Finalist: The Boston Globe, by Ty Burr

By Ty Burr

It plants a flag for a new corporate entertainment franchise and it will make international containerships of money, so does it matter that “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” is joyless and incoherent? Probably not. Years of marketing hype have by now instilled in worldwide audiences a Pavlovian response: A new superhero movie has to be good, so it will be, and, besides, isn’t this what movies are about? Zack Snyder’s film tries to pulverize you into agreement. For the death of cinema, it’s not bad.

“Batman v Superman” should be titled “DC Comics v Marvel,” because those are the actual stakes here. With this follow-up to 2013’s “Man of Steel,” Warner Bros. hopes to challenge the hegemony of the Marvel Studios/Disney alliance by producing a sequelizable movie “universe” based on pop culture’s other line of superheroes: DC’s Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, and so on (although let’s hope they stop before they get to Matter-Eater Lad and Krypto the Superdog). Maybe you don’t care, but if it works, the studio gets to print money for the next 25 years.

At first, the new movie does work. Picking up where “Man of Steel” left off, “Batman v Superman” replays that film’s climactic destruction of Metropolis from the point of view of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), a CEO fuming with grief as the Wayne Enterprises skyscraper collapses and takes hundreds of his employees with it. For once, one of these literal blockbusters pauses to mourn the individual humans who usually get treated as ants. Superman (Henry Cavill) may have saved the planet, but, as Lois Lane (Amy Adams) reminds him, “there’s a cost,” and that cost is people.

“BvS” busies itself for a while with how a 2016 society might in fact respond to the appearance of a superhuman in its midst. There would be a Senate subcommittee arguing over this immigrant alien who leaves rubble wherever he goes, and it’d be headed up by Holly Hunter. Nancy Grace and Neil DeGrasse Tyson would work themselves into a froth. Over in Gotham City, Wayne would stoke the anti-Superman factions while plotting revenge for his dead workers.

Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent, meanwhile, would be concerned with this churlish Batman fellow who brutalizes criminals with no regard for due process. And in a tower above them all, a spindly billionaire Internet brat named Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) — Mark Zuckerberg with fewer social graces, basically — would be plotting, I don’t know, world domination, or longer wait times at the DMV. And everyone’s trying to get at a certain green element left behind in the wreckage of the last film.

That’s all I can tell you without the Warner Bros. elves coming at me with knives. Well, I can say that the imposing Israeli actress Gal Gadot, from the “Fast and Furious” movies, turns up as a Superhero to Be Named Later, and she’s good enough that I wish they’d skipped this movie entirely and gone straight to hers (it’s due in 2017).

Otherwise, “Batman v Superman” sinks slowly into dank, noisy chaos over its 2½-hour running time, as Bruce and Clark work out their issues by beating each other silly before bumping fists in sudden solidarity. (That’s not a spoiler, that’s canon.) Eisenberg probably has the right approach: He overacts even more severely than Gene Hackman did in the Christopher Reeve “Superman” movies, and you’ll find him either an active irritant or the one giggly note of revelry in the gloom. There’s no Robin this time out, but Alfred seems busier than usual and, in Jeremy Irons’s playing, more elegantly depressed.

The film’s problems include a script, by David S. Goyer (of the “Dark Knight” series) and Chris Terrio (“Argo”), that hits a few real-world hot buttons for relevance before devolving into absurd dream sequences, mommy issues, and over-plotted mayhem. The story’s parts never quite fit together, and Snyder still has difficulty directing an action sequence with logic and flow. In one of those dream sequences — the ridiculous one with the flying bat-monkeys out of “The Wizard of Oz” — the director pulls back for a slo-mo 360-pan a la his breakthrough film, “300,” and you can feel him sigh in relief: Yeah, that’s how it’s done.

Here’s something else I never realized: Gotham City is actually Jersey City. Or maybe it’s Hoboken. Whatever, it’s right across the river from Metropolis/Manhattan, which makes sense in this movie, because Cavill’s Superman is one of those graceful 1 percenters with no body fat and hand-tailored outfits that not even a nuclear warhead can wrinkle. He doesn’t sweat, whereas you just know Affleck’s Batman has a bad case of bridge-and-tunnel BO. The latter has gone heavy here, his muscles under a thick layer of unforgiving flesh. This movie’s Bruce Wayne doesn’t bother to shave even when he puts the mask on. He drives a bitchin’ Bat-Camaro. He’s the guy at the gym who drops the weights hard so you’ll hear him.

If Snyder and the script had dug into the subliminal class rage that’s obviously driving Bruce Wayne — the fact that he’ll always be a rich yutz from New Jersey instead of a slim, godlike Manhattanite with a weekend condo at the North Pole — “Batman v Superman” might have amounted to more than a WWE smackdown with billions in ancillary profits riding on it.

It doesn’t. Affleck is aiming for a character here, but he gets lost on the way, and you miss the cruel, clean inscrutability of Christian Bale in the Christopher Nolan “Batman” films. Eventually the script’s illogic and the relentless pounding of the action scenes wear you down. Why do Batman’s eyes start glowing two-thirds of the way through the movie? What does Lex Luthor’s hotsy minion (Tao Okamoto) actually do? Who decided there had to be a climactic countdown alarm clock that doesn’t actually count down to much? Who thought up what can only be considered a sociopathic version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from “Ghostbusters”?

These are the things that keep you distracted as “Batman v Superman” stomps and grinds its way to about six false endings, each meant to set up a future film in the franchise. “The Justice League Part One,” due in late 2017, will gather up all the DC heroes for what promises to be a hell of a three-day company offsite. Here’s an idea: Pit them against The Avengers right now and get the whole thing over with.

