In Theaters: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT (2018)

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT
(US/China - 2018)

Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Cast: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Alec Baldwin, Michelle Monaghan, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, Wes Bentley, Vanessa Kirby, Frederick Schmidt, Liang Yang, Kristoffer Joner, Caspar Phillipson, Alix Benezech. (PG-13, 147 mins)

Big-budget summer blockbusters don't get much more entertaining than MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT, the sixth film in the durable, 22-year-old franchise. An incredible jolt of adrenaline in cinematic form, FALLOUT is easily the best in the M:I series so far, and it might even be the best movie Tom Cruise has ever made. Setting aside his batshit religion, Cruise may very well be The Last Movie Star and only a fool would count him out after a trio of forgettable underperformers--JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK, THE MUMMY, and AMERICAN MADE--that had all of the entertainment industry prognosticators concluding that the now-56-year-old (!) actor was washed-up and his time had passed. While we justifiably question the necessity of a TOP GUN sequel that's due out next year, FALLOUT is Cruise here and now in a series that's been on a roll, reteaming him once more with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning USUAL SUSPECTS screenwriter who emerged from an eight-year sabbatical to become Cruise's most trusted aide-de-camp in either writing (VALKYRIE, EDGE OF TOMORROW, THE MUMMY) or directing (JACK REACHER, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION) capacities in the ensuing decade. What everyone was saying about MAD MAX: FURY ROAD three years ago holds true here: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is an instant classic in the action genre.

A direct sequel to ROGUE NATION, FALLOUT is as convoluted as you'd expect, with IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), botching a mission to intercept three weapons-grade plutonium orbs that end up in the hands of The Apostles, a splinter cell offshoot of The Syndicate, the organization run by international terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), who was apprehended in the previous film. Assigned to retrieve the plutonium by IMF boss Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), the team is overruled by CIA chief Erica Sloane (Angela Bassett), who orders her own operative and attack dog Walker (Henry Cavill) to tag along. The story moves all over the globe, as Hunt ends up posing as a mystery man named John Lark, set to buy the plutonium from the Apostles with a wealthy socialite and arms dealer known as The White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) acting as a go-between. Things get even more complicated when The Apostles refuse to pay for the plutonium, instead insisting that if "Lark"/Hunt wants the plutonium, he has to help Lane escape from a military-fortified prison transport. Throw in MI-6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and her own assignment to kill Lane, Hunt being framed as a rogue agent once more, and a scheming Walker clearly up to games of his own, and the stage is set for one double-cross and jaw-dropping action set piece after another for a two-and-a-half hour stretch that's over before know it.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is a movie that just doesn't quit. It's a preposterous delight and a rare instance of an action film that actually merits the comparison to the proverbial standby blurb of a non-stop rollercoaster ride. Though there's some conservatively-deployed CGI and visual effects, the abundance of practical stunt work and action choreography solidifies Cruise's standing as Hollywood's most death-defying madman. McQuarrie's puzzle-like story construction and recurring motif of "Who's really who?" recalls THE USUAL SUSPECTS, but there's also generous helpings of humor and warmth among the IMF characters who, to borrow a term from the FAST AND THE FURIOUS series, have really become family by this point (it's Hunt's unwillingness to sacrifice Luther that causes him to lose the plutonium in the prologue, something that Sloane and Walker never stop reminding him). FAST AND THE FURIOUS fans may want to argue the point, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a big-budget franchise still creatively firing on all cylinders and running better than ever six installments deep. It's impossible to pick a best scene--the HALO jump, the bone-smashing men's room throwdown, the epic boat/car/motorcycle chase through Paris, the greatest "Tom Cruise running" sequence ever, or the nerve-wracking, INCEPTION-like cross-cutting race against time in the climax, when the team tracks Lane to a medical camp in Kashmir where a smallpox outbreak caused by The Apostles has just been contained, which involves a helicopter chase, a brawl that spills over to the side of a mountain, and the defusing of two nuclear devices. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is crowd-pleasing, edge-of-your-seat, popcorn movie perfection, the kind of relentlessly heart-pounding, balls-to-the-wall barnburner that restores your faith in the summer blockbuster.

