Watch a clip from the film "The Place Beyond the Pines." A stunt rider (Ryan Gosling) starts robbing banks to provide for his lover (Eva Mendes), which puts him on a collision course with a detective (Bradley Cooper). (Photo/Video: Focus Features)

One-third wonderful, "The Place Beyond the Pines" weakens as it unfolds for lack of what makes the early part so good.

The film, structured as three sequential episodes with a common theme, was directed by Derek Cianfrance, and stars Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper and Eva Mendes. Mr. Gosling was superb as the explosive lover in the director's previous film, "Blue Valentine," and he's superb once again as Luke, a stunt motorcyclist with a traveling carnival who discovers that he has a baby son. This hero with a divided soul—a Gosling specialty—is such a powerful presence that his influence is felt even when he's off screen. That's the intended consequence of the story, which concerns the fates bequeathed by fathers to their sons. Still, Luke is off screen much more than he's on, a situation whose unintended consequence is an energy sink in an overlong drama that grows ever more mundane.

Everything turns on Luke as the film begins; watching him is like watching a gathering storm. Some of the attraction flows from the actor's appearance—bleached blond hair, bemuscled body covered with tattoos. Mainly, though, we watch intently because a startlingly spare performance has been coupled with smart, pared-back writing. (The script was written by Mr. Cianfrance, Ben Coccio and Darius Marder. )

Luke speaks softly, guardedly, when Romina, a former lover played affectingly by Ms. Mendes, appears out of nowhere during the carnival's tour of upstate New York. "Do you remember my name?" she asks, scanning his face for any sign of emotion. Far from having forgotten her, he's drawn to her, then stunned to learn she has given birth to his child. Stunned briefly, but decisively. In a flash Luke commits to fatherhood, just as he decides, in a subsequent flash, to provide for his son—shades of "My boy Bill," the carnival barker's soliloquy in "Carousel"—by robbing banks with a newfound buddy named Robin ( Ben Mendelsohn, shrewdly memorable in a minor role).

These are existential decisions made by a prisoner of the moment whose longtime M.O. has been feeling things through instead of thinking about them. They're decisions that need no explanation, and they're all the more exciting to watch because they aren't explained. For better and worse, this flawed but touching hero is a man of action, revealing himself through what he does rather what he says. If only such thematic and dramatic economy governed the film's latter part, which tracks the impact of Luke's deeds on the lives of many others, including his son.

In the middle panel of the movie's triptych, Mr. Cooper plays Avery Cross, another kind of hero—at least he's hailed as such for while—who loses his way, and all sense of his true self, after a brief, morally ambiguous intersection with Luke. There's a sense that the filmmaker's heart is in this part of the story, which uses Avery's rise from rookie cop to district attorney to examine the nature of heroism, the temptations of power and the determinist fate that sets two sons—Luke's and Avery's—on a collision course.

This would seem to be serious stuff, and Mr. Cooper makes his scheming character as interesting as the writing allows. (The young actor cast as Avery's teenage son plays him as a witless, though almost surely unwitting, parody of the young Marlon Brando ; it's a disastrous performance.) For the most part, though, this is self-serious stuff, seething with ambition but almost devoid of spontaneity, and ultimately drained of genuine energy. By the time the generational circle closes, emotion has given way to exhaustion.

Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson Sundance Selects

'Gimme the Loot'

Sometimes principles can be a problem. I try to know as little as possible about movies before I see them so I can actually see them, unclouded by bias or buzz. All I knew about "Gimme the Loot" was the running time, 81 minutes, and for the first 20 minutes I didn't think I could stick it out. What passes for a plot is more of a notion: two young taggers from the Bronx, Sofia and Malcolm, drift cluelessly through the city's summer heat as they try to raise $500 in hopes of pulling off the ultimate triumph of New York tagging—covering the Mets' home-run apple with graffiti. Little by little, though, the cluelessness grew endearing, the cross-purpose conversations intricately funny, the gritty look appealing.

Watch a clip from the film "Gimme the Loot." When their latest work is buffed by a rival crew, two graffiti writers embark on an elaborate plan to bomb the ultimate location: the New York Mets' Home Run Apple. (Photo/Video: Sundance Selects)

Adam Leon's debut feature, as it turns out, had already won prizes and praise at several festivals. Should I have known that in advance? Maybe so, but I didn't and I'm glad, given the pleasure of discovery. Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson are terrific in the main roles. So is Zoë Lescaze as Ginnie, a spoiled white kid who teaches the taggers a thing or two about drift and being dissolute. What Sofia and Malcolm don't know is amazing—they can't keep track of what floor they're on in the course of a robbery, he seems unaware that the flowers he casually stole for his mother's birthday need to be in water. Yet you find yourself rooting for them all the same—not for their success as taggers, or petty thieves, but for their flowering in a foreseeable future.

Michel Bouquet Samuel Goldwyn Films


If "Renoir" weren't gorgeous to behold, all would be lost from the start. Happily, however, this modestly scaled feature by Gilles Bourdos was shot by Mark Ping Bing Lee, the Taiwan-born cinematographer who served as one of the shooters on the peerlessly beautiful "In the Mood For Love." Nothing is lost and much is gained from a luminous sense of place, along with an intriguingly paradoxical, though underdramatized, portrait of the Impressionist master as a maker of beloved art who had little or no love to give those who loved him for himself.

Here's Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1915, near the end of his life—he's played by the splendid Michel Bouquet —still turning out paintings of undiminished beauty in the sublime Riviera setting of Cagnes-sur-Mer, even though his hands are crippled by disease and he's often in pain. (The hand wielding the brush in closeups is that of a celebrated, or notorious, art forger, Guy Ribes.) Here's Andrée Heuschling, an exquisite young woman newly come to model for Renoir; she's played extremely well, given the limits of the writing and direction, by Christa Theret. And here, almost eerily, is the old man's middle son, Jean ( Vincent Rottiers ). Back from the war with an injured leg, young Jean Renoir is enchanted by Andrée, who will become his first wife, and is guided by her faith in the talent that will make him one of the greatest film directors—one might argue the greatest director—of all time.

