Ill-Informed Gadfly

You know who you are. You love movies, or at least you used to, but you’ve been avoiding them this summer because everything on the marquee looks like the shoddy remake of a sequel to a video game. I can’t say “Knight and Day” will enthrall the discerning moviegoers who’ve sent the box office into a well-deserved slump, but it should placate them. At least it did for me. The versatile director James Mangold relies on an endangered formula: A-list stars, glamorous locations, action, humor and romance. “Knight and Day” knowingly takes place in a fantasy version of the real world, where feats of derring-do are tossed off blithely, recognizable in their aftermath only because the hair of Tom Cruise or Cameron Diaz is slightly tousled. Cruise again puts his feral energy in service of comedy, satirizing the super-competent Ethan Hunt of his “Mission: Impossible” series. Diaz is less ideally cast. Her persona in material like this is bubbly-flighty-ditzy-clumsy, and she does it well. But it doesn’t jell with her character’s occupation, restoring vintage cars, or with her surprising acumen in the world of high-stakes espionage. Mangold packs every scene with delirious action and banter, and it’s charming, especially for the first hour or so. But just when the movie should be serving up its most memorable delights, it falls into a rut, repeating setups, transitions and barely-literate catchphrases, like Cruise reacting to desperate situations with three words: “I got this.” “Knight and Day” is similarly enamored of its own sleek competence. It seduces itself when it should still be seducing the audience.

The protagonist of “Please Give” buys people’s unwanted antique furniture for her Manhattan boutique, where she sells it at ridiculous markups. She feels guilty about her occupation. I wonder if writer-director Nicole Holofcener feels the same way about hers. She and distributor Sony Pictures Classics are making the same cynical calculation as her hero: that customers will overpay for crap because the venue has a reputation for quality. It’s sadly apropos that the title sounds like a desperate plea for charity. “Please Give” is boutique cinema that belongs in a DVD bin at Wal-Mart. It’s not incompetent, but it’s so slight it’s barely there. Holofcener casts some of the most appealing actors in movies today, including Catherine Keener, Rebecca Hall and Oliver Platt, and together they craft some plausible character sketches. But the movie concludes by asking us, without apparent irony, to be moved by a privileged 15-year-old girl getting a bad facial, then buying some expensive jeans. Holofcener can hardly be bothered with aesthetics. She begins with a montage of breasts on a mammogram machine, a cheap attention-getter with little relevance to the story. Then she settles in for 90 minutes of people talking, photographed in purely functional closeups and medium shots and accompanied by a Muzak score. There’s no reason to see “Please Give” in a theater, and that means it’s not a movie. When a show as painstakingly crafted and dramatically potent as “Mad Men” is on basic cable and a film like this is charging admission, the choice isn’t just obvious. It’s a moral necessity.

“Splice” isn’t the sort of horror movie where things jump out at you, accompanied by deafening sound effects. It doesn’t pit good against evil or, in the case of many slasher pics, evil against banal. The monster isn’t the bad guy, or girl in her case, and the movie plumbs her complex relationship with her antiheroic creators, as in “Frankenstein.” “Splice” is provocative and unsettling, with sexual taboo-breaking that provokes discomfort more than visceral terror. No wonder it seems to have gained more traction with critics than with the moviegoers who favor the “Saw” series. Its seriousness is evident from the casting of Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as geneticists who create a new species in a bid for pharmaceutical riches. They deliver nuanced performances, even when their characters show laughably bad judgment, recklessly adding human DNA to their stew and hatching a fast-growing girl they call Dren. She’s smart, physically imposing and increasingly easy on the eye, and her development is fraught with moral dilemmas and Freudian psychodrama. “Splice” is never dull, but it’s not always surehanded. Director and co-writer Vincenzo Natali has a few independent genre films under his belt, and he clearly knows how to stay under budget: He uses a mere handful of sets and locations, and only five actors get speaking parts. The movie needs a more expansive third act, but that’s not possible under those limitations, and Natali’s filmmaking disappoints in the crucial final reel. Even so, “Splice” is one of the year’s most interesting and rewarding major-studio releases.