Movie review by Greg Carlson

The experience of “Before Midnight,” the third installment of Richard Linklater’s remarkable group of films exploring, among other things, the possibilities of romantic love, calls to mind Robert Browning’s famous lines, “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be…” What began in 1995 as an impossibly right merger of minimalist plotting and maximalist self-exploration and philosophizing has surprisingly, confidently, and assuredly made the case that sequels can sometimes surpass inaugurations. As Jesse and Celine, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have by now come to feel like two close friends, and we admirers already hope to see them again in another nine years.

Cynics and pessimists need not bother with the “Before” series, ripe as it is with the poetry of spontaneity, love at first sight, and the value of saying yes. That said, “Before Midnight” embraces the changes that accompany post-40 adulthood. Jesse’s missed flight at the conclusion of “Sunset” has led, finally, to a long-term partnership with Celine, and at least one result is a pair of young daughters. “Before Midnight” opens with a sober airport farewell between Jesse and his son Hank, boarding a jet home to America and his mother, the woman Jesse left to be with Celine. It is instantly apparent that Jesse aches to spend more time with his quickly growing child, and the interaction sharply seeds key elements of a conflict that will soon unfold between Jesse and Celine on Greece’s idyllic Peloponnese peninsula.

Like Linklater’s previous treatments of Vienna and Paris, an appreciation of the dreamy, picturesque locations complements the thematic focus on taking chances and seizing happiness. Even so, all of the “Before” movies have made room for careful consideration of mortality and the finite number of moments we have. In the first film, a visit to the Cemetery of the Nameless confronted both the anonymity of death and the way in which time for the dead is suspended (“Now I’m ten years older and she’s still thirteen, I guess”). “Before Midnight” continues the memento mori ruminations, and a spirited dinner conversation attended by participants of many ages and life stages ends in a wistful toast to “passing through.”

Even though “Midnight” eschews the device of an imposed time limit bearing down on Jesse and Celine, a technique essential to “Sunrise” and “Sunset,” the movie’s final act is a tour de force that summons the same kind of panic and urgency we felt as the endings of each of the first two movies approached. What was planned for Celine and Jesse as a kid-free hotel getaway gifted by friends collapses into a bitter display of grievances, accusations, and deeply cutting differences of opinion that no fewer than half a dozen critics have compared to “Scenes from a Marriage.”

One must see “Before Midnight” to appreciate both the detail and the scale of the vicious verbal battle between two idealized projections of our cherished fantasies. My viewing companion, a longtime and committed backer of the “Before” films, expressed her intense feeling of discomfort at bearing witness to the painful blowup. It is unnecessary to say more, since Celine and Jesse have always been best at doing the talking. Like the serpentine twists and turns of fate that challenged our lovers at sunrise and sunset, things are not always what they seem and endings are often just beginnings in disguise.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A fictionalized account of Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 seafaring adventure, “Kon-Tiki” burnishes Heyerdahl’s well-documented penchant for mythmaking and self-promotion. Nominated for an Oscar in the Foreign Language category, “Kon-Tiki” was shot in both Norwegian and English editions, and most U.S. viewers will experience the latter as the Weinstein Company’s release rolls out to American cinemas. Heyerdahl’s theory, that people from what is now Peru may have traveled to and populated Polynesian islands, was not then and is not now believed by most anthropologists, but the spirit of exploration and not the scientific record really fuels the movie.

Culling together material from Heyerdahl’s wildly popular book “The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas” and the Academy Award-winning documentary that remains Norway’s only Oscar-winning feature to date, “Kon-Tiki” tempers the long stretches of uneventful downtime with sudden bursts of intense conflict and crisis. Spending the majority of its duration on the water journey itself, “Kon-Tiki” also covers Heyerdahl’s initially unsuccessful attempts to mount the unlikely Pacific Ocean crossing on a raft of balsa logs lashed together. A minor subplot addressing marital tension between Thor and his wife Liv adds another small layer of drama.

