Casey Affleck really knocks this one out of the park.

Manchester By the Sea could be considered a downer of a movie, and, to be fair, there are plenty of parts of this film that are depressing, but when the pieces are all brought together, this is a real somber tale of damaged people and their struggles to survive the pain of their past.

When word reached Boston handyman/janitor Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) that his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) had died, Lee headed back to his hometown of Manchester, a town that held devastating memories of loss for him.  Discovering that Joe had left Lee as the guardian of Patrick (Lucas Hedges), his son, Lee does not know what he can do.

As he tries to get by, Lee continues to be haunted by the memories of his past, and the reason why he moved away from Manchester in the first place.  He has to see his ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams), Patrick’s alcoholic mother Elsie (Gretchen Mol) and his brother’s friend and partner George (CJ Wilson).

This story is a real human story.  There are none of the manipulative emotional notes like those that are crammed in your face like in Collateral Beauty.  The subtlety in this film is perfect and real and hits the audience hard.

Director Kenneth Lonergan is quite the storyteller as Manchester By the Sea spends much of the time using flashbacks to reveal the history of Lee and why he is acting as he is.  The tragic circumstances really make you understand why Lee is the unlikable jerk that the film seems to be showing.  These flashbacks are seamlessly woven into the fabric of the narrative beautifully, creating a very original feeling story.

Casey Affleck will gain many awards and nominations for his amazingly layered and complex performance in this movie.  He could easily have been over the top but his acting choices creates such a rich character that he carries this film.  Michelle Williams is also wonderful in a smaller role.  Every time Williams is on the screen, you know something powerful is going to happen.  And the connection between Lee and Patrick is strong despite actions by both characters that could damage that connection.  Lucas Hedges is remarkable here, spending most of his time opposite the stellar Affleck and holding his own.

The dialogue of the film is so true that if you told me that they just filmed real people talking, I would believe it.  There are no weak points in the writing of the dialogue or any other aspects of the script.

Manchester By the Sea can be a tough movie to watch because it takes you on such a roller coaster ride of emotions but it also challenges an audience to take that trip naturally, without the manipulations that many tear-jerkers try to use.  It is a wonderfully performed film, with realistic dialogue and flawed characters.

4.2 stars

Sentimentality at its worst.

This film had some possibilities, especially with a very solid if not spectacular performance from Will Smith, but the writing of this was sloppy, the story itself was predictable and at times cruel, and only one of the film’s two twists nailed.  Still, this is not as bad as some critics have made it out to be.

Admittedly, this feels as if it would be more at home on Lifetime or Freeform as a TV movie, Collateral Beauty has an A+ cast.  Unfortunately, I would say that the cast averages out to a C+ performance.

Howard (Will Smith) is an advertising executive who suffers a great tragedy and loses his daughter to a rare cancer, and find that his life has little meaning.  His partners and friends from the agency (Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, and Michael Peña) try to snap him out of his trance in order to save their company by selling it.  The problem, they cannot move forward without him (because he has voting rights). So this threesome decide to hire three actors to portray Love, Death and Time after the discovery that Howard has been writing letters to them.

That’s right.  Howard’s friends try to gaslight their grieving friend and colleague to make him believe that he is going crazy.

Their cruelty is meant to be offset with their individual personal issues.  Whit (Edward Norton) has a daughter who doesn’t want to see him because he cheated on her mother, Claire (Kate Winslet) wonders how long she has before her biological clock stops ticking and Simon (Michael Peña) is dying of cancer.

One of the major problems of this movie is that these people are horrible people and their selfishness is not an excuse for them to pull the manipulation that they do.

The three actors hired by this trio included Helen Mirren as Brigitte, Keira Knightley as Amy and Jacob Latimore as Raffi.  These three want their play financed and are willing to do whatever to Howard that is necessary.  Amy does show some doubt about the plan, but she does go through with it in the end.

Meanwhile, Howard is struggling with an attempt to go to a grief group filled with other parents who lost a child.  Madeleine (Naomi Harris) leads the group and has a bond with Howard almost immediately.

Will Smith is really good here, as he completely envelopes the role, and the relationship with Madeleine seems intriguing and hopeful.  I must say that, although I thought Smith was really good for most of the movie, the scenes of him on his bicycle riding around the city making a variety of faces bordered on hilarity.  Except for those moments, Smith was excellent.

The same can not be said for some of the other actors in this movie.  Edward Norton seemed to be going through the motions and I haven’t seen as poor of a performance from Kate Winselt in a long time.  Both of these actors looked to be cashing a paycheck for these roles.  Michael Peña was okay, but I had a hard time buying his motives in this movie.