On DVD/Blu-ray: KNIGHT OF CUPS (2016) and 45 YEARS (2015)

KNIGHT OF CUPS
(US - 2016)

Terrence Malick makes movies for no one other than Terrence Malick, and by this point, you're either onboard with his improvisational, self-indulgent, stream-of-consciousness journeys up his own ass or you're not. So if you've been open to his increasingly prolific output in recent years or found him stretching well beyond the point of myopic self-parody, KNIGHT OF CUPS isn't going to do a thing to change your opinion. Similar to 2013's ponderous misfire TO THE WONDER--notable for being the first instance of some of his most devoted acolytes finally having the stones to admit he kinda lost them with this one--Malick continues to move away from the concept of narrative altogether in his presentation of Hollywood screenwriter Rick (Christian Bale, who worked with Malick on 2005's significantly better THE NEW WORLD), a man hopelessly lost in a suffocating malaise of L.A. ennui. No, KNIGHT OF CUPS isn't one of those bile-spewing insider takedowns of Hollywood but that might've actually been preferable. There's lots of scenes of Rick walking and driving around various obligatory recognizable locations (other than Bale, the most screen time goes to the 405 and some Death Valley wind turbines, and yes, at one point, he engages in some thousand-yard staring at the nearly bone-dry concrete of the L.A. River, whose appearance in a Los Angeles-set film is apparently required by law) and replaying the bad decisions and lost loves in his life. It's all accompanied by the expected ponderous, insufferable, pained-whisper narration by various characters that's become Malick's trademark (note: these make even less sense in context):

•  "Fragments...pieces of a man...where did I go wrong?" 

•  "I want you. Hold you. Have you. Mine."

•  "All those years...living the life of someone I didn't even know."

•  "You gave me peace. You gave me what the world can't give. Mercy. Love. Joy. All else is cloud. Be with me. Always."

•  "We find me."

•  "Oh. Life."

•  "Begin."

Many familiar faces drift in and out throughout, some playing characters (Cate Blanchett as Rick's ex-wife; Natalie Portman, Imogen Poots, Isabel Lucas, Freida Pinto, and Teresa Palmer as various lovers; Wes Bentley as Rick's brother, who commited suicide; Brian Dennehy as their dad; barely visible bits by Nick Offerman, Jason Clarke, Clifton Collins Jr., Joel Kinnaman, Dane DeHaan, Shea Whigham, and Kevin Corrigan as Rick's buddies or colleagues) and others playing themselves in what amounts to an arthouse ZOOLANDER 2 (Ryan O'Neal, Fabio, Joe LoTruglio, Joe Manganiello, Thomas Lennon, and Antonio Banderas, who offers this bit of sage relationship advice to Rick: "It's like flavors...sometimes you want raspberry and after a while, you get tired and want strawberry," in a way that sounds like Antonio Banderas imitating Chris Kattan imitating Antonio Banderas on SNL). TO THE WONDER was terrible, but at least it captured the beauty in the bland sameness of middle America in a vividly Antonioni-esque, RED DESERT fashion. With KNIGHT OF CUPS, shot way back in 2012 and endlessly tinkered with by its dawdling maker, Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki don't even find a unique visual perspective of Los Angeles, mainly because we've seen all of these places in 50,000 other movies and Malick, currently American cinema's top auteur who doesn't seem to get out much, has no new perspective to offer. Sure, Malick injects some personal pain into the story--his own brother committed suicide--but does it matter when his writing has regressed to the level of an angsty teenager who's just had his heart broken for the first time? Do we need another movie about depressed and loathsome L.A. dickbags and their first-world problems? The Malick of old could bring a singularly original perspective to this tired and played-out concept, but all the Malick of today has to offer are sleepy, enigmatic voiceovers and more California cliches than a Red Hot Chili Peppers song. Look, film snobs. Let's just cut the shit. Stop giving Malick a pass simply because of your fond memories of what he once was. (R, 118 mins)

