The best (and worst) from 2016

Image courtesy Cohen Media.

Looking through this list the one thing that strikes is the breadth of options to pick from. The top film is about five sisters struggling in Turkey, and the rest of the collection incorporates a punk band under siege, a pair of pretty great musicals with wildly different themes and presentations, and a profile of one of the saddest politicians in recent years. Depth and variety are great things to have when hitting up theaters, and 2016 brought a broad palate to theaters.

The films below are all ones reviewed from 2016. I kept the list to the top seven to focus on the films most worth a second look, which cut out a few rather good films. Movies missing the cut include The Neon Demon, Pete's Dragon, The Nice Guys, Rogue One, Hail, Caesar! and Everybody Wants Some! So below are the best films I reviewed this year, along with the absolute worst film I laid eyes on in 2016.

No. 1: Mustang

This one was actually nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2016 Academy Awards, meaning that the film was up for competition among 2015 nominees. I'm keeping it though because the stateside release came in 2016 and to recognize it as the best film I've watched in the last 12 months.

Mustang is a tender and melancholy look into the lives of five sisters being thrown into marriages with little to no choice and a lot of implied violence. There is a hint of fatalism and a lot of danger if things go wrong, but in the end the little victories are what matter in this film. Mustang lifts and drops viewers on such a frequent basis that the relatively positive ending feels like rapture.

Image courtesy A24.

No. 2: Green Room

Director Jeremy Saulnier's follow up to his terrific revenge film Blue Ruin shocks viewers with its sudden bursts of violence between lulls of peculiar black humor. It's tough to find a film this balanced and this effective at what it wants to do; keep the audience on edge and with little clue of what’s really going on.

Despite the oddity of the premise – a punk band led by Anton Yelchin stumbling into a Neo-Nazi murder in the middle of the woods – everything feels natural and logical, the acts of violence ramping up in a strangely grounded fashion. This is one of the better horror films in recent years too, featuring one of the scariest boogeymen to come along recently in Patrick Stewart's Neo-Nazi leader Darcy.

Image courtesy Lionsgate.

No. 3: La La Land

A probable front-runner for a ton of awards, La La Land keeps its soulful analysis of the divide between romance and ambition hidden just underneath a sunny, musical surface. The cheeriness does just enough to disguise the film's true theme – although those sometimes sneak in through the lyrics – and the result is a complex, enchanting musical.

Writer/director Damien Chazelle deserves credit for folding in the tenants of musicals of the past – the big numbers and those little flirty bits of dancing – into a modern setting and doing so in a smooth, logical fashion. That Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are both charming as all hell and showcase a rather engaging rapport just adds to La La Land's many charms.

Image courtesy IFC Films.

No. 4: Weiner

Somehow this film became even more noteworthy in the months after its release. The film didn't predict Anthony Weiner's role in the 2016 election, but it set the table for how the man could muck up enough to become entangled in that morass of awful.

What makes the film so engrossing is watching Anthony Weiner fall apart over the course of a few months and the tragedy of the self-inflicted crash. He is depicted in Weiner as a politician with his heart at least close to the right place, so his second fall from grace impacts a whole lot of people outside of himself and his family. The documentary ably captures his failings, his inability to handle his faults, and the fact that his personal foibles sink any chance of his message catching on.

Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

No. 5: Jackie

Jackie is the film I hope proves to people that Natalie Portman is a terrific actress. She absolutely nails a difficult performance, being a woman who must show a pretty and calm face to the nation and still have enough verve to fulfill the legacy of her husband.

Even though Portman is the heart of Jackie, the film is strong enough independent of her performance to remain a worthwhile experience. It offers one of the more interesting glimpses into the John F. Kennedy legacy, playing around with the concept of Camelot while pointing out why that ideal was seized upon by the public. Kennedy's election came at a difficult time in American history, so a little romanticism worked to assuage the fears of the voters while pushing for vital changes.

Image courtesy Disney.

No. 6: Moana

This film and the next are pretty close to being toss ups, but I liked Moana a little bit more than the next one. For one thing, it has a great performance by the unfairly charismatic Dwayne Johnson, and that tends to push many films up a level or two.

