We are fortunate to have been spared Spike Lee’s take on the Jackie Robinson story, which surely would have been spiteful; emphatic about race grievance and loaded with other Spikey tangents. But Brian Helgeland has made a superb tale about Robinson’s groundbreaking desegregation of baseball through the machinations of Branch Rickey–and about American spiritual history and destiny. The issues and emotions have a beautiful clarity.

42, titled after Robinson’s player number (retired for all teams by the Major League Baseball association yet worn by players every April 15th–Jackie Robinson Day), commemorates Robinson breaking the game’s color bar in 1947 as the first Negro playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Helgeland depicts this world-changing risk as a cultural story–not simply one man’s life story. Instead of biographical depth, 42 sustains the same benevolence as the MLB’s memorial; its lively and vivid narrative goes through the arduous steps of a social and moral revolution.

More than a baseball movie, 42 is a folktale touching on the spirituality evidenced in Robinson (played by Chadwick Boseman) and Dodgers’ General Manager Rickey (played by Harrison Ford). Seeing baseball as the medium of social change; its practice and rituals are understood as basic to America’s sense of capability despite prevailing social divisions. That explains Helgeland’s elastic sense of class. Robinson steps into the roughneck world of sport possessing higher personal principles. He and wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie) are already upwardly mobile; they need only the income and recognition that white Americans take for granted.

Now let’s get rid of the narrow-minded complaint about Hollywood race stories always unequally pairing history’s black sacrificial figures with white cohorts. Helgeland’s even-handed vision of the Rickey-Robinson revolution enlarges it, taking in different aspects of America’s racial reality. Not merely the Jackie Robinson story, 42 relates tandem efforts and transformations by Rickey, Negro sports writer Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), assorted teammates (many brief, perfectly etched characterizations from Max Gail’s captivated retired manager, Chris Meloni’s virile Leo Durocher to Lucas Black’s affable Pee Wee Reese) and the crowds who fill the stands. All profiles in courage.

The back office functioning behind America’s public face rarely gets shown but 42’s story fortunately reveals that it appropriate significance and appeal, primarily through Harrison Ford. Projecting established magnanimous decency, Ford puts Rickey’s risk-taking and persistent urging in perfect balance to newcomer Boseman who portrays Robinson’s circumspect heroism. This isn’t a timed, harmless Black man; he’s self-assured yet resentful of those who want to make him humble. (Jeffrey Wright has played this Poitier complex but Jamie Foxx, Denzel Washington never has). Boseman’s wary intelligence conveys deep pride, a forgotten aspect of black America’s gradual civil rights evolution. 42 revives it.
The way Helgeland balances Ford/Rickey’s courage represents the modern audience’s guileless ignorance of history and the period era’s attitudes. The young black actors–all ebullient, optimistic, determined–represent Blacks’ hopes while the familiar Whites personify fears. When 42 explicates these details, it surpasses Steven Spielberg’s morally compromised Lincoln.

Cinematographer Don Burgess makes 42 the most beautiful movie of 2013 so far. He photographs sunlight and water (when Robinson finally showers with his white teammates) with radiance. Nothing in Lincoln’s political contrivance is as resonant as Rickey confessing “Something was wrong at the heart of the game I loved and I had ignored it.” Kushner-Spielberg’s Lincoln never admitted such sorrowful complex. Lincoln pretended that political opposition was the essence of America’s moral progress when in fact it was only a power struggle; 42 is deeper and more honest in its display of how Americans changed through accepting skill, humanity, sympathy.

This is a better approach to history than George Lucas’ lame Tuskegee Airman tribute Red Tails. Helgeland has made a film totally without cynicism. Cynicism is what ruined Lincoln; cynicism was at the core of Kushner and Spielberg’s self-congratulatory arrogance–which was why liberals overrated it. Will Obama-era audiences appreciate 42’s richness with its deep understanding of how hard-won compassion has greater everyday effectiveness than the rule of law? The splendor of ball field effort? Or a silhouetted fatherly embrace? These images test fairness within the glory of nature without the falsity of The Natural or Field of Dreams like no movie since Robert Aldrich’s The Big Leaguer.

I’d like to describe more of 42’s wonderful scenes such as the shots of Robinson rounding the bases, focused on his “42” uniform imprint like an existential Bressonian icon, but viewers should discover such beauty for themselves. Rickey and Robinson unite over the idea of being “built to last” by doing the right thing. Whether or not 42 conquers the box-office, it is built to last.

The trouble with tragedy is that it is harder than one might think for it to elicit emotion from a third party. Sometimes, an audience remains at a distance despite the harrowing event befalling the characters in front of their eyes. And so it goes with The Silence, an impeccably acted but ultimately un-engaging mystery.

