But as directed by Desplechin, the fact-inspired tale becomes an absorbing portrait of two individuals, who could not have been more different in terms of personality, culture, social, national, and ethnic backgrounds.

Inspired by a true story, Jimmy P. (P stands for Picard) is adapted from the book “Reality and Dream” by Georges Devereux. Published in 1951, the book reflects the remarkable multidisciplinary talents of its author, who stood at the crossroads between anthropology and psychoanalysis, opening the way, among other achievements, to ethno-psychiatry and other disciplines.

Inevitable comparisons will be made to other intimate melodramas (two-handlers in Variety’s jargon), centering on a psychiatrist (therapist) and an eccentric patient, ranging from “Equus” to “A Dangerous Method,” and even “The King’s Speech,” to mention few recent titles.

Both narratively and stylistically, the movie is rather conventional, but the colorful personalities of the two central figures, the actors who inhabit them (Benicio Del Toro and Mathieu Amalric), and the material itself are so fascinating that the end result is an absorbing film.

It’s hard to think of another film, French or English-speaking, which pays such minutia detail to the lengthy treatment process, documenting the progress made in session after session, until it reaches a satisfying solution—a state of grace—for both the professional and his patient.

Both protagonists—sort of Odd Couple—are outsiders in their own milieus, which may explain why they establish a quick, positive rapport from their very first meeting.
Georges Devereux, a Hungarian Jew, moved to Paris in the mid-1920s.

Following a short scientific study (notably with Madame Curie), he dedicated himself to ethnology and anthropology. A contemporary of Claude Levi-Strauss, who was at the time conducting his first studies of Amazonian natives, D chose North America as his area of experimentation.

By the time he joined the Topeka Winter Hospital, Devereux had already held several positions. This military hospital—recreated for the film—was one of the first in America to treat war vets suffering from various psychological and mental disorders.

At the end of WWII, Jimmy Picard (Del Toro), a Native American Blackfoot who fought in France, is admitted to Topeka Military Hospital in Kansas, an institute specializing in mental illness. Jimmy suffers from numerous symptoms: dizzy spells, temporary blindness, hearing loss, and a sense of withdrawal from himself and others.

In the absence of any physiological causes, he is diagnosed as schizophrenic. Nevertheless, the hospital management decides to seek the opinion of Devereux, a French anthropologist, psychoanalyst and specialist in Native American culture.
“Jimmy P.” describes the encounters and developing friendship between the two men, and through flashbacks, we get their socio-ethnic backgrounds and pasts. Obviously, Jimmy P. is allotted greater attention and more screen time than Devereux.

A good deal of the narrative unfolds as a series of dreams and nightmares, told from Jimmy’s P.O.V. and without disclosing too much of the puzzle that makes up his life as a Catholic Native American, suffice is to say that his main problems are with women (his mother died when he was five, he experienced a sexual trauma when seduced by an older girl and caught by his sister, his wife left him during the War for another man). All of these explorations and revelation are interspersed throughout the text, without resorting to hysteria, excessive melodramatics, and histrionic acting.

As played by Amalric, Devereux is a renaissance man, well versed in anthropology, sociology, ethnography, and human behavior. Defying the authorities and the medical establishment, he immediately comes to the conclusion that Jimmy P is not crazy, that there is nothing wrong with him other than what afflict and inflict other human beings in his position.

The weakest part of the narrative is a romantic affair between Devereux and a married woman Gina McKee), who comes to visit his at the hospital, and the duo makes love, ride horses, talk about this and that. But this subplot is contrived and superfluous—it’s as if the writers felt the need to insert some sex life for Devereux. When she leaves, we all sigh with relief, happy to go back to the center of the drama, which is never less than intriguing.

The lack of chemistry between Amalric and McKee, in and out of bed, makes things worse. Indeed, the always vibrant Amalric is at his best as an actor, and at his happiest as a character, when he is tete-a-tete with Jimmy P.

Without straining too much, “Jimmy P.” ultimately makes a strong case for the use psychoanalysis, due to the positive depiction of the process and the upbeat ending.