Moana's real selling point though is the eponymous princess who takes decisive action to save her people even against the recommendations of her father. Even though the film sets things up to have her be Mad Max to Maui's Furiousa, it makes a quick and effective shift that is logical and important. Add that to some terrific vocal performances (particular Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho) and killer songs courtesy Lin-Manuel Miranda and the result is a wicked good animated film.

Image courtesy Disney.

No. 7: Zootopia

Like Moana, one of Zootopia's main selling points is a complex message delivered in a bright, often rather humorous fashion. This film addresses racial stereotypes and how easily those characteristics become ingrained in societal fabric, an important topic given how easy it is to ignore or miss such biases. The film doesn't offer any definitive answers, but it at least works as a gateway for understanding the issue and inspecting one's own biases.

The message wouldn't really work without the rest of Zootopia's charms, as it has so many jokes and clever references it is worth watching just on the surface level. Adding depth to it just makes for a more interesting and rewarding viewing experience.

Image courtesy Lionsgate.

Worst film: Norm of the North

The fun thing with this year's contenders for the worst film was the depth of the terrible. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice suffer from a terminal case of dourness and some tremendously asinine plot twists. Patriots Day is an insensitive, dumb film about a complicated moment Boston history. Dirty Grandpa has the great Robert De Niro at his nadir, while films like Sing and Zoolander 2 are obnoxious at best.

None of those films though fail on the same level as Norm of the North. This animated monstrosity is ugly to look at and is lacking narrative cohesion, talented voice actors (the awful Rob Schneider is the headliner), and any coherent themes. This film is a garbage dump of an animated flick that insults the intelligence of its young target. At least it seems to have drifted away from public eye in the last 12 months, fated to rest in the depths of online streaming services for some unlucky soul to stumble upon.

Patriots Day misses the point

Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Monaghan in Patriots Day. Image courtesy CBS Films.

There is the old saw about how art is meant to stir strong emotional reactions in the people absorbing it; good art, in essence, leaves a person feeling something different than before. Strong emotional responses aren’t always a sign of quality though, as is the case with the wretched Boston Marathon bombing film Patriots Day.

It isn’t necessarily too soon for a film about the bombings and the ensuing days of surreal discomfort; three years is enough time to consider the implications and find insight for what happened. I actually signed up to serve as an extra for it along with hundreds of other locals (I was not selected to be in it) because of the potential such a film could have: The events surrounding the bombings had enough intrigue and action to make for a rather good film like United 93 if done with the same level of sensitivity and filmmaking competence. And director Peter Berg, who is listed as one of three writers on this film, has shown himself to be a generally OK action director; even the otherwise not good Deepwater Horizon sports some pretty solid action sequences. That trait carries over at least a little to Patriots Day, which stages the bombings in an effective and riveting fashion, coming out of nowhere in a sense befitting the actual event.

If the rest of Patriots Day had followed that track this film would at least be interesting. Things though go awry completely shortly after the bombs go off and the bodies of the victims are shown, limbs and shoes strewn across Boylston Street in an unnecessarily blunt fashion. The lowlight of the sequence comes with the presence of a dead child, his body covered by a white sheet. That body represents the real-life victim, an 8-year-old boy and one of three victims from the bombing itself. Berg and his writers can't help but have other characters repeatedly point at the body on the ground, using the death of a child as a prop and showing little actual regard for the child's existence. It's a grotesque display of filmmaking and tastelessness by Berg.

Not that Patriots Day had its priorities set heading to that point. Things open poorly enough when Mark Wahlberg's loose cannon of a cop breaks down a door to arrest some guy unrelated to the bombings itself. The film opts to track the lives of people affected by the bombings from the night before throughout, most of whom are real people played by rather famous actors. To be fair, the cast is a pretty solid, if extremely underutilized, collection of character actors, including John Goodman, Michael Beach, J. K. Simmons, Kevin Bacon, Khandi Alexander, Michelle Monaghan and others. The film even finds time to try to tell the story of the bombers themselves, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (played by Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze, respectively). It's a lot for one film to process, meaning Berg and his writers don't have an adequate amount of time to understand the personalities and beats of each character, especially the disappointingly unexamined Tsarnaevs.

