Movie review by Greg Carlson

In the sixth chapter of Michael Lewis’s bestseller “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane likens the demeanor of his ball club to the comedy “Major League.” The direct comparison fails to make it into Bennet Miller’s handsome, understated, and fictionalized movie version of the book, but the parallel is apt – because the underdog battling against all odds is almost certainly the most employed trope in sports movies. Baseball fanatics will debate the movie’s accuracy in numbing detail, but Miller is less concerned with the specific history of the A’s 2002 season than with the compelling tale of an iconoclast determined to test conventional wisdom.

“Moneyball” floats several David and Goliath scenarios central to Lewis’s original thesis, but the principal conflict, predicated on the huge gulf between the biggest and smallest payrolls in Major League Baseball, sets up statistic-rich sabermetrics decision-making against the romantically inclined traditions of individual player assessment. With Beane as protagonist, it is no surprise that Miller paints the roomful of jargon-spewing Oakland scouts as buffoonish dinosaurs whose shocking inability to recognize markers of legitimate accomplishment over hopeful expectations of future potential provides the simplified conflict demanded by big-budget moviemaking.

There’s more to it than that, and “Moneyball” fleetingly pays tribute to modern stats godfather Bill James, the man whose wit, philosophy and curiosity made mincemeat of many traditional beliefs about crunching big league numbers. Beane discovers his own magician and James disciple in Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a composite character primarily representing Paul DePodesta, who refused to allow the use of his name and likeness to the filmmakers. Beane takes the green Brand under his wing, and the unlikely partnership, comically punctuated by the physical discrepancy between Pitt and Hill, develops into the movie’s fundamental relationship.

Miller, who directed Philip Seymour Hoffman to an Oscar in “Capote,” boldly and surprisingly diminishes the actor’s role as A’s manager Art Howe, undervaluing Hoffman like so many of the players alluded to in “Moneyball.” Despite the actor’s fame, Howe fades into the background following a testy power struggle between front office and dugout, and the movie is made poorer by his absence. While “Moneyball” focuses on Beane, a handful of the players originally highlighted by Lewis, including David Justice, Chad Bradford, Jeremy Giambi, and especially Scott Hatteberg, contribute to the telling of the story.

The “Moneyball” script, credited to Academy Award-winning writers Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, punches up the relationship between Beane and his daughter Casey and the scenes between Pitt and Kerris Dorsey underscore Beane’s down-to-earth decency as a man whose unhealthy devotion to competition is outweighed by an underlying commitment to “not-baseball.” Despite Lewis’s original characterization of Beane as something of a maniac – and his apology in the afterword for doing so – Beane’s quirky habit of avoiding the stands, fans, and luxury boxes of the Coliseum during games humanizes him. “Moneyball” contemplates Beane’s failures as much as his successes, and the A’s record-setting twenty game winning streak means nothing when the team doesn’t make it to the World Series.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A stylish noir based on the novel by James Sallis, “Drive” instantly commands the attention of the design-conscious, thrill-seeking moviegoer. Despite its explosive violence and the sweaty embrace of young male fans ready to anoint Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn the next “auteur du jour,” “Drive” takes turns summoning our excitement and repelling it, asking us to believe that a man who wears a satiny, quilted silver racing jacket emblazoned with a large and ominous scorpion on the back doesn’t want to draw attention to himself.

Carried over from the book, that man is identified only as Driver, and Ryan Gosling plays him with an inscrutable smirk interrupted often by a protruding toothpick and rarely with conversation. As we draw closer to the taciturn wheelman, his day job performing automotive stunts in the make-believe world of the movies announces a confusion of fantasy and reality that facilitates the astonishingly immediate outbursts of violence that float in the liminal space carved out by only a certain kind of crime movie. Refn never identifies any of the film industry projects involving Driver, but the novel’s remake of “Thunder Road” might have been nice to keep.

In-demand talents like Gosling and Carey Mulligan might attract more attention, but “Drive” belongs to its most seasoned veterans. Albert Brooks plays a pragmatic but deadly mobster whose lacerating straight razor is given a run for its money by the old criminal’s equally sharp mouth. Every time he turns up, Brooks runs away with the film. Mulligan is given too little to do, but the doomed, forbidden romance – which culminates in a surreal, tour de force elevator car liebestod – cements Driver’s fate in the fraternity of God’s Lonely Men.

