The fall of ancient Rome

THE GREAT BEAUTY (A-minus) - It's about a girl. It's always about a girl.

Sofia Coppola meets Federico Fellini in Paolo Sorrentino's luscious valentine to Rome, "The Great Beauty" (better, as always, in Italian, "La Grande Bellezza"). It is one of the most visually stunning films I've ever seen. Whether you have the patience for its meandering 2 hours and 21 minutes depends on your mood and your willingness to be thrilled for the sake of aesthetics. (Recall that we bailed out of Sorrentino's politico-mob story from a few years ago "Il Divo.")

Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo in a career-defining performance) never followed up his novel from 40 years ago ("The Human Apparatus"), and at age 65 he's hit with the news that his one true love from his youth, Elisa, has died. He embarks on a half-hearted search for her and the couple they could have been. Yet he doesn't abandon la dolce vita, the playboy life that seduced him and distracted him from his life's work and is still in full force at his prodigious 65th birthday bash. In a blink, decades have passed, yet the trappings of luxury still hold him hostage. Classy parties last till dawn. He sleeps in. When he rises from his rooftop hammock, cocktail in hand, the Coliseum appears in view across the street.

Jep ambles through this existence in a high-society stupor. It's hard to tell if he's seeing ghosts or if he is one himself; this could easily be the flashback fever dream of a man taking his last breaths. He doesn't quite mope or look bored. It's as if he's truly observing the world around him for the first time in ages -- since the novel, perhaps -- and taking pleasure in the mundane, the everyday. He goes to bed with women in their 40s and 50s, but he gets no more pleasure from sex anymore. He's not torn up about it; he still has his memories. The women are elegant; natural beauties aging gracefully. (Sabrina Ferilli is a work of art.)

Jep dreams of the sea. It was there that he fell in love with Elisa.

Most evenings, he's hosting friends and various socialites. In one lazy discussion, he embarks on a classic putdown of another writer (she has actually completed a bunch of novels, the gall), dismissing her as a longtime tool of the Communist Party, having earned her break by being the leader's mistress back in the day.

People drop dead randomly. Women chant (including an angelic version of Robert Burns' "My Heart's in the Highlands"). They take off their tops and invite us into their bosom. They range from coked-up strippers or nuns. They are all smart and lovely, young and old, tall and thin, or short and squat. A life's worth of acquaintances.

The visuals are stunning. At times, Sorrentino's camera glides like a swan through his gilded sets. Nothing on the screen is wasted. Geese, supermodel pretty, graze on party scraps on a balcony before whooshing off. A young man in his underwear does soccer-ball tricks. A woman's high heels click along a vast marble floor. A 104-year-old Mother Teresa type ("You don't talk about poverty. You live it.") crawls on her knees up a flight of stairs. And always, the sea shimmers in Jep's many flashbacks.

The film is as dazzling as one of Jep's geezer-techno bashes. There's knife-throwing. Head-bashing performance art. A teenage pulp-art phenom. A cardinal who won't shut up about food recipes. A laptop DJ backed by a string quartet. A giraffe. When a magician makes the beast disappear, Jep stares at the void, gazing at what's no longer there. Touching.

A fascinating extended scene straight out of Terry Gilliam takes us to an epic room where a celebrity plastic surgeon injects faces and breasts and sweaty palms with a magic fluid that they eagerly pay 700 euros for. He flirts with one wistful old woman and tells her, tauntingly, "Want to go back 30 years, to when it always rained in late August?" That's the dull ache at the heart of this film.

That line is echoed later in this melancholic monologue by Jep's friend Romano:

I've spent all my summers making plans for September. No longer. Now I spend the summer remembering plans I'd made that faded away, due partly to laziness and partly to carelessness. What's wrong with feeling nostalgic? It's the only distraction left for those who have no faith in the future. Lunico. Without rain August is coming to an end and September isn't yet here. And I'm so ordinary. But there's no need to worry. It's all right. It's okay.

Not to fret. Life's a great beauty. And then you die.

New to the Queue

Building momentum ... 

Our latest favorite band is The National, and the lead singer's brother made a film while serving as a roadie, "Mistaken for Strangers."

The latest provocation from Lars Von Trier, Charlotte Gainsbourg starring in "Nymphomaniac."

A fascinating look at a nanny who left a trove of photographs, "Finding Vivian Maier."

(Those first three will have runs at the Guild Cinema in the next month.)

