The Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal is subject matter that evokes feelings of sorrow, disgust, confusion, regret, anger—bottom line, it’s one of the most unpleasant news stories to come to light in the past 50 years. Several documentaries have been made about the controversy (most notable is Amy Berg’s penetrating 2006 exposé Deliver Us From Evil), and each one is a horrific experience, for obvious reasons. Now, director Tom McCarthy examines the scandal with his incredible newsroom drama Spotlight, which focuses on the grinding efforts by a small team of reporters at the Boston Globe to break the conspiracy story. It’s a movie that has every right to be entirely dour and depressing—but is not.

It doesn’t deflect or skate around the terrors lived through by the priests’ young victims, and yet it still crackles with electricity. It’s both powerful and—get this—entertaining. The wound inflicted by the perpetrators and those in the Catholic hierarchy who protected them won’t heal anytime soon, but with Spotlight we’re reminded that, in the spirit of free press and honest reporting, there lies hope for justice.

McCarthy doesn’t present the reporters at the center of his story as paragons of journalistic nobility or even as Bostonian hometown heroes. It’s a more modest, workmanlike procedural that’s as, if not more concerned with its characters’ psyches, ideas and idiosyncrasies as it is with their hard-nosed truth-gathering efforts. Heading up the Globe’s Spotlight investigative department is editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), who’s spent years building unshakeable trust within his small team, Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) and Matty Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James).

Their new boss, editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber, in a measured performance that could be his career-best), is slightly cold and semi-robotic in temperament (he and the gregarious Robby share an awkward rapport), but with his arrival he brings Spotlight a mission of utmost importance, motioning them to look deeper into the case of an accused priest. His directive is met with skepticism both by Robby’s team and the Globe’s higher-ups (personified by a John Slattery, playing the boss’ boss’ boss) due to the church’s strong presence in the city, but when the team begins gathering details and testimonies, it becomes clear that the church could very well have been covering up child-sexual-abuse scandals on an unimaginable scale for a long, long time.

The film is gripping in the way it follows the team’s cumulative breakthroughs on their path to uncovering the ugly truth about the Catholic Church to the public because it does so on a personal level. We see each of them put their nose to the grindstone as they search for clues high and low. They haul boxes and boxes of old files and articles from the Globe basement to their offices, sifting through everything by hand. Sacha goes from door to door, pen and notepad in hand, getting to know the tortured victims and their stories. Michael hounds an elusive attorney (Stanley Tucci) who’s worked closely with the victims for years. Robby incessantly pesters a tight-lipped lawyer (Billy Crudup) to give him a list of names that could blow the case wide open. Seeing the characters not just get their hands dirty, but deal with the psychological trauma of studying and living with these atrocities for months on end.

Keaton’s ball-of-fire turn in Birdman didn’t earn him an acting Oscar, so it’s a bit of a surprise, in that context, that he’s put his hat in the awards ring again with a performance that’s so low-key and operates mostly on undercurrents. He’s quiet and extraordinary, though the even quieter Schreiber threatens to steal the show with a cerebral supporting effort that will likely usher in a new era in the Ray Donovan actor’s career. Ruffalo, McAdams and the supporting cast are great as well, and if the Oscars gave out awards for ensemble casts, this lot would easily run away with it. The way the actors interact and move around each other feels so dynamic and pulsating and alive that the gravity of the story will sometimes dissipate for a moment as you’re caught up in the cast’s sizzling chemistry.

Intricate work is done by McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer to ensure the movie can’t be read as a blatant attack on the church. It’s undeniable that their presence in the city was, in a way, mafia-like (they did cover up a bevy of serious crimes, after all), but McCarthy and Singer refuse to exploit the narrative in a way that cheaply villainizes them. The real villain here is the idea of institutionalized secrecy. Staunchly, the filmmakers focus on Spotlight’s investigation and the emotional trials the journalists faced. It’s really a class-act of a movie, with all involved approaching the material as tastefully as possible without losing a modicum of artful intent on the way. Spotlight is the best kind of newsroom drama in that it doesn’t get weighed down by meditations on the virtues of old journalism. Instead, it celebrates the people who changed the world with unglamorous, day-to-day, hard work.

Right about now, a few short weeks away from the premiere of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, it’s pretty easy to forget that Marvel‘s got another movie cooking for release this summer in the form of Ant-Man. The film is set to drop July 17th and the second full trailer has arrived (though the first consisted mostly of a voiceover from Michael Douglas, so might as well consider this the first real one).