Weirdly, directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg feel compelled to punch up a few of the voyage’s key moments with outright fabrications. Perhaps the most glaring example is the demise of parrot mascot and companion Lorita, who, according to Heyerdahl’s original documentary, simply took wing some sixty days into the adventure, never to be seen again. This time, Lorita is snapped up by a hungry shark, setting the stage for a brutal man-versus-nature slaughter fueled by the rage of a bereaved crewmember. By all accounts, however, the presence of sharks was constant, even if the movies, thanks to “Jaws,” can’t resist showcasing the animals as ultimate, primal fear-inducing predators.

A source of consternation for family members (none of the original Kon-Tiki crew are alive today) of German-born Herman Watzinger is the film’s portrayal of the refrigeration engineer. As Heyerdahl’s second in command, the real life Watzinger was confident of the raft’s seaworthiness, but the movie uses Watzinger to manufacture conflict that did not genuinely exist. Actor Anders Baasmo Christiansen is asked to play a nervous, out-of-shape doubter whose actions veer close to the edge of endangering the lives of his fellow sailors. “Kon-Tiki” screenwriter Petter Skavlan has defended the changes, but the result is diminished credibility.

“Kon-Tiki” might inspire more visits to the excellent museum in Oslo where the original raft is housed (along with Heyerdahl’s Oscar statuette). In the end, the successful completion of Heyerdahl’s mission at least validated the claim that a 4000 plus nautical mile journey on little more than a bobbing cork was possible. Considering the manner in which the filmmakers have defended their “enhancements” to Heyerdahl’s story, however, “Kon-Tiki” surely would have been improved by the inclusion of a more idiosyncratic and self-aware tone. The film takes itself very seriously when it could, and probably should, be playing with the captain’s oddness, ego, and self-righteousness.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A grim, true crime account of the rise and fall of hitman Richard Kuklinski, a bearish mob affiliate and enforcer whose handiwork resulted in a body count estimated at more than 100 victims, Ariel Vromen’s “The Iceman” showcases another example of Michael Shannon’s totally committed, bravura acting chops. Despite a modest budget, the film effectively sketches the period detail of the gritty 1960s through 1980s East Coast environment (Detroit and Shreveport standing in for New York and New Jersey), evoking the street look of classic dramas photographed by Arthur Ornitz and Victor Kemper.

Based on the 1992 HBO documentary “The Iceman Tapes: Conversations with a Killer” and Anthony Bruno’s 1993 book “The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer,” Vromen’s film capitalizes on the unfathomable, unthinkable chasm that exists between Kuklinski the family man and Kuklinski the assassin. Keeping secrets and/or living a double life has served as the narrative engine of titles as wide-ranging as “Belle de Jour,” “Vera Drake,” “True Lies,” and “The Departed,” but “The Iceman” is perhaps closest to “The Sopranos” in terms of Kuklinski’s desire to offer a “normal” life to his wife and kids while concealing the volcanic reservoirs of lethal violence that guide his unorthodox vocation.

As Kuklinski’s wife, renamed Deborah for the movie, Winona Ryder has the unenviable task of playing a character unable to ask questions of or communicate fully with her spouse. The real Barbara Kuklinski described years of physical abuse at the hands of Richard, but Vromen elects to minimize the extent to which Kuklinski’s horrific behavior spilled over into his day-to-day domesticity. The fictionalized Kuklinski is dubiously constructed as a mostly loving husband determined to keep his demons hidden. As the façade begins to crumble, a scene of Richard’s physical abuse is placed as a marker of the man’s slide toward discovery and capture.

Along his twisted path, Kuklinski meets a curious doppelganger in Robert “Mr. Freezy” Pronge, a fellow contract killer whose incongruous front as an ice cream truck driver is just as implausible as Kuklinski’s own double life. Known in real life as Mister Softee and played by an unrecognizable Chris Evans, buried beneath sunglasses and facial hair, Pronge both escalates and diversifies the range of Kuklinski’s grisly trade, which soon includes the use of small spray bottles containing cyanide. Disguised on food or discreetly dispensed as a phony sneeze, the lethal poison is perhaps Kuklinski’s creepiest means of dispatching a target, although the postmortem dismemberments carried out by the two men are equally unsettling.