The one character who the audience does get to know is Wahlberg's sergeant Tommy Saunders, who is fittingly a composite character mixed in with the real people. Saunders is a frustrating character, his apparent alcoholism shown and immediately abandoned despite the pressure of the situation he's involved with, which would realistically result in more drinking. That his figure is vital to the investigation is rather offensive to the real cops and citizens who actually did his character’s work. Considering how many real-life figures are depicted as heroes, using Saunders to cover others up is a little ridiculous. That Saunders just appears everywhere is perplexing, including areas of outside of Boston proper that are not within his jurisdiction. He's a redundant character in a film with far too many figures already.

Patriots Day can’t decide what it wants to be. Attempts at a realistic overview of the bombings are scuttled by the intrusion of Wahlberg’s Saunders. A fictionalized outlook of the moments from the day before through David Ortiz’s famous speech at Fenway is cut short by the attempts at verisimilitude. A bit at the end with interviews of victims and a few notable officials is off putting and adds nothing to the film itself besides wondering why Berg and Wahlberg couldn’t just finance a good documentary instead of producing a clunky, disgraceful flick.

Review: One out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 133 minutes

Genre: Drama

Ask Away

Target audience: Theoretically people in Boston, but it’ll more than likely tick many of them off.

Take the whole family?: The film shows the bombs going off and a pretty brutal shootout, so stick right around the rating level.

Theater or Netflix?: Skip it.

What else is bad about this film?: Aside from probable slander against Katherine Russell (Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wife), the film plays fairly loose with the legality of the decisions made to find the Tsarnaevs. There are certain bits acknowledged by the filmmakers, but they never show any interest in considering the ramifications of the search and the interrogation of Russell. The ends seem to justify the means with this film, which is not overly surprising given how stupid this film is but still serves as another reason for frustration and ire.

Watch this instead?: Doing films based on real life tragedies is difficult but still doable. One of the better options is the subtly complicated Fruitvale Station, starring Michael B. Jordan. Also worth a watch are Gus Van Sant's Elephant and David Fincher's Zodiac.

Sing consistently off-key

Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) in Sing. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Sing opens on a particularly illogical and nonsensical note and never rights its course, opting to run through more 108 minutes of crass jokes, flatulence jokes and an overabundance of Seth MacFarlane to end with something miles away from heartfelt. Sing isn't much of a film, yet it somehow doesn't cross into abhorrent or awful either; it's just annoyingly bad, too lazy and uninspired to do much more than exist and crank out pop music covered by famous actors and aspiring singers.

None of this is really all that surprising. The studio responsible for this, Illumination, is known for producing this type of fair. It has one solid film in Despicable Me and a whole mess of whatevers, including this summer's mediocre Secret Life of Pets. It's an uninteresting studio designed to make lower-budget animated films like Sing and earn a hefty profit in the process, rarely caring for artistic merit, good storytelling or sophisticated jokes. The studio never aspires to be Pixar, Disney, Studio Ghibli or even DreamWorks, although its films cost the same amount at the cinema as the films by the other four. Not every film is going to be Toy Story 3, Moana, My Neighbor Totoro, or Chicken Run, but you'd hope a studio would chuck in a modicum of effort into producing films. Illumination, however, doesn't seem too interested in actually doing something with its animation quality, plot or characters, hitting the proverbial notes as needed to create an overstuffed pile of meh. In a year with a pair of legitimately great animated films and a few OK ones, Sing is just there, waiting for the money to roll in from viewers with little else to do on a December afternoon.  

Usually a film like Sing has a clever idea or some promise that isn't fulfilled, a redeeming quality just under the surface to be positive about. That is very much not the case. The premise, about a collection of anthropomorphic regular folks (voiced by Scarlett Johansson as a porcupine, Reese Witherspoon as a pig, Tori Kelly as an elephant, Taron Egerton as a gorilla, Nick Kroll as another pig and the aforementioned MacFarlene as a mouse) competing in a talent competition run by Matthew McConaughey as a koala with bad business sense, isn't innovative or interesting on its own. Not a fatal flaw if the writers find something interesting to say about it, which they do not. Excluding a bizarre subplot involving MacFarlane's awful mouse wannabe lounge singer, the film never veers off the boring characters take their chance at stardom, doubt themselves, then rise up again to put on a whopper of a performance because that would require some thought and nuance, concepts this film prefers to avoid.