45 YEARS
(UK/Germany - 2015)

A quiet and low-key character piece that subtly grows more tense and uncomfortable as it goes along, 45 YEARS is also a showcase for a pair of late-career triumphs for stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay. Rampling received an Oscar nomination for her performance as Kate Mercer, a retired schoolteacher in a small, rural British town. The film follows Kate and husband Geoff (Courtenay) over the week leading up to a swanky party with all of their friends--the Mercers never had children--celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary (a party was planned for their 40th, but Geoff's heart attack and bypass surgery led to its cancellation). On Monday of that week, Geoff receives a letter from Germany informing him that the still-preserved body of Katya, his German girlfriend who died over 50 years ago, was found in a melting glacier where she fell into a crevasse while they were mountain climbing in Switzerland. Memories from a half-century ago come back to haunt Geoff, and while Kate is initially supportive of the wave of grief overcoming her husband, she grows increasingly concerned over the week as long-buried details of his relationship with Katya come to the surface. He was contacted because the initial report listed him as her next-of-kin, which leads Kate to think Geoff and Katya were married. He insists they weren't, only that they pretended to be since it was a much more conservative era. After a failed attempt at sex due to Geoff's mind being elsewhere, she catches him rummaging around in the attic in the middle of the night, looking for pictures of Katya. Geoff starts smoking again, tries to back out of a lunch with some old work buddies, and even their friends remark that he seems distant, agitated, and preoccupied. He starts reading up on global warming and Kate finds out he's been talking to a travel agent about booking a trip to Switzerland. While Geoff is out one afternoon, Kate goes through his old photos and notebooks in some boxes stashed away in the attic and finds something that makes her question everything about their 45-year marriage.

Based on David Constantine's short story "In Another Country" and written and directed by Andrew Haigh, who cut his teeth working on the editing team of several Ridley Scott films (GLADIATOR, BLACK HAWK DOWN, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN), 45 YEARS is a fascinating, unsettling, and often deeply moving meditation on marriage, trust, love, and the disturbing realization that no matter how long or how well you've known someone, you'll never know everything about them. Kate was aware of Katya's death when she met Geoff, but it never occurred to her just how much of a presence the memory of Katya was in her marriage to Geoff, or the ways in which Katya has been the driving force in many of Geoff's--and by association, Kate's--decisions over the years. Haigh doesn't ask the audience to pick sides--indeed, there are times when Kate seems insensitive to Geoff's grief, but Geoff doesn't make it easy, yammering on about "my Katya" in ways that sometimes seem like an inadvertent slap in Kate's face. There's no doubt that Geoff loves Kate dearly, but it's just as clear that Katya has always been on his mind. In their best roles in years (probably decades for Courtenay, who's been nominated for two Oscars and was big in the mid '60s but seemed to consciously avoid the commercial pursuits of his British "angry young man" contemporaries like Richard Burton, Albert Finney, and Peter O'Toole), the two living legend stars are just superb, their body language and mannerisms expertly conveying decades of lived-in familiarity and shorthand communication, culminating a long, static shot near the end that up-ends all of that in a devastating portrait of ambiguity and uncertainty. (R, 95 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: ROSEWATER (2014); PIONEER (2014); and BLACK NOVEMBER (2015)

ROSEWATER
(US - 2014)

ROSEWATER, a chronicle of Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari's 118 days of interrogation and torture at Tehran's Evin Prison, is the big-screen writing and directing debut of THE DAILY SHOW's Jon Stewart--viewers will recall John Oliver hosting over the summer of 2013 while Stewart made this pet project that has a direct tie to the show. A resident of London, Bahari (played here by Gael Garcia Bernal) was in Tehran covering the 2009 Iran presidential election for Newsweek and staying with his mother Moloojoon (Shohreh Aghdashloo) when he was arrested and held in solitary confinement. Initially, Bahari thinks he was arrested for filming some protests over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's questionable victory. But his interrogator (Kim Bodnia), referred to as "Rosewater" by the constantly blindfolded Bahari, who never saw his face but recognized the rosewater scent of his perfume, informs him that he's been arrested for being a spy. The proof? Bahari was interviewed in a DAILY SHOW segment by Jason Jones (playing himself), who was pretending to be an American spy incognito as a reporter.