Silence, adapted by Baran bo Odar from Jan Costin Wagner’s novel and denoting Odar’s feature directorial debut, is a then-and-now flick. We first see two men track down an eleven-year-old girl in a field; one murders her while the other looks on. Nearly a quarter-century later, another young girl vanishes in what appears to be a copycat crime, stringing together the lives of grieving family members, detectives, and killers alike, all of whom are broken in their own, not unfamiliar ways.

If Silence so far sounds fairly by-the-numbers, that’s because it is, in every sense of the genre, procedural. Odar’s script hits all the expected notes in dealing with the aftermath of a grisly crime, but the net result is less than symphonic. Loss and estrangement permeate pretty much the lives of everyone attached to this case, whose resolution seems pre-ordained thanks to the film’s overt preamble. David (Sebastian Blomberg) is the detective who becomes obsessed with solving the current case as a means of distracting himself from his own recent widowhood. Burghart Klaussner’s Krischan, meanwhile, cannot let go of the earlier, unsolved crime despite his retirement. “It was a real pain in the ass,” glibs Elena (Katrin Sass) about the loss of her daughter 23 years ago, a wound that Sass shows us still bleeds internally even as Elena maintains a stiff upper lip. Even the two murderers we first meet, Peer (Ulrich Thomsen) and Timo (Wotan Wilke Möhring), remain affected by their crime as they go about their lives.

Silence is smart until it isn’t. The notion of the past constantly nipping at the heels of the present is not a revelation. And the idea of suffering and proximity to danger fails to cast a suspenseful shadow over his film, even as an innocent young child injures himself on a trampoline. (We get it: harm lurks around the corner for everyone. Let’s not get too carried away.) And it is eventually a mistake to focus on the inner lives of the film’s tangled web of characters instead of making the central mysteries more engrossing. Still, Odar wrestles wonderful performances from his ensemble. Blomberg, Möhring, and particularly Sass are all quite credible in rendering people whose lives have become untethered, showing what it is to be lost in plain sight.

Sympathy comes for all, but empathy has a more difficult time entering the room. Odar’s portrayal of quiet mourning is eventually too, well, silent for its own good. All of these characters behave in ways that are psychologically justified, but they suffer from a lack of exploration. And most are stoic, so while Odar steers clear of melodrama, there’s also a lack of any kind of dramatic potency to shepherd his story along. And since we know early on whom the perpetrators of at least one crime are, there is little suspense (the thorough explanation by one character of another’s motive provides an unnecessary denouement as well).  One roots for the film and its talented players onscreen and behind it, but Silence is a murder mystery that is all too clinical. Like the events of the film itself, sometimes bad things happen to good people.

The Silence is currently playing at Cinema Village.

Naomie Harris and Daniel Craig in 007's Skyfall.

Agent 007 James Bond (Daniel Craig) returns to his roots in Skyfall, defending the MI6 agency to which he’s always had steadfast dedication, even while gallantly enjoying its bachelor benefits. On home turf, Bond restores all of us to our pop culture roots; Skyfall’s national security plot, combining an arch villain’s (Javier Bardem) threats to Q (Judi Dench), then breaching Bond’s ancestral residence, carries affectionate—even cultural—resonance. The sense of adventure is stabilizing and feels good.

Skyfall’s success isn’t a surprise. It should probably be the first Bond film to win a Best Picture Oscar—not because it’s the best (Goldfinger and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service are still the series’ high points)—but because Skyfall maintains quality popular filmmaking in an era that’s lost sight of what that means.

Exactly what it means can be seen in the fascinating promotional documentary Everything Or Nothing, which details the history of the James Bond franchise from its inception as a Cold War spy novel by British journalist Ian Fleming then adapted by Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, intrepid American film producers who shared the dream of a popular entertainment featuring manly daring, sexual suavity and a subtle sense of political purpose. That this Anglo-American commercial enterprise would result in a 50-year globally admired venture that morphs yet without changing speaks to the marvel of the West’s pop culture dominance.

That dominance is at stake in Skyfall’s plot involving a Wikileaks-style enemy whose nefarious personal crusade and terrorist attack on MI6 heralds a new breed of international threat. (Javier Bardem is spectacular in this role; superior to his performance in No Country For Old Men.) Sizing up her enemies, Q says, “They’re not nations, they’re individuals”—which was also true for the old Bond villains but now takes on the modern sense of social chaos that was unconscionably exploited in Chris Nolan’s Batman movies. But Skyfall avoids nihilism by hewing to a code of valor that extends from Fleming to Saltzman and Broccoli.

That code never changes despite having six other faces on its brand. As Everything Or Nothing shows, each Bond actor lent his own personal integrity. Daniel Craig follows that tradition. His brutalized face and cold eyes personify our acceptance of killing more than Connery’s camp glamour and sophistication. Yet, after the spectacular opening stunt, Craig bounds into a moving train and snaps his tuxedo cuffs with terrific élan. Bond’s urbanity bests the Dark Knight’s affluent yet sophomoric pessimism; the world is in safe hands—as is the idea of entertainment.