★★ 
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Directed by Zack Snyder Written by David S. Goyer and Chris Terrio. Starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeremy Irons, Gal Gadot, Diane Lane. At Boston Common, Fenway, suburbs; Jordan’s Furniture IMAX in Natick and Reading. 153 minutes. PG-13 (intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action throughout, some sensuality).

By Ty Burr

Nothing destroys an audience’s appreciation of a small good movie like advance praise. At this time of the year, we’re hyped to expect award-winning productions, big messages, and sweeping emotions, and if the film in question comes with four-star reviews and nouns like “masterpiece,” it had better play along or people will want a refund. By contrast, a handmade human tragedy about the kind of people you see at the supermarket needs to sneak up on you if it’s to work its magic. Even if it’s a masterpiece.

So I won’t tell you that I’ve seen “Manchester by the Sea” twice now and both times felt haunted for weeks. I won’t tell you it made me cry, because if you see it and you don’t cry you’ll probably think more about that than about the movie, and that’s not fair. I won’t tell you that it’s a ghost story about a man who’s still alive, or that it’s profanely funny about the way that men in New England traditionally profess their love for one another, i.e. with bitter sarcasm and foul language.

I won’t tell you that Casey Affleck comes finally and fully out of his brother’s shadow and into his own as Lee Chandler, an apartment janitor on the South Shore who’s fleeing from what happened to him on the North. That Lee gets called back home when his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) dies of a bad heart, leaving behind a fishing boat with engine problems and a lanky, mouthy 16-year-old son, Patrick (newcomer Lucas Hedges). That when they see he’s back in town, people nudge and point and say “That’s Lee Chandler?” “The very one.” And that, about midway through, “Manchester by the Sea” tells us the particulars of Lee’s past as if disgorging a terrible family secret, so that you suddenly understand why he prefers to sit miles away in Quincy bars, ignoring the women who hit on him while picking fights with the men.

I won’t bother you with how the movie stands as a soul-satisfying comeback for its maker, playwright-turned-writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, who staked a claim on a brilliant career a decade and a half ago with “You Can Count on Me,” the film that made stars of Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo, only to see his 2005 follow-up, “Margaret,” sit on the shelf for six years before its studio released a butchered cut. (A three-hour director’s edition of “Margaret” is available on DVD and Amazon Video; earlier this year a poll of international film critics named that version one of the 100 best films of the 21st century.)

I needn’t explain that Lonergan and his cast get the look and sound of people in these parts without seeming to try very hard; that even if you believe there are no real townies in the town of Manchester-by-the-Sea, this movie convinces you there should be; that no one leans hard on the accents except poor Tate Donovan as the nephew’s hockey coach (excuse me, “hahkey coach”); that all the small parts are cast with people who look like they really live here, whether it’s the lapsed preppie small-town estate lawyer played by Josh Hamilton or Hedges as the nephew, a kid who has two girlfriends, a truly awful garage band (“We are. . . Stentorian”), and no patience for his sullen, withdrawn uncle.

I could say, but I won’t, that we’ve all seen too many movies in which a lost soul comes out of his shell and rejoins the human race after he inherits a kid from a dead relative. I won’t say that everyone here is more interested in how that might play out if the lost soul was just too damned lost. I could say that Affleck’s Lee Chandler, terse, distant, and sardonic, reminds me, and may remind you, of childhood friends who’ve lost their way and never come back; that the sadness of “Manchester by the Sea” is the kind of sadness that makes you feel more alive, rather than less, to the preciousness of things.

I could talk about the lovely classical score that is Lonergan’s one false move, in that it matches the movie’s chilly scenes of winter but not the emotional reality of the characters’ lives, not really. But I could also talk about a meeting of Lee and his ex-wife, played by Michelle Williams, that threatens to turn on the suds but instead lets two people who once loved each other acknowledge what they’ve lost. I could talk about Gretchen Mol as the nephew’s mother, another damaged soul climbing back from the bottle one frightened step at a time. And I could talk about the scene late in the film in which Lee exhales in the hush of a nighttime kitchen, looks his fate in the eye, and you realize that you’re looking at a hero, a Sisyphus of the North Shore, and also at a broken man.

If I do tell you all this, forget I ever did. Just remember you heard somewhere that “Manchester by the Sea” is an experience worth having, not for the magnificence of its impact or the far-flung grandeur of its settings but for the way it illuminates with quiet, unyielding grace how you and I and our neighbors get by, and sometimes how we don’t.

★★★★ 
MANCHESTER BY THE SEA

Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan. Starring Casey Affleck, Lucas Hedges, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler. At Kendall Square, Coolidge Corner, West Newton. 137 minutes. R (language throughout, some sexual content).

By Ty Burr

“Moonlight” is a movie that seems to have arrived out of the blue. In reality, it’s been a long time coming. A poetic drama about growing up poor, black, and gay in an America that insists on looking anywhere but there, it’s the second feature from writer-director Barry Jenkins (“Medicine for Melancholy”) and, in its quietly radical grace, it’s a cultural watershed — a work that dismantles all the ways our media view young black men and puts in their place a series of intimate truths. You walk out feeling dazed, more whole, a little cleaner.

Extrapolated from a play by Tarell McRaney — its full title is “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” — but hewing to aspects of the director’s biography, “Moonlight” gives us one young life in three stages: the wounding, the scarring, the healing. The first panel of the triptych, set in 1980s Miami, follows a fatherless 10-year-old named Chiron (Alex Hibbert), derisively nicknamed “Little” and bullied until he has shut down into a 50-yard stare. Chiron knows he’s a “faggot”; he just doesn’t know what the word means.

