First unfurled in March 1941 by Timely Comics, Captain America goes from that ten-cent comic to the big screen in a summer action adventure built for ten-year-old boys. In 1943, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) lies five times to recruiters before Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), an Austrian scientist in exile in Brooklyn, reclassifies the asthmatic “4F” runt as “IA,” and recruits him into the Strategic Scientific Reserve for a “super-soldier” experiment. Steve is the sort of Brooklynite who gets beat up for chastising a jerk in a movie theater who heckles a patriotic newsreel. A massive injection of blue serum, followed by a blinding zap of Vita-Ray that taps half of Brooklyn’s electricity, “amplifies” Steve’s muscles, stature and righteousness. His homefront handlers brand him Captain America and put him on the road with show girls to hype war bonds. Read the rest of this entry »

All Michael Bay’s “Transformers” in 3D is missing is a 40. (Take a 40, please.) Robustly cynical, “Transformers: Dark Of The Moon,” credited to screenwriter Ehren Kruger (“Scream 3,” “The Ring Two,” “Transformers 2″), serves up generous lashings of counterfactual pulp, including an Autobot-Decepticons-NASA-JFK-Nixon conspiracy with a soupcon of Chernobyl for spice. It’s like a Bizarro World Warren Report reduced to postage-stamp size. (The briefly seen JFK stand-in resembles someone who took second place in a Donald Trump look-alike contest.) “TDOTM” premiered at the Moscow Film Festival, and some of the most jazzed-up (yet largely incomprehensible) passages resemble the winningly cheesy special effects of local mogul Timur Bekmambetov’s “Night Watch” and “Day Watch,” but with less rude charm. Hope for keenly choreographed mayhem quickly fades. If not on the level of Michael Kidd and Vincente Minnelli’s work on “The Band Wagon,” say at least a few bars of “Collateral Damage,” the musical? When you’re working with Decepticons, a sentient race of mechanical beings that preceded film executives, you can hope to be the biggest and the best, but at best, you could only ever be ne plus Ultraman. (Or “Cars 3,” with eager-school-leaver Shia LaBeouf in the role of “Mater.”) Read the rest of this entry »

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Fassbender, Michael Fassbender. “X-Men: First Class” may be the most Bondian non-Bond movie of the decade to date to likely assure that a terrific screen presence becomes a box office player. The work in “Hunger,” “Fish Tank” and “Jane Eyre” were no anomalies. Call him magnetic, call him Magneto. Efficiency and dispatch are strengths of this latest Marvel origin tale. The most admirable skill Matthew Vaughn brings to his direction, and it’s a substantial one, is a sense of design, creating mood through an elevated use of color and décor. Some directors pare away so that one bit indicates everything, as in Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” where the white-walled, sunny, characterless duplex of disaffected architect Sean Penn is marked only by a black edition of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair. Vaughn pushes further, with fizzy bits instead of the tendency toward archive and diorama that mars “Mad Men.” It’s the past but with a present-tense eye to what has remained or become “cool” since 1962, the year “X-Men: First Class” is set. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike, by one estimate, has signed over seventy productions since 1991; the “selected filmography” accompanying the press book for his rousing new release, “13 Assassins” settles for forty-nine entries.

The 50-year-old Miike’s madly prolific output ranges from dark, perverse horror like “Audition” and “Ichi the Killer,” to exceptionally weird comedies, to movies for kids. There’s a story that may or may not be true about a meeting he had with executives at New Line Cinema, just before the turn of the century. They wanted Miike to direct one of their urban-action mid-budget features, $20 million or so, shot in Los Angeles, with about a year turnaround. Story goes, Miike said he couldn’t work that way. What if he took the $20 million and made them seven movies? All right, then, eight movies? They were flummoxed and a worldwide audience was denied probably two fine films and five gaudy misfires. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Thor of “Thor” is but one of 8,000 characters The Walt Disney Co. bought from Marvel Entertainment two years ago. Chris Hemsworth is the Australian mortal fated to embody the son of Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and brother of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) from the exquisitely imagined realm of Asgard, where upsidedownness is part of the intelligent design. The blond uber-hunk who kisses the hands of maidens is also the new ga-ga love of astrophysicist (Natalie Portman), who is otherwise in the thrall of seventeen anomalies in the night sky over New Mexico. Via a magic wormhole, the Norseman and his legendary hammer land in The Land of Enchantment where the night thunders and things aflame fall from the sky with some frequency. As the shiny-black-shoe type from the government and his black-uniformed forces know all to well. Kenneth Branagh directs this summertime fun with the right mix of middlebrow lit and juvenile wit. “Get somebody from linguistics down here!” and “Don’t mistake my appetite for apathy!” are among the better lines crafted by Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz and Don Payne. With nods to Marvel’s 1962 source, the story is credited to J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich, a Columbia College alum and instructor credited with “I Am Legend” and “The Cell.” Conspiracies are afoot on our realm and Thor’s. Interlopers do some realm-to-realm interpolating. The best humor works with this rift in the cultural continuum. Stay after the end credits to see a tease for the next episode. It’s like the cross-franchise tip at the end of “Iron Man 2″ that teased “Thor.” With Stellan Skarsgård, Kat Dennings, Clark Gregg, Colm Feore, Ray Stevenson, Idris Elba, Jaimie Alexander, Tadanobu Asano, Joshua Dallas, Rene Russo. 114m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