A longer review will be published later.

Admittedly, “Fast Five” is a tough act to follow. Representing the biggest bow in Universal’s history, that film opened with $86 million in its first weekend, grossed $209 million domestically, and over $625 million worldwide.

It is unusual for a franchise of that duration (it began low and small in 2001 before it became a sleeper) to have a fifth chapter that is the strongest installment. In many ways, “Fast Five” revisited and redefined the artistic and technical dimensions of everything that was good and commercial about the franchise’s conceptual origin and technical execution.

The series, easily the biggest blockbuster in Universal’s history, has accumulated $1.5 billion over five movies. The turning point in the evolution of the tentpole was the third entry, after which the box-office take has doubled, and then almost doubled again.

What might help the latest installment is the increasing influence of the new social media, the growing number of fans who have seen the previous chapters on DVD, and the ever likeable cast, which now has several additions.

The producers know that the fans do not go to see F&F pictures for their plausible plots, or shapely narratives, or logically motivated characters. Indeed, director Lin and writer Chris Morgan unabashedly go for ridiculous plot, over-the-top action set-pieces, which offer exhilarating, non-stop thrill rides that even the best engineers of Disneylnd cannot match.

In other words, they embrace silliness and encourage the viewers to totally suspend disbelief right from the first moment, when they check into the moviehouse with ultra-size popcorn and drink.

However, despite the growing scale of the films, the filmmakers still know the importance of casting, and here, like in the past, they populate their tale with charming actors whose dramatic range may be limited, but possess sufficient likeability to pull the audience into a fantasy joyride for two hours (actually 130 minutes).

While the stunts have gotten bigger, and the locations more exotic, the core characters and the basic relationships have remained (more or less) the same, following a minimalist, formulaic structure.

After the Rio Heist of Dom (Vin Diesel) and Brian (Paul Walker), which yielded north of $100 million, the heroes and their accomplices have decided to scatter across the globe. But there’s a price to be paid: The inability to return home means lack of roots and living frustrating, incomplete lives.

Meanwhile, Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) has been tracking an organization of lethally skilled mercenary drivers across many countries. The mastermind (Luke Evans) is aided by a ruthless second-in-command, who’s revealed to be the love Dom thought was dead, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez).

The filmmakers claim that they could never expect the viewers’ reaction to the revelation of Letty Ortiz’s survival at the end of Fast Five. Letty’s apparent death had been a jolt to audiences. The return of Letty was a direct result of the fans’ demands. Appealing to the filmmakers to bring their beloved heroine back to the series, loyal fans sent a flurry of correspondence to Universal execs.

In this story, Dom has a fresh adversary, Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), a heavy whose philosophy is diametrically opposed to that Dom and the heroes. A former soldier of the British Special Air Services (SAS), the elite special forces unit of the British army, Shaw has assembled a team of skilled mercenaries who are behind high-profile robberies of new technology that could fetch billions on the black market.

The only way to stop the criminal outfit is to outshine them, and so Hobbs asks Dom to gather his elite team in London. In return, he promises full pardons for all of them so that they can return home and rejoin their beloved families.

Returning to this installment is the series’ main architect, Justin Lin, who has directed the last three films in the Fast & Furious franchise. For Lin, one of the big reasons to do another chapter was to have an antagonist worthy of Dominic Toretto. As he explains: “With Fast & Furious 6, I wanted to take a different tack and create an antagonist that had the opposite philosophy. Dom often goes with trusting his gut, whereas Shaw is more analytic. The ability to develop that aspect of the ‘team versus team’ idea was worth coming back for.”

Fast Five was the ultimate thrill ride for audiences, when it opened in April 2011, setting a record best for Universal as the highest-grossing film for that weekend.
In Hollywood, producing a sixth installment in a blockbuster franchise is a rare, enviable position; most series begin to decline at their third chapters.

While I have no doubts that there will be Fast and Furious 7 in two years, I wish the filmmakers could come up with a more engaging story. Is it too much to expect?