Helen Mirren was her normal solid self.  She seemed to be the only one of the three actors, she was hired as Death, to have much of anything.  He scenes with Smith were all very good, and she got more out of Peña than expected.  Unfortunately, her work was wasted in this garbage story.

There were two surprises at the end of the film.  One involved the relationship between Howard and Madeleine, and I thought that was fabulous.  I did not see that coming, and it made a nice little bow on that story.  However, the second twist was telegraphed so early in this film that it really took away any magic that might have been generated by the movie.

The movie tries really hard to tug on your emotional strings, but all of this baggage felt forced and manipulative.  These emotions did not come naturally from the story, but shoehorned into it by weak writing.

A few good performed scenes does not make a good movie, and Collateral Beauty is not one.  I heard someone claim that this was the worst movie of the year, but that is not the case.  It is not that bad.  But it is nowhere near a good movie either. There is no Christmas magic here.

2 stars

I will admit that at one point, I did not think the idea of Rogue One was a good idea.  I mean, why did it matter how the Rebel Alliance got the plans of the Death Star in Star War: A New Hope?  They just did.

Then I saw Rogue One.  I was wrong.  It was important to know.  It made the original Star Wars better.

Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) was the daughter of an Imperial scientist/inventor (Mads Mikkelsen) who was taken away from her when she was but a child by the Empire.  The Empire wanted Jyn’s father, Galen Erso, to design the weapon that would become the Death Star.  Jyn, alone, was discovered and raised by extremist rebel Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker).  Later in her life, she was recruited by the Rebels to try and find her father.

Without spoiling too much, I am going to leave the story right there.

We are introduced to a series of amazing new characters in this film, as we filled in point of contention from the original Star Wars and built a cohesive story around what did not feel like a major gap in continuity.

Let’s look at some of these great new characters we got in Rogue One.  Jyn is an amazing, kick ass female lead who you could relate to.  She was deserted as a child, wanting only to find her father and regain what she had lost.  She was really well done.

Saw Guerrera was not in the film enough to really connect to him, but Forest Whitaker is always a solid actor.  I believe that the character of Saw could be the focus of other prequels.  Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) had that lovely rogue role that Star Wars seemed to need.  I did like the actor and the character grew on me enough to look past him as a han Solo ripoff.  However, K-2SO (vocied by Alan Tudyk) stole every scene he was in as a former Imperial droid who was working with Cassian.

Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) was a great addition to the cast, playing the blind warrior dedicated to the Force.  He was protected by Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang) to the nth degree.  Sure, Chirrut is not a new character (Daredevil’s Stick has been blind fighting for decades before), but this pairing brought another classic Star Wars trope to the front.

We also got Riz Ahmed, who was brilliant in this past year’s HBO show The Night Of, as former Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook.

Are all these characters basically constructs from past Star Wars movies?  Yes, that is true.  However, there was enough chemistry among the cast and enough exciting action to carry the film through. However, I get the feeling that had I read some of the books and stories from all of the Star Wars canon, I might have thought more of these characters than this.  For me, they were all basically the same type of archetype that I have seen before.

I thought the film as a little slow at the start as we were being introduced to our new cast, but the second and third acts really picked up.  The battles in the third act were full of drama and action.  This was a war movie set in a Star Wars universe.

There was also plenty of nostalgia involved in Rogue One.  We see toss-backs to past movies, including what looked like the exact location from Return of the Jedi.  We see characters we loved make cameos and appearances. and of course…

Darth Vader.

We know Vader makes an appearance in the movie from the trailer.  I think they used Vader a perfect amount.  They did not over use him, and when he did appear, he was shown to be one bad ass man.  The voice of James Earl Jones is perfection coming from one of the greatest movie villains of all time.  Now, he does make a pretty rotten pun that almost wrecked the first scene he was in, but we the second time we get Vader makes up for that in spades.

I also feel that the ending of this film was really well done and was quite brave.  To avoid spoilers, I will leave it at that for now.  I am impressed how much uncertainty there was despite knowing that the ultimate mission (to find the plans of the Death Star) was going to be successful.  I never dismissed parts of this story because I knew that those plans would find their way into R2D2.

Rogue One was a beautifully shot film, and Gareth Edwards, director, does a fantastic job shooting this massive film.  I believe that this film fit perfectly in with the Star Wars films, filling in gaps that might have been problematic issues.  Rogue One feels like both a different Star Wars film than we ever have seen before as well as a comfortable fit into the continuity and Star Wars world.  That is quite an accomplishment.