There is some question regarding Refn’s ability or interest in navigating away from ridiculousness and parody when it threatens to get too close. Certainly, Driver’s debt to the Man with No Name extends to the mayhem he doles out to the scumbags who are presented to us as if they deserve hammered knuckles and steel-toed stomps to the crania. Refn uses Driver’s twisted chivalry as one of several barriers to the peace and happiness he might otherwise find with Mulligan’s Irene (whose parallel Irina barely registers in the book), but the movie seems to tacitly endorse Driver’s bestial and barbaric modus operandi simply because he has been crossed by more gruesome monsters.

Even so, screenwriter Hossein Amini completely overhauls the terse, poetic voice of the novel, and the changes utterly transform Sallis’ cryptic prose and add flesh to the skeletal characters. On the big screen, “Drive” moves like a shark, gliding forward with singular purpose toward what might be the fundamental impulse to survive in the face of encroaching death. Sallis fractured the chronology, jumping forward and backward, but the movie smartly lights a slow-burning linear fuse that mimics the loud-quiet-loud Pixies dynamic so valued by Nirvana. Refn’s affinity for the head and the heady, a motif ideally expressed by the emotionless latex mask Driver occasionally dons, honors inspirations from David Lynch to Jean-Pierre Melville (although Refn singles out Alejandro Jodorowksy in the end credits). “Drive” is far from perfect, but its existential curiosity gives it a sizable lead over its competition.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Like several of Steven Soderbergh’s large canvas features – and even a few of his smaller ones – “Contagion” paints a grim scenario of human fragility, frailty, and fear. Workable as a metaphor for the post-9/11 world as readily as the economically depressed slow-motion global financial catastrophe (already explored in its early stages in “The Girlfriend Experience”), “Contagion” perhaps most closely resembles the director’s drug war/trade ensemble “Traffic.” Darting like a hummingbird among several interconnected storylines unfolding simultaneously in locations around the world, Soderbergh swiftly connects the dots of a mounting health calamity. Sales of hand sanitizer stand to spike in the next few weeks.

It might be convenient to cast Soderbergh as a pessimist, but for all the scenes of looted grocery stores, empty airports, and the hauntingly familiar sight of missing person flyers, “Contagion” embraces the tried and true structure of the procedural, linking together the cumulative efforts of bug-hunting brainiacs in laboratories and on the front lines. The specter of terrorism permeates the movie’s imagery, and even though the notion of the virus as a bio-weapon is quickly dismissed, the ranting of a conspiracy-minded crank blogger played by Jude Law buoys the hopes of skeptics.

Naysayers attack Soderbergh’s icy fatalism as the Achilles’ Heel of “Contagion,” but despite the movie’s macrocosmic hive view, each of the principal characters, and several of the supporting ones, makes a convincing case for the director’s speculative gut-check response to the widespread panic and subsequent lawlessness that blossoms as the epidemic worsens. Matt Damon’s grieving husband and father is the film’s representative Average Joe, and even though his immunity to the disease affords the audience a wide latitude of relief, an old-fashioned can-do spirit accompanies the stories concerning the trained professionals in or near harm’s way – particularly the indefatigable doctor played by Jennifer Ehle.

Like the disaster thrillers produced by Irwin Allen, “Contagion” applies the “Anyone Can Die” trope, but does so sparingly. The movie’s trailer sold “Contagion” on the premise that Gwyneth Paltrow’s international business traveler doesn’t make it, but somewhat surprisingly, only one other major player expires during the course of the action, and that death is treated with an almost ruthless lack of drama. Superior to the similarly themed “Outbreak,” but more aligned with horror/sci-fi material including “28 Days Later,” “I Am Legend,” and even “Children of Men,” Forrest Wickman has already pointed out that “Contagion” can be added to the roster of strong network narratives or, as Alissa Quart calls them, “hyperlink movies.”