“I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex,” the 37-year-old actress wrote in the New York Times.

She added, “I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.”

“I am fortunate to have a partner, Brad Pitt, who is so loving and supportive. So to anyone who has a wife or girlfriend going through this, know that you are a very important part of the transition. Brad was at the Pink Lotus Breast Center, where I was treated, for every minute of the surgeries. We managed to find moments to laugh together. We knew this was the right thing to do for our family and that it would bring us closer. And it has,” Angie said.

After making the big-budget, disappointing studio movie, “Marie Antoinette,” and the minor indie “Somewhere,” which divided critics and never found an audience, Coppola is back on terra ferma with “The Bling Ring,” which, despite shortcomings, represents her best work since the Oscar-winning “Lost in Translation,” ten years ago.

Very much a zeitgeist film, “The Bling Ring” is a moral fable and cautionary tale. In its good moments, which are plentiful, the movie suggests what it means to be young, ruthless, technically alert, an most important of all, obsessed with fast achievement of fame and celebrity, even if it calls for using illegitimate means.

With the right marketing by A24, which will release the film stateside in late June, commercial prospects are good for a vibrant and timely film (the subject is torn off of headlines news), bound to speak to younger viewers, who have grown up into a world defined by the sounds and bites of the new technologies and social media, Facebook, Twitter, texting, and so on.

Though she has made only five films, Coppola is already a recognizable auteur, displaying continuing themes and styles in her work. The themtaic consistency was even manifest in her lush period piece, “Marie Antoinette,” which also dealt with immature teenagers (albeit of royal blood), running around in the corridors of the Versailles, searching for identity and meaning.

As is known from the news stories and well-read article in Vanity Fair, the fact-based “Bling Ring” concerns a bunch of high school kids of San Fernando Valley (a suburb of Los Angeles) who, living in a state of limbo as far as societal values and norms are concerned, go on a spree and invade celebs’ house, stealing considerable amount of items (jewelry, chic wardrobe, designer shoes, among others), later estimated around $3 million in cash. The victims were actors, models, stars of Reality TV shows, such as Paris Hilton.

They live both immoral and amoral lives in a milieu known in sociology as a state of alienation and anomie. The film lacks the intimacy and the insider’s P.O.V. of Coppola’s best film, “Lost in Translation,” which in many ways was highly personal.
For “The Bling Ring,” Coppola takes a more detached and impersonal perspective, examining the main protagonists and their values (or lack of) in a more dispassionate yet nonjudgmental way. Sociologist and psychologists will have a field day with this picture, which puts emphasis on the social background and social conditioning of the girls by the surrounding dominant culture.

The motivation of the perpetrators is not monetary but celebrity, or rather notoriety; they are obsessed with getting recognition in the fastest, most efficient, least violent way.

The tale is obviously fictionalized, and not just in the names allotted of the characters. But Coppola relies quite heavily on the reportage Nancy Jo Sales’ Vanity Fair feature “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” which featured a photo of the ring member Alexis Neiers holding a Frappuccino.

Like “The Virgin Suicides,” this tale centers on female siblings. Nicki (Emma Watson playing real-life girl Alexis Neiers), her younger sister Emily (Georgia Rock) and adopted sister Sam (Taissa Farmiga), live with their eccentric mother (Leslie Mann), who believes in the kind of practical and superficial education one expects from self-help bestsellers, such as “The Secret.”

At a remedial high school, Mark (Israel Broussard), a shy youngster, befriends another strange girl, Rebecca (Katie Chang), who’s Asian-American. It doesn’t take long for the two to realize that they share in common a set of goals. They are both curious and intrigued by the cool and trendy lifestyle of the rich and famous (which clearly they are not). Why not claim their share in the American Dream?

Upon graduation, Rebecca tells Mark that she hopes to attend Los Angeles’ Fashion Institute of Design, “where all the ‘(Beverly) Hills’ girls went.” Mark aims higher, own business with his own brand name—and preferably without the formal training and years of experiences that such an enterprise usually takes.

