Tully offers honest, complicated depiction of motherhood

Charlize Theron in Tully. Image courtesy Focus Features.

The harshest idea in the wonderfully acerbic Tully is the perfect mother. As described by weary parent Marlo (a great Charlize Theron), the ideal mother bakes cupcakes for her children's class, keeps a pristine home, is committed mind and body to her children. Her ideal is a woman who gives without ever needing to take, and it contrasts against her dream of returning to the free, carefree existence she once had. It puts Marlo in an unwinnable situation, unable to become what she feels she must be but unable to shed the thoughts of her once very cool life she still harbors. Marlo is somewhere in between, a broken person trying to hold together three young children while maintaining the idea that everything is fine. But Tully isn’t about holding things together, but being brave enough to admit when you’re falling apart.

Writer Diablo Cody, whose script packs an emotional wallop and her signature sense of humor, doesn't hurl the world at Marlo and expect her to handle the borderline impossibilities of motherhood. Cody and director Jason Reitman show just how hard it can be to juggle three children and a husband (Ron Livingston) moderately invested in the situation. Marlo needs help, and she gets it from the eponymous free-spirited night nurse Tully (Mackenzie Davis), whose job is to watch Marlo's newborn daughter, but whose duty is to give Marlo a break from the constant stress pouring down upon her. Tully is both brutal in its depiction of Marlo's life – a short montage outlines how repetitive and frustrating the experience can be – and sympathetic to its character's plight. Being a parent is not an easy job, especially with a newborn. And it’s exacerbated by a middle child often described as “quirky”, a euphemism designed to avoid talking about exactly what’s going on with the child while simultaneously insulting them. Marlo's eruption over the use of the term by a school administrator is wildly satisfying, yet it’s also a little heartbreaking because it reflects just how close to the edge Marlo has gotten. Her anger was righteous, but slightly misplaced. It’s difficult for a movie to show that with the amount of subtly Tully does, a credit to both Cody’s writing and Theron’s performance.

Marlo's outburst, her frequent dips into self-loathing putdowns, her lack of energy in life reveal a person who is very much not in a good place. They're also obvious indicators, clear signs that something isn't right, a point Marlo’s husband and brother (Mark Duplass) comment on. They, like Marlo herself, miss who she used to be. Diagnosing someone who is sad constantly is relatively easy though. Being able to tell when someone is not OK while everything appears to be fine is a far more difficult task. Even as Tully's presence appears to make Marlo's life easier, even as Marlo tries to turn her life around with exercise and satisfying certain needs, the underlying reasons for her initial frustration are still there. Parenthood is filled with obfuscation, largely directed at keeping the child from worrying about the world around them. But parents lie to themselves too, because pretending things are OK is just as easy for the parent as it is for the child. Being a parent is horrifying in its own way, with the additional obligations and the need to hide so much in order to say this is fine. That everything is fine.

Tully doesn't believe in obfuscation, and she pushes Marlo to embrace her needs and her desires, to no longer try to pretend that everything is fine. In Tully, the only way to get around that thinking is to be honest with yourself, to allow for things not to be OK and to ask for help along the way. Nothing is ever really fine, especially when a person tries to do too much by themselves. It's honesty that ultimately serves Marlo best in Tully, both with her situation as a mother and her role as a mother. Marlo isn't the free spirit she used to be, nor is she that perfect mother she aspires to be either. Instead, she’s a better mother because she’s found a way to balance who she was with the person she is now. Everything still isn’t fine, but she’s about as OK as she can be.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 96 minutes

Genre: Drama

Ask Away
Target audience: Mothers and fans of Diablo Cody's one-liners.

Take the whole family?: The dialog and topic makes it a bad choice for families. It would work though as a date night option though.

Theater or Netflix?: It’s good enough to head to the theater.

Is Charlize Theron underappreciated?: As an actress it feels like she doesn't get anywhere near the credit she deserves for pulling off such a wide range of characters. It takes a lot of talent to shift from an indelible badass like Furiosa and a brawler like Atomic Blonde's Lorraine to a harangued mother like Marlo and the sharp-tongued Mavis in Young Adult, and I don’t think she has earned the kudos she deserves for succeeding at it.

Watch this as well?: Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman make a pretty good team. Their other two collaborations, Juno and Young Adult, are pretty great watches that line up pretty well with Tully.