Soderbergh’s scientific process affirmation positions the film’s several epidemiologists as nerd superstar heroes, but the role of the U.S. government, both in terms of crisis response – handled with a perpetually cool head by Laurence Fishburne’s CDC official – and in the potential for unfair treatment of American citizens, is deliberately murkier. “Contagion” might well have been subtitled “Keep Calm and Carry On,” and in the end, the dedicated civil servants industriously, and a little comically, banish the fictional germ to the deep-freeze dustbin alongside SARS and H1N1. Soderbergh cannot, however, resist a spine-tingling coda imagining the unholy, human-caused association of “the wrong bat” and “the wrong pig” that spawned the trouble in the first place.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Based on a 2007 Israeli movie with the same title, John Madden’s remake of “The Debt” dramatizes Cold War-era Nazi hunting in East Berlin and a cloudy love triangle involving the Mossad agents sent to capture a villain known as the Surgeon of Birkenau. Cutting between the 1965 kidnapping assignment and 1997 events commemorating the presumably heroic actions of the operatives, “The Debt” pivots on a major plot twist linking past and present. Despite the movie’s underutilization of Helen Mirren, Ciaran Hinds, and Tom Wilkinson, “The Debt” manages to revisit a number of long-echoing questions of good, evil, and human nature raised by the grim events of the Holocaust.

The moviemaking technique employing two sets of actors to embody characters who have aged across decades requires a nimble director, a competent editor, and a group of performers committed to developing some sense of consistency. In “The Debt,” both Jessica Chastain and Mirren play Rachel Singer, an intensely dedicated government agent who endures a series of grim tests of psychological commitment to a presumably greater cause. “The Debt” implies that Singer’s selection to the East Berlin team hinged on her gender and her willingness to pose as a pregnancy-minded young patient to infiltrate the clinic run by Nazi-in-hiding Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen).

Singer’s devotion to Israel and the pursuit of justice places her in an unenviable position of incredible vulnerability, as the undercover officer tolerates a series of vaginal exams given by the target of the undertaking. The potentially exploitative circumstances of the unorthodox methods used on the assignment are rife with subtext pairing Singer’s risk of identity exposure to the literal uncovering of her body. That Vogel once participated in medical atrocities committed against Jews but later assumed the role of life-affirming obstetrics and gynecology professional adds another layer of complexity to the proceedings.

Madden squeezes a maximum of squirm-inducing tension from the exam room scenes, and Singer’s relationship to Vogel develops with greater specificity than the muddier romantic feelings she expresses toward her fellow team members. That Rachel Singer’s point of view is privileged and centralized in a genre heavily oriented toward masculinity distinguishes “The Debt” from the majority of its peers, but the staging of several physical altercations involving Singer (including a locked-thighs choke-out evocative of vagina dentata) strongly suggests that any consideration of gender issues will favor action over introspection.

Madden bookends the film with the more recent storyline, placing the 1965 caper at the heart of the narrative in a whopping flashback triggered by the release of a non-fiction account of the episode written by Rachel’s daughter three decades later. Despite the 1997 Rachel’s desire to protect her daughter’s reputation, “The Debt” somewhat inexplicably steers clear of some much-needed exploration of the consequences of the political conspiracy that has remained a secret for so long. Mirren and Wilkinson play a few small scenes that hint at a finer account of long-bottled guilt, remorse, and frustration, but the last act of “The Debt” depends on a wildly improbable scenario that sends Rachel into a creepy sanitarium on one final do-or-die mission.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Wholly dependent on audience desire to see a group of beautiful and skilled performers work on material unworthy of their talents, “Our Idiot Brother” is a wispy, featherweight sitcom in need of sharper characters and more defined conflicts. Paul Rudd trades his better-dressed and cleaner-cut Judd Apatow yuppies for a shaggy beard and a pair of dirty Crocs as the titular Ned, a biodynamic farmer whose total lack of guile lands him in the clink for selling pot to a uniformed police officer. Once released, Ned couch surfs through the NYC homes of his three crisis-prone sisters, each of whom is fundamentally more messed up than their brother.

Rudd has long been capable of projecting an effortless blend of warmth and sarcasm, but his Ned fully jettisons the latter to embody a worldview cloaked in a ridiculous cloud of naivete. A man who belongs to another time, Ned’s hippie persona is never fully convincing, but Rudd’s twinkling eyes and self-effacing earnestness project a likability that should by every measure be missing from such a clueless fool. Of course, the gears of the movie require Ned to hide reserves of wisdom underneath the layers of inanity, even though “Our Idiot Brother” is a long, long way from “Being There.”

