Butler's Cinema Scene

Joaquin Phoenix, Phillip Seymour Hoffman

“THE MASTER” My rating: B- (Now showing)

137 minutes | MPAA rating: R

As screen craftsmanship, “The Master” is flawless.

As a detailed depiction of abnormal psychology it is virtually without peer.

And as an acting tour de force it is unforgettable.

And yet I left the latest from the ambitious Paul Thomas Anderson feeling, well, kinda empty. The preliminaries are terrific. But there’s no main event.

Essentially this is a character study of two men who complement each other in weird and possibly unsavory ways.

Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is a Navy veteran, and a dipsomaniac who likes to mix up his own brain-melting concoctions of alcohol, paint thinner and household chemicals. Freddie is mentally and emotionally troubled. He can pass from laid-back laziness to hair-raising intensity in the blink of an eye. His head is full of sexual fantasies.

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“ROBOT AND FRANK” My rating: B (Now showing wide)

89 minutes | MPAA rating” PG-13

Some of us mellow with age.

Frank Langella just becomes more of a bastard. On screen, anyway.

In recent years the 74-year-old Langella has had a fine old time playing our least lovable Prez in “Frost/Nixon,” an egotistic novelist in “Starting Out in the Evening,” and an evil Manhattan real estate magnate in “All Good Things.”

In the kinda sci-fi “Robot and Frank” he plays a more conventional crook, but his attitude still says “Don’t mess with me.”

The premise of Christopher D. Ford’s screenplay is quite clever.  Frank (Langella) is an ex-con living alone just outside a small town. Frank is developing Alzheimer’s and his well-to-do son (James Marsden) buys for the old man a robot — the setting is “the near future” — that can do household chores and will provide Frank with the sort of companionship necessary if he is to keep whatever wits he still has.

Frank does not accept this gift gracefully. He’s pissed that anyone assumes he needs help, much less that it  could come from a hunk of plastic and metal that he claims will probably try to kill him in  his sleep.

But after a bit Frank sees new possibilities in his mechanical companion (who hasn’t a name…he’s just “Robot”). He decides to resume his old career as a burglar, using Robot to pick locks (he’s a wiz at it), haul loot and stand lookout. (more…)

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Jude Temple, Matthew McConaughey

“KILLER JOE”  My rating: B- (Opening Aug. 24 at the Glenwood Arts and Alamo Draft House)

102 minutes | MPAA Rating: NC-17

If a cough syrup-addicted John Waters made a film based on a pulp novel by Jim Thompson, the results might resemble “Killer Joe,” veteran director William Friedkin’s descent into murder and lust among Texas’ trailer-court trash set.

The film is a blood-splattered comedy of stupidity which, ironically, features a very smart performance by Matthew McConaughey, who in recent films (“Magic Mike,” “Bernie”) has been busy proving that when freed of stifling rom-com conventions he’s a freakin’ fine actor.

“Joe” is based on the stage play by Tracy Letts, who won a Pulitzer a few years back for his “August: Osage County.”

“Killer Joe,” though, is more akin to an earlier Letts play, “Bug,” a paranoid yarn about a couple in a seedy motel room who are convinced insects from a secret government experiment are breeding in their bodies.  Friedkin (“The Exorcist,” “The French Connection”) filmed “Bug” in2006; obviously he’s on Lett’s wavelength.

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“RUBY SPARKS” My rating: B+ (Opening Aug. 10 at the Glenwood Arts, Studio 30, Cinemark Palace)

104 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The bittersweet comedy “Ruby Sparks” has been so well written that if I’d been told it was from a script by Woody Allen, I’d have believed it.

The movie’s fabulist hilarity and aching emotions would fit quite nicely among Allen titles like “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Midnight in Paris” and “Alice.”

Actually, “Ruby Sparks” was written by Zoe Kazan, 29, who also plays the title role, appearing opposite her real-life significant other, actor Paul Dano.

These two and directors and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (the team behind the wonderful “Little Miss Sunshine”) have fashioned a delicately modulated movie that tickles the funnybone, pokes the intellect and tugs at the heartstrings.

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Askel Hennie

“HEADHUNTERS” My rating: B (At the Tivoli)

100 minutes | MPAA rating: R

A borderline repellant protagonist ends up earning our respect in “Headhunters,” a Norwegian thriller that’s equal parts Hitchcock and Road Runner cartoon.

Roger Brown (Askel Hennie) is a headhunter for a big Oslo corporation. He’s apparently very good at  finding top-notch employees, but that’s not his real job.