Charlize Theron brawls her way through glossy, inconsistent Atomic Blonde

Charlize Theron fights her way through some cops in Atomic Blonde. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Atomic Blonde is just fun enough to enjoy despite its many, many flaws. This movie is a sizable mess, littered with inconsistencies and banal ideas like the McGuffin lifted from the first Mission: Impossible movie, and it is difficult to reconcile Atomic Blonde's flaws due to their basis in disinterest rather than experimentation. Fortunately, the visceral response is stronger than the logical disruption caused by this movie. Turning the brain off for a while is a prerequisite for allowing the empty mind to absorb all the fights and rad '80s music that streams through the cinema speakers.

There really aren’t many particularly notable aspects to Atomic Blonde, starting with a pretty basic plot involving Charlize Theron engaging in a series of spy games in Berlin circa 1989. The elements of the basic spy thriller are there, including dealings with fellow British spy Percival (a rather bonkers James McAvoy), French agent Delphine (Sofia Boutella), the well-informed East Berliner Spyglass (Eddie Marsan) and a series of Soviet flunkies to fight off. She's also stuck in an extended debrief to a pair of MI6 leads (Toby Jones and James Faulkner), and a CIA suit (John Goodman), which is standard spy stuff as well. It’s all very functional without a lot of excitement or passion for anything too far beyond Theron using garden hose to whip some poor German cop. There’s an underlying emptiness of the whole endeavor. Sure, this is a movie that lives for its aesthetic and retro '80s style, but that doesn't have to result in the level of emptiness Atomic Blonde seems to aspire to, content in its inability to offer viewers a more complex viewing experience.

Any attempts at depth are grasped at the characterization of Theron's agent, Lorraine Broughton, and the plot itself. Starting with the second before returning to the first, Atomic Blonde uses its plot to deceive the audience in a less than satisfying fashion. Twists are thrown in out of some expectation of necessity and, to steal a line from The Room, to just makes things interesting. Or, rather, appear interesting for a moment or two. Atomic Blonde throws in two major twists in the last five minutes; the first is telegraphed heavily through dream fragments and some heavy dialog, the second is effective. Neither is vital for the viewer and only seem to contribute to a movie in which 90 minutes would have more than sufficed to complete the story.

Both twists do speak to Atomic Blonde's attempts at painting Lorraine as a figure for decency despite spending 95 minutes or so outlining her as a more morally ambiguous figure, someone willing to save lives when needed but whose end goal remains something of a mystery. Rather than leave her as a woman of great intrigue and allow for some ambiguity in the narrative, the filmmakers use one of the two aforementioned twists to push her toward the side of angels and effectively vindicate some of her actions from before. It’s a pretty solid letdown for a movie that, at least for a while, actively fights against such easy portrayals. There's a streak of punk running through this film's veins, so it becomes a little sad when the filmmakers normalize things for narrative laziness.

At least the aesthetics are enough to keep viewers somewhat engaged in the movie's many twisted machinations. The action sequences are rather effective at diverting viewers' attention away from the weak plot and to root for Theron’s spy, who is tough as hell but still small compared with many of her adversaries. Director David Leitch – who has spent much of his career working on stunts as a director, coordinator or active participate – reveals a knack for showcasing gritty sequences that float between brutal and darkly humorous. Atomic Blonde shines as bright as the neon in its logo when it allows Theron to punch, stab, kick, lasso and shoot her way through a series of enemies.

Much of the entertainment belonging to Atomic Blonde comes courtesy of Theron's force of will and icy charisma. Her performance transforms someone designed to be a prototypical action hero – stoic and centered on fights and vengeance – into a fleshed out character worth rooting for despite the mayhem she causes and very much in spite of the writing around her character. For a movie that focuses more on the late '80s patina than depth, it's vital to have someone who can pull the audience into the movie with her. Without her, Atomic Blonde would be lose a good amount of the style it values so much, along with almost all of the intrigue.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 115 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Viewers interested in some largely mindless violence and anything involve Charlize Theron.

Take the whole family?: Definitely not.

Theater or Netflix?: Wait for a home viewing with a few friends.

How great is James McAvoy?: He is pretty fun in this movie, carrying the charismatic insanity he had in Split over to this performance as well. The movie rightly belongs to Theron, but McAvoy does his best to keep his character worth watching in the scenes where she isn’t around. A movie dedicated to his character Percival’s adventures in Berlin could make for a heck of a time.

Watch this as well?: Drive does the stylized bit a lot more effectively than this movie does. For folks who want to see Theron fight her way through swarms of enemies should check out Mad Max: Fury Road and the underappreciated Kubo and the Two Strings.

