A superb cast is one of the highlights of “The Company You Keep”

By Michael Calleri

The title of the new political thriller “The Company You Keep” not only applies to its theme of 1960s radicalism, but also to the stellar cast that gets the audience energized and has them glad to be watching their work. Good film performers make you forget who they are in real life. They make you eager to follow the characters they are playing, to go on an adventure with their reel-time personas.

These days a cast rarely gets much better than who’s in this engaging and well-made movie. It’s like being at a great party after the Oscars.

Robert Redford and Richard Jenkins.

Robert Redford directs and stars in the picture. He has an Academy Award for directing “Ordinary People.” Also on-screen are Susan Sarandon, Julie Christie, and Chris Cooper, all Oscar winners for acting. You’ll also see Academy Award nominees Richard Jenkins, Stanley Tucci, Terence Howard, Anna Kendrick, and Nick Nolte. And as an added bonus, you have Shia LaBeouf, Brendan Gleeson, Brit Marling, and Sam Elliott. There’s not a slacker performance in the group.

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New movie about Jackie Robinson doesn’t quite round the bases

By Michael Calleri

Think about it. In the late 1940s, black men did not play professional baseball with white men.

Blacks had fought in segregated units in World War II, returning home to segregated lives, an especially harsh existence in the southern United States. In many areas of the country, schools, public transportation, restaurants, theaters, and drinking fountains were off limits. The Civil Rights movement was still in its infancy.

And racial segregation in public schools was the standard across America. This wouldn’t change until the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on May 17, 1954 in “Brown versus Board Of Education (Topeka, Kansas)” that led to the desegregation of public schooling.

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In ‘The Place Beyond The Pines,’ lives cross perilous paths

By Michael Calleri

Every now and then a film comes along that makes you glad you love movies. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be alive. “The Place Beyond The Pines” is that kind of film. It’s vibrant and energetic; a little ragged around the edges, but so utterly filled with the harsh cold breath of danger that the riskier it becomes, the more alluring it is.

The audience finds itself complicit in the misdeeds of its characters. It shares in the anger of a father driven to physical violence by the new man in his child’s life. It invites the audience to hope banks will be robbed successfully. Its emotions are so knife-edged, that because of the film’s take on moral choices, on what’s right or wrong, when a character points a gun at a politician begging for his life in a damp patch of woods on the outskirts of town, you’ll be forgiven for thinking: “shoot him.”

Ryan Gosling.

“The Place Beyond The Pines,” directed by Derek Cianfrance, is a gritty movie that brings to mind the best screen melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s. Hollywood made these films in its sleep. When they were good, they were very, very good. One director of that era who really knew how to entice the audience, and make them complicit in a crime, was Alfred Hitchcock.

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Roger Ebert: A personal remembrance

By Michael Calleri

Just as it should have been, the death of Pulitzer prize-winning movie critic Roger Ebert was announced first in the Chicago Sun-Times, the daily newspaper for which he wrote for more than four decades. Of course, this being the era of digital reporting, the paper’s website got the scoop.

But Roger wouldn’t have cared about that. He embraced the new writing and reporting technology with everything he had. He believed in the future of newspapers regardless of the way people read them.

Roger Ebert.

Ebert, from Urbana, Ill., wrote his last column on April 3, literally 46 years to the day that he began working for the Sun-Times. Even though Roger was 70 years old, the hopeful column was full of the promise of youth. He wrote about new plans for his hugely popular website, about the film festival in his hometown, and about the recurrence of the cancer that would end his life a day later.

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‘The Croods’ ambles along to a bright new world, Stone Age style

By Michael Calleri

Well, now we know. The mother-in-law joke, that corny vestige of tired comedians everywhere, was first told in prehistoric times. At least that’s the impression we get from “The Croods,” the new animated feature from DreamWorks.

Mothers-in-law don’t get a fair shake in the movie, but fortunately the cartoon fable doesn’t lose its focus because of this. “The Croods” has enough charms to soothe a savage mastodon.

Yes, the in-law jokes get annoying, but the film overcomes the negativity they engender. Besides, Cloris Leachman provides the voice for the crabby cavewoman. If you’re going to have a curmudgeonly female codger, a grandmother who wears being nasty like a badge of honor, than I guess Leachman’s the gal for you. Her snarling attitude is actually rather funny at times.