While most of the plot details are being kept under wraps, what we do know is that Ant-Man follows Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), a reformed small time crook, who falls under the mentorship of Hank Pym (Douglas). To save the wildly powerful Ant-Man suit, Lang must put his thieving skills back to work and pull off an impossible heist, all while the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

After all the drama with Edgar Wright finally settled, Adam McKay punched up the script, and Payton Reed (The Break-Up, Yes Man) stepped in to direct. Rudd’s supporting cast is pretty top-notch: Judy Greer, Hayley Atwell, John Slattery, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Pena, and Corey Stroll as Darren Cross/Yellowjacket.

So, there are a ton of questions left unresolved here (most of them being in the vein of, how great would Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man have been?), but Rudd is a lot of fun with the right material, and this trailer shows that he’s been given some room to breathe and be Paul Rudd. And, while this Ant-Man might be a more vanilla, more paint-by-numbers-Marvel-movie than the dream version could have been, we’ll be lining up July 17th to watch two tiny guys fight on a model train set.

Ant-Man Trailer

Bluebird is a quiet, understated film from first time filmmaker Lance Edmands on the ripple-effect tragedy projects on an isolated town. Mother nature plays a vital part in the film, demonstrating her unforgiving ways extend even to the most remote and silent areas. The film is a straightforward yet honest look at how people deal with their own morality, and by treating the characters as humans instead of criminals, Edmands allows for contemplative evaluation in unexpected areas.

Winter time in Maine can be very cold, but a small logging town experiences a different kind of chill when tragedy strikes. On one particularly cold morning, Lesley (Amy Morton) notices a small bluebird fly inside the school bus she drives during her routine end-of-day cleaning. She pauses only for a moment, staring at the out-of-place bird, distracting her attention away from her duties. The next morning she realizes the severity of this distraction. As she opens the bus doors to begin her day, Lesley notices a lifeless kid near the back she failed to notice the day before. Turns out that the boy went into hypothermic shock and now remains in a coma after spending the night passed out on the frigid bus.

But is Lesley solely to blame for this misfortune? Sure, she neglected her job-related responsibilities in an honest oversight. But what about the child’s parent? After all, no calls were made about a missing boy into the school or the local police. That’s because Marla (Louisa Krause), the boy’s single parent, spends more time out partying than attending to her child, and she completely forgot about picking him up. To make the situation even sadder, Marla seems largely unaffected, feeling only a fraction of the guilt Lesley does. When Marla weeps it seems to be only because she feels guilty about not feeling enough guilt, and perhaps realizes for the first time that she doesn’t make a good parent.

Thankfully, Bluebird isn’t concerned with which character deserves the most blame. Both Lesley and Marla are equally at fault; one legally and one morally, there are no true villains in this story. Instead, the film is more about how characters deal with the aftermath of the accident. Morton’s constant state of regret makes it easy to feel sorry for her character, especially during moments when she can no longer contain her emotions. But Morton never over-dramatizes the grief her character experiences, which is difficult when the character spends the entire film in an overwhelming state of mental suffering. Krause didn’t have the luxury of playing the favorable character, but her sympathetic performance demonstrates just enough humanity to not completely condemn her. Some of the supporting characters, such as Lesley’s daughter (Emily Meade) and husband (John Slattery), don’t quite make the impact they should have, even as side characters, given the objective of exploring how one event affects multiple lives. Minor script issues aside, their performances were also commendable.

Cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Tiny Furniture) captures the dreary landscapes of a desolate town on grainy 35mm film stock. Falling snow and cold breaths depict the winter season outside, while a blue-ish tint and muted aesthetics imply the coldness characters feel on the inside. These awe-inspiring visuals pair well with the moody script to create a chilling atmosphere.

Small town tragedy stories like this have been done many times before, most recently in Little Accidents, but they’re often paired with a heavy-handed lesson or the pursuit of justice through finger-pointing. Bluebird wisely side-steps these tropes by not telling us how to feel about the situation, nor forces us to choose sides. The film also expresses the underlying theme of isolation: the lone bluebird, an abandoned child, a small community surrounded by mountains, and a single parent. Edmands finds the right balance between atmospheric undertones and understated storytelling, managing to get solid performances from his cast—it’s easy to forget we’re watching the work of a first-time director.

Following the recent loss of one of the best (if not the best) performers of our generation, it feels like a gift to be able to watch Philip Seymour Hoffman grace a movie screen in any capacity. It’s something to be savored, but in God’s Pocket, one of his last ever roles, his talents, along with the talents of the rest of the uniformly brilliant cast, are done little justice. Everyone struggles here, including first time director John Slattery (Mad Men), who grasps and grasps but can’t manage to find a singular vision for the jumbled, lifeless tiny-town crime flick.

