HITMAN

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Richard Linklater and co-screenwriter/actor Glen Powell craft an enticingly funny and sexy social satire inspired by an unlikely true situation.

Leave it to Texas to hire a nerdy math and philosophy college professor to pretend to be a real-life hitman in order to catch those seeking unsavory assistance in the dispatching of an enemy.

That was back in the '80s and '90s, before texts, emails, social media posts, and search engine requests provided most of the background evidence in such cases.

Although the narration categorically informs us that hitmen don't really exist; that little bit of exposition is, well, absolutely untrue; it's just that everyday civilians don't usually have access to such skullduggery.

Rather than Houston, where the actual events took place, Richard Linklater sets the action in New Orleans. It reminds us of what a cool location New Orleans is for movies to be filmed. If there's one city in America that is palpably sexual, it's The Big Easy.

Glen Powell makes a splash as Gary Johnson, a mild mannered math teacher who finds his true calling, and a main squeeze (played by Adria Arjona), when he goes undercover to participate in sting operations against those wishing to purchase the services of a cold blooded killer, namely one poorly disguised Gary Johnson.

"Hitman's" overriding themeline is put both succinctly and indirectly during Gary Johnson's teaching efforts with his classroom students.

How well do we know ourselves?

What is our facility for changing our behaviors?

Gary tells his students to seize the identity that they want for themselves.

These burning questions catch fire as we are introduced to archetypal characters in search for illicit relief from personal problems further clouded by misinformation and America's twisted social norms.

While it may not be a perfect movie, "Hitman" is a perfectly nuanced satire.

"Hitman" comes at right time.

If only we could have such movies without the presence of guns. I suppose that's a big part if this movie's premise.

Richard Linlater's resume just keeps getting better, and better, and better.

Rated R. 115 mins.

SPOTLIGHT

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“Spotlight” is a labored reportage procedural that arrives a decade too late.

The story of the Boston Globe’s [“Spotlight”] editorial team’s earth-shattering exposure of the Boston Catholic Church’s systemic methods of committing and promoting pedophilia against thousands of children hit newsstands in January of 2002.

It would have been a good film to make in ’02 or ’03 when the story was hot, and could have brought more timely attention to the criminality being committed in the name of God.

Cardinal Bernard Law’s (played by Len Cariou) exposed corruption in the investigation proves that the chain of orchestrated and protected pedophilia goes all the way up to the top officials of the Boston Catholic Church, with considerable assistance from the city’s police, judicial system, and the media.

However shocking the Globe's shocking discoveries about the number of pedophile priests being shuffled to new locations where they continue to prey on children, the year's best investigative journalism was overshadowed by the then-recent events of 9/11. 

In 2001, The Boston Globe’s newly hired editor-in-chief Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) assigns his [inherited] cracker-jack investigative team to look into victims of sexual abuse by priests. The Baron is curious about why the story hasn’t been followed up on. Michael Keaton is well cast as Spotlight editor Robby Robinson, who oversees writers Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Marty Campbell (Brian d’Arcy James).

The able cast do a lot with a little within tight genre script constraints that consists of ever-increasing a-ha moments when clues turn into facts, usually in a distinctly unglamorous place such as a broom closet. The movie plays it safe to a fault by sticking too closely to formula. Boston's harsh climate of anti-semitism gets whitewashed out completely. Through dramatic license, Liev Schreiber's Jewish newspaper editor (Marty Baron) escapes the real-life racist sentiments expressed by Boston's predominantly Catholic citizenry at the time.

Everything smells of bleach. 

The filmmakers smartly steer clear of exploiting the rough subject matter for the sake of shock value or dramatic effect, but slough into the realm of cheesy melodrama, as during a scene in which Ruffalo’s character loses his temper in a very actorly way. His oh-so-impassioned anger rings with a telling hollowness that infects the movie.

Still, the picture is culturally significant in that it keeps alive the public discussion about the Catholic Church’s ongoing crisis of pedophile priests taking sexual advantage of their powerful positions in communities around the world. This film’s greatest purpose may be that it gives the viewer a sense of the enormous scale of sexual abuse crimes that Catholic priests have committed, and continue to commit, all over the world.

Rated R. 128 mins.

D.O.A. — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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Cinema doesn't get much more tightly wound than the anxious premise for Rudolph Maté’s film noir standard-bearer. A mussed-up man stumbles into a Los Angeles police precinct and tells the chief he wants to “report a murder,” his own.

What follows is the poor guy’s explanation of the previous day’s events, which will leave him a corpse by the end of movie. “D.O.A.’s” flashback storyline was a bold innovation when it came out in 1950, one of the 20th century’s most seminal years for world cinema. “All About Eve,” “Gun Crazy,” “Rashomon,” “Los Olvidados” and “Sunset Boulevard” were all released the same year.

Rudolph Maté was a renowned cinematographer of Polish descent whose work on “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1927) and “Gilda” (1946) established his first-class reputation. For “D.O.A.” Maté made clever use of locations in San Francisco and Los Angeles to add to the story’s potent sense of urgency. Scenes of his lead character running through crowded sidewalks were shot guerrilla-style without permits. His memorable use of interiors in the now-famous Bradbury building in Los Angeles illustrates Maté’s ingenious ability to instill noir’s shadowy elements from Art Deco designs.

Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) runs his own business as a small-time accountant in the desert town of Banning, California. Mr. Bigelow carries on an affair with his emotionally suffocating secretary Paula (Pamela Britton), a blonde with more sense than he gives her credit for. A weeklong vacation in San Francisco promises to give Frank a chance to sew a few wild oats — with Paula’s bluffing permission — if he is to give any serious consideration to a romantic future with her.

In a tip to the atomic age, during Frank’s first night in Frisco, a mysterious man slips him a radioactive mickey at a “jive” bar that features fiery jazz music played by an all-black band for a crowd of rowdy white “jive-crazy” fans. Maté’s depiction of San Francisco’s delirious jazz scene provided cinema’s first look at what would be termed the Beat Generation by the end of the decade.

Diagnosed the next day as only having “a day or two days — a week at the most” to live, Frank goes on an all-out rampage to track down the man who “murdered” him and carry out his revenge.

A high-concept movie before there was such a thing, “D.O.A.” foreshadowed the poisoning of (possibly) Yasser Arafat and (definitely) Alexander Litvinenko — via polonium-210 — by a half-century.

Although the movie stumbles through a checklist of well-worn film noir clichés like fumbling for change at the bottom of an ill-kept purse, its poison MacGuffin keeps the audience on tenterhooks right up to the final frame when the police captain stamps “D.O.A.” on a missing person’s report. Like any great film, “D.O.A.” keeps its promise.

Not Rated. 83 mins.