Finalist: The New York Times, by Manohla Dargis

By Manohla Dargis

The perfect 21st-century female looks like a million bucks though costs a great deal more. In “Ex Machina,” Alex Garland’s slyly spooky futuristic shocker about old and new desires, the female in question is a robot called Ava, a name suggestive of both Adam and Eve. Ava has a serene humanoid face and the expressive hands and feet of a dancer, but also the transparent figure of a visible woman anatomy model. Beautiful and smart, sleek and stacked, Ava is at once decidedly unsettling and safely under lock and key, which makes her an ideal posthuman female.

“Ex Machina” is itself a smart, sleek movie about men and the machines they make, but it’s also about men and the women they dream up. That makes it a creation story, except instead of God repurposing a rib, the story here involves a Supreme Being who has built an A.I., using a fortune he’s made from a search engine called Blue Book. Mr. Garland, who wrote and directed, isn’t afraid of throwing around big names or heavy ideas, and he has pointedly named the search engine after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1930s “Blue Book.” The trouble with thinking machines, Wittgenstein writes, isn’t that we don’t know yet if they can do the job, but “that the sentence ‘a machine thinks (perceives, wishes)’ seems somehow nonsensical.” And it seems so because such a machine is not (yet) known to us.

“Ex Machina” skips right over that little problem and, like all good science fiction, asserts that the apparently implausible (thinking machines) is absolutely here and now. It makes the imaginative leap, as does Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a software grunt who’s won a visit with his employer, the reclusive Blue Book mogul, Nathan (a terrific Oscar Isaac). Shortly after the movie opens, Caleb is being helicoptered to Nathan’s remote compound, a modernist retreat that’s part Zen palace, part patrician man cave, with verdant views, smart-house technology and one curiously mute female employee, a zomboid beauty named Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno). This isn’t a house, Nathan explains while giving a tour; it’s a research facility in which he’s been working on an artificial intelligence project.

That would be Ava, a conceptual knockout played by the sensational young actress Alicia Vikander. Intricately rendered from her peekaboo belly to the mesh skin that covers much of her visibly artificial parts, Ava looks at once familiar and new, distinctly human and thoroughly machined, evoking by turns the robot in “Metropolis” and a parade of puppet and android vixens. With computer-generated imagery obscuring much of her body, Ms. Vikander builds her controlled performance incrementally, at times geometrically, with angled gestures, head tilts and precision steps. As Ava begins to expresses herself more, making eyes at the exit, Ms. Vikander, who studied ballet, may also remind you of that dancing doll Coppélia, if by way of a “Blade Runner” replicant.

Wowed by Nathan’s attentions or maybe by Ava’s proportions — and presumably by the whole groovy setup that makes the house seem like a docked spaceship — Caleb signs onto Nathan’s endeavors. These at first mostly involve the dudes’ hanging out and Caleb’s chatting with Ava through the thick glass partition that, inexplicably, separates her from the rest of the spread. To explain Caleb’s role, Nathan invokes the Turing test (the imitation game named for its creator, Alan Turing), which hinges on the idea that if a person doesn’t know that he or she is talking to a computer, it makes sense to call the computer intelligent. Except that Caleb, as he points out, knows that he’s talking to a machine. Airily dismissing that nit, Nathan narrows his eyes and asks how Ava makes Caleb feel.

With that appeal to feeling, the movie is off and running. The lab starts to heat up, as does Caleb, who, even as he intellectually spars with Nathan (they’re not remotely in the same weight class), becomes emotionally invested in Ava, friendly chat by chat, shy smile by smile. If, as Wittgenstein also writes, “the human body is the best picture of the human soul” then Caleb’s body when he’s with Ava is an entire Instagram feed of male surrender, from his widening eyes to slackening mouth. Physiognomy is often destiny for actors, and a close-up of Mr. Gleeson’s slender, bobbing throat — stretched across the screen as if offering itself to a knife — nicely suggests why he landed this role.

Mr. Garland, a novelist turned screenwriter making his directing debut, sets an eerily, cleverly unsettled stage. The prowling camerawork establishes a sense of absolute control that fits with this strange fishbowl world and is accentuated by copious production design details, including the glass walls and ubiquitous security cameras. He plays with visual contrasts — Mr. Isaac’s compact, muscled body and Mr. Gleeson’s long, drooping one, picture windows that look out onto an expansively lush landscape and windowless rooms that register as upmarket prison cells — that dovetail with the narrative’s multiple, amusingly deployed dualities: confinement and liberation, agency and submission, mind and body. It sounds more serious than it plays because while Mr. Garland wants to tease your brain, he’s an entertainer, and in time ditches science and philosophy for romance and action.

Some of what follows conforms to template, though there’s more here than slick genre moves, including Mr. Isaac and Ms. Vikander, who suggest complexities not on the page. While Nathan’s charisma throws the triangulated drama off balance, “Ex Machina” belongs to Ava, whose depths of meaning enrich the movie and then engulf it. Ava has antecedents in “Pygmalion,” “Metropolis” and elsewhere. Yet even as she transcends the human-machine divide, she defies categorization because of the radical autonomy she shares with the weird sisters inhabited by Scarlett Johansson in “Her,” “Under the Skin” and “Lucy,” and Tatiana Maslany’s clones in the TV show “Orphan Black.” These are the new heroines: totally hot, bracingly cold, powerfully sovereign — and posthuman.

By Manohla Dargis

Amy Schumer is my kind of superhero — she stops haters dead. As fans of her Comedy Central show, “Inside Amy Schumer,” know, there’s almost nothing that anyone can say about women, her included, that she hasn’t already said herself. Her powers of deflection are the perfect approach in a neofeminist moment in which women are calling out sexists, sometimes against vicious pushback. Think that she’s not thin enough or pretty enough? She intercepts hateful slurs like those and turns them into ferocious comedy gold that exposes chauvinism as the absurdity it is. She can’t be stereotyped away as a sourpuss who just needs to chill out, lie back and smile. She’s already smiling, and she’s killing it, joke after joke.

In “Trainwreck,” Ms. Schumer plays, well, Amy, a more vanilla version of one of her comically flawed women, who aren’t as remotely together as they think or may appear to be. The movie, which was directed by Judd Apatow from her script, is often extremely funny, even if it never approaches the radicalness of her greatest, most dangerous work. Mr. Apatow’s talent as a movie director is opening up a space on screen in which comic performers (and some total stiffs) can be effortlessly funny together. In “Trainwreck,” he creates a roomy, comfortable vehicle stuffed with second bananas (both professional zanies and guest-starring squares), who support Ms. Schumer as she tosses out jokes, pops her eyes, deploys her deadpan and shows off her gift for old-school physical high jinks, often in heels and minis.

Ms. Schumer drew on her own life for the story, which she turned into something of a sexual bildungsroman cum romantic comedy jumping with pop-cultural references and edged with razored social cultural critique. Her on-screen doppelgänger works as a writer for a men’s magazine, S’Nuff, a blistering, jokey title that sums up the idiocy of lad mags and their annihilating views on women. That the editor running it is a woman, Dianna (a peerless Tilda Swinton, in a swingy shag and gloomy spray tan), isn’t surprising. Ms. Schumer can be a merciless equal-opportunity takedown artist. If she doesn’t let women off the hook, it’s because she knows that sexism isn’t exclusively a guy thing; like stupidity, it is a people thing.

“Trainwreck” is pretty straight stuff: Amy likes to have sex with men and isn’t interested in monogamy. That makes her like a lot of women (studies show!), if not like those who generally flounder through the average dippy romantic comedy, where gender norms are rigorously enforced and the only things contemporary about the characters are their designer threads and gadgets. What’s energizing and exciting about Amy, especially when compared with the sexless cuties populating rom-coms, in which female pleasure is often expressed through shopping, is that her erotic appetites aren’t problems that she needs to narratively solve and vanquish. She likes sex, thanks, as an early montage of her shuffling through various men nicely illustrates.

Amy does have issues, which give the movie a fuzzy focal point, namely that she needs to believe she’s worthy of a man’s love or something. The movie suggests that this has to do with her adored father, Gordon (Colin Quinn), who’s introduced in the opener delivering uncommon words of advice to the 9-year-old Amy and her younger sister, Kim. “Monogamy isn’t realistic,” Gordon declares, instructing his daughters to repeat after him. Fast forward 23 years, and Amy has done just that, seemingly taking those words to heart by freely taking men to bed. She’s breezily accepting of her choices, though falters when she receives a one-two punch: She falls for a monogamous-minded surgeon, Aaron (Bill Hader, sweetly vulnerable), and her father’s bad health dramatically worsens.