Notch another coming-of-age film, this one from Eliza Hittman, "It Felt Like Love."

The offbeat teen comic-drama "A Birder's Guide to Everything."

An odd romance starring Emmanuelle Devos, "Just a Sigh."

A documentary about what might have been, "Jodorowsky's Dune."

Another stab at boyhood adolescence, "Hide Your Smiling Faces."

Doc Watch

PARTICLE FEVER (B+) - This is a geeked-out and thoroughly enjoyable chronicle of the rollout of the large hadron collider in Bern, Switzerland, in 2010 as physicists searched for the secret of the universe.

Director Mark Levinson often chooses gloss over depth and in doing so he simplifies a complex subject for simpletons like us. We often see the scientists working out mind-boggling equations on blackboards, but no one ever tries to explain any of the gibberish. Snappy graphics do help in providing a layman's overview of the task at hand.

Instead, Levinson tells a more human story, focusing on six players, including the highly quotable Monica Dunford, who captures the excitement and anxiety inherent in an exercise bent on explaining all of the universe, once and for all. We also spend time with David Kaplan and Nima Arkani-Hamed, two pals approaching middle age and philosophically split, along with their mentor, Savas Dimopoulos, a Stanford physicist who watches many of the proceedings warily from afar (and via Skype). The effervescent Fabiola Giannoti oversees the project like a worrisome mother hen.

The successes and failures of physics' best and brightest are all laid bare, and Levinson manages to drum up drama in a story whose events are readily accessible on Wikipedia or in news archives. He finds the human in a swirl of theory and leaves us pondering not only the origins of time but the here and now.

BIG MEN (C) - The latest provocation from Rachel Boynton ("Our Brand Is Crisis") is a true waste of a grand opportunity to blow the cover off of the colonial mind-set of American oil exploration in Africa.

Boynton gained incredible access to the deal-makers from inside Kosmos Energy, a Dallas oil company, and the government of Ghana, where oil reserves were discovered nearly a decade ago. And some of her footage is truly revealing and provocative. However, the 99-minute narrative she has crafted is a bit of a mess.

The events unfold over the course of about five years, and small revelations come out in drips and drabs. The film loses its momentum over and over and never finds a groove. Boynton repeatedly cuts from Ghana -- going through the oil dance for the first time -- to Nigeria, which serves as a cautionary tale about American exploitation and African piracy,  both at the expense of Nigerians. The leaders of Ghana vow not to enrich themselves but to raise the standard of living for their people.

Boynton introduces a good deal of characters, and it is sometimes hard to keep track of them. Accents are difficult to understand, so she uses subtitles, but not always, so we miss some of the dialogue. Especially in the first half, as she's setting up her story, she blankets the screen with expository information, making the viewer have to read too much; investing in a narrator would have been much more helpful.

We wait patiently for a Big Reveal and it never comes. The Americans are rather slimy but never evil; the Ghanaians are neither naive nor complicit. Granted, life is not so neat between good and evil, and such stories have nuances. But I can't help but think that this footage in the hands of another filmmaker or editor could have been much more powerful.

Toward the Light

IL FUTURO (THE FUTURE) (B+) - What could have been a tiresome telling of the cliched relationship between an old man and a young woman is made fresh by a wonderful performance from Italian TV actress Manuella Martelli.

Bianca (Martelli) and her brother, Tomas (Luigi Ciardo), are high schoolers suddenly on their own after their parents are killed in a car crash. Bianca loses interest in her studies and takes up smoking, while Tomas skips school to work at a gym, where he falls in with a couple of goons from the team of a local bodybuilder. The boys get the idea that a former American Mr. Universe, known as Maciste (a doughy Rutger Hauer), is hiding a treasure in a safe somewhere in his mansion in town and that Bianca should seduce him and divine the location of the haul.

The first half hour is a bit slow, as writer/director Alicia Scherson (adapting a novel by heralded Chilean writer Roberto Bolano) shows the teens getting used to being independent and welcoming the monosyllabic meatheads Libio and Balones into their cluttered, crowded apartment. The slackers watch a lot of TV (Tomas pirates porn; Bianca is partial to a quiz show hosted by a child), and we often see them sleeping or dozing (as if in suspended animation -- or in the womb?). The three young men become inseparable, conducting shady dealings, presumably involving the purchase of steroids, as they create a mildly homoerotic world (they razz their man Gigi (!) for using a "gay" song while posing at a competition, and the two thugs sleep together in the orphans' parents' room, though each also gets a bit of attention from Bianca).