"Renoir" is so beautiful, and so intelligently conceived, that you keep waiting, in vain, for a bit of fire to break out in the narrative. It's easy to be thankful, though, for vivid favors: the details of Renoir's home, which, like the apartment in "Amour," speak volumes about those who live there; the sparkling light from a garden hose in an apple orchard; the bright light behind Andrée's auburn hair; the warm light on her lovely breasts; the light radiating, or so it seems, from her crimson dress. Directors of photography used to be called lighting cameramen. This movie shows why.

Jonathan Pryce, Luke Bracey and Ray Stevenson Paramount Pictures

'G.I. Joe: Retaliation'

Watch a clip from the film "G.I. Joe: Retaliation." The G.I. Joes are not only fighting their mortal enemy Cobra; they are forced to contend with threats from within the government that jeopardize their very existence. (Photo/Video: Paramount)

I'd like to think I'm still a kid at heart, but when I was a real kid I played with Lionel trains, not Hasbro HAS +1.23% Hasbro Inc. U.S.: Nasdaq $54.39 +0.66 +1.23% July 11, 2014 4:00 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 928,275 AFTER HOURS $54.40 +0.01 +0.02% July 11, 2014 7:05 pm Volume (Delayed 15m): 11,718 P/E Ratio 21.93 Market Cap $7.06 Billion Dividend Yield 3.16% Rev. per Employee $818,993 05/24/14 Donald Levine, Hasbro Executiv... 04/24/14 Fandango Buys Movieclips, Bols... 04/21/14 Stocks to Watch: Hasbro, Nu Sk... More quote details and news » action figures, so I won't pretend that I had a great time watching "G.I. Joe: Retaliation." All the same, it was good to find out that a few G.I. Joes could save the world from the vile U.S. president who'd ordered all of them to be exterminated; that the vile president, played by Jonathan Pryce, wasn't who he seemed to be (i.e. a psychopathic monster playing Angry Birds on his cell phone while launching a nuclear strike); that thousands of nuclear missiles could self-destruct in flight without harm to the planet; that an even deadlier weapons system called Zeus could wipe out the whole city of London without harm to global morale, and that hearing loss from countless explosions, not to mention brain damage from dim dialogue, could still be obviated by an inexpensive system of passive defense, i.e. earplugs.

Macarena Garcia Cohen Media Group


For a different kind of paradox, see "Blancanieves," Pablo Berger's spectacular retelling of the Snow White myth. Mr. Berger makes his heroine, played by Macarena Garcia, the daughter of a famous bullfighter who flees her evil stepmother, falls in with a troupe of circus dwarfs and becomes a star toreador in her own right. What's more, the filmmaker puts her in 1920s Spain and tells her tale in a silent film, shot in retroresplendent black-and-white. It's something of a stunt, to be sure, and destined to be seen, at least by those who haven't seen this remarkable film, as emulating "The Artist." Yet the images in "Blancanieves" carry a dramatic charge that those in "Renoir" don't, even though, paradoxically, they're complemented only by music, not by words.

Watch a clip from the film "Blancanieves," a twist on the Snow White fairy tale that is set in 1920s Seville and centered on a female bullfighter. (Photo/Video: Cohen Media Group)

How this could be has to do with the essence of silent film. Mr. Berger and his cinematographer, Kiko de la Rica, work the wordless medium for all it's worth, whether with razzle-dazzle montages (Blancanieves, stricken by amnesia, suddenly sees her previous life playing out before her eyes during a crucial moment in the bull ring); swirling dances (flamenco doesn't need words) or searching closeups ( Maribel Verdú's sex-crazed stepmother, Encarna, is evil incarnate, but wittily so.) And Alfonso de Vilallonga's music isn't mere accompaniment, it's a score with rich emotional resonance. The silents, as this film suggests, achieved aesthetic marvels before sound came along to set things back for a while.

DVD Focus

'The Believer' (2001)

Ryan Gosling has spoken recently of giving up acting for a while. All the more reason to check out his first starring role on the big screen. Mr. Gosling is terrifyingly brilliant, or brilliantly terrifying, as the title character, Danny Balint. Danny is Jewish, a conceited bully of a yeshiva boy grown into a pugnacious young man. Danny is also an anti-Semitic skinhead who wants nothing more than to kill Jews. Henry Bean's remarkable film shows the ability of the human mind to hold, and even cherish, diametrically opposite thoughts.

'Vincent & Theo' (1990)

I've recommended it before, but "Renoir" calls it back to memory again. Robert Altman's film also portrays a peerless painter, but in a very modern way it's about art in the context of commerce. Tim Roth gives a phenomenal performance as Vincent van Gogh, penniless and sinking into insanity as he does paintings that will one day sell for unimaginable millions. Paul Rhys is Vincent's brother Theo, a gallery owner who struggles to sell some of those paintings to a world that finds them of little interest and less value, monetary or artistic.

'The Moment of Truth' (1965)

Francesco Rosi's landmark film, in Italian with English subtitles, was shot documentary-style in brilliant color by Gianni Di Venanzo. Mr. Rosi isn't interested in the romantic trappings of the bull ring. He rips them away in order to show bullfighting as a bloody business that draws hopeful youngsters out of poverty, only to exploit them by filling their heads with highfalutin notions of courage and art. The fictional hero, Miguelín, is played by the bullfighting legend Miguel Mateo, known in real life as Miguelín. The film is available on a Criterion Blu-ray disc that does the original full justice.