Ms. Schumer doesn’t worry too hard about what Amy wants and why, preferring to go with the story flow and use the passage from swinging singleton to cuddling coupledom to cover the joke spectrum, from the comedy of erections to the trouble with spooning. The postcoital nuzzling bit echoes some laughs that the standup comic Elayne Boosler generated about men, women and intimacy (“I think you should make love and go to your corners”) in her landmark, self-financed 1985 comedy special, “Party of One.” A pioneering figure in the 1970s New York standup scene, Ms. Boosler is one of those female pop-cultural warriors (like Clara Bow, Mae West, Beyoncé, etc.) who insist on claiming their sexuality as, you know, their own.

The movie’s giddy first half zips along more smoothly than the second, which sputters when the story takes a short, awkwardly managed detour into tragedy. Ms. Schumer trained as an actress, and her tears in “Trainwreck” are fairly persuasive, if not as contagious as her laughs. Yet while they’re narrative necessities, they’re also tonally at odds with the movie’s overall buoyancy. (Mr. Apatow’s sentimental side is crystallized by a close-up of a weeping Amy, a shot that underscores the obvious.) As with a lot of debuts, there are a few different stories crammed into “Trainwreck,” which is Ms. Schumer’s first produced film script, and the least satisfying one is the melodrama about the daughter struggling to come to terms with her feelings for an aggressively unlovable father who begot, bred and loved her.

Ms. Schumer fares better when she’s slaying symbolic fathers, as in a brutally funny short scene, tucked in a montage sequence, in which Amy and Aaron have sex on a bench in front of a bridge. Much like the flourish from George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” that slips onto the “Trainwreck” soundtrack, this image initially sneaks in like yet another homage to Woody Allen’s 1979 film, “Manhattan,” and the most famous image in his work. The allusion quickly turns into an evisceration of that movie’s gauzy romanticism when Amy jokes that she thinks this is where “Woody Allen met Soon-Yi.” It sounds cheap only if you forget that the other romantic couple in “Manhattan,” the one not immortalized on the bridge, was played by Mr. Allen and a teenage Mariel Hemingway.

It’s gratifying to see Mr. Apatow, who in recent years has worked with the likes of Kristen Wiig and Lena Dunham, continue to put his show-business power to good by joining forces with a smart woman. For too long, the bromances (a subgenre that he popularized) and its corollary, the wedding comedy, have segregated heterosexual men and women into seemingly irreconcilable camps. After “Bridesmaids” blew up, my colleague A. O. Scott astutely suggested that perhaps what it revealed wasn’t that women can be funny but that, as he wrote, “men and women can’t be funny at the same time, or direct their humor at one another.” Similarly to Ms. Dunham, who in her show “Girls” brilliantly grapples with what heterosexual romance means today, Ms. Schumer may be helping change that dynamic.

As with any young talent, she has a way to go, including as a screenwriter. “Trainwreck” has groaners and dead spots (including a dreary art-film parody with Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei), and its jokes about race don’t have the penetrating wit that her material on sex and gender does. Like a lot of white people, Ms. Schumer can fumble when latching onto race; unlike a lot of white performers, she takes on race directly. The looming appearance of LeBron James, who plays himself as well as Aaron’s odd-couple-like best friend, may be a heat-seeking gimmick (he’s the movie’s biggest star), but he’s a surprisingly limber comic presence and he helps set up a sharp scene in which Aaron challenges Amy’s bumblingly false claim about having black friends.

Amy wiggles through that embarrassment, as she does repeatedly. That could be seen as having your cake and eating it too, but mostly it adds another ding to an often ridiculous, imperfect, recognizable character. (This is, after all, a woman who, when she cuts back on her drinking, donates her booze to a derelict played by Dave Attell.) At times in some of her bits, Ms. Schumer has, like other comics, used fakey apologies as get-out-of-jail cards, as a way to both toss out insults and smilingly refuse responsibility for them. In “Trainwreck,” as in her best work elsewhere, Ms. Schumer is at her strongest when she insists that women aren’t distressed damsels but — as they toddle, walk and race in the highest of heels, the tightest of skirts, the sexiest, mightiest of poses — the absolute agents of their lives and desires.

By Manohla Dargis

A space western and a blissed-out cosmic high, “The Martian” stars Matt Damon as an American astronaut who, like a latter-day Robinson Crusoe, learns to survive on his own island of despair. At once epic and intimate, it involves a dual journey into outer and inner space, a trip that takes you into that immensity called the universe and deep into the equally vast landscape of a single consciousness. For this accidental castaway, space is the place where he’s physically marooned, but also where his mind is set free — a dynamic that of course invokes moviegoing itself.

Perhaps that’s one reason Ridley Scott keeps returning to deep space. This is the third of his films — after “Alien” in 1979 and “Prometheus” in 2012 — set beyond the dark side of the moon. Hands down it’s also the funniest, loosest and most optimistic of the group, at once an ode to far-out adventuring and to terra-firma home, a sweeping, old-fashioned entertainment and a plaintive portrait of solitude as both a creative necessity and a danger. It also serves as a nice plug for NASA, which has returned the favor by pushing the movie on its website. (On Monday, scientists announced that signs of liquid water could be seen in photographs taken on Mars by a camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, timing that suggests NASA certainly has the whole
cross-promotion thing down.)

Based on the novel “The Martian” by Andy Weir that Drew Goddard has turned into a fast-moving, streamlined script, the movie focuses on Mark Watney (Mr. Damon), who, during a windstorm on Mars, is accidentally left behind by his team. Mr. Scott likes the action to hit hard and fast: One minute Watney is joking with his space buddies — Jessica Chastain leads a crew that includes Kate Mara and Michael Peña — and minutes later he’s been hooked like a fish by some flying metal that knocks him out. Believing him dead, the crew takes off, as does the movie, which soon becomes a tale of two planets with initially competing narratives, one involving Watney’s efforts simply to stay alive and the second centered on NASA’s post-disaster strategizing.

After some self-surgery to deal with the rod spearing his gut, along with some anxious stock-taking — he has plenty of tunes but not enough air, water and food to survive for long — Watney gets down to the business of living, including farming. “I’m not going to die here,” he helpfully mutters, helpfully because he talks out loud a lot whether just murmuring to himself or recording a video entry in his growing space log. The log keeps the words flowing in what could have been a fairly quiet movie, creating an animated lively babble that approaches the chummy feel of a video face chat. Watney makes for affably pleasant if worrisome company, and if there isn’t much mystery to him it’s because the purity of his struggle doesn’t leave him, at least, time for deep dives into questions of existence.

Although Watney is isolated at first, with no means of communicating with Earth, the parallel narrative means that he’s never truly alone, unlike, say, Crusoe (before Friday) or Tom Hanks’s character in “Cast Away” (before Wilson), whose profound isolation is critical to how you experience them and their stories. Like these other marooned souls (including the 1964 “Robinson Crusoe on Mars”), Watney is physically and psychologically apart, but even before he pings Earth with his big news, you know people are mourning him. The Earth scenes interrupt these solitary interludes with other faces and voices, keeping the narrative jumping, but they also assert that no matter how lost and seemingly forgotten, no one is alone because to be human fundamentally is to exist with other people. We are social, therefore we are.

Gradually, the two stories become one as Watney and everyone else gets to work. At NASA, various brainiacs take hammers and tongs to physics at both the Johnson Space Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where supernerds take on the logistics of a rescue mission. The movie gently thumps several issues: It’s unambiguously on the side of science and rationalism with glints of manifest destiny, American can-do-ism and a little flag-waving folded in. It is also about willing yourself out of the lonely room — call it Mars or your head — and into the world, however inhospitable, so you can breathe the air and drink the water (Watney learns to make both) and yearn for others. It’s a moving testament from the 77-year-old Mr. Scott, whose art comes in all shades of dark.

Here, by contrast, he seems almost giddily attuned to the buzz of human endeavor. The NASA scenes with their friendly, familiar faces — Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig and Jeff Daniels — unfold with charming predictability with corrugated brows, hushed and raised voices, acres of glowing screens and warehouses of space stuff. The vibe is of serious, smart people doing serious, smart work for the good of the rest of us. Mr. Ejiofor’s enormous, pleading eyes signal how grave the situation is, while Ms. Wiig’s prickly warmth and Mr. Daniels’s Daffy Duck mouth-flapping keep the whole thing from getting too heavy. Mr. Scott is a brilliant assembler of casts, and he knows how to organize groups so they seem to naturally fit, and can bob and weave in unison with his roving cameras.