Soon, Bianca takes over the film, and Martelli, whose sharp features resemble Noomi Rapace's hard-ass Lisbeth Salander in "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," is a revelation. Bianca is stone-faced and glum, claiming that she has become hyper-sensitive to light since her parents died. This subtle teen-vampire theme carries over to the dark, dingy mansion of Maciste, who never ventures outside and rarely lets natural light in.

Maciste (pronounced Mah-CHEE-steh) still maintains remnants of Hauer's rugged good looks. He is now blind, but he recognizes a lovely young woman when she's in his presence. In a nod to his own formative years in the body-building game, Maciste likes to coat Bianca in oil from head to toe. Martelli has a wiry, athletic frame and she is frequently naked and glistening or luxuriously wrapped in a silk robe as she meanders through the many rooms that are classically furnished like in old movies. This is a searching, a yearning, and Bianca is not so much trying to find Maciste's treasure (if it exists at all) but rather her self, her identity, the path forward. She's playing like a child in a cluttered basement. She makes token efforts of peeking behind paintings or under rugs, but she is either truly indifferent to the existence of this stash or wary of betraying the man she is falling in love with.

The nudity feels not at all exploitative (easy for us middle-aged men to say) but primal and natural. Bianca is being baptized anew; Martelli is a chiseled work of art. A slow-motion tracking shot of Bianca being carried by her burly protector is breathtaking; we see a close-up of her face, like an infant's, staring up in appreciation and wonder, and then Scherson cuts to a shot of the ceiling seen from Bianca's perspective. The young woman is being delivered to the world, reborn. What could have been creepy is instead touching and sweet. When Maciste is finally drawn toward the light, the visual is heart-breaking.

This may deserve a higher grade (the sloppiness of the first half held me back), and some viewers might consider this a piece of trash. Attempts at profundity early on and in the final shot confuse more than they enlighten. In the end, "Il Futuro" is lovely and haunting, as elegant as a marble Italian statue.

BONUS TRACK

The closing credits revive the Patti Smith song "Wing," and it caps things perfectly.

Cold cash

A friend in L.A., filmmaker Kyle Rankin ("The Battle of Shaker Heights," "Project Greenlight") is touting his new project, a zombie romp called "Night of the Living Deb," on Kickstarter.

The pitch, featuring Rankin regular Ray Wise ("Twin Peaks"), is rather amusing:



Kyle recently created an entertaining "Revolution"-style post-apocalyptic web series "Nuclear Family."

On the Radar

Two New York Times critics highlight the best of the New Directors/New Films Festival now happening in Manhattan. Here's the piece. The films sound promising.

Included is the latest film from Hubert Sauper, who directed the harrowing documentary "Darwin's Nightmare." For our video pleasure, below is the trailer for that movie.



And here he is talking with Amy Goodman about his latest film, "We Come as Friends," about South Sudan:

That '70s Drift

SMILE (1975) (B+) - This is a dry, satisfying comedy putting Bruce Dern through the paces as chief judge of California's "Young American Miss" beauty pageant.

Dern is Big Bob, a used-car (and RV) salesman who is a fading frat-boy type, active in all the bizarre little fraternal organizations, like the one that kicks men out when they turn 35. Grown-up Girl Scout Brenda ropes him into judging the beauty pageant that she runs like a boot camp. His son, Little Bob, is featured in an undercooked, proto-"Porky's" subplot involving attempts by him and two teen pals to snap secret Polaroid shots of the contestants in various stages of undress. (They do succeed in capturing a topless photo of teenage Melanie Griffith, who that same year, in "Night Moves," also wasn't shy about displaying a pair of breasts that were perkier than Feldon's Sister Bertrille hair flip. The photograph here provides a perfect punch line to the film.)

The script by Jerry Belson ("Fun With Dick and Jane," TV's "The Odd Couple") is full of sarcastic swipes at suburbia and America's consumerist culture. (I got a 12-year-old's giggle out of a drive-through scene at a fast food joint called Major Weenie.) It's tough at times to tell whether he's truly satirizing the last gasps of old-boy clubism or lamenting its demise. Brenda's husband, Andy (Nicholas Pryor, the dad in "Risky Business"), is frustrated with his frigid wife and is feeding his ennui and depression with booze. Despite a tragic domestic showdown, the show still goes on.