The presence of Ray Liotta as Gambino crime family crew leader Roy DeMeo links “The Iceman” to “Goodfellas” in spirit and partial milieu, but the tone of Vromen’s movie withholds any romanticizing of the “lifestyle” associated with the mob, instead considering Kuklinski as a perpetual outsider whose ability to commit murder stems in part from a brutal upbringing at the hands of physically and emotionally abusive parents. Using some of Kuklinski’s own confessional descriptions, Vromen alludes to some of the conditions that might shape a future killer, but “The Iceman” is ultimately not in a position to offer any definitive answers for Kuklinski’s psychopathy.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Very loosely based on the story of a singing group of Aboriginal women who performed for soldiers during the Vietnam War, “The Sapphires” depends on the charm and wit of Chris O’Dowd and the catchy soul tunes made famous by Linda Lyndell, the Staple Singers, the Four Tops, and others to overcome the film’s marshmallow structure and simplistic historical reductionism. Director Wayne Blair paints the characters in extremely broad strokes, falling back on the use of single, repeated traits to differentiate among the principal players, but the exuberance of the music and the heartwarming uplift will win over many.

Originally produced as a stage play written by Tony Briggs, whose mother was one of the women who inspired the drama, “The Sapphires” introduces Australian sisters Gail (Deborah Mailman, who played younger sis Cynthia onstage) and Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell) as a duo keen on performing country music in backwater talent competitions. Soon, youngest sibling Julie (Jessica Mauboy) emerges – to the dismay of bossy Gail – as the most talented vocalist in the family. As a single mother who for unknown reasons keeps secret the identity of her little boy’s father in a storyline that goes nowhere, Julie should have been constructed with greater care and detail, especially in the rendering of her decision to temporarily leave her child.

O’Dowd’s boozy promoter Dave Lovelace is initially painted as a potentially untrustworthy opportunist who sees in the Cummeragunja Songbirds a chance to pursue both R&B passions and financial gain. To the film’s credit, we are spared at least one classic ne’er do well cliché when Dave doesn’t squander the group’s earnings during a drunken card game. Instead, the narrative uses Dave’s borderline substance abuse as a conflict trigger in his budding romance with Gail. Both the color of O’Dowd’s skin and his unlikely nationality are mined for jokes, but the character’s affinity for Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett is as earnest as the same kind of ardor displayed by the working class Dubliners in Alan Parker’s infectious 1991 adaptation of Roddy Doyle’s “The Commitments.”

Capitalizing on the parallels between the African-American Civil Rights Movement and the discrimination faced by indigenous Australians through the institutionalized removal of Aboriginal children from their families, “The Sapphires” addresses racism and the horror of legally sanctioned kidnapping in one of its arcs. The story of the fourth Sapphire, Kay (Shari Sebbens), deals with the young woman’s identity as a mixed-race victim of the removal policy. Viewers will be reminded of Phillip Noyce’s 2002 movie adaptation of “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” the best-known feature to cover the Stolen Generations.

The pain caused by the childhood theft and forced adoption of Kay fuels Gail’s feelings of anger, guilt, and resentment, and the subplot is one of the movie’s most emotionally satisfying components. The relationship dynamics between the two women might have served as the basis for a fully-fledged movie on its own. As it stands, “The Sapphires” spends more time on the eye-opening adventures that accompany a theater of war, and in spite of the film’s modest budget, the limited location photography in and around Ho Chi Minh City evokes the period detail of the Vietnam War.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Writer-director Jeff Nichols follows his arresting and much admired “Take Shelter” with “Mud,” a Southern Gothic-tinted, Arkansas bildungsroman indebted to hallmarks including “Tom Sawyer,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Night of the Hunter.” “Mud” is nowhere near as good as those titles, but the movie’s unhurried pace and detailed identification with its young protagonist balance the busy contrivances that mar the climax. Photographed in Nichols’ home state, “Mud” tells the story of fourteen-year-old Ellis (Tye Sheridan), a houseboat dwelling kid dependent on the river for the precarious livelihood of his family. Dealing with the impending separation of his parents and the pangs of first love, Ellis turns his attention to a mysterious fugitive named Mud (Matthew McConaughey) when he discovers the outlaw living in a derelict boat stuck high in the branches of a tree.