Unlike some advertising directors who transitioned to filmmaking, he has always been a good director of actors, though it’s instructive that he uses performers who are either forceful enough screen presences or strikingly beautiful enough (usually both) to stand up to his lush visual style, who can meet the challenge of his meaningfully complex sets and natural vistas. When the film works, the bold drama of his visuals and the dramatic boldness of his stories flow together, becoming all of a narrative piece. Some of these pieces resonate with other meanings, like the red-rock buttes in “Thelma & Louise” and the similarly rust-colored formations in “The Martian” that are suggestive of John Ford’s Monument Valley films. Sometimes here, Mr. Scott seems to be returning to his own work, which may be why you can see Susan Sarandon (Louise), with her protuberant gaze and thin-skinned tremulousness, in Mr. Ejiofor. And of course Mr. Scott loves tough women, so it’s no surprise that Ms. Chastain and Ms. Mara are on board.

“The Martian” has sweep but not the vanity that creeps into many large productions, turning them into bloated vehicles for directorial self-aggrandizement. Mr. Damon’s Everyman quality (he’s our Jimmy Stewart) helps scale the story down, but what makes this epic personal is Mr. Scott’s filmmaking, in which every soaring aerial shot of the red planet is answered by the intimate landscape of a face. There’s a touch of Cecil B. DeMille in his cinematic DNA (for better and occasionally for worse), though, like many who saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” during their esthetically formative years, there’s even more Stanley Kubrick. But Mr. Scott is very much his own artist, one whose reputation as a visual stylist has at times obscured that his great, persistent theme is what it means to be human.

By Manohla Dargis

In “Bridge of Spies,” a gravely moody, perfectly directed thriller, Steven Spielberg returns you to the good old bad days of the Cold War and its great fictions, with their bottomless political chasms and moral gray areas. With a story that has been plucked from the historical record, given a nice dusting and a little sweetening, the movie centers on a 1962 spy swap involving a Soviet mole, Rudolf Abel; an American U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, shot down by the Soviets; and an American student, Frederic L. Pryor, who had ended up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall at the worst possible time. All were chess pieces in a ghastly game that, the film balefully suggests, continues without end.

Steven Spielberg on the Cold War and Other Hollywood Front LinesOCT. 14, 2015
Opening in 1957, when the Cold War was atomically hot, “Bridge of Spies” offers up a world of shadows and the men who haunt them for country, company (as in C.I.A.) and ideology. Like some of Mr. Spielberg’s other recent movies, notably “Lincoln” and “Munich,” this one is a meticulously detailed period piece that revisits the anxieties of the past while also speaking to those of the present. Yet it also feels lighter than those films, less weighted down by accreted history or maybe by a sense of duty to its significance. There are still stirring speeches and swells of important music – this is Steven Spielberg – yet for all the darkness there is also laughter, which finally may be the only reasonable response to the specter of worldwide nuclear annihilation.

In “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” Stanley Kubrick faced that threat with a demented whoop and the terminal sight of Slim Pickens riding an atomic bomb as if it were a bronco. Mr. Spielberg doesn’t embrace the dark side as brutally as Kubrick, or with such finality, but over the years he has become more comfortable admitting its existence. (There are nods to Kubrick in “Spies,” including on a marquee.) Even so, Mr. Spielberg is a canny entertainer and for “Bridge of Spies” he has roped in Tom Hanks, an approachable star who can go dark but wasn’t built to remain there long. He plays the movie’s voice of conscience, a kind of Mr. American Integrity named James B. Donovan, the lawyer who represents Abel and is swept up in high-stakes espionage.

The film opens in an unlikely spy den, a shabby studio in a Brooklyn tenement where Abel – a magnificent Mark Rylance – is staring into a mirror. Thin of hair and body, the ends of his mouth pulled down into a permanent frown, Abel looks wrung out, juiceless. He’s as drab as the room in which he is painting a self-portrait, daubing on color that help turns the scene into a masterpiece of bleak. This sallow man evokes the start of “The Age of Anxiety,” W. H. Auden’s era-defining 1947 long poem, which begins with a figure (displaced, in his way, like Abel) staring at his reflection in a barroom mirror and musing about his double’s world — a vision that seems perfectly in keeping with the stealth intellectualism of Ethan and Joel Coen, who rewrote the film’s original script by Matt Charman.

The opening of “Spies” is sublimely quiet. There’s no music and scarcely any dialogue, just a series of quick-sketch scenes of Abel painting, wordlessly receiving a telephone call and retrieving an encoded message in a hollowed-out nickel. (This introduction evokes other labor-intensive overtures like those in “Wall-E” and “There Will Be Blood.”) It’s as if Mr. Spielberg had wanted to clear the stage for Mr. Rylance, who fills the relative silence with a performance that’s similarly restrained and pointillist, characterized by a fixed gaze, and sagging shoulders and mouth that create a quizzical counterpoint to his raised brows and creased forehead. Abel looks like a defeated man, one whose passions fled long ago even as the occasional sharp flickers in his eyes indicate otherwise.

These early scenes with Abel are unwaveringly beautiful, filled with fine-grained production texture, like the white handkerchiefs draped across his cast-iron bed, the too-large jacket that makes this slight man look as if he were shrunk inside it, and the razor blade (“Made in USA”) he uses to pry open the hollow nickel. He isn’t the only character in these scenes — he’s being tailed by F.B.I. agents who soon arrest him — but he might as well be. In foregrounding Abel, the movie insists on his primacy and his hold on it never eases even when Mr. Hanks, in a warm, generous turn, shows up as Donovan. As the story expands to include Powers (Austin Stowell) and Pryor (Will Rogers) it regularly circles back to Abel, whose double life means he’s both the enemy and a good soldier.

Insistently dialectical, the movie is filled with such doubling, of seeming opposites who are set up as mirrors of each other: Abel and Donovan, Abel and Powers and, of course, the Soviet Union and the United States. This isn’t a matter of forcing false equivalences (though, really, it will all be one big ash heap after nuclear Armageddon), but of posing philosophical questions and positing legal truths, like those that Donovan presents when he explains why he’s defending Abel. He explains himself a lot, largely, it seems, for the benefit of the audience, as when he tells a C.I.A. operative with a German surname, Hoffman (an excellent Scott Shepherd, twitchy and steely), that it’s the Constitution that makes them both American. It’s as corny as an Iowa summer, corny enough to make you weep.

Throughout Mr. Spielberg plays subtly with different registers of realism, from the sweat-soured naturalism of Abel’s apartment, where you can almost smell the neighbor’s boiling potatoes, to the more cartoonish aspects of Donovan’s family life and espionage encounters. The family is as picture-perfect and plastic as a 1950s sitcom (or a later Roy Lichtenstein canvas), with Amy Ryan dolled up as Mrs. Donovan in Donna Reed-style pearls, heels and a Pepsodent smile. Like the silhouetted dark figures that loom throughout, reverberating with intrigue and film-noir dread, Donovan’s wife and children don’t so much register as distinct individuals but as manifestations of an America that seems more and more unreal the closer Donovan gets to yet another double, East Berlin, with its haunted faces and streets.

Every movie is about its own historical moment, though some are more overt or adamant about connecting the past with the present. “Bridge of Spies” is, like most of Mr. Spielberg’s films, a consummate entertainment that sweeps you up with pure cinema. As the story clicks along – Abel is convicted, Powers and Pryor snared and Donovan tapped to handle the swap – Mr. Spielberg heats up the drama with some action, throws in crowds and chaos, and transforms ordinary spaces like a home, an office and a street into battlefields. None are more ominous than the funereal rooms in which cold, gray men move lives like chess pieces. (The supporting cast includes Peter McRobbie as Allen Dulles, the C.I.A. director, and Mikhail Gorevoy as Ivan Schischkin, a Soviet mystery man.)