That his mentor and father figure is the neighborhood drug dealer would be an easy irony or a prelude to action clichés in a different movie. “Moonlight” asks us to consider, instead, that Juan (a majestic Mahershala Ali) might offer this lost boy the affection and emotional grounding he can’t get anywhere else and that the dealer’s girlfriend, Teresa (played by the eccentric pop-music genius Janelle Monáe, in a performance of warmth and wisdom), might be a better mother to Chiron than his own (Naomie Harris).

“Moonlight” leaps from the revelation of where the mother is getting her drugs — a surprise to no one but her son — to the boy’s high school years, where he’s played by Ashton Sanders as a penitent tied to the rack of his longings. Tormented by classmates, silently crushing on a childhood friend (Jharrel Jerome), Chiron is one of those adolescents who seems to will himself into invisibility.

This section builds to a sequence of unexpected rapture — after which Chiron apologizes, for surely he can’t deserve this — and then to a betrayal and a moment of choice. After which “Moonlight” enters its third and final phase, and you understand that everything up to that point has been prelude.

It’s maybe 10 years later. Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) has pushed his sexuality far back into the closet and become “Black,” the man his mentor never wanted him to be, a drug dealer just like Juan, pumped up and hard on the outside, absent from himself until he gets a call — out of the blue — from an old friend (André Holland).

The reunion of the two men, late at night in the Florida diner where the friend slings hash, is the reckoning toward which the film has been building, and the moment where Chiron finally emerges from the mutilated chrysalis of his life. Jenkins lets it play out with subtlety, wit, and an infinitude of tenderness, and Rhodes’s performance registers each micro-shift of emotion. Barbara Lewis’s 1963 hit “Hello Stranger” plays on the jukebox, as if Chiron were silently repeating the words to himself. (Until then, Black’s music of choice has been the hip-hop subgenre known as chopped-and-screwed, which pretty much sums up his life to date.)

Much of “Moonlight” is terribly sad, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the film as a work of chiding urban miserabilism. The tragedies here are personal; the larger social disaster of being poor and black in the United States is mostly a distant backdrop, like the weather. (Although you can’t change the weather.)

That sadness — of not being allowed to be anything like who you are — is tempered by closely observed moments of connection. Little being taught to swim by Juan, a scene that feels as foundational to us as it does to the boy. Chiron communing with Kevin on a moonlit beach. Black at the diner counter, finally remembering who Chiron was, is, and still could be.

Working with cinematographer James Laxton, Jenkins wants us to see the beauty in the concrete, so he shoots the film as an extended swoon, with saturated colors and sweeps of motion. A gorgeous minimalist score by Nicholas Britell illuminates the hero’s inner moonscape.

As good films tend to do — as a lot of good art does — “Moonlight” assumes a common humanity between its characters and its audience. But the film’s strength is rooted far more deeply in the specific. Jenkins understands he’s telling a story many of us have never seen about people our culture tells us we already know.

So while there’s the measure of truth to this film, “Moonlight” is also, in its understated and often paralyzingly lovely way, charged with the power of disassembling a lie. Comparisons to other movies, or other types of movies, about other types of people, diminish it. Some people are calling this the “best film of the year,” but that’s almost beside the point. For the two hours you’re watching it, “Moonlight” feels like the only movie ever made.

★★★★ 
MOONLIGHT

Directed by Barry Jenkins. Written by Jenkins and Tarell McCraney. Starring Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes, Mahershala Ali, Janelle Monáe, Naomie Harris, André Holland. At Boston Common, Kendall Square, Coolidge Corner. 111 minutes. Rated R (sexuality, drug use, brief violence, language throughout)

By Ty Burr

“Sausage Party,” a computer-animated R-rated comedy about walking, talking grocery items, is essentially “Toy Story” with a filthy mind and food products instead of toys. It is shameless. It is puerile. It traffics in retro notions of womanhood and base ethnic and social stereotypes.

It’s also the most philosophically inclined movie release of the summer, a digital cartoon that questions human belief systems on an almost granular ontological level. All this and a final act that’s the most subversive, eyeball-scarring 15 minutes of pop-culture monkey-wrenching you’re likely to see all year.

All right-thinking minds will properly detest the movie. I have to admit I laughed my asparagus off.

It’s as if all the bros in the Big Bro movie tent had gotten together and smoked up a great bad idea: a CGI adventure about a hot dog named Frank (voiced by co-writer Seth Rogen), his girlfriend, Brenda Bun (Kristen Wiig), and the paradisical Great Beyond that all the grocery items at Shopwells supermarket believe is waiting for them once they’re plucked off the shelves and brought home by the shopping Gods.

There’s even a dandy opening musical number scored by Alan Menken (of “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast” fame) in which every food gets a say. This includes the German sauerkraut that wants to kill the juice. From the get-go, “Sausage Party” pushes the comedy envelope in ways not seen since the heyday of Mel Brooks.

Only a traumatized jar of honey mustard (Danny McBride), bought and returned, sounds the alarm about what happens once the Gods bring their purchases home. Unfortunately, none of the characters believe him until it’s too late. These include Frank and Brenda, who bicker bitterly once they’re free of their packaging and have to find their way back to their aisle; the timid misfit sausage Barry (Michael Cera); a cross-ethnic duo named Kareem Abdul Lavash (David Krumholtz) and Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton) (let me repeat that: Edward Norton), working out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the run; a lesbian taco (Salma Hayek); and a piece of gum in the form of physicist Stephen Hawking (Scott Underwood).

The villain, needless to say, is a douche (Nick Kroll).

Directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon, “Sausage Party” is certifiably insane and scurrilous as hell, yet as hard as it tries to offend — and it tries really, really hard — a contrarian intelligence peeks through. This is a movie about the deep-seated need to believe in heavenly rewards and about the contortions and complacencies and lies such beliefs can inspire. When Frank learns the Horrible Truth from the shaman-like Firewater (Bill Hader) — that humans eat their supermarket purchases, that paradise is a place of murder and oblivion and chewed-up baby carrots — he embarks on a mission to enlighten his fellow grocery items. As we all know, such good intentions rarely go unpunished.

“Sausage Party” has its dead spots and weak one-liners, and there isn’t much here for any women in the audience who don’t want to play along with the boys. The visual design of Brenda lands somewhere between the unseemly and the insulting. There are more than enough exit ramps for those so inclined.

But there’s also plenty of detail and wit to offset the fairly ugly production design, and the film’s climax is a genuinely startling vision of exploited retail inventory taking its bloody revenge on all those clueless consumers pushing their shopping carts. (Think about that next time you’re in line at Whole Foods.)

This triumph of the dill is followed by a sequence that literally redefines the phrase “food orgy” and that represents the filmmakers — or whoever was in that smoke-filled room — pushing the envelope of propriety until it snaps with gleeful abandon. The scene is wrong, so deeply wrong, and in a craven, sold-out summer movie marketplace, the laughter it engenders is liberating. Clean-up on Aisle 12? Never mind, it’s too late.

★★★ 
SAUSAGE PARTY

Directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon. Written by Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, and Evan Goldberg. Featuring the voices of Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Edward Norton, Nick Kroll, Salma Hayek, Bill Hader, and Danny McBride. At Boston Common, Fenway, suburbs. 89 minutes. R (strong crude sexual content, pervasive language, and drug use)

By Ty Burr

This may be heresy, but some of us always loved Carrie Fisher more than Princess Leia.

Princess Leia was fine. But Princess Leia wouldn’t have existed without the woman who played her and who had to live a life after the hair buns came off. In the three films in which Fisher first inhabited the character — the original “Star Wars” (1977), “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980), and “Return of the Jedi” (1983) — she took an archetype that for decades had clung timidly behind the likes of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and gave her a spine and a blaster. Leia kicked ass, even in the skimpy galactic harem outfit from “Jedi” that probably marked the character’s nadir.

But Carrie Fisher? She was a great, funny, flawed, human human being who just happened to be celebrated for playing a sovereign of outer space in our culture’s most foundational shared fantasy. She was a survivor; she lived to tell, and tell she did, in memoirs and novels and one-woman shows and delicious interviews and talk-show appearances. Maybe Leia served as a role model for billions of little girls (and fueled the fantasies of billion of adolescent boys), but once you were all grown up, you just wanted her as your friend.

Another difference: Fisher was mortal, and in one last brutal kick in the teeth courtesy of the year 2016, she died Tuesday of complications of a heart attack suffered four days earlier during a flight from London to Los Angeles. She was 60. Princess Leia, of course, will be with us for as long as there are screens. It’s hardly the same. As enduring as the character is, was, and will be, the woman who played her was the more complicated and therefore the more interesting figure. Perhaps the shadows we cast are always thinner than the people who cast them. Or maybe Carrie Fisher was more wised-up than anything in George Lucas’s wonderful science fiction playground.

She had to be: She was Hollywood royalty before she ever ruled Alderaan. Fisher belonged to a very special tribe, the children of the Dream Factory. Her mother is Debbie Reynolds, who as Kathy Selden in “Singin’ in the Rain” belted “Good morning, good mawning, it’s great to stay up late!” as if she’d never seen the bad side of a hangover. Her father was Eddie Fisher, who dumped Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor when Carrie was 2 and kicked off the signal celebrity scandal of the era.

Fisher, in other words, was privileged to grow up witnessing stardom from the other side of the screen, and she had no illusions. “You can’t find any true closeness in Hollywood,” she famously said, “because everybody does the fake closeness so well.” It says a lot that the role that first brought her to greater notice was the sexually precocious Hollywood teenager who jumps Warren Beatty’s bones in “Shampoo” (1975), one of the key films of the New Hollywood. It says even more that the role that made her globally famous — Leia Organa — was in the film that spelled the end of the New Hollywood’s moody, broody realism and inaugurated the era of big-budget fantasy that now rules the culture.

One wonders with regret what sort of movies Fisher might have made had she been born earlier. Maybe she would have been a young film-noir troublemaker. Or maybe she would have had the running start that let Jane Fonda — another second-generation star but two decades older — find room to set her own destiny. In some parallel universe, there’s a Hollywood history more deserving of Carrie Fisher, where she got the roles worthy of her acrid, sorrowful, smart outlook on life. Maybe the awards, too.

Instead, she struggled, and then mined humor and insight and battle scars from that struggle. The not-so-secret secret about Fisher is that, while she had major talent as an actress, her greater gift was for writing. She made sense of her troubles every time she put words to paper: the bi-polar disorder that turned her upside down from adolescence on, the taste for drugs and booze that was colorful in youth and got ugly fast, the hard-won recoveries and steps backward. Her books are delightful to read, from 1987’s sorta-fictional “Postcards from the Edge” (“[My mother told me] that I was only interested in instant gratification. . . . I said, ‘Instant gratification takes too long.’ ”) to this year’s juicy “Star Wars” tell-all “The Princess Diarist.” There she is in your ear — that grainy, lived-in voice acknowledging what we all knew all along, that real life was always more messed up and somehow more worthwhile than anything in that galaxy far, far away.

What we saw — the movie roles, the talk-show appearances — was just the tip of the iceberg. Fisher was an in-demand but rarely credited script doctor throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and some of your favorite movies (“Sister Act,” “The Wedding Singer,” “Hook”) bear the stamp of her sense and sensibility. If you followed her on Twitter, it was like having a friend in your pocket. When the idiot fan-boys complained that her General Leia Organa looked unattractively old in last year’s “The Force Awakens,” Fisher tweeted, “Please stop debating about whether or not I aged well. Unfortunately it hurts all three of my feelings.”