Many laughs are engineered from Ned’s honesty coupled with the man’s facility for misusing or misinterpreting language. Since Ned takes people at their word, prevarications and cover stories spiral out of control once shared in a different context. Emily Mortimer’s frazzled denial of her husband’s affair, Zooey Deschanel’s bi-curious cover-up, and Elizabeth Banks’ true feelings about her neighbor are all aired “wrong place/wrong time” fashion by the dense Ned. These unwelcome epiphanies are meant to generate laughs, and they often do just that, but the frequency of their occurrences diminishes the surprise.

Peretz’s direction is as easygoing as Ned’s live-and-let-live worldview, and “Our Idiot Brother” coasts along, toggling among an array of stories that eventually give way to the sentimental reconciliation and mutual respect demanded by dysfunctional family comedies. Entirely too much time is spent fooling with an inane subplot revolving around Ned’s desire to reclaim his beloved canine pal, a Golden Retriever named Willie Nelson (the pooch’s more famous inspiration shows up on the soundtrack).

As idiot manchild, Ned is not quite in the league of Chauncey Gardiner and Forrest Gump, but “Our Idiot Brother” never pretends to aspire to the scope or scale of ideas suggested by Ashby and Zemeckis. Instead, the film’s manufactured roadblocks read like a laundry list of “white people problems,” spanning a range that includes infidelity, lying to loved ones, and unethical behavior to get ahead at work. Ned, of course, is above (or is it beneath?) all of this strain of poor choice-making, and “Our Idiot Brother” shambles toward a final act that allows goopy life lessons to be imparted to each of the once-spiteful but now-grateful sisters, including the dreaded line, delivered straight, that Ned’s “work here is done.” At least “Our Idiot Brother” doesn’t have a laugh track.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Tom Holland’s much loved 1985 vampire comedy “Fright Night” is respectably, though not spectacularly, remade with Colin Ferrell trying on Chris Sarandon’s considerably large fangs. Director Craig Gillespie and writer Marti Noxon retain the original’s hearty narrative foundation, updating a number of elements – some welcome, some not. Holland’s script, a terrific reinvention of monster maxims infused with a great understanding of classic horror movies, sharp self-awareness, and an erotic electricity almost entirely missing from the new model, proves tough to top.

Protagonist Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) receives a geek-chic makeover for 2011, leaving behind his friendship with childhood pal “Evil” Ed Lee (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to run with a more popular crowd. Suspended between youthful pastimes and the strong desire to be accepted, especially by seemingly out-of-his-league girlfriend Amy (Imogen Poots), Charley’s curt dismissal of Ed’s concern over a missing classmate comes back to haunt him. The bittersweet dynamic of the withered relationship between Charley and Ed imbues the former with a caustic edge and the latter with a pitiable air of lament.

The Las Vegas setting is one of the remake’s shrewdest alterations, giving Ferrell’s Jerry Dandrige an excuse to sleep all day following night construction shifts on the Strip (or so he would like the neighbors to believe). Rows of “for sale” signs on empty split-levels allude to the post-2008 recession, and Charley’s mother Jane (Toni Collette) is a Century 21 real estate agent whose extra yard signs come complete with handy stakes once Charley’s outrageous claims concerning Jerry’s vampirism are believed. The Sin City setting also makes room for the transformation of Charley’s savior Peter Vincent (David Tennant) from washed up actor/late night horror host into flashy Criss Angel-by-way-of-Russell Brand stage illusionist. While Roddy McDowall’s indelible Vincent can’t be bettered, Tennant holds his own, transcending the deliberately tacky outrageousness of the new model with smarts and timing. Too bad he wasn’t given a bit more to do.

Missing from the remake is Jerry’s manservant/roommate Billy Cole, and while the downsizing/streamlining of two characters into one is in keeping with Ferrell’s loner menace (described by the filmmakers as a deliberate homage to the killer shark in “Jaws”), the movie loses an intriguing homoeroticism inherent in the original friendship. The remake’s only significant same-sex connection occurs during the weirdly poignant “turning” of Ed by Jerry in a swimming pool, a scene evocative of both baptism and the loss of virginity.