With its scenes of prisoner abuse, arguments about American justice and all the cameras that telegraph the emergence of the surveillance state, “Bridge of Spies” suggests that the Cold War has its own twin in the war on terror. That’s hardly controversial, yet it’s something far too few filmmakers engage. In 1966, John le Carré, that great bard of the Cold War, responded to a Russian critic who said he had fanned its flames in his work, including “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.” Mr. le Carré countered that what concerned him was the cost, “in moral terms,” to the West in its fight. “How long can we defend ourselves – you and we,” he wrote, “by methods of this kind, and still remain the kind of society that is worth defending?” A half-century later, Mr. Spielberg is asking the same question.

By Manohla Dargis

All of creation converges in “In Jackson Heights,” a thrilling, transporting love letter from Frederick Wiseman to New York and its multi-everything glory. Set in the Queens neighborhood of its title — where people from across the globe are staking a claim on America while speaking Spanish, Tibetan and Punjabi — Mr. Wiseman’s latest documentary is a movingly principled, political look at a dynamic neighborhood in which older waves of pioneers make room for new, amid creeping gentrification. It’s an immigration story, so it goes without saying that it is also about New York and the United States — that “teeming nation of nations,” to steal a phrase from Walt Whitman.

Times Square is often called the crossroads of the world, but Mr. Wiseman suggests that that title more rightly belongs to Jackson Heights. The neighborhood, a blocky parcel formerly known as Trains Meadows and about 30 minutes by subway from Midtown Manhattan, was created in the early 20th century as a suburblike development. The area’s modern history is inscribed in the elevated train (the line opened in 1917) that runs along Roosevelt Avenue, its southernmost border, and which is glimpsed and heard throughout the movie. Other chapters of that history can be seen in the garden apartment houses that were built in the 1910s and ’20s, in the garden homes built after 1924 and in the gaudy storefront signs that today ornament the main commercial strips.

That history is there for the reading, but Mr. Wiseman isn’t a pedagogue and doesn’t wield a hammer, much less a wagging finger. Like anthropologists (or some poets), he studies other people and their behaviors, finding meanings in the visible world. Put another way, he immerses himself in a world — call it his fieldwork — observes it closely and brings back the evidence. Crucially, to expand on this ethnographic comparison, he also edits his documentaries, in addition to doing the sound work. “Cutting a documentary,” he said in the 1970s, “is like putting together a reality dream, because the events in it are all true, except really they have no meaning except insofar as you impose a form on them, and that form is imposed in large measure, of course, in the editing.”

And because Mr. Wiseman doesn’t use voice-overs or talking-head interviews or, just as important, impose an obvious narrative arc on his material, or channel it through a solitary heroic figure (the “relatable” human portal), he expects you to do your interpretive share. To that end, he offers people, patterns, informative signposts and, in this documentary, actual street signs, including 37 AV and 77 ST, and 82 ST and ROOSEVELT AV. He bookends “In Jackson Heights” with parallel extreme long shots of the urban landscape, opening with an overhead shot of a daytime street tableau and closing at night with a jewel-like city aglow with bursts of fireworks. In between these paired images he writes an epic of a city, its people and the democratic process in tentative and kinetic action.

Mr. Wiseman plunges you into Jackson Heights like a no-nonsense tour guide, dropping you into the ’hood and immersing you in sights and sounds with a succession of harmoniously framed shots of people, corners, flags (a Brazilian banner ornaments one shot, while the Stars and Stripes waves in another) stores and bins of brightly colored vegetables. Working with his longtime cinematographer, John Davey, Mr. Wiseman also pops into a Muslim school, a Jewish center, a meeting of gay and transgender people, a City Council office and the local headquarters of Make the Road New York, an activist organization dedicated to Latino and working-class people. Every so often, he pauses a while as someone delivers a song, an argument, a speech, a complaint or a tribute — what great talkers he finds!

Mr. Wiseman’s subject is, famously, institutions, or, as he put it in another 1970s interview, “a series of activities that take place in a limited geographical area with a more or less consistent group of people being involved.” Those institutions can seem as direct and familiar as the halls and teachers in “High School” (1968); other times, as in “Central Park” (1989), the idea of the institution emerges in the nexus of children’s playgrounds, city policies and the public commons. Similarly, while “In Jackson Heights” is an exploration of a particular neighborhood, Mr. Wiseman advances the idea that what makes a city — and makes it great — are the people in its streets and stores, its barbershops and laundromats, who together are weaving its cultural, social and political fabric.

Over time, as the movie returns to specific spaces, touching on human rights and gentrification along the way, it develops into a deeply stirring ode to the immigrant experience and American identity. Each person and storefront sign carries a story, opens another world, from “Articulos Católicos” to “Himalayan Driving School” and “Whole Baby Goat.” (Animal lovers should be aware that a bird is slaughtered in one scene.) Mostly, these stories mingle peacefully, despite worried brows and references to past violence, as with a shot of the street sign for Edgar Garzon Corner, named for a gay man who was beaten to death in 2001 — an image that Mr. Wiseman answers with images from a pride march. By the time fireworks are soaring, your heart is, too.

In his preface to “Leaves of Grass,” Whitman wrote that the genius of America is found in its “common people” rather than in its executives or ambassadors, colleges or churches. He found an “unrhymed poetry” in “their manners speech dress friendship — the freshness and candor of their physiognomy — the picturesque looseness of their carriage … their deathless attachment to freedom — their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean — the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states.” Whitman’s words are a glorious, rhapsodic catalog of everyday Americans, as well as a poem in their own right, one that for the last half-century Mr. Wiseman, in documentary after documentary and in his own generous fashion, has been expanding on beautifully.

By Manohla Dargis

There’s no risk that Katniss Everdeen, the warrior who has led the charge against oppression in “The Hunger Games” movies, can ever return to her current incarnation. Even if she and her world are rebooted back into franchise existence by a ravenous studio, her moment was now. Katniss, as played by Jennifer Lawrence over three years and four blockbusters, has evolved from a backwoods scrapper in the first movie into a battle-scarred champion and an exemplar of female power on screen and off — and the battles she’s fought have extended far beyond the fictional nation of Panem.

So, yes, of course Katniss is back, just as promised by the clumsy title of her last movie, “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1.” In “Part 2,” she has returned as destined to finish the fight, defeat the enemy and send off a big-screen series that has had an astonishing run both in cold-cash terms and in its meaningful symbolism. She’s ready. Since 2012, when the first movie landed, Katniss has grown into her role as a savior, an evolution that parallels that of Ms. Lawrence, who entered the series as a Sundance starlet and leaves it as one of the biggest stars in the world. Both have grown exponentially, rising to the demands of their loving audience.

And “The Hunger Games” has triumphed partly because it means so many different things to so many people. It’s a story of war and peace, love and bullets, pegged to a girl-woman who fights for her family, her friends and the future. It’s aspirational and inspirational, personal and communal, familiar and strange, and it speaks to the past as well as the present, sometimes unnervingly so. Suzanne Collins, who wrote the books, took her cues from reality television, the Iraq war, Roman gladiator games and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and then filtered her influences through a heroine who embodies the adage that it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees. The result was a great character on the page and a transcendent one on the screen, where women tend to be sidelined or trapped in the virgin-whore divide.

If Katniss escaped that old binary it’s because Ms. Collins created a character who exists outside the traditional confines of the feminine-masculine split, and because the movies have stayed true to that original conception. At once a hunter and a nurturer, Katniss is tough and teary, stoic and sentimental, which give her layers that reflect her changeable inner states as well as her public and private identities as daughter, sister, lover and leader. It’s instructive that she’s worn her most overtly glamour-girl outfits as part of the farcical role forced on her by the totalitarian government that rules Panem, having been dolled up with makeup and smiles for the televised sideshows that accompany the murderous games of the series title. She’s since graduated to basic battle black or unisex clothing that’s suggestive of a Dystopian Gap.

“Part 2” more or less picks up where the last movie left off, with Katniss and the rest of the rebel forces closing in on the government and Panem’s leader, President Snow (the invaluable Donald Sutherland, leading with an insouciant self-amused smile). There are no real surprises, though many familiar faces, some of whom (Jeffrey Wright and, more movingly, Philip Seymour Hoffman) flash by so quickly that they feel like guests who have popped in only to say goodbye. As with a lot of contemporary franchises, this one stocked the supporting roles with veterans who have given ballast to a largely unmemorable young cast, including the insipid twosome — Josh Hutcherson as Peeta and Liam Hemsworth as Gale — who have wanly bookended Katniss from the start.