Hoffman plays Mickey Scarpato, an exhausted-looking fellow who lives in the titular South Philly neighborhood with his bored wife Jeanie (Christina Hendricks) and rotten stepson Leon (Caleb Landry Jones, who maximizes the few minutes he’s given). Leon is a terror of a shit-talker, infuriating his co-workers at his factory job to no end. Or rather, to his end: After pushing one of the boys to the brink with awful racist insults, he’s clobbered on the head and…well…so begins Mickey’s landslide of problems. He must bury the boy to appease the unappeasable Jeanie, which leads to him racking up major debt and getting mixed up with dirty mafia types.

The tone, writing, and performances in God’s Pocket are all incredibly awkward, which is a surprise considering the artists at work. Hoffman just can’t get his hands on the character of Mickey, with a fluctuating accent and emotionally ambiguous reactions to just about every situation. He clicks best with John Turturro, who plays his Sopranos-esque best friend and confidant Arthur, but even their chemistry doesn’t feel completely natural.

The characters are written too loosely, oscillating between working class clichés and unreadable moralism. Jeanie begins to take a liking to Philly celebrity journalist Richard Shellburn (Richard Jenkins), an old scumbag who makes a pass at her while sitting on Leon’s twin bed. The infidelity seems to be born out of her resentment toward Mickey, but her inner struggle is conveyed with the depth and subtlety of a pea-brained bimbo by Hendricks, who is capable of so much more.

There’s something off about the script (written by Slattery and Alex Metcalf), which tries very hard to mix quirky small-town humor with flashes of shocking violence. Both the comedic and dramatic elements are woefully uncalibrated and unbalanced, canceling each other out at every turn. When Arthur’s elderly mother shoots a goon in the chest at the family store, the man bleeding out on the floor, it’s hard to figure out the scene’s intended effect. The tired “old lady turns out to be a badass” gag is clearly comedic, but as Turturro kicks the dying man in the stomach screaming “This is my family!”, it all just feels very, very uncomfortable.

The neighborhood of God’s Pocket is well-crafted by Slattery and his crew, and well shot by cinematographer Lance Acord. The costumes and sets are rightly gritty, conveying the perpetual hard-drinking slump of similar salt-of-the-earth communities. The visual presentation is convincing–it’s just too bad that it’s the only thing convincing about this mediocre production. The stakes are unclear, the story is aimless, the performances are half-hearted, and those thirsting for another shining showcase of Hoffman’s gift will be sorely disappointed.

God’s Pocket trailer

Hide Your Smiling Faces

Set in a beautifully photographed forested town in the rural North East, Hide Your Smiling Faces by Daniel Patrick Carbone is a moving, richly atmospheric coming-of-age film in the vein of Terrence Malick. It centers on two young brothers who, following the death of a friend, are forced to come to terms with the bitter taste of mortality, both in their own way. It’s a hauntingly accurate depiction of the dark side of boyhood and puberty. The boys wrestle with overwhelming emotions they don’t have the faculty to contain, and they wrestle with each other as well, literally, in their lush, deep green surroundings. Carbone and DP Nick Bentgen capture the landscape in amazingly composed, majestic shots that serve as the perfect framing for the boys’ bubbling emotions. Performances are good across the board, though the young actors feel more naturalistic and raw than the seasoned adults, whose polished skills feel less appropriate to the material. Highly recommended.

Bluebird

When Lesley (Amy Morton), a good-natured school bus driver, is distracted by a pretty bluebird perched inside her bus, she fails to discover a young boy hiding in a back seat during a routine end-of-the-day check-up. The boy goes into hypothermic shock when he’s left in the freezing cold overnight. Set in a frigid industrial town in Maine, Bluebird follows the families of both the boy and the bus driver as they’re stricken with guilt, grief, and inner turmoil. Morton and Louisa Krause (who plays the boy’s mother) are fantastic, and the supporting cast (including John Slattery, Margo Martindale, Emily Meade, and Louisa Krause) back them up solidly, despite their characters feeling like quickly-sketched small town stereotypes. Despite the horrifying nature of the incident at the center of the drama, the film lacks a sense of urgency or intensity, making it feel emotionally distant. Director-writer Lance Edmands shows promise, however, even though his potential isn’t fully realized here.

Rezeta

Following a free-spirited, 21-year-old Albanian fashion model whose jet-setting lifestyle has brought her to Mexico City, Rezeta is a somewhat messy, but peculiarly charming indie romance film starring talented non-actors. While at first Rezeta (Rezeta Veliu) has fun in her new environment, sleeping around with various handsome men, her romantic side begins to yearn for a more stable relationship. She finds this in a tatted-up punk rocker named Alex (Roger Mendoza), whose shy, bad boy personality draws her in. Rezeta’s flirtatious tendencies begin to form cracks in their relationship, and Alex eventually reaches a breaking point, though Rezeta won’t let him slip away without a fight. Director-writer Fernando Frias has an ear for naturalistic dialog, and he pulls good performances out of his actors. He makes Mexico City look as colorful and vibrant as Rezeta’s personality.