Well, technically the film does make a viewer think about the inane insanity of the film universe. Much of the soundtrack consists of covers of songs like Shake It Off, Call Me Maybe, My Way, Hallelujah, and Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing. An underlying issue though is how these animals are singing these songs; the original artists are never mentioned in animal form, yet they are part of the fabric of the film universe. Is this some sort of universe in which animals have copies of popular music produced by humans? Were the humans conquered recently a la Planet of the Apes, their music, clothes and cars the only remnants of the pre-animal conquered world? Are there animal versions of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Stevie Wonder and Leonard Cohen (RIP) floating around this animal universe? Really, is there a reason to have animal characters instead of humans? The answer to the last point is a resounding no, besides maybe a cuteness factor that is unrelated to the plot, script or good storytelling techniques.

The closest Sing gets to finding some emotional resonance is at the end, amid the grand performance the animals had worked so hard to perfect despite all the bland and easily avoidable obstacles in their way. After Kelly's elephant rocks out to an uninspired cover of a great Stevie Wonder song, a slight chill ran through my body and I thought maybe this film has found a place in my heart. Then I remembered I had walked through a heavy rain in November to get to this screening and my clothes were still soaked. I continued to shiver, my only comfort being that I won't have to watch Sing again any time soon.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 108 minutes

Genre: Animated
 

Ask Away

Target audience: Families who can't get tickets to Rogue One.

Take the whole family?: The film gets lazy with a couple of fart jokes, but on the whole there isn't anything objectionable about the content besides the quality.

Theater or Netflix?: Wait for home if you must watch it.

What's the deal with Seth MacFarlene?: He is the one character who bugs me more than anything else in this film. While the other characters are at least trying to do something with their lives, MacFarlene's mouse is awful, never really interested in redeeming himself. That his crappy character also offers MacFarlene to indulge in his fantasies of being Sinatra (when he's at best a C- Bublé)  is all the more frustrating.

Watch this instead?: There's still an animated musical in theaters that is leagues better than this thing. It’s called Moana.

La La Land a sweet and sad musical throwback

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in La La Land. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

Writer/director Damien Chazelle has created something marvelous with La La Land. He's taken the best assets of the traditional musicals – the fantastic dreaminess of the dance sequences, the perfect banter that brought relationships to life – and meshed them with modern sensibilities to create a loving homage without devolving into a cheap rehash. It's a film easy to fall in love with and retains some intellectual challenge and consideration about the complicated nature of relationships and the complications of dreams.

There is a logic in using the bones of the old studio musical and inserting bits of modernity to keep it in touch with a younger audience. The classic boy meets girl story, in this case an aspiring actress who grew up on Bogart and the Hepburns (Emma Stone's Mia) and hopeful jazz pianist in love with Felonious Monk (Ryan Gosling's Sebastian) who meet and fall into a relationship, is difficult to botch wholesale as long as the actors have some spark between them. Fortunately, Stone and Gosling are charming as hell individually and share an incredible rapport that makes their flirting seem realistic and sweet amid the more fantastic elements. They sync together almost perfectly, with a perfect charm and a surprising accessibility for two incredibly good looking people. They just sort of glide together, a trait shared with much of La La Land as a whole, from the plotting and pacing to the musical sequences that ease naturally into the story with minimal to no disruption. The tricky thing with musicals is avoiding cramming songs in for the sake of having them in there, wasting valuable minutes on a point that leads nowhere, an issue Chazelle avoids by limiting the number of musical interludes and staggering them to reflect the moment in Mia's and Sebastian's relationship. The songs are more plentiful and more cheerful in the early stages of the relationship and both diminish and darken as the relationship evolves and the seasons change.

