the tyke with the same sarcasm and arrogance he does everyone else.

Back again is Don Cheadle as Col. James Rhodes, who has his own version of the Iron Man suit. Cheadle is a good actor who, to me, always looks bored or lost in this role.

It all ends in a massive brawl that pretty much flattens the Port of Miami.  But then Miami is already pretty flat.

| Robert W. Butler

“NO PLACE ON EARTH” My rating: B-

83 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

 There’s a hell of a story at the heart of “No Place On Earth.”  But I do wish it had been better told.

The facts are pretty amazing.  During World War II several Ukrainian Jewish families took shelter from the Nazis in an immense gypsum cave system. After more than a year underground 38 men, women and children emerged to find that the Germans had retreated in the face of the Red Army.

While the men would periodically venture out in search of food and fuel, the women and children remained hidden, thus setting a world record for days spent underground. One girl – now an octogenarian – had forgotten what sunlight was like.

Janet Tobias’ documentary allows these now-elderly individuals to tell their own stories…and that’s both good and bad. 

Chris Nicola

Good because it’s their story, after all.  Bad because, well, the film misses all sorts of opportunities for real dramatic oomph. It lacks an emotional spine.

What must it have been like to grow up in darkness? To fear that the next pair of feet sliding down the narrow entrance tunnel belonged to a Gestapo officer?

Surprisingly, Tobias avoids answering those very human questions. We’re expected, I guess, to use our imaginations.

Old-fashioned TV documentary-style narration has fallen out of favor, but this is an instance where it could have been successfully used to pull the various pieces of the story together.

Tobias fleshes out the talking-head interviews with docudrama-recreations of life underground. These have been very well mounted – the costuming, sets and acting are of feature quality – but they’ve been shot so darkly that half the time you don’t know what’s going on. Perhaps that’s the idea. But in many ways “No Place on Earth” feels not like a movie without a soundtrack but like a soundtrack without a movie.

There’s a framing device sandwiching the main portion of the film. At the outset New York investigator and amateur cave explorer Chris Nicola recalls visiting the Ukrainian caves shortly after the fall of Communism and stumbling across numerous signs of long human habitation – pieces of shoes, cooking equipment, medicine bottles. Asking around he was told that they might have been left by Jews, but nobody knew what happened to them.

It took a decade of sleuthing before Nicola discovered that one of the survivors now lived just a few miles away from him in NYC.

At the end of the film Nicola takes two of the survivors – the oldest is 91 – into the cave they once called home. Along for the journey are two of their grandchildren…a genuinely touching example of getting down with your family’s roots. I wish the rest of the film had been as affecting as the story it tells.

| Robert W. Butler

Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko…falling in love in France

“TO THE WONDER” My rating: C (Opens May 3 at the Tivoli)

112 minutes | MPAA rating: R

There’s a temptation to write off “To the Wonder” as a dead-on satiric parody of a Terrence Malick film.

Except that it is a Terrence Malick film.

And since I don’t think Malick is making fun of himself, we are left to struggle with just what  this admittedly talented but hugely exasperating filmmaker is up to.

Hell, maybe he’s just perverse.

“To the Wonder” embraces all the elements that irritated people with his previous film, “The Tree of Life” (which I count as one of the great movies of the last decade) and jettisons all the good stuff.

The film may be the ultimate statement in Malick’s war on narrative. It’s visually poetic, yeah — like an artsy fartsy TV commercial where you can never figure out what they’re selling — but also emotionally empty. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the movie is throwing a hearty “fuck you” into our faces.

I’m going to assume Malick is not just giving us the finger here, that he has attempted to make a real piece of art, and that he has failed.

Happens to everyone. Now how about a plot next time?

Here’s what we can say with certainty. “To the Wonder” is about an American man (Ben Affleck) who on a trip to France falls in love with a young woman (Olga Kurylenko) and brings her and her young daughter back to live with him in the U.S.

Except that he resides in a treeless, flat, irony-free tract-home subdivision outside Bartlesville, OK. It’s a neighborhood hemmed in on one side by high-tension power lines and on the other by an Interstate. There’s an oil well in the back yard.

Hmmmm…let’s see.  Paris…or Oklahoma?  Gosh, it’s such a tough call.

It’s enough to make you think this woman hasn’t got a brain in her head.

Javier Bardem

Anyway, the relationship runs out of steam. Marina and Neil (that’s how the credits identify them, I don’t believe they ever call each other by name) break up when her visa expires.

Neil then starts seeing a childhood friend, Jane (Rachel McAdams), who is running her family’s ranch and coping with the death of her child.

Eventually, though, Marina comes back to the States and reclaims Neil, though the relationship once again falls apart.