The popularity of the vampire, particularly among young audiences, exploded anew with the “Twilight” series (acknowledged in “Fright Night” by longtime “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” scribe/producer Noxon in a tart aside), but the genre’s durability extends well beyond the icy chivalry of Edward Cullen. Jerry Dandrige, whose ravenous appetite for Amy in the original “Fright Night” was explained by her resemblance to a long lost love, now taunts Charley with coarse allusions to predatory wish fulfillment (Charley’s sexual hang-ups provide subtext in both versions), but beyond recognizing Amy as “ripe,” the new Jerry doesn’t distinguish her from any of his other victims. A side-by-side comparison of the dance club sequences testifies to the superiority of Holland’s vision and the importance of forging a real Charley-Jerry-Amy triangle. Despite Ferrell’s winking sultriness, the first “Fright Night” is still the real thing.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Beginners,” writer-director-designer-artist Mike Mills’ huge improvement over “Thumbsucker,” sheds much of the self-consciously precious affect that bedeviled his feature narrative debut to relate a semi-autobiography about a young man coming to terms with the death of his father. Assembled as an asynchronous seesaw that totters between two principal timeframes, “Beginners” adroitly blends blossoming romance and family melodrama without disservice to either genre. By separating the protagonist’s past, represented in more recent scenes with his father and distant memories of his mother, and present, in which a relationship veers toward love and commitment, Mills finds a way to embrace the messy poles of life through eyes that smile as well as cry.

Ewan McGregor plays Oliver, an illustrator/graphic designer reflecting deeply on life and love in the wake of losing papa Hal (Christopher Plummer) just a few short years after the death of Oliver’s mom Georgia (Mary Page Keller), Hal’s spouse of 44 years. Before his decline, the aging Hal – who waited until his wife lost her own cancer battle – announces his homosexuality at age 75, and Mills uses the premise to advantage with a series of montages outlining the challenges, disappointments, and heartaches faced by the closeted during the second half of the twentieth century. The stylishly presented images, punctuated by Oliver’s narration (“This is what the sun looks like”) bridge past and present, providing information that invites the viewer into Oliver’s interior space.

Oliver, who is given to episodes of melancholia, joins a group of friends at a costume party and meets the enchanting Anna (Melanie Laurent), whose laryngitis relegates communication to scribbles in a notepad and a range of intimate, eye-contact dependent non-verbals. Amusingly attired as Freud, Oliver “treats” patient Anna while Mills takes the opportunity to comment coyly on the therapeutic possibilities of fresh attraction. Later, as Oliver and Anna bond, they begin to talk about their parents, and even though the film’s point of view firmly belongs to Oliver, Anna emerges as something more substantive than Nathan Rabin’s dreaded, static Manic Pixie Dream Girl stereotype (despite her ability to roller skate).

Mills is graced with a trio of appealing performers, and even though “Beginners” is Oliver’s story, both Hal and Anna bloom into vibrant characters in no small measure through the choices of their portrayers. Plummer, Laurent, and McGregor all find the room in Mills’ screenplay to reveal the less-attractive corners and contours of personality common to us all, and “Beginners” is richer for its prickles and barbs. At one point, Oliver says, “Our good fortune allowed us to feel a sadness our parents didn’t have time for.” At first, the sentiment sounds like self-pity, but Mills positions the thought so that Oliver recognizes Hal’s decades-long personal sacrifices instead.

Without the intensity of Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry’s surrealist science fiction gamesmanship, “Beginners” addresses some of the very same emotional terrain as the masterful “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Both movies are actively engaged with the dizzying fear that comes with the realization that what we have can be quickly lost, sometimes through our own foolish tendencies toward self-destruction. Both movies also recognize and explore the interlocking past, present, and future – and do so in ways that conjure up the Jungian “unus mundus” of meaningful coincidences through powerful serendipities that mark endings, beginnings, and the journey in between.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Inspired by Judith Thurman’s lovely 2008 feature in “The New Yorker,” Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” documents the astonishing artwork adorning the walls of France’s Chauvet Cave, the site of the world’s oldest known representational painted images. Discovered by a trio of speleologists in 1994, the Chauvet illustrations – a breathtaking menagerie of more than a dozen species including lion, ibex, bison, horse, owl, bear, hyena, rhino, and mammoth – shattered all previously held records concerning the earliest efforts by human cave artists. By comparison, the famous Lascaux paintings are roughly half the age of the Chauvet work, which has been carbon-dated to a pair of creation periods some 30,000 and 35,000 years ago.