4.2 stars

I have never seen a movie that made me want to take a shower more than Miss Sloane.

Miss Sloane shone a light on the career of political lobbyists, and that light make them scurry for the shade.  No, really… this movie showed these people as the slimiest and most repugnant people around.  They made them seem considerably worse than members of Congress…I know right?

In fact, there is the typical scene where the lobbyists have members of Congress on each side and they have to swing certain ones over to their side to win a vote.  It was like the scenes in American President with Annette Bening… except with Bening not being the sweetheart she was.  I don’t know if I can watch that scene again without wondering what dirty trick is really going down.

Jessica Chastain played Elizabeth Sloane, one of Washington’s most successful and downright rotten lobbyists around.  When a bill attempting to place restrictions on guns comes to the floor of Congress, Sloane leaves her current company to try to help get the bill passed.  And she does just about whatever she needs to do to make it so.  No line is too far to cross.

Of course, opposing her is the NRA and their own bag of dirty tricks and lobbyists willing to do whatever is necessary to win.  Miss Sloane apparently knows all the dirty tricks because she showed a remarkable ability to anticipate what her opponents were planning and to counter that with her own slimy trick.

There were people shown on Sloane’s side that were not as slimy as Sloane herself.  There is Esme (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who had a good reputation as a knowledgeable worker who had a hidden past with gun violence.  There is Rodolfo Schmidt (Mark Strong) who spear-headed the group trying to get the bill passed and he brought Sloane into the fold.  Some of the other characters on Sloane’s side were interesting, but most of their contributions to the story was to stare, slack-jawed at the things that Sloane would do.

The gun supporting side was basically played off as the heartless villains, but they were still shocked at the lengths stooped to by Sloane.  One of the negative notes of the movie is how the other side was not more positively portrayed.  Gun control does not have to be one side is right, one side is wrong…especially with the lobbyists characters falling so hard into the shades of gray section.

But it is clear that no one is smarter than Miss Sloane, and that is fine, especially since she is such a flawed and downright rotten person.  She is played brilliantly by Jessica Chastain and she makes you root for this awful woman, despite the constant travesties that she engages in.  Chastain showed the human side of this woman, creating someone that could easily have been a caricature.

The film was a little long, but the ending payoff is worth the wait.  Yes, it is unrealistic (No SPOILERS), but it paid off the film in a big way.  Kudos to not only Chastain, but also John Lithgow, who played a senator in charge of a Congressional hearing into Sloane’s business practices.  Their showdown was high drama.

Never once did the fact that Miss Sloane was a powerful woman come into play, and I liked that very much.  This was not a story about a powerful woman taking on the NRA, but a powerful lobbyist doing the same.  It felt as if we had taken a step past identifying her as a woman.  She just was.  That is a great thing.

As I said, the whole story pays off big time, but the suspension of disbelief is remarkably high.  If you cannot accept that, Miss Sloane is going to fall apart for you.  I had no problem with the end, so I really did enjoy the film.  I do wish the pro-gun side would have been less villainized, but I understand why they did it.

Jessica Chastain is excellent and the character of Miss Sloane is an enigmatic woman who wants to win above almost anything else.  She does not need to be seen as a hero.  In fact, she is as dirty as any of them.  However, she is shown as a complex and real person who has reasons for her choices.

Our political system really is messed up.

4 stars

I was completely enthralled with Nocturnal Animals.  I even had considered, as I sat in the theater, the possibility that this would become my favorite film of the year. However, I was not a fan of the ending of the movie, so I dropped it down a few notches.

Then, I was reflecting upon it and listened to some theories about the ending.  These were some ideas that I had not considered.  This is one of the reasons I really enjoyed this film.  There were a lot of layers to the movie, and you really had to think about what you were seeing.

Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) was an artist with a successful exhibit and career, a handsome husband (Armie Hammer) and lots of money and yet she was wallowing in her unhappiness.  When a manuscript for a novel, dedicated to Susan, arrived from her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), she found herself emotionally invested in the story.

It is at this point where the second narrative of this film begins to be told.  As Susan read the novel, the audience began to see a visualization of the story through Susan’s POV.  She placed Edward in the role of Tony Hastings, the novel’s main character.

In the novel, Tony and his wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter (Ellie Bamber) are on a road trip through Texas when a group of scoundrels and troublemakers run them off the road.  Led by real lowlife Ray (Aaron-Taylor Johnson), the men wind up abducting Tony’s wife and daughter, leaving Tony alone and stranded in the Texas wilds.