There’s another character, a Roman Catholic priest (Javier Bardem) who is having a crisis of faith and tries to compensate through charitable work with prisoners, addicts, and other outcasts.

And maybe we’re supposed to read something into Neil’s job — he seems to be a geologic engineer testing ground pollution resulting from the fracking boom.

Anyway, there ought to be enough for a movie in all this — but there isn’t.

I’ve heard that Malick based the film on the breakup of his own marriage. But unlike “Tree of Life,”" which was rich in intoxicating details drawn from his memories of a Texas childhood in the ’50s, Malick here seems terrified of actually examining what went wrong. Instead of informing, he’s evading. This may be the most impersonal study of romantic failure ever.

For starters, there’s virtually no dialogue. Once again we eavesdrop on the character’s thoughts, particularly Marina’s, but they’re in French. So, yeah, you have to read subtitles, too.

And it’s not like her thought processes are particularly coherent. She thinks stuff like “Love makes us one. I in you. You in me.”

Blah blah blah. Come to think of it, it’s a good thing it’s in French.

Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams

Malick has Kurylenko express romantic happiness by frolicking and gamboling. God help us, but this woman frolicks and gambols. She’s like a hippie chick on LSD at a Renaissance Festival (and the camera is always bobbing and weaving to catch up with her).

Affleck, on the other hand, is pretty much expressionless, though he does look like he’d give his left nut for a slug of Maalox.

I’m  just spitballing here, but it looks to me like Malick’s methodology has finally led him to a dead end.

In recent films he’s worked without a script, allowing his actors to improvise and shooting tons of coverage over many months.  Then he spends more months in the editing room trying to find the story in all that footage.

If there is a story.

That process served him well in “Tree of Life.” But “To the Wonder” looks less like artistic shorthand than just plain laziness.

Perhaps the quality of his actors is the deciding factor. “Tree of Life” had Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. Affleck and Kurylenko are decidedly second tier by comparison.

It’s been announced that Malick’s next movie is a comedy.  Couldn’t come too soon.

| Robert W. Butler

Saskia Rosendahl, Kai Malina in “Lore”

“LORE”  My rating: B (Opening May 3 at the Tivoli )109 minutes | No MPAA rating

You’re born into a world of privilege and comfort. You grow up thinking you’re superior, that you’re entitled to all the good that comes your way.

And then it ends. Abruptly and forever.

That’s the situation facing five German children in “Lore,” Cate Shortland’s quietly devastating tale of siblings struggling to survive in the last days of World War II.

From the time of their births Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), Liesl (Nele Trebs), Gunther (Andre Frid) and Jurgen (Mika Seidel) have lived a blessed existence as the children of a high-ranking Nazi official. 

Now their father (Hans-Jochen Wagner) has returned to kiss them goodbye. The war is lost. The Americans, Russians and British are advancing and Papa’s work in the concentration camps makes him a marked man.

The children’s mother (Ursina Lardi) has become unhinged by the realization that her beloved Third Reich is going down in flames. A specialist in eugenics, she begins burning her research, which calls for the killing of the mentally underdeveloped and the malformed.

Before she vanishes, Mama tells the oldest child, 14-year-old Lore, that she is now in charge. She is to lead her brothers and sisters – including baby Peter, who is still in diapers – across hundreds of miles of war-torn country and take refuge on the farm of their grandmother. And she warns that they should avoid soldiers, since “They kill children.”

Director Shortland and co-writer Robin Mukherjee (adapting Rachel Seiffert’s novel) are of the show-don’t-tell school. The dialogue is in German with English subtitles, but even without the subtitles you’d know what’s going on simply through the visuals.

To a large degree the film is about how the brutal realities of their situation break down the children’s solid Nazi standards.  The two boys aren’t that far from feral to begin with and their exposure to dead bodies and forest living quickly brings out their wild sides.

But Lore is a tougher sell.  She has drunk often of Herr Hitler’s Kool-Aid and is a dyed-in-the-wool member of the Master Race. So when the family gains a traveling companion – Thomas (Kai Malina), fresh from a prison camp and carrying papers that identify him as a Jew – Lore is torn between her desperate need for an ally and the revulsion and hatred generated by this scrawny “subhuman.”

There’s some very heavy stuff going on here, but “Lore,” is remarkably free of conventional melodrama. Despite some close escapes, a tragic death, and various encounters with fellow Germans whose attitudes range from the saintly to the mercenary, the film is completely rooted in reality.

Largely this is due to Rosendahl, a 20-year-old actress playing a 14-year-old. The mental and emotional journey Lore mast take – from swallowing her pride to using her sex as a weapon – is perfectly limned by this young performer.

| Robert W. Butler

But what happens when the dream dies?