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‘Olympus Has Fallen’ continues the ultra-violent trend that is failing at the box office

By Michael Calleri

Blood is the new currency in Hollywood.

But it might be a currency that needs to be recalled. The recent crop of action movies are riff with bloodletting. However, if the lukewarm audience reaction to these films is any indication, this pumping up of the flow of blood is a plot device that needs to be seriously reined in.

When a masterful visual stylist like Quentin Tarantino approaches violence, the result is much different from how less-talented directors attempt to score points by ramping up the carnage. Tarantino advances his stories with blood and madness. Others take delight in merely offering slaughter for slaughter’s sake, more often than not throwing aside the story to mistakenly concentrate on bullets and bombs.

As action pictures continue to languish at the box office, there’s a reason for their collective failure. The message is clear. For a while, perhaps for too long a time, the idea was that the more blood that flowed in an action film the better. “Olympus Has Fallen” is merely the latest example of Hollywood’s taste for stylized bloodletting.

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Lily Tomlin shows Tina Fey how it’s done in ‘Admission’

By Michael Calleri

There’s a trap for comedy performers who want to transition to being a little less comical, perhaps even doing something more dramatic. The audience waits in anticipation of that first big laugh. It expects their clowns to be what they’ve always been, funny.

Tina Fey, a satirist and comedienne of the highest order, faces this problem head-on in “Admission,” a film that, like its star, wants to be taken seriously. Yes, there are laughs in the movie, most of them courtesy of a scenery-chewing performance by Lily Tomlin, but by-and-large this is a thought-provoker with some important things it wants to say about feminism, college admission hurdles, adoption, and women in the workplace. The film is directed by Paul Weitz (“About A Boy,” “Being Flynn”) and written by Karen Croner from Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel.

Tina Fey and Lily Tomlin star in “Admission.”

“Admission” follows Fey, who plays Portia Nathan, a long-standing college admissions officer at Princeton. She is one of a university team that will decide which high school students, out of 20,000 applicants, will be selected for the coveted chance to be part of Princeton’s class of 2016. At most, only 1,500 will be admitted. This specific vetting process is important because whichever admissions officer brings something special to the table, as in a promising student of astonishing potential, will probably be the person chosen to replace the retiring Dean of Admissions (nicely played by Wallace Shawn).

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Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant shine in ‘Amour’

By Michael Calleri

Truly great movies are rare. “Amour” is one of those rarities. It is an extraordinary experience that focuses on issues almost everyone will face. It is a film about old age and memories of being young. It is a work of art in the classic meaning of the word, and it is also a beautiful entertainment.

Georges and Anne are married and devoted to each other. Now in their 80s, they live a comfortable life in one of those classic book-lined Paris apartments. They are retired music teachers who enjoy going to concerts and sharing quiet moments reading to each other. As we will see, theirs was a sunny existence.

Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant in “Amour.”

The movie opens with an abrupt act. The police break into an apartment. They find Anne’s decomposing body beautifully laid-out on a bed. She is in a lovely dress with her hands holding flowers. Within moments, we are back in time, watching an elderly couple in seeming good health taking in a piano recital.

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Is Jason Statham the next action hero?

By Michael Calleri

For movie fans, the month of January is the doldrums, and the past few weeks have seen a rash of less than satisfying motion pictures. The major studios had so little faith in these films that they refused to screen them for critics across the country.

Most of these January releases fail at the box office and disappear quickly. Chances are you haven’t rushed out to see recent studio efforts such as “Gangster Squad,” “Broken City,” “The Last Stand,” “Hansel And Gretel: Witch Hunters,” “A Haunted House,” “Movie 43,” or “Race 2.”

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A cabin in the woods and two wild little girls

By Michael Calleri

Events in horror movies rarely look as good as what transpires in “Mama,” a less than truly scary take on the classic nurturer of most lives, a person’s mother.

The film opens with a bit of Wall Street insanity, but not the monetary kind. No “greed is good” here. Rather, we get a greed-can-make-you-crazy prologue. We’re many miles away from the Manhattan epicenter of stocks and bonds, which is meant to prove that the economic meltdown of 2008 affected financial workers everywhere.

After a breathless beginning during which a killer slaughters his wife and his business partners, the guy takes his two very young daughters into the woods. Victoria is 3 and Lily is 1. Just as he’s about to shoot the girls and himself, something wicked this way comes. A specter descends upon the cabin.

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