The crime spree begins, when Mark and Rebecca rob the home of a classmate. But soon, joining forces with Nicki, Sam and other accomplices, the group becomes more aggressively ambitious.

When the heists occurred, Paris Hilton lived on my street (in the Hollywood Hills), and I always knew from the waiting paparazzi when she is about to come or leave. Thus, it’s utterly credible that the wild bunch of burglars could rely on media accounts (satellite photos from Google Earth about the best way and the best time to strike) for her exact coming and going.

The real-life Paris Hilton appears in a cameo in the film, and she has also allowed Coppola to shoot inside her lavishly decorated home, including her art work and the numerous closets, cluttered with Prada and Miu Miu, and other brand products.
Hotel heiress Hilton is the only one whose house is intruded more than once. Raids on other, similarly big and lush houses, containing valuables, include those inhabited by Orlando Bloom and Megan Fox.

As scripted, “The Bling Ring” benefits from a rather straightforward (a tad too conventional by Coppola’s standards, and for my taste), though she violates chronology and doesn’t presents the events in a traditional linear fashion.
The text retains some ambiguity in the sense that various characters narrate their subjective versions of the “true events.” But, ultimately, it’s up to the spectators to decide which characters to follow and who to believe in.

Coppola has always been a more astute director than writer, and she has always (from the very first picture) been able to create moody works, stronger in atmosphere than in narrative. You may recall the melancholy and sadness of “Lost in Translation,” or the elegiac and tragic nature of “The Virgins’ Suicides.”

What struck me after the first viewing (and I would like to see the picture again) is Coppola’s own sense of wonder. It’s as if she admits that what she presents is speculative rather definitive version of a high-profile case, that she herself doesn’t fully understand the bizarre phenomenon.

It is a well-known fact that most victims don’t report the crimes. Some don’t even realize right away that they have been burglarized. The deviant youngsters don’t try to conceal their identities—in fact, they give the impression that they actually want to get caught by the authorities so that they will get their fifteen minutes (or rather fifteen seconds) in the limelight—in shows like Extra or Access Hollywood.

Always proficient with young and inexperienced performers (Kirstin Dunst, Scarlett Johansson), Coppola has coaxed fresh performances from her cast of newcomers. The only exception is Emma Watson, who deviates from her screen image, as established in the “Harry Potter” franchise.

Working with her longtime collaborator, the brilliant cinematographer Harris Savides (who was ill and died of brain tumor in post-production), and later Christopher Blauvelt. Coppola gets the right look for her saga, though the dramatic and visual depiction of the break-ins get repetitious. Coppola has acknowledged the immeasurable contribution of Savides to the entire film, and specifically to one break-in, of TV reality star Audrina Partridge’s house, which is done from a distant wide shot.

Production values are enticing across the board. The hip-hop soundtrack includes such cool and popular musicians as Kanye West, Frank Ocean, and Big K.R.I.T., which can only elevate the cache of the picture among young spectators.

When one of the girls’ dilemmas is what to wear in court, you know that something is basically wrong with their education and families and with our media-obsessed culture, which stresses surfaces and physical appearances.

Ironically, if “The Bling Ring” catches fire, it will make the ring member even more (in)famous and recognizable by the large public than they ever were before.

Credits:
Running time: 90 MIN.
A24 release
Produced by Roman Coppola, Sofia Coppola, Youree Henley.
Executive producers, Emilio Diez Barroso, Darlene Caamano Loquet, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Rassam, Fred Roos, Mike Zakin.
Directed, written by Sofia Coppola, based on the Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales.
Camera, Harris Savides, Christopher Blauvelt. Editor, Sarah Flack.
Music supervisor, Brian Reitzell.
Production designer, Anne Ross; set decorators, Sara Parks, Lulu Stewart.
Costume designer, Stacey Battat.
Sound, Susumu Tokunow.
Casting, Courtney Bright, Nicole Daniels.