The textbook definition of a “B” movie didn’t begin with balls, brawn, breasts and, well, bravura, but Justin Lin’s bold, onrushing “Fast Five” includes those elements and much more, as honorable (and entertaining) a studio production as odds would have you expect. Lin’s third go at the $1-billion-grossing series is a street race-meets-heist “Ocean’s 11,” as if directed by a Michael Bay who had more of an interest in tempo, topography and the timing of human expressions. Lin’s turned out to be a very, very good action director, a superb machinist, a crafter and wielder of tools. Sundance 2002′s “Better Luck Tomorrow” was a terrific debut for Lin, but didn’t forecast where his career has taken him. When you see a superlatively rotten movie at which tens of millions of dollars has been thrown, the idle thought usually pops up, couldn’t they have at least done something professional with all that money? “Fast Five” rebukes that quibble in almost every scene in its unapologetic pop professionalism. There’s a key perspective as well in Wesley Morris’ keen and necessary Boston Globe piece about the Utopian yet everyday world shown in the four previous installments and brought to casual nonpareil here. “It was a place the movies had never precisely seen before: gangs of young people of different races unified by automotive exhilaration. There were blacks, Asians of all kinds, Mexicans, Michelle Rodriguez, and whatever Vin Diesel and Jordana Brewster are. Friction exists among the factions, but it’s… the organic sort you expect from a bunch of marginal kids engaged in… illegal hobbies… [F]or the young and youngish people who’ve bought tickets (and rented and downloaded it), this is just how the world looks.” Or, as he told NPR after the article ran last Sunday, “Basically it promotes race as this very normal thing. [There] are these very different types of people, but it’s not the subject of the movie like it is in most Hollywood movies. Race is just a matter of fact.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“How long have you been in the forest?”

A small, tight fistful of blunt lines like that in Joe Wright’s outlandish, determined art-house action thriller, “Hanna,” quickly set the heart of the casual admirer of Bruno Bettelheim’s fairytale study “The Uses of Enchantment” to racing. Wright is also bolder than ever with visual flourish.

A motherless child grows up in a rude cabin in far snowy reaches, taught by her father (Eric Bana) to be a ruthless mind, a calculating creature. She’s not amnesiac, she just knows no experience of the larger world: it’s “The Newbourne identity.” “Where do you come from?” “The forest.” The swamp, the primordial ooze, the soup, the shadows: from which all life and fear emerge. Outside the forest, a spy agency in the person of a Texas-twanging Cate Blanchett beckons, threatens.

There aren’t many high-functioning Asperger’s, tongue-in-cheek, Jesus-girl, killer-child thrillers in the market, which makes even the wooziest and blowziest moments of “Hanna” startling. A jarring mix of tones prevails, at one moment in settings that suggest Fassbinder making a “Modesty Blaise” and others, the Euro-oddness of the more gregarious films by Fatih Akin, like “Im Juli” or “Soul Kitchen.” As shot by the gifted Alwin Küchler (“Ratcatcher,” “Sunshine,” “Morvern Callar”) and tethered to the serene, slightly sinister percolation of a score by the Chemical Brothers, the world outside is otherworldly, as if we, the audience, were pitched into as much strangeness as bright young Hanna. Read the rest of this entry »

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“It took over 200 years to create the symbol of the presidency,” notes the president in “The Sentinel,” a political thriller with an illicit romance that George Nolfi scripted in 2006. Now he writes and directs a superior “romantic thriller” that spells out what it will take to make David Norris (Matt Damon) president in a foreseeable future. Tinkering with this Brooklyn pol’s itinerary to higher office are strange men-in-hats carrying proto-iPads: their screens map the existential GPS of Norris and all the rest of us. Micromanaging fate is necessary to maintain the exact timetable of human history. Except hat-wearing Harry (Anthony Mackie) is a minute late for a preset spilling of coffee on Norris’ shirt. Norris steps into a venture-capital meeting a bit earlier than expected and sees Harry’s coworkers, some uniformed in long black leather coats like those worn by the firemen in “Fahrenheit 451,” in the act of adjusting the mind of one of his immobilized coworkers. As in “Inception,” subconscious recalibrations alter one’s later “decision trees.” Minimizing “ripples” in the space-time continuum is like maintaining film continuity. “The Adjustment Bureau” posits God not as the Ur-auteur, but as an executive producer with script doctors doing rewrites to steer history since the hunter-gatherers. Read the rest of this entry »

Director Wilson Yip and screenwriter Edmond Wong continue the martial arts saga of “Ip Man” (2008). “Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster” shows the title athlete (Donnie Yen) relocating from the Chinese mainland to establish a rooftop academy in Hong Kong. A child is on the way and rent is due. An opening title indicates 1950. (A forward-moving timeline then starts at “Day 8″ for some reason and clicks ahead.) Flashbacks show Japanese troops shooting an unarmed Chinese colleague in the back of the head. That former master, introduced in the first film, is now homeless and brain-damaged. The polished fight scenes progress from Ip Man thrashing local toughs, to besting local martial arts teachers, and ultimately taking on the “foreign devil” known as Twister (Darren Shahlavi), a smirking lunk who fights wearing red boxing gloves and no shirt. Ip Man assumes the mantle of defender of Chinese tradition against vulgar Brits. Racial solidarity blossoms. The cultural politics are blunt. Fisticuffs meet flying kicks. Fight aficionados may already know the answer, but shouldn’t there be a little dialogue here about the mechanics of mismatch between Chinese fighters and the Caucasian colonizer? The story’s historical inspiration is footnoted at the very end, when a very young Bruce Lee comes for his lessons. With Sammo Hung (also credited as Action Director), Fan Siu-Wong. 108m. (Bill Stamets)

“Ip Man 2″ opens Friday at the Music Box.