I could spend the rest of this column just quoting Fisher, and we’d all be better off. (OK, just this one, from a 2014 interview with The Guardian: “I had a lot of fun killing Jabba the Hutt. They asked me on the day if I wanted to have a stunt double kill Jabba. No! That’s the best time I ever had as an actor. And the only reason to go into acting is if you can kill a giant monster.”) And you could always just go dig out the first “Star Wars” trilogy again and your children would thank you.

But better than quoting Fisher is to go to the library, take out one of her books (like the drily titled “Wishful Drinking,” from 2008), and simply read her. The actual secret about Carrie Fisher is that she may yet turn out to have been the Dorothy Parker of her time and place, writing with rueful hilarity about how hard it is to live up to the dream-factory fantasies that simultaneously sustain us and let us down. She fought the real star wars, and she won.

Dylan’s lyrics, playful and profound, earn him literature’s high honor

By Ty Burr

The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.

The bridge at midnight trembles. The country doctor rambles.

When we meet again/introduced as friends/please don’t let on that you knew me when/I was hungry and it was your world.

Is it fair to call what Bob Dylan does “literature’’? Or does it do the man a disservice to call him anything other than a songwriter, and arguably the greatest of our time?

This sounds like a moot point, a splitting of Boomerologist hairs. And, yes, both your dad and your strenuously hip seventh-grade English teacher are ecstatic at the news that the bard of Hibbing has been named recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Why now? Well, why not? Everyone seems happy about this except for fans of Philip Roth, who’s 83 and not getting any younger.

I’m happy, too, to be honest, since Dylan has meant many, many things to me over the years. I can put thumbtacks in my personal timeline where everything seemed to stop while that mooncow voice whispered or sneered or insinuated or threw judgments down from the mountaintop.

Hearing “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’’ on the radio at the age of 9 and wondering why everybody must get stoned.

Listening to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’’ as a teenager and burning my fingers on every single line.

Alone at 2 a.m. in a post-college New York apartment looking in the mirror of “Visions of Johanna,’’ a song that may be the secret pinnacle of his art.

Thinking the man had nothing left in him by the mid-1990s and then finding “Dignity.’’

Listening to “Cold Irons Bound’’ during a late-night drive with two sleeping toddlers in the back and feeling that I was peering over the edge of an abyss.

Watching one of those children 16 years later as she discovered “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’’ and her jaw hit the floor.

My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums/Should I leave them by the gate?

But here’s the thing: Dylan’s poetry needs Dylan’s voice to fully and wholly work. You can put it on the page and call it “lit-tra-chure’’ and sometimes it’ll come through. The selections strewn throughout this article are lines from the canon that have been among the most resonant to me over the years — your list would doubtless be different — and you’re absolutely forgiven if they don’t speak to you in this context.

Because they’re not meant to speak. They’re meant to be sung. The line from “Sad-Eyed Lady’’ above makes no conventional sense and that’s fine: Dylan’s lyrics are written to evoke, not explain. But if you’ve never heard the song — if you can’t hear in your head the incantation of those phrases as they pile up over 11 minutes and 22 seconds of aural fugue state — the words are going to lie much flatter than they should. And despite a handful of cover versions that equal or surpass the originals (Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower,’’ Van Morrison’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,’’ insert your choice here), it’s Dylan’s voice you need to be hearing.

She never stumbles/she’s got no place to fall.

It’s not only Dylan’s voice, though—it’s his entire sound-world. The line above comes from “She Belongs to Me,’’ one of the most beautiful love songs penned by a man better known for his kiss-off tunes; its power depends on the gentle, circular chiming of Bruce Langhorne’s electric guitar. “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)’’ has some pretty good lines ricocheting inside it (’’I didn’t realize how young you were’’) but the song’s almost unbearable intensity comes from the crashing of Paul Griffin’s piano and the implacable calm of Al Kooper’s organ. The legend of Dylan is inextricable from the “thin wild mercury sound’’ he carried around in his head until we all heard it, too.

It balances on your head the way a mattress balances on a bottle of wine/your leopard-skin pillbox hat.

The need to sanctify Dylan as something other than a pop singer — as belonging to the high plane of international prizes rather than the low funk of where people live — always comes at a price. Yet it’s understandable. The man put midcentury popular culture through a paradigm shift by showing that a pop song could be more than “Tell your Ma, tell your Pa/Our Love’s a-gonna grow, ooh-wah, ooh-wah.’’

A pop song could be protest or personal or poetry. It could be comedy — Dylan’s terrific sense of humor, as evidenced in the fragment above, has always gone underacknowledged. It could seem to have no meaning at all and still be carried into your long-term memory banks on the power of that ungainly, seductive voice.

Many musicians looked at what Dylan was doing in the 1960s and said, “Right, I’m a poet now, too.’’ Some of them were even right: Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro. Most just didn’t have the chops. You could argue (and I bet Dylan would agree with you) that the pungent simplicity of Chuck Berry (“He could play a guitar just like ringing a bell’’) or the Brill Building songwriters (“When this old world starts getting me down/And people are just too much for me to face/(Up on the roof)’’), the Gershwins (“It’s very clear/Our love is here to stay/Not for a year/But ever and a day’’) and blues great Robert Johnson (“Won’t you come on in my kitchen/’Cause it’s goin’ to be rainin’ outdoors’’), were already literature. And they didn’t need to hear it from the Nobel committee. Although that probably would have been nice.