Annette O'Toole, in her first major role, carries the load as the lead contestant, who figures she's a shoo-in because her talent is essentially tossing out double entendres and stripping down to a body stocking. She rooms with prim-and-proper Robin, played by Joan Prather, her generation's Kristen Stewart. The pageant itself and the preparation for it provide endless opportunities for sight gags, including one contestant's tone-deaf rendition of "Delta Dawn" that she ends with a saxophone flourish. Brenda decides to spend extravagantly ($2,000) on a big-time choreographer/producer to whip the girls in shape, and he shows up as a burned-out grump embarrassed by such a sell-out gig.

With his parade of men on the brink of middle age, Belson has various outlets for expressing his exhaustion with our culture's media-driven depiction of love, beauty and happiness. Director Michael Ritchie (in a middle of a great run from "The Candidate" to "Semi-Tough") keeps the proceedings understated and cheeky. This holds up well with the next generation's much broader and vulgar variation on the theme, the amusing "Drop Dead Gorgeous," which came at the beauty pageant industry from the burned-out mom point of view.

WISE BLOOD (1979) (B+) - What a bizarre little fever dream of a film. John Huston, late career, interprets a seedy Flannery O'Connor story, setting it in rundown Macon, Ga. (On the Criterion DVD extras, you can hear O'Connor read her classic "A Good Man Is Hard to Find.")

The film stars the unnerving Brad Dourif, whose resume ranges from stuttering Billy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Doc in HBO's "Deadwood," and who was sort of his generation's Mike White. Dourif is Hazel Motes (an anagram of "smote"), a young man returning from military service to find his boyhood home decrepit and abandoned. He is haunted by memories of his grandfather (Huston in flashbacks), a shady preacher who used the young Hazel as a prop in his stage show. (The boy walked around with stones in his shoes and was known to pee himself as he sat on stage during the hellfire sermons.

Hazel is an unrepentant born sinner who finds company by reading the "for a good time" listings on men's room walls. He styles himself as an anti-preacher and vows to start a Church of Christ Without Christ. While it's not clear what he would replace Christ with, a local unstable teen, Enoch (Dan Shor), suggests a creepy museum artifact as a replacement idol.

Hazel becomes obsessed with street preacher/beggar, Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton), who the papers say blinded himself with lime but who appears to be one big scam artist.  Hawks' plain daughter, Sabbath Lily (Amy Wright), has her bug-eyes set on Hazel and is determined to finagle her way into his bed. Ned Beatty has a brief role as a would-be business partner with Hazel. When Hazel rejects him, Beatty recruits some random poor soul (the sublime William Hickey ("Moonlighting"), buys him a cheap suit and sends him out to the curb to compete with Hazel -- with disastrous results.

The script is loose, with stray scenes involving Hazel's escapades in a beat-up jalopy (that he insists, repeatedly, is a "good car," as if it's a stand-in for his own character and reputation). Those bits play like broad "Laugh-In" blackouts and make it seem as if much of the film's action might be taking place in Hazel's hallucinations. (Enoch's obsession with a movie character in a gorilla suit just seems random, playing like a series of outtakes from a '60s beach movie.)

The blatant racism of 1979 Georgia is shocking to the ear. Even though the movie is set in the present day, Hazel's car is a '50s heap, and the street-preacher motif lends a Depression-era vibe to the proceedings. This is a dark comedy that draws its color scheme from the darkness of our souls. It's haunting.

New to the Queue

Spring cleaning ...

A chronicle of scientists' search for the Higgs boson, "Particle Fever."

Finally, after repeated viewings of the trailer, Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel."



The debut feature from actress Valeria Golino, the drama about assisted suicide, "Honey."

The claustrophobic spooker, "In Fear."

A documentary about the flow of oil money in Ghana, "Big Men."

Catherine Deneuve in a melancholy road movie, "On My Way."

Thug Life

MIKE TYSON: UNDISPUTED TRUTH (C-minus) - I know what Spike Lee is going for here, but this cutesy rehabilitation of the former champ as stand-up comic plays like a long, awkward outtake from "Raging Bull" -- those sad scenes of the overweight, over-the-hill Jake LaMotta sputtering nonsense rhymes. Imagine if Scorsese made a 90-minute film of just those nightclub scenes.

Tyson plays to a sympathetic New York crowd in his Broadway one-man show (filmed for HBO), telling foul-mouthed tales from throughout his tough, colorful life. Overweight, out of shape, and frequently pawing at his flop-sweat, Iron Mike can barely make it through each anecdote without wheezing let alone a three-minute round these days. His speech impediment is an actual impediment to such a vaudeville spectacle; several times (and several times too many) he makes reference to the show's speech coach.