Nichols believably pinpoints the intersection of hope and desperation in the charismatic McConaughey, who is perfectly cast and ideally realized as the hungry lawbreaker whose silver tongue and smooth confidence seduce Ellis and Ellis’ close friend Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) into aid and abetment. Mud tells the boys about Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), the woman whose purported victimization at the hands of a brutish lover brought about a miscarriage and the subsequent murder of the man by Mud. Despite being hunted by the dead man’s family and the local authorities, Mud is certain he can restore the boat and make his escape.

Like many coming of age narratives, “Mud” develops a theme addressing the question of what it takes to be a man, and the movie has no shortage of fathers, father figures, and males of various ages working out the codes of honor that are preoccupations of masculinity. Nichols locks on to paternal regulations with gusto, even casting go-to grizzlies Sam Shepard and Joe Don Baker in parallel roles. When it comes to the outnumbered women, Nichols is less certain of himself, and Juniper in particular is frustratingly opaque. Mud’s proximity to Juniper puts him in grave danger, but Ellis – whose own romantic pursuit of the hard-to-read May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant) – can only see things in terms of his incomplete teenage notions of chivalry.

Even if the film’s female characters are underserved and, as noted by Kimberly Jones, exist only in their relation to men, “Mud” understands the possibility that the gullibility and earnestness of youth can lead to situations in which kids are used by grown-ups. Nichols’ conclusion is ambivalent on the extent to which Mud has taken advantage of Ellis and Neckbone, even though that question is at one point directly raised. The ambiguity of some child-adult relationships can make one’s heart ache as innocence gives way to experience, and Nichols captures the feeling.

The wild, violent conclusion of the movie will feel out of step for some of the viewers who appreciate the finely observed repetition of Ellis’ smallish, hardscrabble day-to-day. The economics of small town De Witt, Eudora, and the surrounding communities are not nearly as dire and catastrophic as Hushpuppy’s environs in “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” but both movies touch on the possibility that their young heroes and heroines are flirting with the epiphany that the world is much bigger than previously imagined.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” receives its fourth theatrical feature adaptation (for whatever reason, the forgotten 2005 “G” is not included on that list) along with the Baz Luhrmann treatment, an expectedly anachronistic bricolage that marginally improves on the somnolence of the 1974 version directed by Jack Clayton. Mostly faithful in major plot detail and too faithful in the relentless use of “old sport” as Gatsby’s favorite term of endearment, Luhrmann’s edition spares no expense in conjuring up a simulacrum of Jazz Age extravagance and conspicuous consumption. The movie’s brio fails to develop into a “spectacular spectacular,” however, and like Gatsby’s doomed quest, no amount of money can buy the viewer’s love.

The 1998 Greenhaven Press compilation “Readings on The Great Gatsby” addresses Gatsby’s nature by presenting a quintet of essays arguing that the man is variously a classic romantic, a sinister gangster, a profoundly comic character, a pathological narcissist, and a fairytale hero for the middle class. Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t get at each of these positions equally, but his portrayal effectively encapsulates Gatsby’s neediness and desperation for love and approval that never arrive. Of course, it is Nick and not Daisy who comes closest to validating Gatsby’s desire (“You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”), but Luhrmann doesn’t press the homoeroticism of the Jay-Nick bromance, extra-textually stimulated by DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire’s foundational membership in the coarsely named Pussy Posse.