That’s the question answered by Billy Wilder’s 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard,” a movie that is simultaneously dramatic and bitterly amusing, one that casts a jaundiced eye on our ideas about Hollywood, glamor, and success.

It will be shown at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, May 5, at the Plaza Library, 4801 Main Street, as part of the Kansas City Public Library’s Movies That Matter series. I’ll provide opening and closing remarks.

It’s free.

This classic follows a financially and morally bankrupt screenwriter (William Holden) as he becomes the kept boy toy of a predatory older woman, former silent movie star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson).

Norma lives on past glory, watches her old movie in her home theater, keeps her former director/husband (Erich von Stroheim) around as her butler/chauffeur, and schemes to return to the stardom that has long passed her by.

It’s one of the most cynical films ever, yet supremely watchable because of the terrific acting (Swanson really was a former silent movie star) and Wilder’s utter control of his medium.

“Sunset Boulevard” is today part of our movie vocabulary (“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up”). It’s become a hit Broadway musical and in 1998 was voted the 12^th best American movie of all time in an American Film Institute poll.

See you there.

| Robert W. Butler

Paul Brannigan

“THE ANGEL’S SHARE”  My rating: B+ (Opens April 26 at the Tivoli)

101 minutes | No MPAA rating            

The players rarely seem to be acting in Ken Loach films, usually because so many of them have never before been in a movie. But even when he casts old pros, the performances Loach gets are natural, unforced, and of an astonishingly high order.

Loach, now in his 70s and the dean of Britain’s left-leaning ashcan filmmakers, does it again in “The Angel’s Share,” a gentle comedy — with some very dramatic moments –about a bunch of kids from the Scottish underclass who become connoisseurs of fine whisky and then come up with a plan to steal some priceless century-old single malt.

We meet Robbie (Paul Brannigan, who in real life is a social worker) in a courtroom where he’s on trial for beating a fellow hooligan within an inch of his life. For reasons that not even he quite understands, Robbie gets 300 hours of community service instead of jail time. This is important since his girlfriend Leonie (Siobhan Reilly) is about to have his baby. Robbie makes a vow to stick to the straight and narrow and build a real life for his child.

But that’s not easy. During his days of carousing and coke-snorting Robbie has made many enemies who are still seeking revenge. Among them are Leonie’s uncles, who beat him senseless when he shows up at the hospital to see his new son. Moreover, his criminal record makes getting even a menial job impossible.

John Henshaw, Paul Brannigan

But there are good things in his life, as well. Like Harry (John Henshaw), the beefy captain of the community service team who takes Robbie and other young miscreants under his wing. Harry is, in fact, halfway to sainthood. He lets Robbie stay at his house and, just as important, introduces him to the wonders of fine whisky.

Turns out that this Glasgow kid has a tremendous palate. Before too long he’s impressing his fellows with flowery whisky-talk: “It’s got a maritime nose, with leather and polish, a big sweetness to start with, then tannic, drying…it’s certainly got some European oak in there…”

When a Scottish distillery discovers an overlooked cask of century-old spirits — it’s expected to bring 1 million pounds at auction — Robbie and his ragtag crew come up with an audacious plan. They’ll sneak into the place, siphon off three bottles of the precious stuff, and replace it with good but not great whiskey.  No one will be the wiser and they’ll make enough off the sale of the bottles to start their lives anew.

Three totally different movies blend seamlessly under Loach’s direction and through Paul Laverty’s screenplay.

First “The Angel’s Share” is about the plight of the working class. Or the class that would be working if there was any work to be had. Loach has a real affinity for folks trapped in economic dead ends, and while he doesn’t excuse the brutality that has ruled much of Robbie’s life, he understands where it comes from.  There’s a wonderful scene in which Robbie meets one of his victims, a young man now blind in one eye, and finds himself reduced to tears by what he’s done.

But the film is also a comedy, albeit a realistic, believable one. Much humor is generated by the other blokes on Harry’s work crew, especially the bald, bespectacled Albert (Gary Maitland), an oaf so spectacularly stupid that you almost end up admiring his total obtuseness. But here’s the thing… there’s no meanness in Loach’s humor. He sees all of us as molded by our environment. Some of us are fortunate enough to rise above it, others become its victim. Luck of the draw.

And finally this is a very effective heist film generating considerable suspense.

“Angel’s Share” — the title refers to the 2 percent of a cask’s contents that evaporate while the whisky is aging — gently but firmly holds all of these elements in balance. Heartbreak, humor and even a bit of action.

| Robert W. Butler