Begin Again (2014)

I love “Once,” the Dublin-set debut from John Carney that sucked the whimsical romance out of the meet-cute genre and gave us one of the best musical soundtracks in many a year. In “Begin Again” –- once called “Can a Song Save Your Life?,” a better title -– Carney hits the USA with Brit Keira Knightley in tow to play music with Mark Ruffalo. Once again, so to speak, Carney avoids the easy romantic lines and lets adults be adults, ones who exist by song: Creating them, listening to them, savoring them. Knightly is the cheated-on girlfriend of a rising pop star, and Ruffalo is on the skids of a broken marriage and dying music career. Then he hears Knightley sing and realizes a new reason to thrive. I’ll stop there. As with “Once,” music is key to every scene, but never breaks from reality. This is a good, smart film as much about New York as the couple at story’s center. Carney only over reaches when trying to make his leads seem ultra-hip independents when they share guilty pleasure songs while walking the Big Apple. Her embarrassed choice: “As Time Goes By.” Seriously, who doesn’t love to hear Dooley Wilson’s voice? B+

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)

I loved Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan book series before I drifted left and he disappeared into techno-war-porn liberal hate. Ryan was a great read: Injured marine turned CIA desk geek with deadly smarts. Blow shit up? Tougher guys did that. Clancy’s writing electrified: He foresaw 9/11 in 1994. Now comes “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” a reboot with Chris Pine as Ryan. It fizzles. It chases 9/11. It casts Russians as villains in a move politely called nostalgic. It starts strong: Young Ryan is wounded in Afghanistan, but his rehab spirit captures him a gal (Keira Knightly) and a secret boss (Kevin Costner) who hires Ryan for his vibe on tracking bad money. But fizzles. I’ll skip plot, because when the climax hits, Ryan –- injured 10 years on  -– is popping motorcycles like Knievel and punches like Bourne. Baffling. Did a reel get lost? Kenneth Branagh is director and bad guy, going full Hollywood. A missed idea screams loud: Why not recast Ryan with Knightly -- oddly cast as distressed damsel -- as female Ryan? Clancy might have been a right-wing blowhard, but he knew cool women. Disappointing. (But better than that Affleck crap.) C+

Anna Karenina (2012)

I’ve not read Tolstoy’s phone-book thick novel “Anna Karenina,” but I know how Russian love stories end. Not well. The same holds true for Joe Wright’s Brit-heavy adaptation with Keira Knightley (they also did “Atonement” together) as the title aristocrat who rips late 19^th century rules and has an affair with an army officer (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to the anger of her bureaucrat husband (Jude Law). This is a wild-card visual beauty that plays on the Shakespeare adage that, “All the world’s a stage...” Much of the movie is set inside a theater with the characters moving from the stage out into the audience and up through rafters and balconies, sets changing around them. Scenes set at a farm where true love and hard work abound are shot with no artifice. Yes, Wright is saying the wealthy are fake, while the people of the land are true. Pretentious? I dug it. It’s the love triangle that disappoints: Taylor-Johnson -– looking like he should be playing live guitar at the vegetarian restaurant three doors down from the theater I was at –- is miscast as the officer who women swoon for. The scandalous romance, then, pales beside the sets and music. B-

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

I watched “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” twice in one week to truly understand how much of an empty-headed, empty-hearted letdown it is, a dull gray shadow of its first outing, “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” one of the most fun Big Hollywood Tent Pole Movies of 2003 and the past decade.

That was a deserved Hollywood blockbuster: The thrill of seeing undead men walking on the ocean floor in moonlight to take a ship, Geoffrey Rush’s gleefully nasty villain who, I swear, I wanted to win because he was so … rotten good, Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, a swashbuckling conman hero with eye-liner who took part in the action yet remained aloof, a comedic Puck-like character from Shakespeare. With an undying thirst for rum, rum, rum. And rum. It was as if Depp said, “You want me to headline a Hollywood summer film? Alright, stand back.” The cast and characters (including Orlando Bloom and then-unknown Keira Knightley as the hero and damsel in distress) seemingly had no idea how to contemplate the actor Depp or the character Jack, and in once hilarious scene Bloom all but breaks the fourth wall to make sport of Sparrow/Depp.