The crime of this production is that Tyson waters down his material for middle America. Despite the flurry of expletives and thuggish histrionics, this revisionist history is self-serving and made palatable for the masses. Rape? Cocaine binges? A little ear-nibbling? Oh, you rascal!


The sentiments expressed are beyond trite. His mother, sister and daughter are all angels who flew up to heaven, exploited conveniently to mark the end of each act. The facile script was penned by Tyson's wife, Kiki, and it presents a version of the heavyweight as seen through a spouse's rose-colored glasses. The whole experiment is a cruel hoax; you half-expect him to break out of this crazy character and rampage through the theater like Peter Boyle's tuxedoed monster in "Young Frankenstein."

Throughout, Tyson shows a bizarre inclination toward outdated ethnic and lifestyle stereotypes, repeatedly reminding us that mentor Cus D'Amato was Italian and pantomiming jail rape of his adversaries. A centerpiece spiel about his tedious rivalry with boxer Mitch Green, complete with oafish clowning, goes on forever and kills the show.

I'm a fan of Tyson the boxer, and I admire his ability to work through his lifetime of issues. For the real Mike Tyson, check out James Toback's fascinating 2008 study of the man as he was coming out of rehab and wrestling with his significant demons, while expressing a fairly cogent philosophy of life. (Or re-watch his cameo in "The Hangover.") This guy on Broadway in the Atticus Finch suit? He's a hack and a fraud.


THIS IS THE END (B-minus) - The first 20 minutes of this vanity project -- in which the offspring of Apatow portray exaggerated versions of their public personas -- are pretty fun. But the conceit gets old quickly, and these broad characterizations grow tiring, especially when the apocalypse hits and the special effects flood the screen.

Seth Rogan and Jonah Hill are together again (I loved them both in Apatow's underappreciated "Funny People" from 2009) -- clean cut and popular now -- and they're joined by a who's who frat pack of self-deprecating cool comedians, including Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, Jason Segal, Aziz Ansari, Kevin Hart and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, clowning around at a party at James Franco's house. Michael Cera has a blast as a coked-out asshole pussy-hound, who gets bitch-slapped by (I think) Rihanna. A few women are given bit parts in this male fantasy -- Mindy Kahling is granted a line or two, and Emma Watson gets her "Hunger Games" on. Channing Tatum shows up at the end in a turn that would make Magic Mike blush.


The ostensible story involves Jay Baruchel feeling left out of the SoCal crowd and abandoned by old pal Rogen, in a flat bromance in which all winking hetero hipsters hope to go to heaven. But that's just a quick sketch to give these improv olympics a hint of a beginning, middle and end. Otherwise, this is wall-to-wall pop-culture riffing, often at elevated decibels. And don't dismiss this as just a relentless slog of tossed off dick jokes; writers Rogen and Evan Goldberg also give us several castration sight-gags.

After the Second Coming sets siege on L.A. and ruins Franco's party, the boys go into survival mode, hunkered down in the "127 Hours" star's mansion. They are oh-so-clever in their repartee, surviving in their boy bubble by playing video games and cuddling at night. The shtick dribbles steadily downhill.

The only consistent highlights come from McBride, whose putdown skills run rings around all the others combined. Sure, his range is limited, but when he's in the zone, like in HBO's "Eastbound and Down," no one can keep up with him. He's worth the price of admission.

If you make it all the way through the bloated 107 minutes and the psychotic special effects (some rough beast gets circumcised by a laser beam from heaven), you're rewarded with a predictable epilogue featuring the requisite '90s nostalgia act. From, you know, the heady days of adolescence.

The Rubber Room

ROOM 237 (B) - Can a film be pointless and fascinating at the same time? This celebration of obsessive fans/analysts of Stanley Kubrick's horror classic "The Shining" is definitely non-essential viewing, but it has a subtle way of drawing you in.

Director Rodney Ascher lets five talking heads (headless, i.e., never seen, while scenes from the movie play exclusively) blather on about the messages and symbols they have gleaned (or read into) Kubrick's 1980 masterpiece after repeated viewings. He gives them wide berth, with limited editing; at one point Ascher pauses a scene from the movie while one of the speakers, mid-point, goes off to quiet his child and then returns to finish his thought.