Stewart occasionally flirts with black comedy but always pulls back, which is too bad, since he would seem to be a natural for exploring the absurdity of the situation with some satirical bite (early on, Iranian authorities label Bahari's DVD collection, with things like THE SOPRANOS and Pasolini's TEOREMA, as "porn"). Instead, Stewart fashions ROSEWATER as a reverent, inspiring, triumph-of-the-human-spirit saga that just never catches fire. There's little suspense or tension in Bahari's situation--not because we know the outcome that he gets released after 118 days and will be OK, but because Stewart tackles the subject in such a perfunctory and by-the-numbers fashion. Perhaps he wanted to be taken seriously as a filmmaker and be respectful of his subject but he erred too much on the side of caution, ending up with a film that's dull, plodding, and predictable. None of Stewart's personality comes through in a creative way and his voice is nowhere to be heard (and THE DAILY SHOW is never even referenced by name) and when he starts showing Bahari having imaginary conversations with and getting "hang in there!" pep talks from the ghosts of his late father (Haluk Bilginer) and sister (Golshifteh Farahani), ROSEWATER starts to look like something any hired gun director could've put together. In Stewart's defense, these conversations with his dead father and sister, both political prisoners, are in Bahari's memoir Then They Came for Me, and while it may have worked on the page and he wanted to remain faithful to Bahari's writing, it's a mawkish, eye-rolling cliche when put on the screen. Given his status as both a comedy figure and an astute political junkie, as well as his own indirect involvement with the situation, there's so many other approaches Stewart could've taken with ROSEWATER rather than going for superficial, transparent awards-bait. Open Road didn't really know what to do with the dry, tedious ROSEWATER, only putting it on 371 screens at its widest release for a gross of $3 million. It's doubtful it would've even gotten that without Stewart's name attached to it. There was a lot of potential here and the intentions are nothing but sincere, but all things considered, this is a major disappointment. (R, 103 mins)


PIONEER
(Norway/Germany/Sweden/Finland/France - 2013; US release 2014)

Set in the late 1970s and looking like it was made then as well, the nautical conspiracy thriller PIONEER is a throwback in every way, right down to an on-set mishap that looks like something out of the original GONE IN 60 SECONDS. Star Aksel Hennie's (HEADHUNTERS) character is being chased in his Jeep, and the actor insisted on doing his own driving. He lost control of the Jeep, flipping twice, windows shattering and top torn off before the Jeep lands upright, Hennie clearly visible in the driver's seat and looking terrified. Even as it happens in the film, it's attention-getting simply for the spontaneous and awkward way it happens...like a real car wreck would rather than one precisely engineered by stunt coordinators or pulled off with CGI. Hennie emerged uninjured but quite shaken, and even in a DVD special feature called "The Crash," he still gets emotional recounting it. It's left in the film as it happened, taking a rather humdrum car chase and making it unforgettable. The film itself has origins in fact, dealing with the installation of an oil pipeline along the floor of the North Sea off the coast of Norway. The job requires training professional divers to do the work and the project is a joint Norwegian-American venture, with the Norwegian divers, headed by Petter (Hennie) and his brother Knut (Andre Eriksen) at odds with the arrogant American divers, represented by Mike (a scowling Wes Bentley). Tragedy strikes when Petter blacks out on a dive, failing to close a valve that results in Knut's death. Aside from losing his younger brother, something doesn't feel right about what happened, and the more he presses for answers, the less anyone around him wants to talk. He begins to suspect that someone tampered with his oxygen supply. Anyone with answers turns up missing or dead, the videotape documenting the accident is nowhere to be found, the perpetually surly Mike speeds up behind Petter and tries to run him off the road, and the bottom-line-watching American oil company rep Ferris (Stephen Lang) is running out of patience with Petter's refusal to let it go.

Director/co-writer Erik Skjoldbjaerg, who helmed the original Norwegian INSOMNIA and came to Hollywood for his mandatory Horrible Harvey Weinstein experience--pretty much a rite of passage for foreign filmmakers at this point--with the four-years-on-the-shelf PROZAC NATION, really gets a solid '70s paranoia vibe throughout, helped a lot by the short, balding Hennie looking nothing like your conventional leading man. He really does look like an average, blue collar guy getting in way over his head with powerful people, but still bulldozing forward, not giving it up--even his widowed sister-in-law (Stephanie Sigman) seems content to take Ferris' fat settlement offer--and it's admirable that Skjoldbjaerg and the screenwriters aren't always concerned with making Petter appealing. Indeed, there's times when he's a bellicose prick. There's a doomy, palpable tension as the screws tighten and Petter realizes that somebody's hiding something and it could cost him his life, but Skjoldbjaerg shows his cards too soon and it's too obvious that the Americans are shady and untrustworthy. Bentley's Mike is a completely unlikable asshole, glaring, seething and yelling at the Norwegians from the moment he first appears, for no real reason. And it makes no sense when he stops someone from torturing Petter in a pressurized chamber ("I didn't sign on to kill anyone," he protests), only to resume the torture as soon as the other guy leaves the room. We've also seen Stephen Lang in enough movies to know that if he's acting altruistic and sympathetic, it's because his character is anything but. PIONEER has its glaring flaws and plot holes, and its ambiguities are such that they lead to an unsatisfying ending, but its positives still outweigh its negatives, generating significant suspense and establishing an effectively bleak, gray atmosphere, which gets an immense push from an occasionally Tangerine Dream-ish score by Air. (R, 111 mins)