When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose/You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal

The news of Dylan’s award, announced early on Thursday, came as a welcome and only slightly weird respite from the ongoing meltdown of America’s body politic. Old fogeys and young hipsters rallied on Facebook and traded favorite Zimmy lyrics. The young and the callow protected themselves with snark. (“Yeah, the guy from the Victoria’s Secret ad’’ ran the subhead at online magazine The Awl.)

It was noted that Dylan is the first American to win this award since Toni Morrison in 1993 and that only 14 women have won in 115 years (“oh the times they ain’t a changing’’ tweeted one wry onlooker). It was also noted that as the recipient of 11 Grammys, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a Pulitzer, and now a Nobel, Dylan is a GrOPuNoGG, which only sounds like a Donald Trump drinking game. The news launched a thousand Dylan playlists on Spotify and either prompted you to make yet another mix CD for your kids or to get one from your dad.

What it didn’t do was convince anyone that the man in question wasn’t already an artist of the highest order, however you chose to categorize it. Once, it’s true, many of us tried to defend Dylan by taking what he did off the turntable and calling it literature. We were so much older then. We’re younger than that now.

By Ty Burr

If you’re from around these parts, you already know whether you want to see “Patriots Day.” If you’d like to pay money to watch our local strength and valor celebrated, the movie would have to be terrible to keep you away. If the very idea of a Hollywood dramatization of the 2013 Marathon bombing strikes you as exploitative, it would have to be a four-star classic to suck you in.

Peter Berg’s movie, starring Mark Wahlberg in an invented role, is neither great nor gawdawful. It’s professionally made, slickly heartfelt, and is offered up as an act of civic healing. At best, it’s unnecessary. At worst, it’s vaguely insulting.

If you’re not from Greater Boston or New England, of course, the movie will be the latest dramatic reenactment of something bad, cathartic, historic, and inspirational that happened elsewhere. And, honestly, if a pair of idiot terrorist wannabes had bombed an iconic national event in, say, San Diego or Minneapolis, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

But it did happen here, in a region notably prickly about outsiders (like Berg, a native New Yorker) telling us what we’ve seen with our own eyes. Wahlberg’s a son of Boston, with his share of controversies and charitable acts, and he approaches the part of Boston police Sergeant Tommy Saunders with deference and respect. The fact remains that the role is a “composite,” meaning that it’s based on the experiences of a number of people — meaning that Sergeant Tommy is everywhere the action is happening in this movie.

He’s at the finish line when the pressure-cooker bombs explode, one of the first responders knee-deep in trauma. He’s buddies with Police Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman, with pasted-on eyebrows and a Foghorn Leghorn variation of a Bahstan accent). He’s at the Black Falcon terminal on the South Boston waterfront when FBI agent Richard DesLauriers (a solid Kevin Bacon) sets up the command post. He’s cruising the streets of Boston at night looking for the perps. And Saunders is right there in the thick of the climactic firefight in Watertown that resulted in the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze) and that, contrary to reports, is staged as a midsize apocalypse, with cars detonating in fireballs. He’s at the boat where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Alex Wolff) holed up. He’s there with Big Papi (as himself) when it’s all over.

Wahlberg’s Sergeant Saunders gets the big, weary speech at the end, too — about “good versus evil, love versus hate” — and right about then you may yourself feel profoundly exhausted at the mind-set that believes the human mind can’t process calamity until it has been reshaped for maximum dramatic impact and sold back to us with famous names attached.

I repeat: Everyone involved with this movie believes they’re acting with respect, even when they’re not. That includes director Berg, who pans with tasteless irony across the legs of Jessica Kensky (Rachel Brosnahan) and Patrick Downes (Christopher O’Shea) as they make love on the morning of the Marathon. It includes the five-man writing team (Berg included) that stages the interrogation of Tamerlan’s widow (Melissa Benoist of TV’s “Supergirl”) by an FBI agent (Khandi Alexander, “CSI: Miami”) as a sub-“Homeland” test of wills.

Some of the story lines feel less compromised but still cooked for our acceptance. The doomed arc of MIT officer Sean Collier (Jake Picking) is made sadder because of his ongoing flirtation with a pretty student (Lana Condor). The Tsarnaev brothers’ hijacking of a car owned by Dun Meng (Jimmy O. Yang) is pure you-are-there tension and the least forced of the many tangents. J.K. Simmons has so much fun inhabiting his role as Watertown police Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese that matters of fidelity briefly become secondary. The many actors, local and imported, who play the citizens and police officers of Greater Boston perform with spirit.

Look, this is human nature, the retelling of catastrophe in an effort to sift the rubble for meaning. It’s how the sinking of the Titanic becomes a love story for teenage girls, why there are nearly 50 films dealing one way or another with the 9/11 attacks. Audiences know when they’re being played, too — when filmmakers overshape the material and amp up the drama as if what’s there isn’t good enough. Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor” is seen as a traducing of real events. Last year’s “Spotlight,” by contrast, parlayed a style of muted realism — a concerted effort to avoid melodrama — into an Academy Award.

It says something that the only moment during the “Patriots Day” screening that I felt myself tearing up over — a response confirmed by others I’ve spoken with — was the real-life footage of bombing survivors and first responders at the end. It’s also worth noting that the current HBO documentary “Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing” (produced in association with the Globe, but don’t let that stop you) puts a viewer right back in the thick of April 15, 2013, and in the panicky days and long, hard weeks of recovery that followed, with an immediacy and an empathy that make “Patriots Day” seem a sham.

The only meaning you need is right there in the faces of the victims, their families, the people who saved them, and you and I in the crowd. No movie stars necessary.