Like the previous two movies, “Part 2” was directed by Francis Lawrence who, like most franchise filmmakers, was not hired for the quality of his mise-en-scène but for one job: to not screw up an extremely valuable property. (The first was shepherded by Gary Ross, whose cinematographer, Tom Stern, alas, also departed the series.) And, so, mission accomplished, largely with a lot of conversational face-offs and regular bursts of showy violence that sometimes turn panoramic, allowing you to admire the scale of the apocalyptically dressed sets. To that instrumental end, the actors hit their marks while running and gunning amid the gray rubble and black ooze, although Mr. Lawrence does raise some nice shivers in a tunnel sequence, making the horrific most out of the dark.

“Part 2” looks much like most contemporary dystopian future worlds, one that’s by turns similar enough to ours to be reassuring and different enough to be diverting. What makes the material still feel personal — other than the yearslong investment and love that transform entertainments into fan communities — is the combination of Katniss and Ms. Lawrence, who have become a perfect fit. Ms. Lawrence now inhabits the role as effortlessly as breathing, partly because, like all great stars, she seems to be playing a version of her “real” self. It’s the kind of realness that can give you and the movie a jolt, as in a scene with Ms. Lawrence and a sensationally raw Jena Malone that thrusts it into that place where heroes and villains give way to something like life.

It’s crucial to the conception of Katniss that most of the character’s more emotionally plangent scenes have been with other women, including her family, friends and other Hunger Games combatants. Some of this can be chalked up to casting and, together with Ms. Lawrence, Ms. Malone, Natalie Dormer, Patina Miller and Michelle Forbes make one of the toughest groups of women to band together on screen since Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” his ode to exploitation cinema and its chicks. This series has had its share of robust male assistance (notably from Mr. Sutherland and Woody Harrelson), but it’s been distracting and at times more than a little amusing that Katniss’s love interests are played by the blindingly bland brotherhood of Mr. Hutcherson and Mr. Hemsworth.

Intentional or not, their casting ensured that in the movies, just as in the books, Katniss was never going to be upstaged by a love interest. “The Hunger Games” may have shocked readers and viewers with its child-on-child violence, but even more startling and certainly far more pleasurable has been the girl-woman at its center who can lead troops like a reborn Joan of Arc, yet find time to nuzzle the downy lips of her male comrades before returning to battle. Her desire is as fluid as her gender, whether she’s slipping into froufrou, shooting down enemy aircraft, kissing a boy or taking a punch. Unlike a lot of screen heroines, she has never settled into stereotype, which, despite the whole dystopian thing, makes her a lot like the contemporary girls and women watching her.

That has helped make Katniss the right heroine for these neo-feminist times, the you-go-and-fight girl who has led the empowerment charge at the box office and in the public imagination, often while slinging a bow and arrow borrowed from Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt. It wasn’t long before Katniss was making more like a latter-day Athena, the Greek goddess of war, even as this very human girl-woman was also suggesting a vibrant new take on the American Adam. You may not know the name, but you know the type: He’s the hero whom the critic R. W. B. Lewis, in his 1955 study of 19th-century literature (and an “American mythology”) described as being “emancipated from history, happily bereft from ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race.”

However mythic this figure — individual, self-reliant, “fundamentally innocent” — the illusion of freedom he enjoys is meaningful, Lewis argues, because it makes for fiction capable of “profound tragic understanding” rather than hopelessness. Even inadequately, this Adam struggles because, as with his biblical namesake, “the world and history lay all before” him; by contrast, these lay all behind Katniss, who has endured history, violence and death. Yet she goes forth into her world because she too has an illusion of freedom, one which has spared us the nihilism polluting too many movies and has meant that she is neither Adam nor Eve but something else. And it is only by being this something else (not the Girl, not the Virgin or the Whore) that she has been able both to love and to fight, including against the big bad patriarch.

The success of “The Hunger Games” series has been itself, in its bottom-line fashion, a rejoinder to another intolerant regime, that of a movie industry that continues to treat women on and off the screen as a distraction, an afterthought and a problem. A few months into its run, the second installment, “Catching Fire,” became the first movie with a lone female lead to top the annual domestic box office in four decades. That’s astonishing because it reveals the historical depths of the industry’s inequities even while it speaks to the audience’s embrace of this series. There are all sorts of reasons that viewers have flocked to these movies, including the studio hard sell, but I like to think the numbers prove that, in rallying to Katniss’s side, they’re also backing the other liberation struggle she has come to represent.

By Manohla Dargis

The laughs in Spike Lee’s corrosive “Chi-Raq” burn like acid. Urgent, surreal, furious, funny and wildly messy, the movie sounds like an invitation to defeat, but it’s an improbable triumph that finds Mr. Lee doing his best work in years. Set in contemporary Chicago, where sidewalks are washed with blood, and human hearts beat to the rhythm of gunfire, it takes as its inspiration Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” the fifth-century B.C. comedy in which women organize a sex strike to stop men from making war or, as Mr. Lee puts it with a vulgar flourish, “No peace, no [expletive]!”

The war in “Chi-Raq” is strictly a domestic affair, waged by black male citizens on other black citizens. The main combatants are rival gangs, the Spartans and the Trojans, who have helped turn Chicago into a war zone — hence the tragic, bleak portmanteau title. The gangs seem to take some of their cues from the real Crips and Bloods, whose blue versus red color coding has been translated into Spartan purple and Trojan orange. Flying their respective colors, the Chi-Raq gangs violently run their hoods, or at least think that they rule. There are, as Mr. Lee hammers in rat-a-tat-tat, other economic and political forces in play that, like shadow armies, are doing their murderous part.

Subtlety isn’t in Mr. Lee’s dictionary, which makes him a fine fit for a bawdy comedy that tosses out an orgiastic aside in its first sentence. Gleefully blunt, “Lysistrata” is thought to have been first performed in Athens at a festival of Dionysus, the god of wine. It opens with its title character fretting that the women she’s asked to meet haven’t materialized. Lysistrata’s brilliant, daft idea is that together they can end the bloodshed with a full-body shutdown, which, after much scheming and whining, they do, leaving the men incredulous, desperate and tumescent. Some of the men end up delivering their lines erect, which the ancient Athenian players expressed by wearing artificial phalluses. (Somehow I don’t remember that detail from school.)

Mr. Lee doesn’t go that far, alas, but he does go cinematically all out with exuberant set pieces, musical numbers, bursts of phantasmagoric color, oceans of tears and blunt-force rhetoric. Written in verse, sometimes rhymed and sometimes not, “Chi-Raq” is at once old and new, from its polymorphous narrative strategies to its musical forms (hip-hop, jazz, gospel, R&B), and by turns fiercely funny and deadly sincere. It rolls along smoothly and fitfully, carried by the boldness of Mr. Lee’s conceit, his love of the form and the largely excellent company of artists he’s gathered, including Samuel L. Jackson as Dolmedes, a loquacious Greek chorus of one who pops in and out with a cane and in a series of lusciously colored suits.

There’s no such character in “Lysistrata,” but Dolmedes’s name and sartorial flamboyance evoke Dolemite, the titular pimp played by the comic Rudy Ray Moore in the 1975 blaxploitation flick. Among the routines that Mr. Moore (1927-2008) was known for is the Signifying Monkey toast, a boasting, humorously raw recitation and linguistic practice (like the Dozens), involving a sly, agitating monkey that provokes a fight between a lion and an elephant. To an extent, Dolmedes registers as a trickster, a wily figure who always shows up at the right time to deliver exposition with a wink and some showy wordsmithing. At the same time, Lysistrata — a magnificent Teyonah Parris — is stirring up trouble, angling to dethrone kings like her guy, a gang leader, Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon).

“Chi-Raq” can be read as an illustration of signifyin(g), to borrow the spelling of Henry Louis Gates Jr., in how it rewrites “the received textual tradition,” as he puts it in his book “The Signifying Monkey.” There are limits to every rewriting, of course, to how far a revision riffs on the idioms, ideas and forms of its influences. Mr. Lee’s most radical move in “Chi-Raq,” which he wrote with Kevin Willmott, is to transport a classical Greek play to a Chicago that is highly fictional and painfully real, geographically specific and unmistakably metaphoric. That this is a movie about the United States is as obvious as the Stars and Stripes that late in the movie looms (as in “Patton”) behind Dolmedes, even as it is also a showbiz showcase for the likes of Dave Chappelle and Wesley Snipes.