Cast

Israel Broussard
Katie Chang
Taissa Farmiga
Claire Julien
Georgia Rock
Emma Watson
Leslie Mann

The latest is a follow up to the equally captivating “Before Sunrise,” which was made in 1995, and “Before Sunset,” produced in 2004. It makes perfect sense to resume this unique franchise at nine-year intervals, which now a days represent a whole generation in terms of culture, technology, and media.

The “Before” series may prevail for several decades- until the filmmakers decide that they have exhausted all the narrative and dramatic possibilities inherent in this conceptual (and cerebral) material, which is beautifully enacted by its two stars, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpie.

Viewers and critics (like me), who have followed the actors over the past two decades, have aged along with the protagonists, and those spectators qho are of the same age of Hawke and Delpie will find “Before Midnight” particularly resonant and timely in terms of its central issues and concerns.

In this segment, Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpié’s Celine are in their forties, and while not exactly going through mid-life crisis, they face all the existential, professional, and personal problems that modern, intelligent, and alert characters of their caliber deal with.

Early on, Jesse is seeing off his son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) at the Kalamata Airport in Greece. Hank is returning to his mother and life in the U.S. after spending what he describes as the “best summer ever” with Jesse and his new family.

As their separation draws near, the middle-school guy is calmer and cooler than his anxiety-ridden father. There is a reason for his restlessness, as he is about to rejoins Celine and their young twin daughters, Ella and Nina (Jennifer and Charlotte Prior).

The geographic landscapes of the trilogy continue to change, adding a much needed and fresher dimension, and in some way the vistas and locations also play a character in the text; they are not merely there for their exotic look. The couple now drives through the beautiful rocky hillsides of Messinia.

As they drive, the duo engages in lengthy, routine, but also passionate talks about their lives far from Hank, about Celine’s career as an environmentalist and hopes for a new job, while not neglecting some more general and aesthetic issues, such as the appeal of ancient and modern Greece and its impact on everyday life.

Both latent and overt tensions arise, when Jesse hints at his wish to move back to the U.S., after years of living in Paris. Celine is less excited by the prospects, feeling that she has paid her dues, when they lived in New York for a while. Still European in her psychological makeup and sensibility, she is not particularly eager to return to America.

A successful novelist, Jesse is in Greece at a writer’s retreat, staying in the bucolic villa of an older expatriate writer, Patrick (Walter Lassally). Jesse’s fertile imagination—his flights of creative fancy, skills at storytelling—prove endearing to his surrounding company, which is composed of warm and friendly Greek couples, which clearly have not met before anyone like Jesse.

For her part, Celine is beginning to show signs of fatigue and intellectual weariness of serving as the muse to Jesse’s creative career. As is known by now, Celine’s past has played a significant part in Jesse’s semi-personal novels.

Mid-point, the couple gets to spend a luxurious, worries-free night alone at a seaside hotel, when their Greek friends volunteer to babysit for the twins. Feeling the undercurrents of frictions between them, Celine wants to beg off, but their friends insist.

This marital crisis offers an opportunity to take long walks through the spectacular countryside, enjoy each other’s intimate bond (as they used to, before they had children and obligations and responsibilities).

In the process, they talk, tease, flirt, argue, debate and disagree. But middle-age and the new responsibilities impinge and they can no longer forget completely the outside, more öbjective” reality, as it impinges on this (and all other) nights.

Throughtout there is evidence of nostalgia for a past that’s well remembered but also idealized, for oost youth, for inevitable regrets that come with aging and maturing, painful truth (Is this the life I really want to live? Is this the man/woman I would like to end my life with?).

Inevitably, there is the weight of children, the pressures of work, the feel of unfulfilled ambitions, various personal and professional disappointments, not to mention the ebb and flow of romantic love, the decrease of eros as manifest in their declining sexual lives. But there are also the strains of a continuously evolving, deepening relationship, and the tests of new challenges, as they are isolated in an idyllic, solitary night, far from their routine existence.

For those who need a reminder, Jesse and Celine first met while they were in their twenties in “Before Sunrise,” in 1995), they were then reunited a decade later while in their thirties in “Before Sunset” in 2004. The best compliment I can pay this feature is to say that I am eager to see the follow-up, hopefully in 2022.

