This Oscar nominated film got past me in 2013, and I am all the sorrier for it. Judi Dench is Philomena, a provincial, sweet Irish retiree in London who, living with her adult daughter, reveals a long-hidden secret – that she gave birth to a son in Ireland out of wedlock in the 1950s, and subsequently, was forced into labor in a Catholic abbey as penance while her child was relocated, at a price, to the United States. Philomena’s daughter enlists the assistance of a recently sacked Blair-administration official, Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), who, grudgingly and rather condescendingly takes on her “human interest” story to find her son. What follows is a trip (yes, another Steve Coogan trip movie), first to the abbey, and them after receiving no help there, to America. Along the way, Coogan’s cynicism, self-importance and emptiness tangles with Dench’s faith, sincerity and essential decency.

This is a beautiful, kind-hearted, witty movie. Dench is moving as a mother haunted by the absence of a child she kept firmly in her mind (the nuns at the abbey allowed the shamed mothers to visit their children an hour a day, making their inevitable separation even more traumatic), and Coogan is firmly cold-hearted and self-pitying without being a caricature. Their scenes together are sensitive and comedic without lapsing into treacle or schmaltz, and the impact each has on the other is believable.  My only mild criticisms are a few too-cute moments for Dench and a juiced-up ending, pouring it on the nuns.  While it works dramatically, it paints a picture even the real Philomena was uncomfortable with, and upon reflection, it’s too much (we are provided an evil nun who spits a final rejoinder of, “self-denial and mortification of the flesh is what brings us closer to God. These girls have no one to blame except themselves”).

Nonetheless, this is largely true to the incredible true story, and I can’t recommend it enough.

A beautiful film, lovingly rendered by Richard Linklater, who has an affinity for passage of time and coming of age stories.  His Julie Delpy-Ethan Hawke Before trio of films similarly plumbed a relationship over the years and Dazed and Confused is perhaps the best coming of age film ever made. Shot a short period of every year over a 12 year period, Linklater presents the life of a family (Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, son Ellar Coltrane and daughter Lorelie Linklater) from 2002 through 2013.  We see the kids grow up before our eyes, as well as mother Arquette through two post-Hawke relationships and father Hawke through maturation from free spirit, bohemian divorcee’ to a more grounded, traditional man, with a second wife and child.  The exchanges are utterly believable and poignant, in particular, those between Coltrane and Hawke. The leads, with an exception below, are very good, and the authenticity of the endeavor is enhanced by their restrained performances.  Linklater’s treatment of the transient characters – Arquette’s two troubled husbands, the boy’s high school teacher and boss at work, and the others who comprise his support group – is deft and even-handed.  Missing are the histrionics of most any family drama or the easy lessons and dawnings that infect the coming of age genre.

There are two problems with the picture, neither insignificant nor crippling. First, unlike Hawke, who appears to have meticulously studied his character as a changing being, Arquette is static in her role as the boy’s mother. Some of this is attributable to the stolid nature of her character, but when, as Coltrane is about to depart for college, she breaks, Arquette doesn’t have the chops to deliver the scene, and what Linklater has her deliver – a surprising, almost narcissistic “what about me?” plea – is atonal and off-putting.  The film is also too long. The last stretch, covering the son’s high school and entry to college, traverses from languid to drowsy.

Still, a deserved Best Picture nominee and groundbreaking in its production.  As Linklater noted in a recent interview, “you talk to business people, and they couldn’t get their heads around it. They were like, ‘What? We can’t see any of the film before it’s finished? And we don’t get our money back for 13 years?’ All of that makes people insecure . . . The idea that an executive at a company anywhere in this business would green-light it and still be there 12 years later – that’s a statistical anomaly. So if a film like this never gets made again it’ll be for those reasons.”

*WARNING – SPOILERS*

David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel works as a procedural, a domestic drama, and a meditation on modern tabloid culture. It is patient, methodical and mostly interesting, though contemporaneous commentary notwithstanding, it has nothing serious to say of love, marriage or the waning of romance, which is what it purports to examine. Sure, there is perfunctory sex, Pike’s voiceover vituperation over the rigors of being the junior partner, and some suggested physical violence, all of little import.  In the end, it’s a monster movie, an elegant, crisp, well-acted monster movie in the hands of one of our more meticulous directors, but a mere monster movie nonetheless.

The monster’s victim is Ben Affleck, who is surprisingly savvy as the husband set up for the ultimate fall by his seemingly perfect wife (Rosamund Pike). Affleck is an apt choice for a weak man searching for a lifeline while his world crashes around him. Affleck the actor has often failed due to a lack of depth, a certain surface charm that has nothing beneath it, and here, he uses that to his advantage. He is complemented by Carrie Coon, who plays his loyal but disapproving sister, and Kim Dickens (Deadwood), the skeptical detective investigating the disappearance of Pike.

There are two strange casting choices, one that works out and one not so much. Tyler Perry has been trying to shake off Madea, and as a high profile, cable news ready criminal defense attorney, he does so, bringing some real wit to the role. As Pike’s former paramour, however, Neil Patrick Harris is thin, almost lost.  He is too strongly rooted in broad comedy and he works to overcome that persona with a deliberate, cautious performance that is creepier and more distracting than it should be.

The story, however, is riveting, told first from the vantage point of the increasingly beleaguered Affleck and the flashbacks of Pike as she narrates from her diary. Theirs is a storybook romance that eventually succumbs to the pressures of money, familiarity and recrimination. Except for one difference. Pike is nuts, a serial fantasist who destroys anyone who rejects her.

Pike’s predecessors – Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Bonnie Bedelia in Presumed Innocent – were in their own ways every bit as batshit crazy, but both women were decidedly more nuanced. Close’s jilted one-weekend stand refused to be ignored by Michael Douglas, but there was a discernible crack in her facade that made her sympathetic. Like Pike, Bedelia not only wanted to torture her husband and insisted upon his fealty after the fact, but her rebellion against the invasion of the impossibly attractive Greta Scacchi was sold as the aging frump protecting her castle and its king, Harrison Ford. Pike, however, is The Terminator (or maybe Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), so psychopathic that she sets up all her former paramours when they as much as back away. Accordingly, any observation she or the film offers on the nature of marriage or relationships are no more than the ravings of a lunatic, even if this particular lunatic is cool, calm and seemingly accomplished. She’s loathsome and it’s hard to care much about the fate of Affleck, who chooses to sally forth with her even after she tries to destroy him. Which makes for an ultimately silly movie, but one that is a great deal of fun arriving at its pointlessness.