As usual, Herzog makes his presence felt, indulging his considerable curiosity, narrating the movie and appearing in scenes alongside his small crew. Herzog describes in detail the restrictions imposed by the French government on the filmmaking process. Clothed in contaminant-free suits, the moviemakers were confined to a narrow metal catwalk and granted access to Chauvet for only four hours on each of six total days. In addition to Herzog, several of the cave’s principal researchers appear, including Jean Clottes, whose work on shamanic practices designed to contextualize prehistoric cave art has met with fascination and controversy.

Why did Paleolithic artists almost never draw men, women, and children? “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” does not speculate but highlights what has been dubbed “The Venus and the Sorcerer,” a picture of the lower anatomy of a human female partnered or intertwined or layered or combined with a “man-bison” figure. Painted in a place of prominence and privilege on a limestone cone in the Salle du Fond, the final and deepest of Chauvet’s chambers, the “Venus and the Sorcerer” contains one of only five female representations in the cave, and invites a series of additional questions concerning Chauvet’s use as a site of religion, spirituality, mysticism, and shamanism.

Despite Herzog’s musings on the way in which flickering firelight conjures the “proto-cinematic” illusion of animated movement when dancing across the images of the animals, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” begs for additional commentary on the wide-ranging theories of the intentions of the unknowable artists. The 90-minute running time necessitates the exclusion of any number of potentially rich components of the Chauvet story, and despite the excitement of a vicarious visit to the cave by way of Herzog’s own style of magic lantern show, the original Thurman article articulates Chauvet’s bombshells, turf wars, legal struggles, and ideological divisions more vividly and impressively than the movie (Thurman receives credit as a co-producer of “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”).

Herzog has always been a world-class dreamer, and his identification with the obscure and the eccentric often carries with it an air of strange collusion between the filmmaker and his subjects. Detractors argue that Herzog’s spaced-out voiceovers in his non-fiction oeuvre interfere with, and perhaps even overshadow, the content. Supporters, however, adore his poetic digressions and earnest contemplations – often embodied in huge, rhetorical questions that invite much additional thought. Herzog’s resistance to closed-text summary sometimes flirts with the deliriously kooky, and “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” concludes with a bizarre postscript reflected in the demonic eyes of mutant, albino crocodiles populating the tropical incongruity of a nuclear plant near the Chauvet Cave.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In Jon Favreau’s “Cowboys & Aliens,” flinty amnesiac Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) joins the list of tight-lipped movie toughs eager to piece together out-of-focus memories. From Jason Bourne to the anterograde Lenny in “Memento,” the inability to recount one’s past operates like a cinematic magic bullet/tabula rasa that simultaneously liberates the protagonist from layers of weighty mental baggage and serves the plot with a built-in catalyst driving the action toward a goal of self-(re)discovery. Additionally, the gimmick invites the viewer to identify with the hero, experiencing his – or very rarely her – adventures with a parallel sensation of novelty. As mash-ups go, “Cowboys & Aliens” owes a great deal more to the six-shooter than the ray gun, an imbalance that will find some favor with open-minded fans of America’s most durable movie genre.

Lonergan, who wakes up in the brush with a strange metallic gauntlet attached to his arm and a nasty laceration under his rib cage, makes his way to Absolution – the town and the theological state of forgiveness and reconciliation – where he runs afoul of Percy Dolarhyde (Paul Dano, who has perfected the impudent whelp), the liquored-up son of crusty cattleman Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). Before Percy and the wanted Lonergan can be extradited to the custody of a federal judge by Sheriff John Taggart (Keith Carradine), Col. Dolarhyde and an alien aircraft arrive simultaneously, forcing an uneasy alliance between the outlaw and the rancher when all kinds of hell breaks loose.

The otherworldly invaders make off with several townsfolk, roping them like spooked cows by way of cables attached to the underside of their UFOs. As a hastily organized posse (is there any other kind?) gives chase, Favreau attempts to channel John Ford, outlining several familial relationship conflicts that focus primarily on Dolarhyde’s failures as a father and his inability to acknowledge the paternal bond he shares with surrogate son Nat Colorado (Adam Beach), a tracker who lives in Percy’s ugly shadow. Additionally, the mysterious and almost impossibly beautiful Ella (Olivia Wilde) insists on sticking close to a wary Lonergan.