World-premiering at the 2012 Venice Film Fest and playing at the Toronto Film Fest to great critical acclaim, “Stories We Tell” is now released by Roadside Attractions in a platform mode.

There have been several work about the elusive, mysterious nature of “Truth” (if there is such a thing), going back to Akira Kurosawa’s seminal “Rashomon,”
which depicts the same events from different perspectives and P.O.V.s.

As writer and director, Polley is familiar with this tradition, and her nonfictional work goes beyond it, showing not only that reality is more dramatic, strange, and bizarre than fiction, but that each and every family has its own stories to tell, and that, potentially, there are as many stories and storytellers as there are individual members of the same clan.

End result is a formally elegant, personal, and even transformative documentary that presents a complex labyrinth of tales that are related from different perspectives, and thus leave a good deal of ambiguity.

Serving as a storyteller herself, an astute filmmaker (who continues to improve technically), and an investigative private eye, she unravels all kinds of facts, secret, myths (and possibly distortions and lies) kept by a family of storytellers.

She playfully interviews and interrogates a cast of individuals, asking them the same questions. As expected the characters differ in their dramatic skills, personal charisma, subjective memory, and degree of reliability. That the responses are to a large extent different, and at time contradictory, is no surprise, because they ultimately depend on the social position of the teller and his/her memory of the same events.

Centering on the departure of the mother, each interviewee relates in his/her idiosyncratic way versions of the family past and present, based on nostalgic recollections of facts and myths. Polley unravels the paradoxes that form what we take to be the essence of family life, with all its warmth and love and other positive qualities, but she does not neglect the messy, disappointing and frustrating elements that prevail in every family.

Ultimately, as the title indicates, the feature is about the endless intricacies of family life, but it also provide profound commentary on the nature of storytelling itself, or narrativity (to use a more academic jargon), namely, the universal need to construct and reconstruct more or less shapely narratives, which fulfill both personal and collective functions in defining our identities as individuals as well as members of particular families.

MPAA: PG-13
Running time: 108 Minutes.

As conceived and directed by Baz Luhrmann, “The Great Gatsby” is a jazzy postmodern spectacle, a presumably corrective and revisionist version that actually misinterprets the essence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notable novel, which continues to touch emotionally and haunt dramatically readers and filmmakers alike.

Trailer: www.emanuellevy.com/?attachment_id=60934

Luhrmann’s mishmash of a movie is the equivalent of a fruit cocktail, in which there are too many ingredients, as if to make sure that the drink is tasty, or at least not bland/, but the ingredients don’t mix well, resulting in sharply uneven, incoherent work.

World premiering in h U.S. on May 10, “The Great Gatsby” was selected as opening night (May 15) of the Cannes Film Fest, where Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge” had premiered in 2001 (also as opener). Likely to divide critics, “The Great Gatsby” stands a slim chance to recover its huge production budget domestically, but it could appeal o younger viewers, who are not familiar with Fitzgerald’s well respected novel and may be intrigued by the cool music.

Just like the first 20 minutes of “Moulin Rouge,” which were visualy dazzling but disorienting, the first reel of thisovie, co-written by Luhrmann and his frequent collaborator, Craig Pearce, is particularly weak, unfolding as a series of lavish parties, spectacle of sounds and lights, to which everyone and anyone in New York (and, by extension, the audience) is invited. It’s as if the director did not trust the source material, and also felt that he had to justify the use of 3D technology and the escalating budget of over $120 million, the biggest budget allotted to Luhrmann’s to date.

Overall, the movie does not benefit much from the 3D, which is sizzling in a superficial way, but more often than not distract attention from the central strands of the book, which in its critique of the American Dream and the manners and mores of the power elite has continued to affect readers for nearly a century, ever since it was published.

One can understand Luhrmann’s need to distinguish is version from the previous four or five Hollywood renditions. But he has ended up making a cinema of excess and surface. By now it’s clear that Australia’s enfant terrible has a distinctive film vision, albeit a very limited one,, which he has applied one for twenty years to all of his films, regardless of their literary source material.