Tony is able to find his way to the police and eventually, police officer Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) arrived to try and help Tony.

There is actually a third strand of story here as well as we get flashbacks to the time when Edward and Susan first met and began becoming involved in a relationship.

Amazingly enough, all three narratives have through lines that work as metaphors for what was happening.  There are so many layers to this film that you will be thinking about it well after you walk out of the theater.  I know that happened for me.  There were things that I had not considered at first that, upon reflection, make perfect sense.  This is a beautifully crafted tale and the three different narratives work very well together.

The performances are awesome.  In particular, Michael Shannon as Bobby is one of the best characters in any movie this year.  I believe Shannon is a lock for an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.  Bobby’s dogged determination drove Tony to seek justice for his family and inspired the weak-willed husband and father to continue to push for revenge.

Nocturnal Animals is very dark and troubling.  It seemed to strive to make the viewer uncomfortable, dealing with issues that were remarkably troubling.  This included one of the most initially disturbing opening credits scene that I have ever seen.  Yet, again upon reflection, see the metaphor that director Tom Ford was going for.  The idea of being completely free is a wonderful feeling that so few of us are able to feel, and it is certainly on display here.

And this film is gorgeous.  There are countless visual moments throughout the film that is meant to shock, entice or appall you.  There are several images that cross over between the three narratives that it is apparent that they are intentional.  Some are subtle, but some are  painfully apparent.  At all times, the imagery is one of beauty, even those times when the imagery is gruesome or painful.

Nocturnal Animals is a brilliant film, with remarkably intelligent writing, and perfect performances.  It is a film that will stick with you well after you have seen it, and you might have to see it again to fully appreciate what you have seen.

4.85 stars

Jeff Nichols wrote and directed Loving, the story of an interracial couple from Virginia in the late 1950s who decide to get married and wind up getting arrested.

You see, in Virginia at the time, it was illegal for people of different races to marry, so when Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred (Ruth Negga) drove up to Washington, D.C. to get married, they knew the dangers of returning to Virginia.

Still, the couple did return to the state and began living as husband and wife.  Someone turned them in, and, before you knew it, the Lovings were in jail.  After pleading guilty, the couple were sentenced to leave Virginia for 25 years.

However, Mildred was pregnant, and really wanted Richard’s mother (Sharon Blackwood) to deliver the baby, so they sneaked back into the state for the birth.  This led to them being arrested again.

After this, they returned to D.C. to continue living their lives until a near tragedy caused Mildred to want to return to the country life of Virginia.  Setting themselves up in a rural home, the Lovings planned on living the remainder of their lives in quiet isolation.

Mildren, though, had written a letter to Bobby Kennedy, who redirected the letter to the ACLU, who hooked them up with a lawyer (Nick Kroll) who saw this as an opportunity to take biracial marriages to the Supreme Court.

This is all quite amazing of a story, and is all the more amazing when you know that this is a true story.

I enjoyed this movie, mainly because of the amazing performances of its two lead stars.  Joel Edgerton is unrecognizable, diving into the character of Richard, while Ruth Negga (who starred in this year’s hit show Preacher) is just astounding as Mildred.  It is very possible that Negga will receive an Oscar nomination for the role.  Both performances were very understated and subtle.  They were a couple who just wanted two live their lives in peace where they wanted to live.

Michael Shannon had a small role here, but he brought his best once again.  This has been a strong year for Shannon.

The film did drag at times, and it took several time jumps that did not feel right.  The pacing issues aside, this film was pretty solid.  There was never that jump up and hit you moment of emotion, but there was pretty consistent emotional taps throughout.

I would have liked to see more of the Supreme Court scene, as very little of the argument was presented.

It is another reminder of how sad it is that some humans can be so full of hate over things such as the color of a person’s skin.  The fact there were once laws like this on the books in the USA is a shameful moment in our history.

4 stars

‘Tis the season to be jolly.

Or, at least, to giggle a little bit.

Office Christmas Party is the newest holiday fare with your typical wild party hi jinks.  You’ve seen that before. This time, the wild party is being held at an office of a business desperately trying to stay afloat.

When his mean sister Carol (Jennifer Aniston) threatens to close down the company, Clay (TJ Miller) and his co-worker Josh (Jason Bateman) try to grab a huge account and save the jobs of their employees by throwing a huge Christmas party.  And, of course, things get out of hand.