Most movie chases are alike, and the Bond movies have set the standard for all action thrillers—Road Warrior, Indiana Jones and even the Transporter flicks are just a few that display the Bond influence. The level of stylistic commitment in the Bond films is reassuring. It takes an ace team (including producer Barbara Broccoli), because director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) knows nothing about this kind of cinema. Joe Wright’s Hanna showed genuine style, and Luc Besson and his cadre have revolutionized action tropes, quickening their purpose, while Skyfall clicks efficiently. The opening escapade introduces a Bond-girl sidekick (Naomie Harris), which enriches what would be routine; that humane flourish sets the tone for Mendes’ foray into genre.

It might have gone badly—imagine Mike Nichols pinch-hitting an Indiana Jones film. But Skyfall features more character nuances than Craig’s previous Bond movies: Harris’ role, along with vivid participation from Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney, Ben Wishaw and Bardem display Mendes’ striking  interest in actors.

Mendes is lucky. Skyfall is his first film on home turf, and he knows how these people talk and how they relate to the environs of metropolitan London (including a brief stint among the J.M.W. Turners at the Tate Museum) and the Scottish countryside. It adds to the story’s personal feel. These well-tailored Tories fighting an internal security breach and “a war we can’t understand and can’t possibly win” sounds sufficiently post-9/11, which makes Skyfall a modern version of the British WWII homefront movie Went the Day Well? as much as a Bond installment.

When Bond escorts Q in the fabled Aston Martin, Skyfall also carries us back to the past—our pop culture past where entertainment wasn’t merely frivolous. Skyfall plays with heritage and personal homeland defense but those ideas are no richer than Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Fortunately, the movie looks terrific. Roger Deakins photographs a silhouetted assassin brawl in a skyscraper and a sequence of red-gold pagodas at night like Robert Burks did It Takes a Thief—for sheer splendor.

In Everything Or Nothing, Fleming’s first book is referred to as “the autobiography of a dream.” This speaks to how the Bond film series epitomized desire and satisfaction. As an expression of Western hegemony, the series isn’t just commercial; its good work translates to all territories. In the real world, espionage ain’t pretty, but when James Bond wins, it’s a global victory.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Like the lusted-over, fantasized Bond girls, the Bond themes are not just love objects; the songs are timeless, idealized encapsulations of the excitements of their times.

Is this also true of Adele’s new theme “Skyfall”? Like all Adele’s recordings, this one is formulaic—but what a workable method! It is quasi-sultry, ersatz romantic, and its enigmatic titular image contains a hint of intrigue and possible hazard that is befitting for a mystery/crime/espionage thriller.

Adele received her Bond commission by right of pop star eminence. In the past, each Bond-theme crooner was a test-proven chart-topper famous enough to attest the new film’s worthiness as a pop culture object. (Adele’s track recalls Nancy Sinatra’s passable “You Only Live Twice” or Rita Coolidge’s “All Time High” rather than Madonna’s forgettable “Die Another Day.”) The formula dictates that if the song and performance was good enough, it worked in tandem with the movie to create a pop event. This actually only occurred a few times, leaving the majority of Bond themes to simply be anti-melodic relics such as Duran Duran’s “View to a Kill,” Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Live and Let Die”—or campy gems like Tom Jones’ “Thunderball,” a wonderfully exaggerated response to “Goldfinger,” the archetypal Bond theme, done with Jones’ testicular melodrama befitting a pop-besotted operatic tenor more than a secret agent’s surrogate.

The greatest of all Bond themes, “Goldfinger,” is so because almost 50 years later it remains a sizzling emanation of what was thrilling in 1964. It still carries the aura of the new, which proves its value as a theme song par excellence. The Goldfinger plot appears in Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s lyric description “web of sin,” the narcotizing scent of an intangible element felt in John Barry’s composition. That’s the thrill of movies in a single tune. As a song, “Goldfinger” draws one into the allure of the James Bond phenomenon. The films are not works of high cinematic art, but they are almost ideal examples of commercial movie pleasure, and the song is perfectly scintillating even when it is silly.

Shirley Bassey’s unbeatable, overdramatic recitation maintains the exhilarating promise of a movie trailer. She’s all hype; even her natural sexiness is put to the use of sheer commercial seduction. In the Warhol ’60s, artifice and desire were one. Yet, like the best moments in any Bond film, vocalist Bassey grins—Cheshirely, if not Welshly.