This strategy worked when the material (narrative, plot) was slight, such as “Strictly Ballroom,” which put Luhrmann on the movie map in 1992, and “Moulin Rouge”" (his most inventive and successful work to date, because they were musicals, a genre that lends himself to the director’s fertile (and perverse) visual imagination.

It yielded mixed results in “Shkekspeare’s Rome+Juliet,” Luhrmann’s first teaming with the estimable DiCaprio, back in 1996, but backfired with “Australia,” an artistic and commercial flop in which Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman not only embarrassed themselves but also proved that stars cannot elevate Luhrmann’s work, if the narrative foundations are not right.

This is also one of the problems of “The Great Gatsby,” which the director has cast after long audition processes. But, alas, of the three central actors, only DiCaprio, as Gatsby, gives a commanding and compelling performance that’s faithful to Fitzgerald’s conception in all the multi-nuanced shading of the character..

One of this rendition’s main shortcoming is Tobey Maguire, who, nominally, has the bigger roles, Nick Caraway. Nick serves as one part of the triangle (and later quartet), and as the narrator, in a movie that relies heavily on voice-overs. Most of the events in the film are shown from his P.O.V. and his commentary is inserted throughout the film.
Luhrmann is nothing if not ambitious: In this adaptation, he wishes to combines his distinctive visual, musical, and storytelling styles in 3D, while remaining faithful to Fitzgerald’s text and also bearing relevance to contemporary audiences.

That elusive and persistent ideological concept–the American Dream—serves as a guiding light for all five characters. Nick Carraway leaves the Midwest for New York City in the spring of 1922, an era of loosening morals, glittering jazz, bootleg kings, and sky-rocketing stocks. Nick lands next door to a mysterious, party-giving millionaire, Jay Gatsby, and across the bay from his cousin, Daisy, and her rich, philandering husband, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton)

It is easy to understand why a naïve and innocent guy like Nick would be drawn into the captivating world of the rich and powerful elite, their illusions, loves and deceits. H bears witness, as he himself says, both within and without of the world he observes and only partially inhabits. In the process, he begins to write a tale of impossible love, based on incorruptible dreams, and leading to a devastating tragedy.

Nick, the narrator (who, in the novel is writing the story of the Great Gatsby), describes his neighbor as shadowy, corrupt, ambitious, but ultimately inspiring, a man with “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, an extraordinary gift for hope, such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”

The biggest challenge—how to express dramatically Nick inner life, is only partially met by the filmmakers, a function of the conceptual writing and of Maguire’s undistinguished performance. Though already in his 40s, Maguire has maintained his boyish quality and limited vocal range. That he lacks overtly erotic appeal makes things worse. He is the only male in the film who has no independent life, including romance and sex.

Carey Mulligan, the gifted British actress (who was so good in the Oscar-nominated “Ëducation”) has her moments in a tough, challenging role, full of ambiguities, but she lacks the gorgeous beauty, the luminous personality of a woman that stood between three men and was worshipped by all of them—albeit in vastly different ways.

It takes about half an hour for DiCaprio’s Gatsby to make an appearance, and through Nick’s narration, we get brief glimpses into his life–or rather lives. A man of many masks, he is rumored have killed a man, a German spy or a hero in WWI, an entrepreneur who rose from poverty to become a rich man, a criminal connected with the Mafia. And it’s a tribute to DiCaprio’s considerable range that he can act any of these faces wit credibility. A complex, evasive, mysterious, romantic, glamorous, and mythic man, DiCaprio captures vividly Fitzgerald’s description of Gatsby as a man who possesses the kind of rare smile that possesses a quality of reassurance, while able to change it within a flash into the look of a man who had killed.”