Fate of the Furious doesn't mess with success

Charlize Theron and Vin Diesel in The Fate of the Furious. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

My adoration for much of the Fast and the Furious franchise entries is hypocritical given my overarching loathing for movies similar to Fast and the Furious. This franchise commits all the sins I rant and rail against committed by other franchises. They big and bloated movies with empty plots and little going for them aside from spectacle and frequent speeches about family. Some of this will be an attempt to explain why I love a series of movies with little connection to reality, because all of those reasons explain my joy of the most recent entry in the series, the fairly awesome The Fate of the Furious.

There isn't anything overly different with Fate of the Furious compared with the rest of the franchise, the exception being the absences of Jordana Brewster and the late Paul Walker. The rest of the main cast is back (Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Ludacris, Tyrese Gibson, Dwayne Johnson) along with a few additions from the last film (Kurt Russell, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jason Statham) and two new players (villain Charlize Theron and agent Scott Eastwood). Ridiculous heists are pulled in locales across the world; the word “family” is referenced ad nauseam; Johnson and Statham drop a few quips; beautiful cars get totaled; beautiful people get ogled; and a whole host of other similar shenanigans ensue. It’s the same as every film in this franchise since Fast Five, the one where the series shifted toward the globetrotting model it currently follows to enormous box office returns and at least two more entries in this series through 2021.

Looking at this film and the rest of the series critically little of it really holds up. The plots are thin and lack general logic. The movies always run on the long side despite the thin plots, with the less engaging entries losing steam in between the grandiose action sequences (a problem that plagues Fate of the Furious). Diesel, the face and de facto heart of the franchise, continues his tradition of not putting that much effort into his performance as Dominic Toretto. The amount of time the camera spends on certain female body parts remains a little disconcerting. And the films are generally hesitant to try to engage viewers in too many intellectual challenges.

Yet I still leave the theater pumped after watching these ludicrous movies. For all the flaws the series has, the positives have outweighed the negatives as a whole since Fast Five. Diesel's acting remains an issue, but he's surrounded by enough personality from the likes of Rodriguez, Johnson, Russell, Statham, Gibson, Russell and Ludacris to make his inherent lack of emotional range sort of work in his favor. Adding in Theron as the Fate of the Furious’ big bad is a boon as well; her iciness and scenery nibbling make her an unpredictable and surprisingly vicious femme fatale. Movies like this don't necessarily need great acting to work; a surplus of personality is often just as effective.

Besides, the real selling point for this franchise and Fate of the Furious is the spectacle. There's a simple level of joy to be taken solely from watching Vin Diesel race someone while driving backwards in a car that's on fire, or watching the main cast somehow avoid a freaking submarine while driving on ice covered water in Russia. There's the sequence where Theron makes it rain with cars, a helicopter getting taken out by an EMP, Johnson using his arm to divert a torpedo, and a pretty solid prison riot highlighted by stompings put on by Johnson and Statham. Just writing those things down is ridiculous enough, but the fact the film commits to these feats with a level of normality is fascinating in its own right. Whatever reaction the characters have to all of this insanity is a few steps below how it should play out in real life.

But this series is based in fantasy, a point the various directors who have come and gone have generally agreed upon. Anything can happen in the Fast and the Furious universe, and the only thing the filmmakers can do from one film to the next is stretch what anything means. It's fun to watch them get more and more creative without quite hitting the point of desperation. And while Fate of the Furious never hits the level of absurdity that makes Fast Five and Furious 7 so entertaining, it's still a damn fun film.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 136 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Folks who've lined up to watch the last seven movies.

Take the whole family?: This one gets a little bloodier than some of the previous ones, so stick within a year or two of the PG-13 rating.

Theater or Netflix?: Theater is good, but maybe avoid the IMAX if it isn’t a matinee.

What do they do about Paul Walker?: Even though the actor died before the release of Furious 7, his character Brian is referenced in this one as being alive but retired, just as he was at the end of the previous film. It was kind of nice to see the filmmakers avoid overly inserting Walker (sadly at the expense of Jordana Brewster), but a scene at the end makes for a strange coda given the circumstances.

Watch this as well?: Fast Five remains the glorious, bonkers highlight of this franchise. I'm also a very enthusiastic fan of Furious 7 even with the reduced Dwayne Johnson presence; adding in Kurt Russell and Jason Statham proved to be nice touches.