The movie opens with a series of shocks, including a red, white and blue graphic of the United States made entirely of guns. This illustration, which creates a visual bookend with Dolmedes’s flag, forms part of the overture, which features a succession of blood-red lyrics blown up on the screen (from the song “Pray 4 My City”), each word reverberating like a shout:

Police sirens, Everyday
People dyin’, Everyday
Mamas cryin’, Everyday
Fathers tryin’, Everyday.

Mr. Lee then raises the stakes with a series of chilling statistics that juxtapose American deaths in the Iraq war from 2003 to 2011 (the movie puts the number at 4,424) with homicides in Chicago from 2001 to 2015 (a staggering 7,356, according to the movie).

These numbers are followed by the voice of the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a real Roman Catholic priest who preaches and agitates in Chicago and is an outspoken critic of gun culture and the National Rifle Association. Father Pfleger, after saying that it’s young black men killing young black men, closes the overture with a prayer: “Heaven help us all.” The flag, the statistics, the guns make for a powerful, unsettling opener, perhaps especially because the movie opens in a week of high-profile mass shootings — and not in Chicago. By virtue of the heaviness of their documentary truth, though, which grows weightier with each number and word, these elements almost torpedo the movie before it begins. Like many filmmakers who draw on the historical record to shore up their fictions, Mr. Lee has to work hard to rise to the challenge of the real world.

That he pulls off “Chi-Raq” is a testament to his cinematic imagination, which he cuts loose with split screens, direct address, surreal fillips and outsize performances. With the composer Terence Blanchard, who wrote the wall-to-wall score, and the cinematographer Matthew Libatique, Mr. Lee creates a “Lysistrata” that entertains, engages and, at times, enrages as it takes on violence, ogles lady parts and expounds on greed and democracy. He stumbles plenty, including in an awkward, didactic scene in which John Cusack, as a priest, delivers a sermon for a dead child. (Jennifer Hudson plays the mother.) Yet while you can argue with Mr. Lee’s ideas, cinematic and political, few directors shake you up this hard, creating laughter that is as bitter as tears.

John Boyega and Daisy Ridley in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Mr. Boyega (Finn) and Ms. Ridley (Rey) are joined by Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron) in making a charismatic, contemporary trinity. (David James/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures).

By Manohla Dargis

The big news about “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is — spoiler alert — that it’s good! Despite the prerelease hype, it won’t save the world, not even Hollywood, but it seamlessly balances cozy favorites — Harrison Ford, ladies and gentlemen — and new kinetic wows, along with some of the niceties that went missing as the series grew into a phenomenon, most crucially a scale and a sensibility that are rooted in the human. It has the usual toy-store-ready gizmos and critters, but it also has appealingly imperfect men and women whose blunders and victories, decency and goofiness remind you that a pop mythology like “Star Wars” needs more than old gods to sustain it.

J. J. Abrams, the director of “The Force Awakens,” may not have the makings of a god or an empire builder like George Lucas, but he turns out to be what this stagnant franchise needs: a “Star Wars” superfan and pop culture savant. Given that the fans have been doing much of the heavy lifting for a while, holding up the franchise even as the filmmakers let them down with some titanic clunkers (“Attack of the Clones” — why, George, why?), it seems fitting that the new film was directed by one of their own. Mr. Abrams was 11 when he saw the original “Star Wars” back in 1977; by the time he was a teenager, he had a gig cleaning Steven Spielberg’s old student movies.

You could call Mr. Abrams a love child of Mr. Lucas and Mr. Spielberg, born to the blockbuster world they helped make. At its best, that world taps into the wonder that can come with new visions and realms, sending you into raptures with earthly delights or those in galaxies far away. Too often, though, this world gives privilege to special effects and anonymity over story, character, directorial vision or just a little creative intelligence. Instead, moviemakers bludgeon viewers, numbing them into quiescence with pictorial monotony punctuated by apocalyptic clamor, with the same repetitive story beats, explosions, close shaves and grindingly unsurprising saves. In these pictures, good invariably triumphs over every evil except moviemaking formula.

Mr. Abrams became a small-screen name with television shows like “Alias” before making a discouraging transition to film directing with the third, prophetically titled “Mission: Impossible.” He scaled down nicely for “Super 8,” getting his Spielberg on with a story about some kids who help an alien return home. Even better was his “Star Trek,” an enjoyable big-screen gloss on the 1960s series that he followed with a disappointing sequel, taking two steps back. Mr. Abrams is still trying to transcend the worst of the blockbuster imperative, but with “The Force Awakens,” he shows that he hasn’t stopped learning and that the lessons have begun to pay off. (He’s backed by some of his regular crewmates, notably the cinematographer Dan Mindel and the editors Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey.)

Mr. Abrams’s smart idea — an overarching ethos, really — in “The Force Awakens” is to have returned to basics, largely by dispensing with a lot of clutter. This is no small thing in a complicated movie universe in which the series sequence doesn’t even align with the release dates: The original 1977 film, for instance, is the fourth in the series and now known as “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope.” “The Force Awakens” is the seventh chapter but also the first film in what’s being called a sequel trilogy. This sounds headache-inducing, but it just means that “Force” picks up years after “Return of the Jedi” (1983), the third release, left off, after Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) prevailed over villainy with his sister, Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), and their pal Han Solo (Mr. Ford).

Much as in the real world, though, the war has dragged on, and now Luke, Leia and Han have been succeeded by a charismatic, talented trio — played by Oscar Isaac, John Boyega and Daisy Ridley — who look more like the multitudes humankind contains, a genuine diversity infrequently represented in our movies. Yet while these three are variations on the original holy trinity, part of what makes them contemporary isn’t just their skin colors but also the slippery playfulness of their roles. Mr. Isaac, as a resistance pilot, Poe Dameron, suggests a next-generation Han, but so does Mr. Boyega as Finn, stormtrooper turned refusenik. The one seemingly unambiguous note is that the new-school Luke Skywalker is a young woman, a desert scavenger named Rey (Ms. Ridley), who shares Luke’s skill set and love of natural fabrics.

That Finn saves Rey and she saves him in turn isn’t a new dynamic; Princess Leia, created in the wake of second-wave feminism, was always a thoroughly liberated woman, whether shooting a laser gun or working a metal bikini. Leia is now a resistance general and played with a muted twinkle and tasteful up-do by Ms. Fisher. Like Mr. Ford, she has become more of a supporting player in a crowded room that also includes Adam Driver, who brings intensity and flowing physical grace to Kylo Ren. Among the strongest creations of Team Abrams, Kylo Ren is a kind of baby Darth Vader who throws tantrums in inky-black robes while wearing a leather-and-metal head appliance that looks like a domination mask by way of the grille of a 1952 Chevy.

Written by Mr. Abrams, with Michael Arndt and the “Star Wars” veteran Lawrence Kasdan, “The Force Awakens” takes off with a battle and closes on a meaningful moment of quiet. Mr. Abrams doesn’t pile on the mayhem, and, for the most part, the pace remains fast without being overly frantic. In the inaugural skirmish, you can follow Poe Dameron as he darts across the screen; he doesn’t get lost among the shadows and editing, a clarity that remains fairly consistent. As for the story, well, it’s as simple as ever, with the usual complications and a bestiary of cute, cuddly and loathsome creatures (humanoid and not) with odd names and habits that keep this circus jumping. It’s the old war of all against all, with fur and feathers, snouts and slapstick, and a guest appearance by Oedipus.

It’s no surprise that paternal problems have made a comeback in “The Force Awakens,” which folds in a father-and-son schism that evokes the one between Luke and Darth Vader. Even so, the more interesting Oedipal struggle may turn out to be between Mr. Lucas and his cinematic sons, starting with Mr. Abrams. He has delivered a more seamlessly diverting movie than Mr. Lucas has in years, but his most far-reaching accomplishment here is casting Mr. Isaac, Mr. Boyega and Ms. Ridley — a Latino, a black man and a white woman — in this juggernaut series. It’s too early to know how this will play out as the whole thing evolves, but the images of Mr. Boyega and Ms. Ridley each holding a lightsaber are among the most utopian moments in a Hollywood movie this year.