Unfortunately, the secondary characters are all underdeveloped. Isla Fisher is too broad and stereotypical as Myrtle, one of Tom’s mistresses. Elizabeth Debicki plays Jordan Baker, Fitzgerald’s notion of the new breed of women, as a tall, elegant femme with nothing interesting to do or to say. Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan is decent as Meyer Wolfshiem. The only supporting actor who registers strongly is Jason Clark as Myrtle’s working-class husband, who ultimately takes the law in his hands and shoots Gatsby in cold blood (while the latter is taking a swim in his pool).

As far as I am concerned, there has never been a completely satisfying, fully realized Hollywood version of the book, and those efforts would include the Alan Ladd and Bette Fields version, as well as the Robert Redford and Mia Farrow rendition of 1974, under the direction of Jack Clayton, which was both an artistic and commercial flop. (I have not seen the Made for TV movie starring Mira Sorvino as Daisy).

A longer review will be published later today

This is the low-key Robinson’s first chance to be a leading man and his biggest film role since “Hot Tub Time Machine” (2010).

His bumbling, usually subtle approach might seem an unnatural fit for a Perry production, but it’s one of the key ingredients that make this film notable—that and his agile sparring with comic firebrand David Alan Grier.

Robinson plays Wade Walker, a good-natured regular Joe who’s been together with a wonderful, talented woman, Grace Peeples (Kerry Washington, a little lost here), for one blissful year. He’s ready to meet her family, but she’s more than a little hesitant—the “chocolate Kennedys,” as he calls them, are all perfectionists, nothing like Wade’s people. While Wade works hard to make it as a children’s music therapist, his unlicensed status isn’t likely to impress any of the overachieving Peeples.

Wade shows up uninvited for a family weekend in Sag Harbor—a weekend celebrating, of all things, the local Moby Dick Day—and his relationship with Grace is tested in every way thinkable.

The basic joke at work is that the Peeples aren’t really that black, they’re closer to white—and Wade represents the unwanted “real black” element. This is accentuated in an uncomfortable later scene where Wade’s accused of stealing earrings from Grace’s mother (S. Epatha Merkerson).

On his surprise arrival, Wade’s miffed to learn that Grace never actually told her family about him—the first of a flurry of surprises to hit him in Sag Harbor. The Peeples turn out to be a highly dysfunctional bunch behind the curtain, everyone deeply invested in keeping secrets from everyone else. In short order, Wade knows more about the Peeples than he wants to. In fact, he soon knows way more than they know about themselves: the dad’s a closet nudist, the mother needs to go back to rehab, Grace’s sister (Kali Hawk) is a lesbian who hasn’t come out to the family, and Grace’s brother (Tyler James Williams) has a problem with kleptomania.

Meanwhile, all Wade wants is the right moment to propose to Grace. But he just can’t catch a break—what can go wrong for him keeps doing so.

The biggest thorn in his side is Grace’s overbearing father, Virgil (Grier), a retired federal judge who repeatedly demands that Wade address him only as “Judge Peeples.” It’s “Meet the Parents” (2000) all over again, with Robinson taking Ben Stiller’s spot and Grier taking Robert De Niro’s—except this time, of course, everyone’s black.

In her directorial debut, Tina Gordon Chism doesn’t waste any time getting the familiar gears going. Although her premise has zero originality, she stuffs her screenplay with genuine quirkiness and plenty of black cultural references to make “Peeples” seem original enough in places. Here and there, there’s even the hint of Sturgian social satire at work.

Some highlights: Wade discovers that Mrs. Peeples is the former 1970s disco queen Lady Divine, which leads to him secretly trying on her old headdress—and getting caught red-handed by the judge. There’s also a raucous sweat lodge sequence, in which Wade and Virgil battle it out to see who’s manlier, and a surreal climax at Moby Dick Day: Wade accidentally consumes psychedelic mushrooms and has a violent encounter with Virgil, who’s dressed for the day as none other than Ahab.

While “Peeples” hardly breaks new ground, it’s the funniest thing Hollywood’s come up with this year—much funnier than, say, “Identity Thief.” And the humor is for the most part inoffensive, thank you.

“Peeples” is also a welcome step forward for Robinson, who will likely excel at drama as well as comedy, and a debut of promise for a new woman director, Chism.