Roger is an art thief. He conducts job interviews with well-heeled management candidates in order to learn about their habits and their possessions.

Then, with the help of Ove (Eivind Sander), his associate and an employee of a firm that maintains security for the city’s wealthiest homeowners, he sneaks in, takes the art out of its frame and leaves behind a reproduction. It takes weeks for the victims to realize they’ve been ripped off .

Roger thieves because it allows him to live beyond his means. You see, Roger is short and borderline ugly (he’s kind of a Norwegian Steve Buscemi), and he lives in constant fear that his beautiful, blonde, towering wife Diana (Synnove Macody Lund) will leave him unless he can satisfy her every material whim.

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Woody Allen, Judy Davis

“TO ROME WITH LOVE” My rating: C (Now showing)

102 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“To Rome With Love” is Woody Allen’s Michael Bay movie. Which is to say that it’s very busy and discouragingly empty.

Perhaps I’m too harsh. It’s a Woody movie, after all, which means that it has a fair share of solid laughs. It’s just that the laughs don’t seem to be in the service of anything. There’s not even any of the magical sleight of hand of his last film, the sleeper hit “Midnight in Paris.”

As the title suggests, this one is set in Rome. There’s not story, just lots of little stories as the film flits among a big cast of characters, both American and Italian.

An American student (Alison Pill) falls for an Italian boy (Flavio Parenti), necessitating a meeting between her parents (Judy Davis and Allen, the latter in high hypochondriacal form) and his. Allen’s character is a retired opera director, and he is thrilled to discover that his Italian counterpart (acclaimed tenor Fabio Armiliato), a mortician by trade, possesses a fantastic singing voice.  But he can only hit those high notes when in the shower. Let your imagination do the rest.

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Kara Haywood, Jared Gilman

“MOONRISE KINGDOM” My rating: A- (Opening June 29 at the Tivoli and Glenwood)

94 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“Moonrise Kingdom,” Wes Anderson’s new comedy of melancholy, sneaks up on you.

Initially it seems comfortingly familiar. We get Anderson’s trademark visual oddities (in the first shot the camera pans past the rooms of a sort of lighthouse home as if peering into a  dollhouse occupied by living figurines – it’s like a similar passage set aboard a ship in Anderson’s “The Life Aquatic”).

There are oodles of absurdist humor applied with deadpan delivery.

There are faces (Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman) familiar from other Anderson efforts.

But about halfway through you realize that this time around Anderson is going for the magic as well.

In this tale of two 12-year-olds who run away to live an idyllic life in the woods, Anderson his hitting some new notes, creating chords of childlike innocence entwined  with adult angst.

It’s the summer of 1965 on New Penzance Island, a New England paradise with no paved roads, lush forests and lovely rocky beaches.

Living full time on the island is Suzy Bishop (Kara Haywood). Suzy isn’t beautiful, exactly, but she has riveting eyes and sharp features and a penetrating stare. She looks like a young Christine Baranski.

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“WHERE DO WE GO NOW?” My rating: B (Opening June 22 at the Tivoli and Glenwood at Red Bridge)

110 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

The only thing men love more than fighting is sex.

That ancient truth, recognized in 411 BC in Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” (a comedy in which the women of a Greek city withhold sex until their husbands stop making war), gets an updating in “Where Do We Go Now?”, the latest from Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki (“Caramel”).

Labaki wastes no time in letting us know that her film, set in an isolated village, should be viewed as a fable.

It begins with the town’s women walking to the local cemetery to clean the graves of their dead menfolk. They’re evenly divided between Christian and Muslim. But they are united by grief.

Slowly their footsteps become synchronized to a percussive beat. The women begin moving their arms and gesturing in unison.

It’s a lot like one of choreographer Pina Bausch’s curious rhythmic marches, and it tells us up front not to expect too much realism over the next 110 minutes.

The little burg — half Christian, half Muslim — has been cut off from the rest of the world for most of a generation. The sole bridge into town was destroyed long ago in sectarian fighting. The only access is a narrow trail surrounded on both sides by steep dropoffs.

Since nothing bigger than a motorbike can negotiate the trail, most of the villagers rarely leave.

For years now an uneasy peace has been maintained by the women working in cahoots with the local priest and imam. They burn newspapers lest their husbands, brothers and sons learn about the religious infighting that continues in Lebanon. When someone rigs an old TV to pick up a faint signal, the ladies sabotage the effort lest the evening news set off a local bloodbath.

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