★★ 
PATRIOTS DAY

Directed by Peter Berg. Written by Berg, Matt Cook, Joshua Zetumer, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson. Starring Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Kevin Bacon, Rachel Brosnahan, Christopher O’Shea, Michelle Monaghan. At Boston Common, Fenway, suburbs. 133 minutes. R (violence, realistically graphic injury images, language throughout, some drug use).

By Ty Burr

It’s Valentine’s Day, and maybe you’ve got a sweetie within earshot or eyesight. (If you don’t, listen, forget the whole thing — it’s a fake holiday anyway, cooked up by florists and the greeting card industry.) Remember when you guys were first hitting it off, striking sparks that felt like the first in recorded human history? Remember when you realized it was serious — like, meet-the-parents serious — and that you were actually contemplating spending a life with this person?

That’s when you had to sit them down and make them watch the movie. You know the one I’m talking about. The deal-breaker, the Love Me, Love This Movie movie. The film you cherish way too much, and if Mr. or Ms. Wonderful doesn’t like it . . . well, maybe they’re not so wonderful after all.

This sounds superficial, but, trust me, it isn’t. You’re facing the possibility of decades together — children, grandchildren, Florida. If you love “The Royal Tenenbaums” or “The Notebook” and he or she doesn’t, this isn’t a minor parting of taste. This reflects a profound philosophical schism, and you’re probably better off breaking up. No, really.

Back in the mid-1980s, I started dating a woman I’d known casually in college and had become reacquainted with in New York. She was beautiful, accomplished, literate, hot — man, was I out of my league.

Our first movie dates were exploratory, as these things are. We saw Spike Lee’s breakthrough, “She’s Gotta Have It,” Rob Reiner’s “Stand By Me,” a freaky horror film called “From Beyond,” by the same team that had made the gonzo 1985 gore-comedy classic “Re-Animator.” She stayed in the lobby for most of that one. But she stayed.

Eventually, though, I sat her down for the litmus test: her, me, a TV, a VCR, and a copy of “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.”

What, you thought I was going to say “Citizen Kane” or “The Godfather”? Those are the acknowledged warhorses of cinema, and if you don’t like them, that’s your business. But in 1986 — years before his little scandal — the humor of Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman, was a decidedly acquired taste. Either you laughed helplessly at the pure silliness of lines like “Let’s talk about your big ‘but,’ ” or you had contempt for the whole thing, like The New York Times critic Vincent Canby, who famously poured vitriol on “Adventure” and ended his review with the words: “You have been warned.”

He didn’t get the joke, obviously. But would my lady friend? She was a lawyer, it was the ’80s, she had serious hair and power shoulders. Could she still tap into her infantile side enough to appreciate a grown man wrapping his face in Scotch tape and yelling, “I know you are, but what am I?”

Recently I conducted an informal poll of online friends and family, throwing the question out there. What was your deal-breaker movie? At first, I was surprised by how many people came back with a comedy. “Airplane!,” “Duck Soup,” “The Hot Rock,” “Annie Hall,” “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.” But on second thought, this makes complete sense. Comedy is personal. What makes us howl at one thing and sit stone-faced at another is probably decided at the level of genetic algorithms. In romance, the genes have to match in all the least obvious ways. Would you want to share the rest of your days with someone who doesn’t think “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” is funny? I didn’t think so.

I also heard about certain cult films and art-house classics that hit the respondent at a tender and impressionable age. “Amelie,” “Jean de Florette,” and “Les Enfants du Paradis,” came up a lot. Also “Harold and Maude,” because if you and your beloved can get on the same page regarding a wonderful black comedy about suicide and intergenerational romance, you deserve each other, and your children deserve you.

“Casablanca” is a handy clearinghouse item; in the words of one friend: “I finally got her to see it; she did not like it. (‘It’s stupid.’) I have not seen her since 1985. She was gorgeous, but I can’t say I miss her.” This goes both ways, interestingly. Another friend went to a John Hughes movie, the woman loved it, he hated it, and that was that. Call it a reverse dealbreaker.

It can get granular. My critical colleague Peter Keough says of his dealbreaker movie, the 1986 comedy “¡Three Amigos!,” “Extra points if there’s laughter at Martin Short’s story about Dorothy Gish told to the bewildered Mexican children.” My buddy Clif says his wife “passed the test when she named the band doing the Bowie cover in ‘Something Wild.’ ” That band was The Feelies; now I want to marry her.

Our deal-breaker movies say things about ourselves that we could never express otherwise. Cueing up “The Princess Bride” signals that you prefer your romantic cheese simultaneously parodied and served straight — a tough concept to articulate. My high school friend Greg says his deal-breaker is “Slapshot,” a terrific film that requires one to appreciate the game of hockey and the great joke of it as well.

Some choices seem perverse, but only on the surface. I heard about a guy who took all his dates to screenings of the disgusto midnight-movie staple “Pink Flamingoes” — “If they could stand it, they were in.” I heard “Repo Man,” “Face/Off,” Tarantino’s “Death Proof” (the girlfriend in that case made him watch “Mean Girls”; they both passed with flying colors). I heard from a woman who loaded up her future husband with gruesome classics like “Night of the Living Dead.” (“It wasn’t that he needed to love them, but I felt that he couldn’t understand me without watching these films.”) I heard from a friend who recalled the illicit thrill of his leg touching another man’s during a college showing of “Blade Runner”; 30 years later, they’re still together.

It’s always a gamble, and if it pays off, it can seem like a miracle. To go back to that evening in the mid-1980s, I can’t begin to convey my relief as my sophisticated lawyer love’s power shoulders shook with laughter at every idiot joke in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” The breakfast scene, the trip to the Alamo, Large Marge — all of it. The deal was set, the die was cast; two kids and many big adventures later, we’re about to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.