Dreams are the life force for La La Land. The film is an ode to the people who dreamed of making it big, the ones who scratched and clawed their way to success despite one rejection after another and somehow found a way to come out on top. The title itself is a link to a romantic hint at the lives Mia and Sebastian pursue, ones in which the greatest hopes and desires are filled with a little luck and a lot of persistence to make things work. Anything can happen in La La Land; traffic jams can become musical numbers, characters can dance among the stars at a planetarium, people will sing along to the songs you start on a whim. Yet there's an ironic twist to the idea of La La Land akin to Faulkner's short story Golden Land. The titles present a whimsical, playful perception of life in Los Angeles, but lurking just beneath the surface is a little heartbreak and disappointment. La La Land dives in from the get go, its opening song both a revelry of pursuing a life of dreams and a comment on how fleeting those dreams can be; the sun always shines even after the hopefuls pack their bags and abandon the pursuit. The film continues with that concept throughout, showing the need to have large aspirations as a part of the human condition and the ramifications those pursuits can have. Success sometimes means abandoning love when the two conflict and the love isn't strong enough to overcome.

Such dreams are a little wistful by their nature, as is the nostalgia felt for hopes that never panned out and memories that are never quite as perfect as they seem. La La Land loads up on the latter, featuring a pair of characters too young to have lived the pasts they wrap themselves in but still wanting to be part of it. They live for something they can't have, and Chazelle uses their longing as the reason the two would connect in the first place and the root of their eventual troubles. The film uses nostalgia as a selling point and turns it around on the audience, a choice that is a little cruel given how sweet everything appears but more honest than letting the fantasy run amok. Dreams are vital in La La Land, but even in a movie that loves improbable aspiration the sweetest fantasy can’t overcome reality.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 128 minutes

Genre: Musical

Ask Away

Target audience: People missing an old fashioned musical.

Take the whole family?: The F-bomb is dropped once, but the overall content isn't overly problematic for kids. Ages 10 and up is fine.

Theater or Netflix?: It'd make for a great date night film.

How's the soundtrack?: Legitimately great and enjoyable. There's a strong mix of classic musical score, a bit of John Legend influence, and more jazz appropriate tunes, and the two work splendidly together. Plus it is catchy as all heck; I kept whistling one of the main tracks, City of Stars, while walking to the train after the movie.

Watch this as well?: This one is rather similar to the French film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which stars a very young Catherine Deneuve. While the films differ a bit in presentation – any dialogue in Umbrellas of Cherbourg is sung – both deal with the fleeting nature of love and how life moves on even after passion fades. A more familiar friendly pick is one I recommend frequently, Enchanted, which is carried in large part by Amy Adams' terrific performance.

Rogue One a darker take on Star Wars

Felicity Jones in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Image courtesy Disney.

What makes Rogue One: A Star Wars Story the most interesting Star Wars film to come out in the last two decades is its undercurrent of darkness. This isn't the fantastic journey of New Hope or  Force Awakens, the Ewok festival of Return of the Jedi, or the lesson in political gamesmanship like entries one, two and three. Rather, it's heart is in the same place as the series' best entry, Empire Strikes Back, and the darker, grittier tone lends itself to a space opera rooted in the most basic battle of good against evil. Both films find the rebels in a dire situation, facing impossible odds and a relentless, malevolent force aimed at their destruction.

Desperation is the driving force behind both Empire Strikes Back, and Rogue One. For the characters of Rogue One, the circumstances are driven by the fear of an unknown weapon of mass destruction (the Death Star) and how little knowledge they have of the weapon’s capabilities. That the weapon can destroy planets is horrifying; that the Rebellion has no way of fighting such a thing in its early stages is almost worse. Desperation though is a strong motivator, enough to have a small collection of fighters, criminals and traitors (Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Riz Ahmed, Donnie Yen, Wen Jiang, a Droid voiced by Alan Tudyk, Forest Whitaker and Mads Mikkelsen) to risk their lives to stop it and an evil Empire director (Ben Mendelsohn). Characters in films like this need a persuasive enough motivator to send themselves into such a dire, fatalistic situation, and the stakes in this case are heavy enough to provide a justifiable reason to engage in a doomed mission. Star Wars films need that despair and hint of menace to work. The prequels lacked that feeling of darkness (aside from a Padawan slaughter in film three) and even last year’s very fun Force Awakens felt a little light in its tone. The darkness in Empire Strikes Back, New Hope, and Rogue One is required to sell the underlying message of hope these films offer as well. Light doesn’t seem so bright and isn’t as necessary before the darkness sets in.