The first 20 minutes are awkward, because it seems that these crazy conspiracy theorists are way more into the movie than you (or anyone you know) could possibly be. But Ascher's technique grows on you. You realize that this isn't a film for "Shining" fanatics; this documentary is aimed at the rest of us who are entertained by such ardent cryptologists. This is a movie about watching movies to the point of obsession. You don't even need to have seen "The Shining" to appreciate this whole exercise.

Some of the points made by the four men and one woman are quite interesting -- the numerology; the revelation of camera tricks; the theory that the movie is about the Holocaust or perhaps about the slaughter of the American Indians, or maybe a combination of both. At the halfway point, one observer launches his grand idea that the movie is somehow Kubrick's explanation of how he was behind the camera for the faking of the footage of the moon landing. At that point, it's time to buckle in for the ride.

Rarely are any of these folks deterred by what seem like mere continuity errors or basic coincidences. Their devotion before the altar of Kubrick is unshakeable. One is allowed to toss out, unchallenged, the claim that the reclusive director had an IQ of 200. Ascher's philosophy of Anything Goes  makes you wonder whether he's taking any of this at all seriously or whether he's maybe exposing his subjects as blathering goofballs.

The most cogent theories suggest that Kubrick's loose adaptation of the Stephen King novel is about duality of the mind and how we deal with horror by convincing ourselves that it's either all in the past or that it never really happened, that it's just a story we've been told. Like "The Wizard of Oz," it's all make-believe. One sophisticated observation suggests that the film, like our dream worlds, incorporates everything that infiltrated our subconscious before it (in cinema and in history), adding just a dollop of perspective that tries to make sense of that toxic stew.

All the while, Ascher hypnotizes us with footage from the film (and from others by Kubrick, revealing patterns) and you can't help but get caught up in the wonders of cinema. In the end, this film is about having fun at the movies and getting lost in a world inside a world.

Every Father's Son

YOU WILL BE MY SON (B-) - This French psychodrama comes off more as soap opera than compelling storytelling, with overly broad characters and over-acting.

Lorant Deutch is the mousy Martin, heir apparent to his father's esteemed winery, if only his dad, Paul (Niels Arestrup, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped") wasn't an unrelenting asshole intent on reducing the young man to a puddle of insecurity. Martin's beautiful wife, Alice (Anne Marivin), is seen as his only indicator of manhood; otherwise, he's belittled by his father as a childhood stutterer with academic but little practical experience or inclination in the field whose weaknesses are apparent because he's a jogger and he rents out a home from his father.

Martin's inheritance is threatened when the beloved longtime estate manager Francois (Patrick Chesnais, in the only authentic performance) is found to be dying of cancer and Francois' son, Phillipe (Nicolas Bridet), flies back to France from California, where he has been running the Coppola winery. Paul latches on to Phillipe and brings him in for the harvest while Francois convalesces from treatment. Meanwhile, Martin reels under his insufferable father's constant badgering, reduced to a bumbling (and once-again stammering) mess.

The film takes on hoary horror-film cliches that distract from the proceedings. Paul has a penchant for adding a few flakes of someone's ashes to each season's batch. And another character channels Lon Chaney Jr. as he seeks to lock another in the airless cask room.

You want to sink your teeth into this one, but the actors playing Paul and Martin are just a bit too cartoonish to believe. A clever ending can't rescue this pulp.

THE BUTLER (C+) - Forest Whitaker deserved better than this sweeping saga of an African-American butler who was a witness to power as a White House servant but who respectfully sat out the civil rights movement.

Lee Daniels ("The Paperboy"!) makes a crucial misstep in deciding to create a sweep of history in the clunky fashion of "Forrest Gump" or "Four Friends." Rather than provide weight to the proceedings, the gimmick becomes a ridiculous exercise in makeup tricks and a simpleton's lesson in U.S. history in the second half of the 20th century.

There's no doubt that Whitaker, as the classy Cecil Gaines, is still a powerful performer who can speak volumes with a look or a gesture. The final 20 minutes of this film can be profoundly moving. But the long strange trip, mostly through the 1960s and '70s, is a facile romp through a baby boomer's scrapbook of threadbare headlines.

The hook here is that Cecil (as we're reminded over and over) is an old-fashioned subservient minority while his son Louis (David Olelowo) asserts his rights as an activist breaking through barriers, popping up at every key event in the civil rights movement and eventually establishing a political career. Meantime, his father has the ear of presidents but stands mostly silent, remaining in his place.