Daisy Fay Buchanan, the shallow and capricious committer of vehicular homicide, is arguably the Gatsby character most resistant to cinematic translation. Mia Farrow’s disastrous interpretation left much to be desired, and Carey Mulligan strains to make the most of her very scarce opportunities to instill complexity in a young woman so idealized by her onetime suitor she cannot possibly live up to Gatsby’s expectations. The romance of “The Great Gatsby” has always struck me as a terrible, rotten mirage, and its fundamental emptiness and fraudulence – a key part of Fitzgerald’s tragedy – presents a major adaptation obstacle.

Those who accept the novel as sacred canon will despise Luhrmann’s big alterations, most glaringly manifested in a poorly conceived and wretchedly executed framing device that places Nick Carraway in a sanatorium as he “writes” the story of Gatsby as a kind of purgation of his alcoholic and melancholic demons. The gimmick gives Luhrmann and co-screenwriter Craig Pearce an excuse to slather on what feels like pages and pages of extraneous voiceover narration presumably included to honor Fitzgerald’s poetic cadences. In case we miss the point, Luhrmann superimposes the text of key passages and quotations directly onscreen.

Considering Shawn Carter’s producing credit and soundtrack presence, it obviously occurred to Luhrmann that Jay-Z’s Marcy Projects to Madison Square Garden trajectory mirrors the Horatio Alger-esque, self-made journey of Gatsby. In her “New York Times” column, Maureen Dowd quoted Leon Wieseltier, who “thinks it’s time for a black Gatsby.” Luhrmann retains Fitzgerald’s references to race, including the moment when Nick and Jay are passed on the Queensboro Bridge by a limousine “driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl.” The scene in the film is underscored by Jay-Z’s “Izzo (H.O.V.A.),” and serves as a reminder of the gulf between the wealthy white Roaring Twenties aristocracy and the artists and innovators of the Harlem Renaissance.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

WARNING: The following review reveals key plot information. Read only if you have seen “Trance.”

The recently released “Oblivion” made the error of using Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” as an artificial stand-in for desired psychological depth that failed to materialize. In Danny Boyle’s “Trance,” a similar tactic is employed via Francisco Goya’s 1798 “Witches in the Air,” but in this case the painting is a major MacGuffin at the center of an auction house art heist gone wrong. Boyle pays homage to and explodes the contours of classic film noir, although one’s enjoyment of the movie will depend on the extent to which disbelief can be suspended in the service of a plot that explores lost and found memory.

James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, and Vincent Cassel form the highly unreliable triangle of participants in the criminal roundelay. McAvoy’s Simon is the inside man who suffers an unexpected blow to the head that leaves crook Franck (Cassel) no choice but to retain the services of hypnotherapist Elizabeth Lamb (Dawson), who will assist Simon in remembering the location of the Goya. In his biography of Ava Gardner, Lee Server wrote that amnesia is “noir’s version of the common cold.” Joe Ahearne – who wrote and directed the TV movie upon which “Trance” is based – and John Hodge take the device to heart in their script, setting out to both construct a typically fatalistic noir and explore the abstract, faulty, and untrustworthy workings of the brain.

With its dependence on double and triple-crosses, “Trance” pays homage to a number of twisty noir hallmarks, including “Detour,” “D.O.A.,” and as Tom Wardak has pointed out, “High Wall” and “Spellbound,” a pair of psychiatry noirs that Wardak notes, “flipped the gendered stereotypes of male psychotherapist and female hysteric… to explore the emasculation that returning soldiers now felt in a peaceful, domesticated, female-driven arena.” The emasculation of “Trance” is mostly visual and in keeping with motion picture rating double standards, as both McAvoy and Cassel are photographed in careful compositions to obscure their genitalia while Dawson’s nudity is situated as a key plot point doubling as an art history lesson about the presence and absence of pubic hair.