Even the Rebellion isn’t immune from dark acts. Rogue One is more honest than any previous Star Wars film about the nature of the Rebellion. This is not the clean cut army of fighters shown in films past, a group devoted to both peace and the power of the force. The rebels portrayed as cutthroat murderers, doing what is best for the greater good even if and when it leaves their hands dirty. War is an ugly process in which the good fight is never pure and unsoiled, a point the film emphasizes as it gets deeper into the moral quagmire.

Even with the emotional heft Rogue One can’t escape the calling siren of fan service. A few cameos from characters featured briefly in New Hope come across as distracting and add nothing to the film’s narrative, coming across more as cute than anything. Also at issue is the bizarre decision to depend on a digitized version of Peter Cushing to carry several scenes. That the ersatz Grand Moff Tarkin doesn't come particularly close to bridging the Uncanny Valley (and indeed blinks eerily on a few occasions) points out the uselessness of the endeavor. Director Gareth Edwards and his collection of writers could have worked around Tarkin's existence in a similar fashion as it does with Obi-Wan Kenobi; acknowledging the existence of the character without digging up the corpse from the grave.  

Still, Rogue One saves its strongest stride for the ending, a sizable battle akin to Return of the Jedi in scope and framing. Edwards showcases his solid digital directing skills in rendering a large scale battle. That the film contrasts the gritty Rebellion fighters to the almost pristine ones used by the Empire retains the hint of verisimilitude in this otherwise fantastic universe.

Rogue One is different from the Star Wars films of the past, a bit of a safe experiment by Disney to expand the franchise’s cinematic universe. That the experiment works as well as it does is at least moderately comforting given the plans to add more of these secondary stories in the coming years. Rogue One isn’t perfect, but it at least brings back the desperation and verve (and space battles) that make the best Star Wars so memorable.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 133 minute

Genre: Sci-Fi

Ask Away

Target audience: Everyone who has ever seen a Star Wars film in the past 40 years, along with their kids.

Take the whole family?: The action gets heavy toward the end, and the film has a pretty nasty cruel streak. Still, the general lack of blood makes this at least tolerable for kids around age 9.

Theater or Netflix?: You're probably going to see it in theaters, so it really depends on how much money you're willing to shell out. The traditional 2D version was solid, so that should suffice for people not willing to pay for the 3D and/or IMAX experience.

How diverse is the casting?: Leagues greater than the original run. Although the main cast remains male dominant, the featured character is female like in Force Awakens, and the secondary characters are a mix of people representing multiple cultures. More notable are the random pilots and soldiers in the Rebellion that offers a broad array of diversity that reflects the necessary unity of the Rebellion's efforts.

Watch this as well?: The best of the series and the one worth rewatching the most frequently is Empire Strikes Back. New Hope, Return of the Jedi, Force Awakens and Revenge of the Sith are all at least watchable.

Dreamy legacy at the heart of Jackie

Natalie Portman in a scene from Jackie. Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

The smartest part of the heartfelt, melancholy Jackie rests in its unorthodox storytelling. Beginning with an interview between Jackie Kennedy (played brilliantly by Natalie Portman) and a disheveled reporter (Billy Crudup), the film mixes and matches events occurring somewhere between a couple of years before to a few weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. It's an effective nesting doll effect, a story being told within a story told within a story, that mirrors the perception of the White House at that time as a beacon shining at a brighter future. That the unseemly facts get lost in the perception befits a film in which the broader scope is of greater import than the ugly details that only distract from the hopeful veneer.