The main fun here is the casting of the key historical figures. Robin Williams is Dwight Eisenhower (by way of Elmer Fudd); John Cusack (memorable as the serial killer in "The Paperboy") hams it up as Richard Nixon (as both veep and as president); and Jane Fonda is perfect as Nancy Reagan. In a major return to the big screen, Oprah Winfrey has a few effective moments as Cecil's alcoholic, long-suffering, cheating wife but mostly seems out of her league, a sassy refugee from "Mama's Family." Cuba Gooding Jr. makes the most of a supporting role as a fellow butler; his reaction to LBJ's insincere TV-friendly pronunciation of the word "negro" is priceless.

The entire structure of the movie is one big misstep. The fast-forward button is your best friend. And if you can handle the melodrama and a view of history suited for a fifth-grade textbook, Whitaker will somehow make you care deeply about one man's noble slog through life.

Modern Family: Part 2

The second of two solid recent releases, left over from late 2013:

AFTERNOON DELIGHT (A-minus) - This really is an unexpected delight. The first feature from veteran TV writer/director Jill Soloway ("Six Fee Under," "United States of Tara") has snap as a comedy as well as heart and insight into the lives of 30-somethings strolling zombie-like through marriage and parenthood.

Kathryn Hahn performs like a star in the lead role of Rachel, a restless, guilt-ridden One-Percenter (her husband creates apps) who finds a young stripper out on the street and invites her to stay at the empty nanny's quarters. In the opening scene, Rachel wallows in her white-woman's burden before her therapist, Lenore (Jane Lynch, finding yet another inappropriate character to bring to life); now she can perform a true act of direct charity and mentor an oppressed sister.

The twist here is that the stripper, McKenna (a wonderfully blase Juno Temple), who's really a full-on sex worker, probably has more to teach Rachel about life than Rachel can teach McKenna. Rachel lives in a bubble. She runs with her Jewish posse of moms who are perpetually volunteering and staging charitable events. Her pals include the type-A ringleader Jennie (our favorite, Michaela Watkins), the sassy blond Stephanie (Jessica St. Clair, showing great timing and improv skills), and the devout Amanda (sourpuss Annie Mumolo).

Rachel's husband, Jeff (a pitch-perfect Josh Radnor from "How I Met Your Mother"), sleepwalks through the household activities, often distracted by his smart phone and tuning out Rachel and their 5-year-old son. The dialogue crackles throughout. When Rachel parades around unabashedly in pantyhose Jeff implores her to get dreassed: "Men wear those on their faces when they rob banks."

It was Rachel's idea, goosed by Stephanie, to go to a strip club with their husbands, where Jeff buys Rachel a lap dance from McKenna. Soon Rachel is sneaking off to McKenna's neighborhood, hoping to run into her. Rachel's present when McKenna's belongings end up on the street, and soon McKenna is ensconced in the mansion, a ticking time bomb.

McKenna puts on a half-hearted innocent act (with baby voice) that no one buys. Temple finds just the right tone of a nihilistic millennial who is comfortable with her body and unashamed about her lifestyle. She offers an open invitation to Rachel to join her with a client who likes having another woman watch. (Jack is played creepily by John Kapelos, whom I remember from Second City's main stage in the '80s.)

Soloway has a sure hand choreographing the upper-crust angst, epitomized by Rachel's social anxiety about not having multiple children like the rest of her friends and suffering through a six-month sex drought. Rachel studied journalism and once wanted to change the world, but now she languishes as an uninspired stay-at-home mom who can't bring herself to actually get on the floor and play with the son who never took to breast-feeding. (She wants to experience the real world, a theme driven home by a running gag about the goal of the "eyes open" orgasm.)

This all comes to a head when the women have a wine night -- where Rachel gets drunk and insults the others -- while Jeff and the other husbands (including Keegan-Michael Key and a sleazy Josh Stamberg) gather for poker night. As they spin digital tunes and smoke and drink, that ticking time bomb is about to read 00:00.

The set-up, execution and resolution are all organically rendered, capturing a privileged world where one young woman who specializes in artificial hook-ups finds all the vulnerable soft tissue in everyone else's relationships. Things crescendo a bit too sloppily, and the ending wraps things up a little too neatly, but otherwise Soloway has crafted a smart story with a top-notch cast, led by its churning star, the Ana Gasteyer look-alike Hahn.