Congratulations!

Writer-director Mike Brune’s nutty missing-person drama Congratulations! will appeal to those who enjoy films about the stranger side of suburbia, like Blue Velvet or Quentin Dupieux’s Wrong, which played at Indiefest last year. When an 8-year-old boy named Paul mysteriously disappears during a house party, Mr. and Mrs. Gray (Robert Longstreet and Rhoda Griffis) are left frozen in a state of utter confusion. To the rescue comes Detective Dan Skok (John Curran), who believes that there is “no such thing as a missing person; only missing information”. All evidence points to Paul still being somewhere in the Gray family home, so Dan takes up residence, incessantly searching for clues, driven by the nagging memory of a similar case. As everyone’s mind begins to unwind, their behavior, including Skok’s, grows more bizarre by the minute. Brune conjures some deliciously weird shots (the image of the entire house covered in missing person posters is unforgettable), and the film’s pacing is spot-on. The cast is constantly, constantly deadpanning, which is hilarious at times, grating at others.

It’s a concept we’re all familiar with: a soldier comes home from war and finds it difficult to readjust to normal life. So what is it that makes Return something we’ve never seen on screens before? In her debut feature film, Liza Johnson interestingly subverts the typically expected gender roles of this genre, giving us a strong female lead in Kelli (Linda Cardellini). With so many soldiers being women these days, it seems about time.

Clearly displaying that she appreciates just how much this topic has been dealt with, Johnson makes a point of avoiding many of the cliches we’re used to. There are no flashbacks to the war, no moments of hysterical crying or yelling – and in perhaps the bravest move of the film, no drama. Kelli is rather against talking about her time in the Middle East, a trait that we come to see as fairly unhealthy. Her girlfriends are full of questions, eager for her to open up in the belief that it will be a cathartic experience for her, but Kelli refuses to be the victim. “There were a lot of people who had it a lot worse than me,” she repeats, as though it’s something she has programmed into herself in order to get by. But when she casually says “I wasn’t raped, assaulted, or bullied, like a lot of women; I had it good,” one of the most poignant lines of the film comes almost in the form of a throwaway. Her matter-of-fact tone and the sheer lack of gravitas it’s given mean it rings with truth – this isn’t something she says for the attention, but something that is so genuine it’s barely worth mentioning. Here, in the understated simplicity and the chilling honesty, lies the beauty of Johnson’s film.

Everything about Cardellini’s performance screams muted power, and it’s done with great effect, conveying all of her emotions through a filter: a chronic detachment to the world around her. But her supporting cast are frustratingly underused, particularly Michael Shannon in the role of her husband Mike. While it’s nice to not simply see an age old story from a different perspective, the focus on Kelli becomes a little dull, making it harder to feel an emotional connection to any of the other characters. We can sympathize when Kelli seems to go through the motions of daily life in a robotic manner, but even her husband seems really quite humdrum. He’s neither great nor awful at anything, but instead entirely average. Her friends seem shallow and obsessed with trivialities to the point of irritation. Her job, and the characters that come along with it, are also tedious – but would stapling various pieces of metal to each other have been interesting before the war? It’s not really a surprise that she’s bored when she comes back; she should have been bored before she left.

It doesn’t help that Johnson’s fallback events are alcohol issues, marriage troubles and custody battles. Among well written lines, such quintessential events in a returning soldier’s life make the script seem disjointed and lacking in depth; they take something vital away from the truly moving moments, such as when Kelli spontaneously sleeps on the floor of her children’s room. There are so many of these silent, tender scenes that convey Kelli’s internal struggle far more effectively than something as predictable as her getting a DUI, but Johnson tries to force a basic progressive plot on what is otherwise an interesting dilemma. Her saving grace is the unexpected yet surprisingly believable twist in the second half, making it so much clearer to see just how hopeless Kelli’s situation is. I won’t reveal too much about it, but it’s an interesting way to bring home the despair felt by this woman – it removes the distance of her reality by making her seem more vulnerable.

Kelli is transformed by her time away – that much is clear. But we as an audience never see what life was like before she left, instead having to guess at it from her current interactions. This, paired with the two-dimensional nature of the other characters, makes it difficult to feel emotionally involved in the film; we’re often left wanting to feel more but just unable to. Return may have its flaws, but it is nevertheless a refreshing take on a sensitive topic. The problem is that no matter how powerful Cardellini’s performance is, a silent sufferer taking so much of the screen-time just doesn’t do enough to pull on our heartstrings.