BLACK NOVEMBER
(Nigeria/US - 2015)

BLACK NOVEMBER is a bad movie, but at least it's a bad movie with noble intentions. A feature-length lecture on the evils of Big Oil and government corruption, BLACK NOVEMBER opens with text explaining that Nigeria is the world's fifth largest oil supplier, while neglecting to mention that their top export is deposed princes who just need your checking account and social security numbers. A group of Nigerian terrorists led by Opuwei (Akon) and Timi (Wyclef Jean) are holding Western Oil CEO Tom Hudson (Mickey Rourke, looking embalmed) hostage in the 2nd Street Tunnel in Los Angeles. Unlike their needlessly complex plan of orchestrating a massive rush hour traffic jam, their demand is simple: arrange the release of activist Ebiere (a convincing Mbong Amata), currently in a Warri prison in the Niger Delta, where she's about to be executed. Flashbacks reveal that Ebiere attended college in America on a Western Oil scholarship, and Hudson would use her to settle disputes between Nigerians (irate that their land has been ruined by constant oil spills) and the corrupt military that acts at the behest of the oil company, frequently going over the line into atrocities like murder and gang-rape. In time, Ebiere is driven to a shocking act of violence when she realizes she's been set up by Hudson and the whole thing was a ploy to get the protesters arrested. Shockingly, the unscrupulous Hudson is one of those billionaire CEOs who cares more about profits than people, and back in L.A., he's about to pay for his misdeeds if he can't convince the Nigerian government to spare Ebiere's life.

Very sporadically enlivened by bits of action and some inexcusably crummy CGI explosions, BLACK NOVEMBER is essentially a 96-minute public service announcement disguised as a commercial movie. Characters don't speak naturally but rather, in hackneyed, exposition-heavy proclamations, almost like the script is just a bullet-pointed outline (Hudson's model-like daughter, just before he's abducted from his limo: "You always get nervous before you fly to Nigeria."). It's terrible, but that's only because Nigerian writer/director Jeta Amata (Mbong's husband--it's a family affair with Amatas everywhere in the credits, with Mbong being much more talented than the other Amatas in the cast) is more concerned with shouting his points than telling a story with any subtlety or nuance. It's too sincere in its intent to be dismissed as a mere vanity project (though Amata calling his production company "Jeta Amata Concepts" doesn't bode well), but that doesn't give it a pass. The backstory of BLACK NOVEMBER is much more interesting than the film itself. Amata took his shelved 2011 film BLACK GOLD--produced by Nigerian oil baron Captain Hosa Wells Okunbo--dumped roughly half of it and shot additional footage to restructure it into its current form as BLACK NOVEMBER. BLACK GOLD starred Mbong Amata as Ebiere, along with a veritable Who's Who of Redbox All-Stars including Tom Sizemore, Michael Madsen, and Billy Zane, the latter three nowhere to be seen in BLACK NOVEMBER. Conversely, Rourke, Kim Basinger (as intrepid reporter Kristy Ames, covering the L.A. hostage situation), Anne Heche (a virtual walk-on with maybe two lines of dialogue as an FBI agent), Jean, and Akon did not appear in BLACK GOLD. Footage of Vivica A. Fox as a US government official and former WALKING DEAD star Sarah Wayne Callies as a crusading cable news reporter comes from BLACK GOLD, as do most of Mbong Amata's scenes that take place in the Niger Delta (she looks noticeably different in NOVEMBER-shot footage with Rourke). Amata has a confused mess on his hands, but with the help of four credited editors, he almost makes the whole thing hang together, with the seams only slightly showing when Callies picks up a ringing phone in BLACK GOLD and it's BLACK NOVEMBER's Basinger on the other end of the line, and when Fox is seen at a command center that seemingly belongs in another movie, that's because it does. Jean and Akon put up some of the financing for Amata to transform BLACK GOLD into BLACK NOVEMBER, which was completed way back in 2012 and shelved after being screened for events at the Kennedy Center and the United Nations before getting its belated commercial release in early 2015. Regardless of its good intentions, BLACK NOVEMBER is still junky, cobbled-together DTV material (it's too bad the original cut of BLACK GOLD isn't included as a bonus feature for the masochistically-inclined), with Rourke, Basinger, and Heche looking especially perplexed over exactly how they ended up being Raymond Burr'd into a Nigerian protest drama. (Unrated, 97 mins)