Situated within the framework of the contemporary western, “Cowboys & Aliens” leans heavily on a foundation of outmoded and regressive cinematic stereotypes in the treatment and coding of Native Americans. The introduction of members of the Chiricahua Apache, led by Black Knife (Raoul Trujillo) conjures the musty tradition of the mystically inclined, spiritually in-tune, nature-connected other. Defined principally by stony nobility, fierce fighting skills, and a tendency to full-throated shrieks and whoops, the Apache reluctantly join forces with Dolarhyde because their people have also been kidnapped by the creatures.

Favreau is good with actors, and had he been confident enough to include even more John Ford-inspired explorations of human nature, culture clash, and the tensions between the wild/chaotic and the settled/ordered, “Cowboys & Aliens” might have fulfilled its promised as something unique on the summer release schedule. Ford’s films consistently and patiently filtered the action through quieter scenes depicting rites of passage, ceremony, and ritual, but the action-oriented demands of the contemporary, big-budget movie appear to deny nuance in favor of thrilling spectacle.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In the 2011 superhero movie derby, “Captain America: The First Avenger” emerges near the head of an underachieving class, capitalizing on its World War II timeframe and the accompanying sense of nostalgia inspired by the black and white simplicity of Allies vs. Axis. Punching the lights out of “The Green Hornet,” “Green Lantern,” and fellow masthead-mate “Thor,” “Captain America” comes in second only to the more sharply conceived and self-aware “X-Men: First Class,” another Marvel property enlivened by period pizzazz.

Director Joe Johnston recaptures the retro vibe of serialized style apparent in his 1991 feature “The Rocketeer,” although no amount of scrubbing will fully erase the stain of last year’s “The Wolfman,” a career nadir. Johnston’s workmanlike staging complements the leisurely origin story, an element as de rigueur to any comic book movie as the retooled costumes of the pulp icons. Skinny Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), the epitome of self-sacrificing, Greatest Generation patriotism, buffs up and bulges out with the aid of Dr. Abraham Erskine’s (Stanley Tucci) “Super Soldier Serum,” but before the weaponized New Yorker makes it behind enemy lines, the script sets up a delightful diversion showcasing both the original red, white, and blue tights and Cap’s theatrical flair for slugging Adolf Hitler in the mouth.

Johnston is slightly less successful once Captain America disobeys superiors like crusty Col. Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones) and fashions a one-man rescue mission into soon-to-be nemesis Red Skull’s (Hugo Weaving) HYDRA facilities. Rogers is encouraged by Erskine to think for himself, and the advice leads to the soldier’s insubordination within the ranks of the U.S. military machine and also snuffs many potentially interesting characters and relationships as the Sergeant York-like hero goes-it-alone. The Captain’s hand-picked crew, including pals like Dum Dum Dugan and Bucky Barnes, scarcely functions as a coherent unit, and the story misses its opportunity to craft Dirty Dozen or Magnificent Seven bonhomie.

Even more disappointing is the immobilization of Steve’s crush Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), the stiff upper lip Brit officer from the Strategic Scientific Reserve. The only woman in the movie with more than a few seconds of screen time, Atwell suffers the “best girl’s” standard fate: removal from the central action sequences and a personality largely based on providing emotional support to the male hero. I suppose one could be grateful Carter gets to squeeze off some machine gun rounds and avoid the need to be rescued by Captain America, but why banish one of the very best things the movie has going for itself? Carter’s false modernity is represented by a handful of coded actions (i.e. a wicked hook to a sexist grunt) that fail to establish her as a genuine equal to her colleagues.

“Captain America: The First Avenger” has been fairly and appropriately lauded for its idealized remembrances of the 1940s, but its computer-enhanced action set pieces argue that perhaps it is not old-fashioned enough. Many have said that Nazis make the best movie villains, and there is no lack of Third Reich mysticism driving the Skull’s obsession with the “cosmic cube,” referred to here as the tesseract (the “jewel of Odin’s treasure room” also functions as an unwelcome Thor tie-in). The late appearance of Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury sets both fanboy/fangirl hearts aflutter and the proverbial stage for 2012’s Avengers movie, although there must be more true believers out there who would rather watch Cap sock it to the Fuhrer than struggle to adapt to a world 70 years in his future.