In Jackie, the illusion of a concept is more trustworthy than the reality. The film's underlying brutality and the days surrounding it are portrayed in a less straightforward manner than the fantasy Portman's Jackie forces Crudup's nameless reporter to accept. That fantasy is based heavily on the idea of Camelot (rooted in the mythology and the musical), a utopia consisting of hopes and desires for a better tomorrow. Previous portrayals of the Kennedy family have used the Kennedy's love of the musical Camelot in an ironic fashion, using the innocent dreaminess of the concept of the show to contrast brightly with the true, more salacious nature of the relationship. That Camelot the show is more about the destruction of a kingdom and its ideals rather than the growth of one is often looked over when comparing it to the Kennedy White House, and the film shows how Jackie uses the illusion of the concept of Camelot to sell the Kennedy legacy. It's a lie built upon a lie that has an inkling of truth just underneath it all: Legends outlive and outgrow the details.

Jackie understands that better than anyone else around her, and a fair amount of the fighting she does in this film is directed at reinforcing and maintaining the image of her husband as a man and president. The version Portman plays is a hell of a fighter too, despite her voice never rising above a strong whisper. She's canny and clever, using her quiet demeanor as a key weapon in her battles against officials with more experience and more power than she would, whether it’s Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) or Lyndon B. Johnson (John Carroll Lynch). She knows how the game is played and in particular the right buttons to press to end up on top of an argument. This comes across most in the interview between Kennedy and the reporter, with Portman’s character shown as the dominant force in the conversation. Jackie as manipulator is meant to contrast against the poised, pretty and precise First Lady the film shows in a re-creation of her famed televised White House tour. That Jackie, guided by her friend Nancy (Greta Gerwig), is tied inextricably to the Kennedy legacy, a devoted woman and lover of the arts who could serve as the perfect queen to John Kennedy's king. It's the most false and the most honest version Jackie uses, the blatant falseness of the act a means toward preserving the aforementioned legacy. The clothes and immaculate styling she underwent to create that image are what made her the cultural icon she became.

There is a third representation offered by director Pablo Larrain and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim for one night. It comes in a sequence after the assassination with Jackie alone in the White House wandering about with lots of alcohol and little idea of what else she should do. She's lost and alone, unsure of what she should be doing now or the days and months thereafter. Her facade means nothing in an empty house, but she's still frantically trying to find something that will work her through the grief. It's a heartbreaking sequence queued up by Richard Burton's rendition of Camelot, the song from the show with the most idealized version of the eponymous kingdom.

What Jackie does with all these components – the legacy, the depths of Jackie Kennedy, the historical significance of the moment – is cook them together so separating the truth from the illusion is quite difficult. And that's the way the film wants it and the reason it opts to end not with the death of a president or a woman alone crying, but of a perfect moment supporting the idea of a beautiful ersatz Camelot where, perhaps, joy is found within the illusion.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Rating: R

Run time: 99 minutes

Genre: Biography

Ask Away

Target audience: Viewers interested in anything related to the Kennedy clan.

Take the whole family?: The rating is a little harsh given the content. Still, kids will be bored by the content on screen, and there is one scene that is graphic.

Theater or Netflix?: It justifies a cinema trip, but feel free to wait for it if you can't find it locally.

How are the Kennedy accents?: The only one you really get to hear is Peter Sarsgaard's, and it is a pretty weak attempt. The issue for Sarsgaard is the lack of consistency to his Brahmin inflection, which is patchy at best. Folks who've lived around Boston know vocabulary, mood, tone and level of sobriety can influence when the accent pops out, although none of those appear to be a factor for Sarsgaard's Bobby Kennedy.

Watch this as well?: Thematically speaking there are a few parallels between this film and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Both films deal with the formations of legends and how becoming one isn't necessarily for the best. That's also hit upon in the documentary Smash His Camera, which profiles famed Jackie Kennedy paparazzo Ron Galella.

Moana is better than your average Disney princess

Moana and Maui in a scene from Moana. Image courtesy Disney.