In Theaters: INTERSTELLAR (2014)

INTERSTELLAR
(US - 2014)

Directed by Christopher Nolan. Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan. Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, David Gyasi, William Devane, Timothee Chalamet, Leah Cairns, David Oyelowo, Collette Wolfe, voices of Bill Irwin, Josh Stewart. (PG-13, 169 mins)

Like the work of his contemporary David Fincher, the films of Christopher Nolan are among the very few that qualify as legitimate "event" films. A master filmmaker who, like Fincher, consistently draws comparisons to Stanley Kubrick, Nolan has one of the finest track records of any filmmaker in the modern era, even with the inevitable backlash that comes with such a high level of acclaim. Through MEMENTO, the DARK KNIGHT trilogy, and INCEPTION, Nolan's scope and vision grow with each new project. His latest film, INTERSTELLAR, is his most ambitious yet, a stunning sci-fi saga filled with state-of-the-art visual effects, a memorable, organ-driven Hans Zimmer score, breathtaking cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema (TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY), and excellent performances all around, and one packed with such grandiose vision that it can't be contained in one reality or even in one galaxy. With obvious influences including the likes of Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS (1972), along with Douglas Trumbull's SILENT RUNNING (1972), Robert Zemeckis' CONTACT (1997), and Danny Boyle's SUNSHINE (2007), INTERSTELLAR often feels like it's juggling too many hard sci-fi concepts. On one hand, it's almost impossible to not marvel at such a staggering achievement, but on the other, it magnifies Nolan's few weaknesses.  In the span of just a few moments, your mouth is agape at what you're seeing, then you're groaning as the characters overexplain something for the third or fourth time. Again utilizing his trademark intercutting (think of that SUV's endless plummet into the water in INCEPTION), Nolan can present a brilliantly-edited set piece of nail-biting intensity with three or more distinct and equally suspenseful things simultaneously unfolding, then follow it with a hoary cliche like someone taking their last dying, gasping breath as they're about to reveal a deep, dark secret.

INTERSTELLAR takes place in a near future where Earth is dangerously close to being unable to sustain itself. Crops are scarce--they've just lost okra and corn is on its way out. Cities resemble a new Dust Bowl, the New York Yankees play to a crowd that consists of a few people on a small set of bleachers and the roster is filled with people who have no idea how to play baseball. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a NASA-trained ex-pilot and widower struggling to make it as a farmer while supporting his teenage son Tom (Timothee Chalamet), ten-year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), and his wry, wise father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow). Times have changed--all government money goes toward farming and organizations like NASA have been disbanded and discredited, as evidenced by Murph getting suspended from school for bringing an old textbook that doesn't reflect the new accepted version of history: that NASA wasn't a legit outfit and the moon landings were faked to help bankrupt the Soviet Union. Books keep falling off of Murph's bookshelf and Cooper dismisses her talk that it's a "ghost." Dust blowing in the windows falls in a specific pattern on her bedroom floor. Scientist and curious mind that he still is at heart, and Murph being his daughter, they eventually figure out that the pattern is a code for coordinates on a map. They follow it and stumble on a seemingly abandoned NORAD outpost in the desert that houses what's left of the space program: Cooper's old mentor Prof. Brand (Michael Caine), his protegee/daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), scientists Doyle (Wes Bentley) and Romilly (David Gyasi), and the de facto head of NASA (William Devane). Brand tells Cooper that 50 years earlier, a wormhole was discovered behind Saturn and probes sent through it found another galaxy with a dozen potentially habitable planets. Earth has, at most, a generation left before it dies, and they need to find another planet to sustain human life and carry on the species, either by colonizing it with the humans left on Earth or, if that fails, by incubating fertilized eggs on the new planet. Twelve astronauts were sent on a mission a decade earlier to survey each of the planets.  Nine have been eliminated from contention and Amelia, Doyle, and Romilly need a pilot to get them through the wormhole to investigate the three planets where colonization has been deemed possible and attempt to locate the surviving astronauts.

