Captain Marvel

Although it is a muddled and superficial film, Captain Marvel stars Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, the latter of which is among the most watchable movie stars working today. Their tandem charms and relative comfort working within the Marvel aesthetic make the experience almost tolerable.

Directed by indie journeymen Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Marvel’s latest chapter in its never-ending story is almost unwatchable in its first reel. The titular character has about three names, thus we can stick with “Captain.” We meet Captain on her home planet, where she’s haunted by memories she can’t quite snap into focus. It’s a warrior society, and in its first third the film borrows from everything from Green Lantern to Superman to The Matrix and grows more tedious with every purloined almost-idea.

There’s an early covert mission Captain goes on with her fellow alien freaks that’s a mess of too-dark cinematography and meandering, uninspired direction. The formal maneuver of representing Captain’s repressed/erased memories of a past life through extremely on-the-nose editing gets old instantaneously. It’s also annoying. There was an opportunity here to do something interesting with the are-we-our-memories philosophical underpinnings of the story, the feminist subject matter, and the 1990s setting. But these elements are never explored, just simply presented.

It would have been great, for example, to see the 90s setting used to some thematic effect rather than simply mined for its obnoxiously obvious playlist. A Marvel movie that actually mimicked a 90s movie aesthetic would have been… well, it would have been as good as any idea in Captain Marvel. The film’s one actually worthwhile major theme — that Captain Marvel had been fighting on the wrong side of a war because she didn’t know who she truly was (literally) — is rendered in such an incurious fashion that the notion is wasted.

Larson navigates the character’s intensity and, remarkably for an alien, penchant for wry comedy more or less skillfully. Of course, the problem with a hero who literally doesn’t know her true identity is that whatever personality traits she might exhibit seem random. Which they are. Oh, is she also a swordsman of sarcasm? Sure, why not?

Larson gets by on her instincts, never really seeming to know, well, who this character is. (Compare with Robert Downey Jr.’s handling of Tony Stark in the Iron Man films; this is less a testament to Downey’s talents than it is to the fact that Tony Stark has character traits that make him recognizable in a literal crowd of superheroes.) Predictably, her best scenes are ones that resemble her own indie background — e.g., sitting at a kitchen table and reminiscing with an old friend, or engaging is semi-barbed banter with Nick Fury (Jackson).

To the extent that Marvel films exist as long-form trailers for the next Marvel film, Captain Marvel is about as effective as it gets. It has the perfunctory boisterousness and pointless swagger that only the finest (worst) trailers can effect. Sitting in the theater, one realizes that the reason the fans come out is the post-credits sequences, in which it becomes clear that the main attraction is never the film you’re watching but the one you’re meant to watch next.

Captain Marvel — TWO STARS

Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

Rated PG-13

Marvel Studios

Walt Disney Studios 

124 min.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” is a fine chocolate enveloped in even finer chocolate and wrapped in one of Wonka’s golden tickets. Wes Anderson’s eighth film is a premium piece of maximalist cinema that charms all the way down.

Anderson’s best work draws its power not from the the window dressing of visual style but from his penchant for melancholy — the sense that some truth about our own fragile hearts has been expressed, albeit in bright 1970s upholstery colors.

A writer (Tom Wilkinson and Jude Law, alternately) muses on his life as a storyteller. He tells of how he wrote one story in particular. Anderson swoops us into that story, where a new narrator and characters take over. The fluidity with which we enter and exit the various levels of story is an impressive feat of clever screenwriting and direction.

By creating a fairy tale within a fairy tale within a frame story, Anderson admits to the very idea of contrivance. Anderson is ever that avuncular storyteller, that grandfather who sits on Fred Savage’s bed in “The Princess Bride,” not just telling us a story but telling us he’s telling us a story. “Budapest” crackles with the delight of a giddy tale spinner.

The adventure hotel manager Mr. Gustave (Ralph Feinnes) and his lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori) have is one the Marx Brothers would have loved. Anderson’s obsessive control of the frame for once benefits the material, as these characters seem at peace with their own rigidity. Anderson’s style of comedy also maps beautifully onto the mores of the fictional nation of Zubrowska.

Anderson’s last couple of films have been parades of famous faces. “Budapest” continues this silly tradition. I’m not sure why they had to call in the equivalent of a casting air strike by nabbing Harvey Keitel to play the scout leader in “Moonrise Kingdom,” or why Jeff Goldblum needed to play the mostly inconsequential lawyer character in “Budapest.”

I suppose the caravan of celebrities is, for Anderson, a game in itself. One has the sense of a grown man making sculptures out of his mashed potatoes.

Yet Anderson’s films have much to say about the human condition without seeming like they’re trying to say much of anything. This is his real gift. In his better films, the colorful peacocking of maximalist mis en scene serves as misdirection as he sneaks in the pathos. As his films become more visually rigid, they also become more humane.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” — FOUR STARS

Directed by Wes Anderson. Rated R. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 100 min. 

Dom Hemingway

“Dom Hemingway” is non-stop sex. It begins with the main character getting a blowjob. Then it jerks off the audience for the next 90 minutes.

Jude Law gained a few pounds and grew a Wolverine-style beard to star as Dom, a career safecracker freed after a 12-year bid in prison. He didn’t implicate his boss, Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir), a gesture for which Dom expects to be compensated. The plot, which thinks itself clever, then lumbers from inanity to inanity.

A lot has changed in 12 years — Dom’s marriage, the culture (no more smoking in pubs!), etc. He copes in his own misanthropic way. An obnoxious and thinly drawn character, Dom’s misbehavior reveals nothing about him as a person. He is a master safecracker and a drunk. How did he come to be these things? Who knows.

Yet director/screenwriter Richard Shepard gives us heaps of “as-you-know” dialogue — in which one character tells another something they both already know — written in the aggressively slick Guy Ritchie style. When done artfully, this can be hilarious, as in Ritchie’s “Snatch.” When done poorly, as in “Dom Hemingway,” we have time to think, “No one speaks this way in real life.”

If Jude Law possesses any charisma (a proposition toward which I am agnostic), it is absent here. His outrageousness is forced, the jokes unfunny. Law’s self-conscious performance is akin to a prudish reverend’s wife who’s decided to take a pole-dancing class. Hey world, look at me letting my hair down! Didn’t think I had it in me, didya?

“Dom Hemingway” thinks itself most clever when it is most formulaic. It is a film in which a character with one hand is nicknamed “Lefty.” The joke isn’t thrown away with irony but dwelt upon as if it were innovative.

Mostly it’s a matter of poor execution. When Dom and his buddy Dickie (Richard E. Grant) confront Mr. Fontaine at the crime boss’ palatial estate, a potentially good scene gets drowned in flat jokes and broken story logic. Aside from being mysterious, I still don’t know anything about Mr. Fontaine’s motives, nor those of his female companion (Madalina Diana Ghenea), who plays a key role in the almost-plot.

By the time the film gets around to something interesting, we’re over an hour in. Dom never knew his daughter (Emilia Clarke) or his grand-kid. He yearns to reconnect. This would be compelling if we were given some reason to empathize with Dom besides his braggadocio.

“Dom Hemingway” — ONE STAR

Directed by Richard Shepard. Rated R. BBC Films, Isle of Man Films. 93 minutes.