Even though Lamb is grossly outnumbered by the male thugs and thieves with whom she capably holds her own, “Trance” has a few tricks up its sleeve regarding gender. While it is easy to read Lamb initially as a femme fatale responsible for the downfall of Simon, Boyle’s slippery shifts in allegiance and the revelation of Simon as a possessive abuser suggest that the “real” protagonist of “Trance” is Elizabeth. Unfortunately, Boyle seems to be less interested in character than in structure, and despite Dawson’s considerable efforts, Lamb suffers in the tradeoff.

The resolute amorality of the movie’s characters burdens anything that might pass for a rooting interest, and in this respect “Trance” is less successful than Boyle’s directorial debut “Shallow Grave.” Regular collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle works his usual magic behind the camera, fracturing, fragmenting, and mirroring motifs into a hallucinatory kaleidoscope that includes a bizarre close-up of what remains of Cassel’s head after a point blank gunshot. Next to Dawson’s glabrousness, it’s the movie’s most discussed image. The photographic pyrotechnics complement the contrivances bound to the film’s big shock, a disclosure made all the wilder for its dependence on Simon’s acomoclitism as memory trigger. “Trance” may not be for every taste, but it’s a razor in more ways than one.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

WARNING: The following review reveals key plot information. Read only if you have seen “Oblivion.”

Director Joseph Kosinski, working from his own currently unpublished graphic novel, borrows from so many science fiction texts that genre fans might well pass the unsustainable running time of “Oblivion” tallying the allusions. From any number of episodes of “The Twilight Zone” to quotations of “WALL-E,” “Solaris,” “Moon,” “Minority Report,” and the unavoidable indebtedness to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Kosinski’s shaky simulacrum labors as a visual concept-in-search-of-a-story that took multiple scribes several rewrites to complete. Many of the harshest critiques have been levied at star Tom Cruise, who continues to look and behave some fifteen to twenty years younger than the July 3, 1962 date on his pilot’s license, but the real trouble with “Oblivion” is the huge, empty vacuum of nothingness suggested by its title.

Long after viewers have sifted through messy exposition belabored by long stretches of redundant voiceover, “Oblivion” adopts a “Matrix” meets “Terminator” view of enslavement or death delivered by artificial intelligence. A gigantic tetrahedral station unimaginatively nicknamed the Tet fills in for HAL 9000/Matrix/Skynet as the movie’s symbol of sentient machinery gone awry. Cruise’s Jack Harper, in partnership with communications officer/lover Victoria Olsen (Andrea Riseborough), works on a desolate Earth to service and repair the intimidating drones that patrol the huge platforms slurping up resources needed to sustain the Tet. No matter how many midnights he skinny-dips with Victoria, Jack cannot shake visions of life before the fall, even if he erroneously believes humans have retreated to the safety of a colony on Saturn’s moon Titan.

Olga Kurylenko, who was three years old when “Risky Business” was released in 1983, plays Julia Rusakova, an astronaut whose frequent appearances in Jack’s dreams portend even deeper significance when she shows up in the flesh aboard a crippled NASA craft. Julia’s arrival shifts the narrative focus of “Oblivion” to a series of creaky revelations that include both the AI shocker and an opportunity to feature Jack versus Jack fisticuffs in a clone showdown. Throw in retreats to Jack’s secret cabin and the mysterious “Scavs,” led by an underutilized Morgan Freeman, and the recipe of “Oblivion” stirs in too many ingredients to be palatable.

Kosinski’s fondness for elegant design rescues “Oblivion” from total catastrophe, but like his debut “Tron: Legacy,” the beauty is only pixel deep and bereft of intellectual sustenance – especially notable when Jack succumbs to that most laughable of action tropes: outrunning the fireball. The vehicle effects work, however, and Claudio Miranda’s frequent, IMAX-ready wide shots frame landscapes that provide the necessary scale for the dragonfly-shaped, iPhallic “bubble ship” flybys. Along with the EVE meets Beholder firepower of the spheroid drones, the sleek, Bell 47 helicopter-inspired “bubble ship” is the film’s most interesting and memorable character.