Happy Valentine’s day, dearest. Are you glad for where Pee-wee and company have taken us over the years? I know you are, and so am I.

By Ty Burr

The best movie of the year to date? That would be Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade.’

The video, I mean, and not the album. The 12-song collection itself, dropped on an unsuspecting world Saturday night, is a rich and varied pop symphony on the theme of a cheating husband and the most mature work yet to come from the one-time Destiny’s Child.

But it’s the hour-long video, which debuted on HBO and comes along with the digital album, that is the signal work of art here. “Lemonade” the album, as good as it is, is a souvenir of “Lemonade” the movie, rather than the other way around.

It’s directed by seven varied young talents from the world of music, music video, and advertising (including the singer herself), and it includes the spectral spoken verse of Warsan Shire, an acclaimed 26-year-old Somali-British poet.

But Beyoncé gets the “executive producer” title and “Lemonade” has sprung from the singer’s heart and head as an expression of a woman scorned and a diva triumphant. That the film, even more than the album, embraces the struggles, trials, and resilience of all women of color, of all generations — and, by extension, every woman everywhere — makes it a statement of almost unparalleled magnanimity.

The backstory is that Beyoncé’s husband, the rapper-entrepreneur Jay Z, slept with another woman. Whom? At the end of “Sorry,” an early track on “Lemonade,” the singer calls out “Becky with the good hair.” This set off a frenzy of social media spelunking Saturday night and Sunday morning, and the woman in question was identified as fashion designer Rachel Roy. Aside from the cheap thrills, the gossip is pretty much beside the point. Jay Z gave his wife lemons. She made “Lemonade.”

The album is an attempt to express all the emotions that can course through a cheated-upon spouse. From the joyous contempt of “Hold Up” (with its cheeky sampling of the 1962 Andy Williams hit “I Can’t Get Used to Losing You”) to the fury of “6 Inch” to the churchy sorrow of “Sandcastles” to the Aretha-esque self-flagellation of “Freedom” all the way to the qualified (and, to some commentators, controversial) forgiveness of “All Night,” “Lemonade” is a conscious and complete guide to a woman’s inner life.

It’s also maybe one of the most audacious emotional concept albums ever made, comparable only to Marvin Gaye’s 1978 alimony LP “Here, My Dear.”

By contrast, the achievement of “Lemonade” the “visual album” is that it extends Beyoncé’s argument to millions of her sisters. The video calls upon a large cast of dancers and actresses, celebrities and grandmas, anonymous women and women who wish they could have remained anonymous — like the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, seen in “Forward” holding portraits of their dead sons.

Collaborations mostly with male artists on the album are transmuted into female solidarity onscreen: only a snippet of Kendrick Lamar’s heartfelt rap on “Freedom” makes it into the video. As on the record, Malcolm X is heard reminding us that “the most disrespected person in America is the black woman.”

When the movie gets to “Sorry,” tennis star Serena Williams joins Beyoncé onscreen, dancing with in-your-face pride and self-possession — a reminder that the song’s title is anything but sincere and that men spurn their goddesses at their peril. Most of the segments were shot in and around New Orleans, and the entire project has the swampy, witchy feel of women communing late at night, comparing tears and joys.

The images in “Lemonade” have a primal staying power: The singer ecstatically taking a baseball bat to cars and shop windows as the block explodes behind her in “Hold Up”; the singer in home movies from her childhood, musing on the shared flaws of her father and her husband; the singer lying prostrate and miserable in a cavernous New Orleans Superdome, one small stop on a people’s larger trail of tears. “Lemonade” references films like “Daughters of the Dust” (1991) but adds mothers and wives; “Eve’s Bayou” (1997) becomes Beyoncé’s.

And, yes, “Lemonade” eventually — and surprisingly — comes down on the side of forgiveness and, in the words of one of the many chapter headings, “Redemption.” Tellingly, the singer credits herself as “Beyoncé Knowles Carter,” and the album’s climactic next-to-last song, the lush “All Night,” is accompanied onscreen by shots of Jay Z at play with his wife and baby daughter.

To some, that’s a disappointment: The critic Anjelica Jade Bastien, writing in the online magazine Thrillist, has noted that “Beyoncé takes a polarizing stance with the line ‘and my torturer became my remedy.’ There is something to be said about the way black women are expected to forgive and stay with men who are downright abusive against their best self-interest.”

And you’re allowed to express a little cynicism over the fact that this grand slam against an errant husband was available for its first 24 hours only on that husband’s exclusive streaming site, Tidal. Is the whole thing a con to drum up business for Jay Z? Or was it his wife’s way of giving the screw one last turn by forcing his site to broadcast his infidelity?

Maybe both, maybe neither, and, in any event, “Lemonade” in both its aural and visual iterations could be purchased on iTunes by Sunday.

There’s something else that needs to be said about this project. It was only coincidence that “Lemonade” landed in the midst of the general cultural mourning for Prince. (On Saturday night, you could flip from the debut of the album on HBO to a “Saturday Night Live” tribute to the Purple One.)

But the synchronicities are there between two artists who were and are able seemingly to do it all and who, moreover, insisted and increasingly insist on doing it their own way. “Purple Rain” remains the visual keepsake of Prince’s reign, but as great as it was as a pop explosion and as great as it remains as a celebration of its songs, as a movie it’s fairly lame. Which may or may not have to do with the fact that Prince didn’t write it, direct it, or produce it.

“Lemonade” is something else and something more — something downright radical. It’s a statement of pride and purpose, of black womanhood and one specific woman, of burdens and feminism and solidarity and the mystery of whatever it is that happens between two people. And every bit of it comes from Queen Bey.

They say there are too few opportunities for female creators in the entertainment industry? Start here. And go from there.