“Black Pearl” was and remains a fun blast. No one knew it would work. It did. Massively. (Rush was robbed of a Best Supporting Actor nomination, fact.) The film remains endlessly rewatchable, just to pick out the shifts and squirms in Depp and his pirate self. The inevitable sequels disappointed, they had nowhere to go but down, but they limped along nicely enough. This? This fourth sequel? Third sequel? Shit, does it matter? No. I have thus far avoided talking about it have you not noticed? It hurts my cinematic brain.

Depp is back, and the center stage as Jack Sparrow, the first mistake in this Rob Marshall-directed (he made “Chicago” and “Nine”) crapper that has no spark, no center, or soul, or logic. (Gore Verbinski helmed the first three.) Even hair-brained Hollywood logic, by which I mean the “Don’t think, enjoy” mantra is gone. Depp looks deeply sullen and uninterested from the start as he badly impersonates a London judge then – must I explain? – gets mixed in with a former flame (Penelope Cruz) and the nastiest pirate of all, Blackbeard (Ian McShane). It is McShane who gives some pulse to this mess, which leaves Bloom and Knightley behind for another couple two boring to speak about, and I say that knowing the dude plays a Christian missionary and the lady plays a genuine mermaid. How that can be boring, I’ll never know, but the writers behind this film make it so.

The whole darn lot is after the Fountain of Youth, and the climatic fight over it – involving pirates, Brits, the Spanish navy, those mermaids and zombies, yes, zombies – plays like an AARP promo. Arthritic, with bad-lighting, and lots of mugging. I mean sorry-ass smiles, not robbery, unless one counts the price of a movie ticket or DVD. The filmmakers whip up so many switcheroos that the endless double crosses become redundant echoes of “Gotch’ya!” In one ugly spot, Sparrow pulls a mutiny prank that gets an innocent man executed (by flamethrower!) at the hands of Blackbeard. Sparrow just shrugs it off. The scene is all kinds of wrong, bad for Jack and the series.

No scene is more boring and overlong than an early sword fight between Depp and Cruz, shot in pitch dark and from angles so unpleasant and haphazard, even a child would know we are watching stunt doubles piss about in a second-unit action scene. The once-rousing “Pirates” music by Klaus Badelt, Depp’s comedic timing, and the way he once slipped in and out of the action like an armed drunken court jester, is all off, as is the supernatural kitsch. We get zombie pirates, massive ships (the Black Pearl!) shrunken and captured in rum bottles, and voodoo magic. None of it is explained, and all of it reeks like half-assed script ideas abandoned whilst cameras rolled.

Rush returns (again!) as Barbossa, but that joyously evil glimmer he showed in “Black Pearl” is gone. Rush is here for the paycheck and the vacation in Central America, same as Depp. Having seen Depp slump through “Rum Diary,” I’m not too shocked, but Rush is usually above that. The first film played like a wild card gag, while “Stranger” lacks strangeness and magic, it is a lifeless bore, so dark (and in useless 3-D) I thought the big-screen TV we recently purchased was off kilter.

A fifth (!) “Pirates” is in the works, but I hope it’s a chest never opened. Beyond McShane and employing hundreds of CGI geeks and model makers, this third sequel (that hurts typing that again) has no reason to exist other than to have made hordes of money. (Which it sadly did.) Jump the shark? Jump off the plank. Captain Jack should quit the sea, and retire. To the ocean floor. Black Pearl: A On Stranger Tides: C-

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 sci-fi novel is a brilliant under-handed writing pitch, a dystopian alternate universe cautionary tale built on high-tech ideas but plays as razor straight as a Charlotte Bronte novel. The film version is very good but it doesn’t pack the devastating emotional wallop. It can’t, this is a story about what goes on in people’s heads, little action, and no amount of narration can cover such ground. The gist: Three youth (Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield as adults) learn that their lives, raised in total control at a boarding school, are preset. There’s no alternative. No happy ending. We get a slow half-hour start of their childhood upfront that read far better on the page. I will not divulge anything else, except there is some comedy (the trio ordering food at a café) among the drama. Garfield shows teeth and rage only hinted at in “The Social Network.” Watch the movie, but read the book. It is heart-breaking and unforgettable. B+