This movie was okay, but not great.  There were not too many really great laughs.  The issue with that is there should have been.  It relies on the old standby jokes of drug culture and sexual innuendo and most of them seem dull by comparison.  The film wants to be lewd and over-the-top, but it does not feel that way.

That is a shame, because the cast of this film is extremely strong and indelibly likable.  Jason Bateman, TJ Miller, Jennifer Aniston, Olivia Munn, Kate McKinnon, Rob Corddry, Courtney B. Vance, and Jillian Bell all appear here and are actors who are fun to watch and who I generally like.  Unfortunately, most of them could have stronger characters to portray.  Aniston is basically playing the same bad boss character that she has played several times.  Bateman is playing Jason Bateman.  And yet, there was just something about these people that made me not hate this film.  I found myself rooting for them and that was surprising.

Yes, the story was very thin. and there were many ridiculous things that happened, but none of it felt obnoxious.  It just was.

If this cast had a better story, this could have been a really surprising movie.  There were moments of good work, and there was some possibility with the brother sister relationship between Miler and Aniston’s characters, but most of the really solid characters moments were buried beneath the excesses of indulgence that populated most of this movie.  The office party was too much of the film and took it to levels that were just impossible to believe.

The biggest issue was there were just not enough really laugh out loud scenes.  I did giggle a few times, and (maybe) even guffawed once.  There was just not enough of that to justify the rest.

There were some fun secondary characters, including the security guard Carla (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) who had a fixation on Die Hard, the Uber driver Lonny (Fortune Feimster) who has some of the better dialogue in the film, and unappreciated assistant Allison (Vanessa Bayer) who attracts the wrong type of man. These were fun characters that helped the film, but there was just too many other moments that were not funny.

I liked watching this film, but I did not love it, and, with the ensemble of this film, that is a shame.  It is worlds better than Bad Santa 2 (ironically, probably not as funny, though) so if you want a new Christmas movie for the year, this might be your best bet.

2.5 stars

I kept thinking through this whole movie just how long ago did they film this?  How long had this been on the shelf because the young boy starring in Incarnate is David Mazouz, who plays Bruce Wayne on Fox’s Gotham series, and he looks so different now…so much older.  Young Bruce Wayne is very close to a man.  Here he was just a little boy.  So why am I just now seeing this film.  Could it be because it is a bad movie?

In the 1980s, Marvel Comics put out a comic called “Nightmask” in their New Universe imprint where the main character could jump into the mind of sleeping people and help them out.  I always believed that Nightmask would have made an interesting movie.

It seems that Incarnate is evidence to the contrary.

Now, I did not completely hate this movie.  I mean, WWE superstar Mark Henry makes a cameo.  Um…

The film has Aaron Eckhart.

Hm.  That really might be it.

Dr. Seth Ember (Eckhart) is a wheelchair-bound psychic who is hired to help people “possessed” by some kind of spirit.  The film takes the religion out of the exorcism here and made it more scientific, (which was interesting).  Ember had ulterior motives for taking these cases, and that was a chance to go searching for a specific “demon” named Maggie who had killed Ember’s wife and child in a car wreck.  When Maggie takes control of Camreon (Mazouz), she taunts Ember to put himself on line to get his revenge.

The film does have an interesting premise, but there is so much garbage around it that the premise gets lost in the midst of it all.  Emjay Anthony, who is one of my favorite child actors working today (Chef, Bad Moms), is totally wasted here as Ember’s dead son.  The writing is bad and the dialogue is heavy-handed and exposition filled.  They add scenes that make no sense with the story itself.  There is a couple of scenes with Eckhart and one of his friends Felix (Tomas Arana) that basically had nothing to do with the plot of the film.  I’m not sure why that was included at all.

The film brings in the father of Cameron and that character makes zero impact on the film.  It was as if the film just needed material to fill time.

I do believe that Aaron Eckhart was doing what he could to make this movie better.  He wanted to be able to be that actor that can transcend the material and put that film on his back.  He failed here.  Eckhart, up until this point, has had a pretty good year, first in an okay sequel London Has Fallen, and then being the best part of Bleed for This and being just great in Sully, so I know he can bring it.  Unfortunately, this film wasted the efforts of Eckhart and a potentially intriguing twist on the possession movie with poor writing and uninspiring characters that really did not help the narrative.

Plus, the movie implied that there were others beside Ember who had this skill to enter people’s dreams.  The were called incarnates, but this was just tossed in to explain how he could do it and never touched upon again.  This could have really been a strong hook to make this more than just another poorly made movie.

I still would like to see a Nightmask in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Marvel would know how to handle it.  Incarnate did not.

1.5 stars