Of course, Cooper leaves his family behind and has no idea how long he'll be gone, which doesn't go over well with Murph. A miscalculation by Amelia results in three members of the team--Amelia, Cooper, and Doyle--spending over three hours on a planet where one hour equals seven Earth years. When they return to the main spacecraft, Romilly is 23 years older and there's communication messages from the now-grown Tom (Casey Affleck) and the still-resentful Murph (Jessica Chastain), who's now working with the elderly and wheelchair-bound Prof. Brand to finish the equation that will being the quartet back to Earth. It's here that INTERSTELLAR goes in directions that are best approached knowing as little as possible.

In many ways, it's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY if Kubrick films had the ability to be warm and sentimental. And that streak of sentimentality is where INTERSTELLAR sometimes stumbles. Nolan is clinical and doesn't wear sentimental well. His protagonists--think Guy Pearce's Leonard Shelby in MEMENTO, Christian Bale's Alfred Borden in THE PRESTIGE and Bruce Wayne in the DARK KNIGHT trilogy, Leonardo DiCaprio's Dom Cobb in INCEPTION--are driven by emotion that's been distorted into obsession and, in most cases, revenge. That cold focus is something that draws the Kubrick analogies. Practically every major character in INTERSTELLAR gets a scene where Zimmer's score--quite majestic and often dark but still a bit much at times--swells up John Williams-style as tears roll down their faces. This look doesn't suit Nolan, and sometimes, the film seems less inspired by 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY or SOLARIS or SUNSHINE (there's even talk of doing a shortcut to "sling-shot" around a black hole to land on one of the planets, much like the Boyle film's last-ditch, desperate "sling-shot" effort to drop the payload and restart the sun), and more like a secret, elaborate, hard sci-fi adaptation of the 1977 Todd Rundgren/Utopia song "Love is the Answer."  The song's not in the movie, but someone at a more maudlin point in the proceedings alludes to love being the answer, which made me think of the song, and well, here, read the lyrics:

Name your price
A ticket to paradise
I can't stay here any more
And I've looked high and low
I've been from shore to shore to shore
If there's a short cut I'd have found it
But there's no easy way around it

Light of the world, shine on me
Love is the answer
Shine on us all, set us free
Love is the answer

Who knows why
Someday we all must die
Were all homeless boys and girls
And we are never heard
It's such a lonely world
People turn their heads and walk on by
Tell me, is it worth just another try?

Tell me, are we alive, or just a dying planet?
What are the chances?
Ask the man in your heart for the answers

Nolan's films have a grim darkness to them and that extends to INTERSTELLAR, particularly in some the mid-film plot turns.  All the tears and the crying makes for an uneven work as Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan try to have it both ways, and it's the same thing that made something like A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001) so frustrating, as Steven Spielberg brought a never-realized Kubrick project to life and you can see in the film the precise moment where Kubrick's cold, clinical script ended and Spielberg's heart-tugging contributions took flight. Some of it works with INTERSTELLAR, particularly Cooper seeing the 23 years older Murph on a video message and realizing how bitter she remains over him leaving.  It's heartbreakingly played by both McConaughey and Chastain, who's very good throughout.  Other times, such as the climax (well, one of the climaxes, I should say), which follows this film's version of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY's "Jupiter and beyond the infinite..." set piece, and Prof. Brand's repeated invocation of Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," the Nolan brothers are just belaboring the point for maximum mawkishness.

Please note that these are immediate reactions. Like Kubrick, Nolan is a filmmaker whose work is difficult to judge on one viewing. That's never been the case more than it is with INTERSTELLAR, a flawed film with some issues of tone that nonetheless has too many brilliant sequences and powerful performances to dismiss. There's a lot to process here, and for everything that doesn't work, there's ten things that do. Performances are terrific across the board, with Hathaway, Lithgow, and young Foy also standing out, in addition to a sardonic and droll work by Bill Irwin as the voice of TARS, the ship's robot, ballbusting the crew with his humor setting at 95% ("Why don't we take that down to 75?" Cooper instructs TARS after the robot jokes about using them as slaves for his planned robot colony). It's a gargantuan, visually dazzling, and often thematically bold piece of work, but in the end, it's really just a bigger, longer SUNSHINE, one of the most underrated sci-fi films of the last decade. INTERSTELLAR is demonstrative of Nolan wanting to make his Kubrick groundbreaker and Tarkovsky art film but needing to make sure it's Spielberg-accessible and audience-friendly. Most of the time, the reconciling of those two goals balances out, but the film struggles in the moments when that balance is lost.