The most enjoyable part of the Moana screening didn't come while watching the film, but shortly thereafter while waiting in line to pick up a cellphone. In line were a few women talking excitedly about it, their excitement peaking with the fact that the eponymous female Disney character with royal roots has not one but two living parents. While on the outset it seems like an odd thing to consider, Disney has a historically nasty habit of using dead parents (or the illusion of that in the case of Tangled) as plot points to build female characters from. It's a cheap way of creating the ideal strong, female character, a figure that can overcome the worst loss and succeed with a slew of despites in her way. That Moana didn't resort to killing the lead character's parents is an appreciated change of pace for the folks who grew up frustrated by that pattern.

Better still, the filmmakers didn’t need to do it to prove their central figure's bona fides as a character. Moana, voiced by newcomer Auli'i Cravalho, is shown immediately as a courageous soul who embraces the dangers of the unknown. She’s drawn immediately to the tale her grandmother (Rachel House) tells about cocksure demigod Maui (voiced by the unfairly charming Dwayne Johnson) and is lured by the adventure the legend promises. Life is waiting for her at sea, albeit one conflicting with her status as her island's next queen, a role her father (Temeura Morrison) and mother (Nicole Scherzinger) push her toward through a catchy Lin-Manuel Miranda tune. The tension of the situation could be resolved through a sad song by Moana before the great adventure serving as the film's drawing point begins. But Moana doesn't take the easy route with its decision, instead having Moana see her value on the island and only leave as a means of saving her friends, showing the leadership she exhibits in one song without abandoning the promises she just made in it. The concept is a fairly complex one, and it reveals just a shade of the traits and portrayal, both in the writing and in Cravalho's performance, that make Moana such an interesting, deep character to pull from.

Her role underlines how much of Moana is devoted to women, whether it’s Moana (who pulls off most of the successful feats of daring as Maui watches), her mother, her grandmother, and the island Moana and Maui adventure off to resurrect to save the island. The film even pulls off a third act twist to realign the narrative to fit the concept and emphasize the film's feminine bent, switching up the prophecy at the film's heart to a nuanced resolution that fits the film's themes perfectly. This isn't exactly unknown territory for a film to take, but it remains nice to see Disney at least continue to broaden its characterization of its female characters that has taken the company from comatose damsels to clever and competent seafaring leaders.

Moana's thematic depth extends beyond female role changes to rip into trite narrative shortcuts. This is the kind of film that uses the concept of The Special – the one character destined to be Neo or Harry Potter or Superman – as a plot point and as a way of criticizing the concept at the same time with the idea of fate being limited by free will. In the filmmaker's eyes, a savior has to decide to be one even if the actual ocean itself anoints that person for the role. Moana has a habit of undercutting tropes – Johnson's Maui makes a few cracks about Disney princesses – but this one is the sharpest rebuke and the one that has the most resonance, or at least is taken most seriously by the filmmakers.

Moana is worthy of respect for its layers and intelligence, but it earns its keep through a rather fun plot that excels in its simplicity. There's nothing overly complicated about the hero's journey, and the filmmakers throw in the right level of levity, homages (among them a rather goofy one to Fury Road), Miranda songs and Dwayne Johnson to make the whole experience sing. Add that to some gorgeous animation and you have a pretty strong case for the best animated film of the year. At the least, it is good enough to please a fan base eager for Disney to catch up with the times.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 113 minutes

Genre: Animation

Ask Away

Target audience: Families and people who want a Disney protagonist with two living parents.

Take the whole family?: One sequence is a little intimidating, but overall this should be acceptable for kids ages 5 and up.

Theater or Netflix?: Theater is cool for this one. I'm not entirely sold on the need for 3D though; the regular format was gorgeous as is.

What of the short film at the beginning?: It's OK. Called Inner Workings, the short features the internal struggles the protagonist's mind has with the rest of the body to figure out what's in the best interest of the human. There's enough humor from the awkwardness of the brain tugging along the heart, stomach and other organs to keep everything in line, although the final message is a little heavy-handed. The best of the recent batch of shorts remain 2012's brilliant Paperman.

Watch this as well?: Just about everything from Disney's recent run of good to greatness is worthwhile, but I'm going to step away from the Mouse and recommend another terrific animated film that rips holes into narrative tropes and has an infectious score to boot: The Lego Movie.