Over the decades, as “Star Wars” grew into an entertainment machine, it took on the aspect of a cult. That, at any rate, is how it could feel to those of us looking at it from the outside in, especially as one mediocre movie after another with noxious creations like Jar Jar Binks crushed the box office. Mr. Abrams may be as worshipful as any “Star Wars” obsessive, but in “The Force Awakens” he’s made a movie that goes for old-fashioned escapism even as it presents a futuristic vision of a pluralistic world that his audience already lives in. He hasn’t made a film only for true believers; he has made a film for everyone (well, almost). So, will Rey, Finn and Poe save the day? Will they battle Kylo Ren and Oedipus, too? Stay tuned for the next potentially thrilling, or at least pretty good, adventure.

By Manohla Dargis

In “The Revenant,” a period drama reaching for tragedy, Leonardo DiCaprio plays the mountain man Hugh Glass, a figure straight out of American myth and history. He enters dressed in a greasy, fur-trimmed coat, holding a flintlock rifle while stealing through a forest primeval that Longfellow might have recognized. This, though, is no Arcadia; it’s 1823 in the Great Plains, a pitiless testing ground for men that’s littered with the vivid red carcasses of skinned animals, ghastly portents of another slaughter shortly to come. The setting could not be more striking or the men more flinty.

“The Revenant” is an American foundation story, by turns soaring and overblown. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu (“Birdman,” “Babel”), it features a battalion of very fine, hardworking actors, none more diligently committed than Mr. DiCaprio, and some of the most beautiful natural tableaus you’re likely to see in a movie this year. Partly shot in outwardly unspoiled tracts in Canada and Argentina, it has the brilliant, crystalline look that high-definition digital can provide, with natural vistas that seem to go on forever and suggest the seeming limitless bounty that once was. Here, green lichen carpets trees that look tall enough to pierce the heavens. It’s that kind of movie, with that kind of visual splendor — it spurs you to match its industrious poeticism.

If you’re familiar with Mr. Iñárritu’s work, you know paradise is generally short-lived, and here arrows and bullets are soon flying, bodies are falling and the muddy banks of a riverside camp are a gory churn. Glass, part of a commercial fur expedition, escapes with others on a boat and sails into an adventure that takes him through a crucible of suffering — including a near-fatal grizzly attack — that evokes by turns classics of American literature and a “Perils of Pauline”-style silent-film serial. Left for dead by two companions, Glass crawls out of a shallow grave and toward the men who abandoned him. It’s a narrative turn that suggests he, like so many before him, is one of D. H. Lawrence’s essential American souls: “hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.”

The movie is partly based on “The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge,” a 2002 historical adventure by Michael Punke inspired by the real Hugh Glass. In 1823, Glass signed on with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company for an expedition on the upper Missouri River that almost did him in when Arikara Indians attacked the group and, sometime later, he was mauled by a grizzly sow that may have been protecting her cubs. The bear should have killed Glass. Instead, its failure to do so — along with Glass’s frontier skills, some help from strangers and the indestructible romance of the American West — turned him into a mountain man legend and the inspiration for various accounts, including a book-length poem and a 1971 film, “Man in the Wilderness.”

The historical Glass was somewhat of a question mark, which makes him a spacious vessel for interpretation. Mr. Iñárritu, who wrote the script with Mark L. Smith, fills that vessel to near overflowing, specifically by amplifying Glass with a vague, gauzily romantic past life with an unnamed Pawnee wife (Grace Dove) seen in elliptical flashback. By the time the movie opens, the wife is long dead, having been murdered by white troops, and Glass’s son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), has become his close companion. The son’s name evokes James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawk-eye (“The Last of the Mohicans”), and together Glass and Hawk create an intimate, familial bulwark — and a multicultural father-and-son dyad — in a wilderness teeming with assorted savages.

Who exactly the savage is here is never much of an issue; as a sign scrawled in French spells out in one scene, everyone is. Mr. Iñárritu likes big themes, but he isn’t given to subtlety. There’s a shocker of an image, for instance, in “Amores Perros,” his feature debut, which expresses his talent for finding the indelible cinematic shot, the one you can’t look away from even when you want to, and also underscores his penchant for overstatement. One of those multi-stranded stories that he helped repopularize (“Babel,” etc.), “Amores Perros” includes a murder capped by the vision of human blood spilled on a hot griddle. This being a big moment as well as an illustration of Mr. Iñárritu’s sensibility, the blood doesn’t just splatter, it also sizzles. It’s filmmaking as swagger.

I thought of that artfully boiling blood while watching “The Revenant,” with its butchered animals, muddled ideas, heart-skippingly natural landscapes and moment after moment of visual and narrative sizzle. What makes too many of his moments, ghastly and grand — an arrow piercing a man’s throat, the beatific face of a beloved, a man scooping the innards out of a fallen horse, the enveloping softness of the dusk light — isn’t the moment itself, but that little something special that he adds to it, whether it’s a gurgle of blood in a throat or the perfectly lighted sheen of a hunk of offal. Mr. Iñárritu isn’t content to merely seduce you with ecstatic beauty and annihilating terror; he wants to blow your mind, to amp up your art-house experience with blockbusterlike awesomeness.

Sometimes, as with “Birdman,” Mr. Iñárritu’s last movie, this desire to knock the audience out pays off. “The Revenant” is a more explicitly serious, graver and aspirational effort. Working again with a team that includes the director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (whose credits include “Birdman”) and a handful of special-effects companies, Mr. Iñárritu creates a lush, immersive world that suggests what early-19th-century North America might have looked like once upon an antediluvian time. Yet he complicates the myth of the American Eden — and with it the myth of exceptionalism — by giving Glass an Indian wife and mixed-race son. It’s a strategic move (and another bit of sizzle) that turns a loner into a sympathetic family man. It also softens the story. Instead of another hunter for hire doing his bit to advance the economy one pelt at a time, Glass becomes a sentimentalized figure and finally as much victim as victimizer.

From Davy Crockett to Kit Carson, the mountain man has long had a hold on the American imagination and recently made a revisionist appearance in the form of Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of “The Hunger Games.” The mountain men in “The Revenant” are drawn along more traditional and masculine lines, from their bushy beards to the buckskins and bulky furs that at times make them look almost indistinguishable from the animals they kill. Mr. Iñárritu is entranced by this world, with its glories and miseries, its bison tartare and everyday primitivism, which he scrupulously recreates with detail and sweep. He’s particularly strong whenever Glass, employing that old can-do pragmatism, goes into survivalist mode to cauterize a wound, catch a fish or find shelter.

But Mr. Iñárritu blows it when he moves from the material to the mystical and tries to elevate an ugly story into a spiritual one, with repeated images of a spiral and even a flash of homespun magical realism. Worse, he makes Glass not just a helpless witness to a murder that’s a stand-in for the genocide of the Indians, but also a proxy victim of that catastrophe. It’s disappointing in a movie that offers much and that actually points to another foundation story that emerges when one of Glass’s companions, Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), tries and fails to get paid for his labor. He learns too late that the system that turns people and animals into commodities is rigged against men like him. And while the simple facts of that system may be too brutal to feed the ambitions of a movie like “The Revenant,” we know that the system nevertheless helped build a nation.

On many fronts, women push for opportunity in Hollywood.

The Director Gap: Female filmmakers and their fight for equality. The last of three articles. 

By Manohla Dargis

The American movie mainstream needs a revolution — and if some women have their way, it just might get one. It’s time. Not because Ava DuVernay wasn’t tapped as a best director in the recent Academy Award nominations, even though her acclaimed movie “Selma” received a best picture nod. There has been a lot of speculation about the snub, but the reasons are less crucial than the message that the largely white, male directors in the Academy sent: This woman doesn’t deserve credit for her own movie. Women in film are routinely denied jobs, credits, prizes and equal pay, so the rebuke was familiar. That’s because while individual men struggle in the industry, women struggle as a *group*.

The outrage over the Oscar nominations has been welcome even if the problem isn’t the Academy Awards but a blinkered, fossilized industry that offers so few opportunities to women and minorities. Ms. DuVernay is one of the few female directors to make the leap into the major studio world. While it’s disappointing that she wasn’t nominated, she made a great movie and is going to keep directing without the permission of the mainstream old guard. The good news is that she won’t be alone. Increasing numbers of people — if mostly women — are pushing back hard at the industry’s biases. And they’re pushing back publicly, a gutsy stance in an industry that runs on secrets, lies and fear.