'Winter's War' battles against a lack of necessity

Chris Hemsworth and Jessica Chastain star in "The Huntsman: Winter's War." Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

If you squint hard enough you can almost see the charms hidden within “The Huntsman: Winter's War.” It's more often than not light and goofy, rarely laden with that dour weight plaguing the first “Huntsman” film and seemingly happy to drift away into sub-mediocrity. It's a perfectly forgettable film that neither strains brain cells nor the viewer's patience, lasting only a few minutes longer than it ought to but still well short of interminable like, say, another recent blockbuster film featuring rodents and capes.

Any true enjoyment of “The Huntsman” – a title that is technically a misnomer – is rooted in how much one enjoys watching star and titular outdoorsman Chris Hemsworth in action. He's about as close as current cinema has to a galoot; a large, amiable enough fella who works his way through films with a smile and an admirable torso while sporting a horrendous accent that flitters away when he forgets his character has it. To be fair, employing an accent in the first place is silly enough for a movie based on a Teutonic fairy tale existing in what narrator Liam Neeson acknowledges is a fantastical world. Why the filmmakers decided to have native Californian Jessica Chastain adopt a brogue while South African Charlize Theron has nary an accent will never receive a proper answer. And at least Emily Blunt retains her natural speech patterns for once. But back to Hemsworth, an attractive actor who grits his way through a role that never quite works for him. He's never quite robotic or stiff, yet he lacks a certain lightness of being too him to be too charming, as if he's trying a little too hard to be funny to compensate for his physical excellence. Still, there's something inherently sweet about Hemsworth, whose physicality is never bulky enough to be threatening and whose persona is never too serious or self important. He's workmanlike, never strong enough to boost a film but rarely a true detriment to the final product either, the kind of leading man who could be interesting as a character actor down the line once the good looks begin to fade a little.

Hemsworth is fine, as is Chastain, as is Theron in a much weaker role than the evil queen presented in the first film, and as is Blunt as a woebegone ice queen/little sister to Theron's wicked Ravenna. Slightly less fine is everything around them, essentially a movie that never really knows where it's going or what it wants to do with itself. It starts off as a prequel to “The Huntsman,” depicting the origins of Blunt's frosty queen and her hatred of love and how Hemsworth became the eponymous character, or at least one of them along with Chastain and a whole host of child soldiers. Then it segues into a sequel, mostly eliding over the presence of Snow White (and, of course, Kristen Stewart) but still bringing back one of the seven dwarfs (Nick Frost) and eventually adding three more (Rob Brydon, Sheridan Smith and Alexandra Roach), leading to a net negative of three dwarfs. Goblins and faeries are tossed in as well for reasons that may or may not be related to the plot from “The Lord of the Rings” because the writers couldn't come up with a plot of their own.

“Winter’s War” perhaps might have worked as either a prequel or a sequel; combining both is sloppy and requires the frequent insertion of a rather bored Neeson to keep track of what’s happening. This is a very mismatched film, dependent on miscommunication to advance the story. A nice spot of tea would resolve most of the character’s problems, our at least hash out the idea that villains aren’t to be trusted.

And yet “Winter's War” could be much, much worse than it is. The tone is either amiable or solidly campy, especially whenever Theron pops up and excessively emotes and snarls at Blunt and Hemsworth. It's almost disappointing to say this film isn't quite a trainwreck – a complete disaster is a joy on its own – but it doesn't induce bile either, and it'll assume its fate of fading into the nether regions of the memory bank until the commercials for the DVD come out in about four months. At the least, it's not going to disappoint audiences hoping for something resembling greatness from what is slowly morphing into a film franchise; expecting an ant hill and finding a molehill instead has its benefits.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 114 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: People who like Chris Hemsworth as a leading man.

Take the whole family?: Some of the content is a little more shocking than expected, so follow the ratings recommendation.

Theater or Netflix?: Stay at home and stream it if you want to see it.

Does anything disappoint in this film?: The only thing that serves as a proper letdown is what happens to Charlize Theron's Ravenna. She's a complex figure in the first film, tragic and somewhat pitiable given her background and her ambitions. All of the nuance is lost this time though, and the movie even goes out of its way to make her even more sinister because of one truly vile act she technically commits before the start of “The Huntsman.”

Watch this instead?: This one's definitely a blast from the past, but “Ladyhawke” is a pretty fun little knight story with an interesting premise and a very young Michelle Pfeiffer. You could hit up the recent works of the three leading ladies: “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Sicario” and “Crimson Peak.”