The post-apocalyptic dystopia of “Oblivion” contains all kinds of markers to lace the unfamiliarity with a sense of the uncanny. Aviator sunglasses and a New York Yankees baseball cap are joined by other iconic symbols of American culture, including “Planet of the Apes”-style glimpses of a half-buried Statue of Liberty and the inexplicable presence of Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” as a symbol of who knows just what – a reference to Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001” novel, maybe? The danger of inviting a painting like “Christina’s World” to the party is the risk that some viewers will notice its artistic superiority. I can imagine spending two hours revisiting Wyeth’s canvas. “Oblivion,” not so much.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

WARNING: The following review reveals key plot information. Read only if you have seen “The Place Beyond the Pines.”

Derek Cianfrance trades the time-jumping, one-on-one marital discord of “Blue Valentine” for the more determined triptych of “The Place Beyond the Pines,” an expectedly moody and atmospheric examination of paternal failure and inescapable generational torment that nods to sources as wide-ranging as “Roustabout” and “Miller’s Crossing.” Selling the movie on the promise of Ryan Gosling as a death-defying motorcyclist who robs banks to provide for the baby he didn’t know he fathered, Cianfrance delivers a “Psycho”-style shock when Gosling’s Luke Glanton is killed just as the audience has grown accustomed to his reckless larceny. The murder of Luke by police officer Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper) provides the first of two significant narrative turning points in which Cianfrance divulges his agenda.

It turns out Cross is no less ruthless than outlaw Glanton, but the privilege afforded him by his upbringing as the offspring of a judge allows room for political ambitions that don’t necessitate armed robbery. Cianfrance might be trying to comment on class (as in societal pecking order) and class (as in character that transcends financial disadvantage), but the film is guarded and cagey on matters of good and bad fortune, morality, and personal responsibility. In his aggressive demolition of the film, Ed Gonzalez calls “The Place Beyond the Pines” a “daisy chain of physical and emotional violence that sacrifices emotional specificity to often-purple marriages of sight and sound.” In light of the director’s way with actors, not all viewers will be this perturbed by Cianfrance’s storytelling proclivities.

In the third story arc, Cianfrance focuses on teenagers AJ (the son of Avery) and Jason (the son of Luke). The director lavishes a surprising amount of attention on AJ (Emory Cohen), a frustrated bully who postures behind the phony affect of mannered slang and grating false bravado. Following the lead of many a soap opera, the boys become friends without knowing that AJ’s dad shot and killed Jason’s dad. AJ’s ugly personality is so pronounced one cannot help but wonder how he managed to develop into a cur, especially when raised with means by Rose Byrne’s sympathetic Jennifer. We’re not supposed to like AJ, but it’s hard not to wonder what happened in the fifteen years skipped over by the director.

In assigning point of view, Cianfrance shortchanged Michelle Williams in “Blue Valentine” and does the same thing to the often invisible women of “The Place Beyond the Pines.” As the mother of Luke’s child, Eva Mendes manages to squeeze every possible drop of humanity from her suffering, noble Romina. Since Cianfrance doesn’t offer, we have to speculate as to the reason Romina would be drawn back to Luke when she has begun building a new, stable life with Kofi (Mahershala Ali), the one male in the film who might be a whole dad. Mendes is every bit as good as the men – maybe better, since she is given so much less emphasis and has fewer scenes in which to make an impression.

In “Blue Valentine,” Cianfrance demonstrated his keen ear for music, and “The Place Beyond the Pines,” from Mike Patton’s score to needle-drops of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” and the climactic placement of Bon Iver’s “The Wolves (Act I & II),” marry Gosling’s tough persona to the ineffable cool of song, not unlike the heat generated much the same way in “Drive.” Coincidentally, Springsteen (“State Trooper”) and the very same Bon Iver track were cued up in Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone,” a superior study of a troubled man not fully equipped to be a father.