Some of these activists, like Geena Davis, are focusing on female representation in the media; others, like Maria Giese, a member of the Directors Guild of America, are going after their own organization. Gamechanger Films is practicing checkbook activism by funding female directors. The Sundance Institute and the advocacy group Women in Film have commissioned an important study for which researchers like Stacy L. Smith are crunching the numbers. Consider some recent findings: Only 4.4 percent of the top 100 box-office domestic releases between 2002 and 2012 were directed by women. In 2012, only 28.4 percent of all on-screen speaking characters in the top 100 were women. If you thought women in movies don’t have much of a voice, you’re right.

American commercial cinema has long been dominated by men, but I don’t think there has ever been another time when women have been as underrepresented on screen as they are now. The biggest problem isn’t genuinely independent cinema, where lower budgets mean more opportunities for women in front of and behind the camera. The problem is the six major studios that dominate the box office, the entertainment chatter and the popular imagination. Their refusal to hire more female directors is immoral, maybe illegal, and has helped create and sustain a representational ghetto for women.

The barriers that female directors confront are numerous, substantial, structural and ideological, which is why activists are attacking biases on a number of fronts. Ms. Giese, for one, has turned her personal frustration over a stalled directing career into a veritable crusade. Her primary target has been her own organization, the Directors Guild, the labor group that represents more than 15,000 directors and directorial support staff working in movies, television, commercials, the news, sports and new media. In the 1930s, Dorothy Arzner became the Guild’s first female member. Women now make up 22.5 percent of its membership — but only 13.7 percent are directors.

Among Ms. Giese’s criticisms is how the Guild classifies women and male minorities under the general rubric of diversity, including in its latest contract, which stipulates that employers “shall work diligently and make good faith efforts to increase the number of working racial and ethnic minority and women directors.” She writes on the blog Women Directors in Hollywood that companies that are Guild signatories can “fulfill their diversity obligations by hiring male ethnic minority members, and hiring no women at all.” In a recent study, the Guild established that minority men directed 17 percent of the prime time episodic television produced from 2013-14, while white women directed 12 percent and minority women directed 2 percent. The numbers for both women and minority men are undeniably awful, and the industrious Tyler Perry might be pushing the numbers up for minority men.

I raised the issue of combining women and minority men with Paris Barclay, the president of the Directors Guild, noting that 23 percent of a recent season of the FX series “Sons of Anarchy” had been directed by a minority man — namely Mr. Barclay — while 8 percent (one episode) had a female director.

“Well, it’s interesting,” he said, speaking by phone. “I mean, on ‘Sons’ the No. 1 director was me, that’s true. I’m a black, gay man, so I’m virtually a woman,” he said with a laugh. “We’re in a fight for hiring equity, and the work that it takes to break down these studio and network directing stereotypes requires advocating for all of our members,” Mr. Barclay continued. “We really believe in this particular fight that solidarity is the way to go.”

Solidarity is a seductive word, but it can also obscure the differences between sexism and racism. With rare exceptions, women of all colors were shut out of directing during the old Hollywood studio era, for instance. But some white women did work in executive suites and on sets, while many more worked as actresses, even as black and Asian women were relegated to invisibility or maid uniforms. Female filmgoers helped popularize movies and build a star system that, in turn, produced indelible images of women — along with stereotyped roles, the casting couch and the occasional suicide. There are still female stars, and most, alas, are still white, but actresses now often compensate for a lack of roles by playing the star on the red carpet and in the entertainment media.

Behind the parade of dazzling smiles and designer gowns is an industry that is failing women. The most visible proof is the limited roles for women, especially in top box-office releases. In 2004, Ms. Davis founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media, an organization she runs with Madeline Di Nonno. They have raised awareness through educational campaigns, symposiums and deep-dive research. Among their findings is a statistic that many women know intuitively: Female directors and writers create more female characters than men do. That isn’t the case with producers, which may be why there seem to be more high-profile female producers than directors.

An important partner in Ms. Davis’s activism has been Dr. Smith, a researcher at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, at the University of Southern California. Squirreled away in a media lab on the campus, Dr. Smith’s team collects data that put the American movie industry’s sexism into stark, empirical relief. The lab is modest, dominated by a narrow hallway crammed with computers and a room in which, the day I visited last fall, a handful of students were coding titles like “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” a painstaking process — each movie is checked by at least three people — that allows them to identify the gender breakdown in a movie, among other factors.

A few years ago, Cathy Schulman, the president of Women in Film, and Keri Putnam, the executive director of the Sundance Institute, joined forces with Dr. Smith for a three-part study on female directors. “Exploring the Barriers and Opportunities for Independent Women Filmmakers,” conducted by Dr. Smith, Katherine Pieper and Marc Choueiti at Annenberg’s Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative, looks at gender differences at Sundance’s film festival and its filmmaking labs from 2002 to 2013. Sundance has been, for good reason, widely viewed as more welcoming to women: During the study’s period of research, women directed about a quarter of the movies in the high-profile dramatic competition, far more than they did in the top 100 box-office releases.

There is a multitude of reasons female directors struggle, from the legacy of the historically male-dominated Hollywood to, as Kim Gordon once suggested, a fear of a female planet. Women fare fine in some areas, including in film schools. In 1998, Martha M. Lauzen, who tallies women working behind the scenes in her annual report, “The Celluloid Ceiling,” found that women composed from one-third to over one-half of the students at the schools she surveyed. More recently, I checked in with six film schools, including Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles, and found that women were consistently well represented. The problems happen later.

Ms. Schulman said that there’s “an absolute decrescendo of opportunity for women as the economics crescendo.” The third part of the Women in Film/Sundance study, which will be previewed at Sundance on Monday, takes a closer look at early careers and why it’s hard for female filmmakers to make second and third movies that are either independently or institutionally funded. “Women are treated more equally in the independent sector,” said Kimberly Peirce, who went through Sundance’s directors and screenwriters labs with “Boys Don’t Cry,” her 1999 feature debut, and whose second feature, “Stop-Loss,” was released nine years later. “You don’t have histories of employment, you don’t have tendencies. You’ve just got a story — let’s tell it. You’re less encumbered by presuppositions.”

The equity fund Gamechanger Films is bypassing those assumptions by tapping investors to bankroll female directors. This for-profit was founded in 2013 by four independent producers — Julie Parker Benello, Dan Cogan, Geralyn Dreyfous and Wendy Ettinger — who were moved to action around the same time as the Women in Film and Sundance research was gearing up.

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“Our contribution,” Mr. Cogan said, “was to say that the way you address this problem is money. It’s about access to capital for women directors. That’s it. It’s not about mentorship. It’s about putting the money on the table and giving it to women.” To that end, Gamechanger focuses on commercial projects across a variety of genres. One of its recent titles is a forthcoming thriller, “The Invitation,” from Karyn Kusama, who broke out with the indie favorite “Girlfight,” stumbled in the commercial mainstream (“Aeon Flux”) and has now re-entered the indie fold.

Money will only go so far. Minds need to change and, more radically, filmmaking values and habits. Even as women have directed more movies, the profession remains heavily coded as masculine, from its white-collar male auteurs to its blue-collar laborers. It has a production culture developed over time by men, and if more women are to join its ranks, that culture will need to evolve, including dealing with the crushing hours that are especially difficult if you’re the primary caretaker of your kids. Female directors eagerly work those hours.

But the question — especially given concerns over hours and safety — is why anyone, fathers and mothers included, should have to. Clint Eastwood, first among he-men auteurs, is famous for quick, efficient shoots. Anyone who thinks women can’t hack it should know the name Jamie Babbit, who was directing a movie right after delivering a baby. (Her next feature, “Fresno,” was funded by Gamechanger.) She had tried to hide her pregnancy from her financier, worrying that it might get in the way of the movie. She hoped it looked like she just had a beer belly. The week she was to deliver, the financier told her that their movie was suddenly a go. “O.K., give me three days after I deliver,” Ms. Babbit said, “and I’ll come.” She hired a nanny and directed the movie, pumping milk through the shoot.

Ms. Babbit had a chance and grabbed it, just as any man would, the difference being that she did so with a baby in tow. This isn’t 1960, even if the movie industry continues to treat women — film directors and filmgoers alike — as if it were. In 1960, most women worked in the home and most Americans were white. Now almost 60 percent of women participate in the labor force, and 40 percent are the sole or primary wage-earners. Whites are 64 percent of the population. According to the Pew Research Center, by 2060, around the time that “Marvel’s The Avengers: 48 Years Young!” opens on your wearable device, whites will be 43 percent.

By then, Ms. DuVernay will have a few dusty Oscars, and girls being born around now will be running the world and, if any are left, a few movie studios. Just watch.