As intro and exeunt to the film—and as a stand-alone 45 rpm, one of the first I ever bought—Bassey’s style established that the Bond theme song was a tease. Its brevity is part of its genius. Though not a rock ’n’ roll tune, it bears that ineffable quality of the greatest pop song: Its two-minute entirety is a hook. It worked before you saw the movie, as you watched and forever after seeing it. Even if you’ve never seen the film—and I find it to still be the most dazzling of the Bond movies—the “Goldfinger” song provides a comparably, pleasurably memorable experience.

According to the documentary Everything Or Nothing, the Bond franchise faced perennial challenge by producers other than Saltzman-Broccoli, who finagled rights to Ian Fleming novels—which explains why the best song to come from a Bond film is a renegade, “The Look of Love” for the 1967 Casino Royale. That Burt Bacharach-Hal David composition, superbly sung by Dusty Springfield, is a really good song despite being a movie tie-in. But its excellence is the rare exception.

Runners-up: Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better” for The Spy Who Loved Me—an odd, elliptical ’70s-singer-songwriter test of the Bond theme formula that builds grandly even as it becomes an obscurely personal woman’s confession. And Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time in the World” for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service eludes campiness to provide love wisdom. It is the most melancholic Bond theme (for the most grandly tragic film of the series). If unquestioned authority were needed to confer worthiness on the Bond films, Armstrong does it.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Tim Burton reaches the outer limits of creepy in Frankenweenie, the 3D remake of his 1984 animated short about a boy who plays Frankenstein and brings his dead dog Sparky back to life. That’s why it was a relief to step from that gothic cliché to the more original ParaNorman, another 3D animated film but about a boy whose response to death transcends morbid fascination.

Both films are being sold as Halloween treats, but Frankenweenie is the rotten apple. It represents the excesses of Burton’s success (especially after his brutally unimaginative Alice in Wonderland). Burton seems to have lost that sense of humorous whimsy which turned his early work about lonely, eccentric, death-haunted boys into satires on both normalcy and sappiness.

Since his collaboration with Johnny Depp attained fame, wealth and power, Burton’s humor has dried up. Depp’s production company is disturbingly titled Infinitum Nihil, and except for Ed Wood and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (also the acting highlights of Depp’s career), their partnership has had almost Faustian costs. Burton exhibits weirdness for his own sake, as if prostituting what once made him unique. The light has gone out in his recent films, and this big-budget Frankenweenie loses any sense of innocence.

Burton’s little Victor Frankenstein represents all the Burton commonplace oddities from Edward Scissorhands on—especially the unbearable Nightmare Before Christmas. Without that film’s mind-numbing music score, the story is still annoying in its play on horror-film clichés that are now Burton clichés. Victor’s reanimation routine evokes the 1930s horror films from Universal Studios that have long passed from common knowledge. Jokes like Sparky’s romance with a poodle who sprouts a Bride of Frankenstein white stripe have no punch—the cultural resonance is lost. When Victor’s schoolmates (other ghoulish children with catatonic, petrified faces) reanimate their dead pets, the monster-movie results are predictable and tired.

Burton uses a Charles Addams gray-scale color scheme but doesn’t know how to satirize it; his love of the outré has become second-hand (the cause of Dark Shadows’ misfire). Earlier, in his 1984 animated short Vincent (also about a lonely kid), Burton created an affectionate sense of alienation resolved through movie lore. The relatively harmless, truly childlike tribute to Hollywood horror icon Vincent Price predated fan boy culture. Now that cynicism, nihilism and creepiness rules the culture, Burton’s knack has become oppressive—anti-art and anti-humane (the cause of Sweeney Todd’s misfire). Under the guise of Halloween drollery, Burton’s wit has become infernal.

But ParaNorman shows what Burton lacks. Little Norman Babcock “sees dead people,” turning the pop cliché of The Sixth Sense into a new expression of childhood grief—Norman’s longing for his grandmother. This gift makes him an outcast, but it also personalizes what might otherwise be grim. ParaNorman doesn’t exploit the family-movie market; its poignancy may have caused its box-office flop, but it’s one of the most sophisticated works of 3D animation since Coraline.

Directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell depict Norman’s visions in a yellowy-green glow, like the appearance of Constance Cummings in David Lean’s film of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit.

Norman lives in the small New England town of Blithe Hollow, whose mean living (a 24/7 Halloween) reverses traditional Puritanism. It’s up to Norman to save the town from a 300-year-old curse following its witch trials. His remedy is the lessons learned from storybook lore—an empathetic sense of pain and loss that surpasses the Burton-Depp idea of wicked “fun.”

ParaNorman is more creative than Frankenweenie. Norman’s crooked nostrils, his jowly mother and chinless father are caricatures on a human scale, but they also show the tactile rubberiness and translucence of dolls. Unlike Frankenweenie, ParaNorman has infectious charm and graspable purpose. The horror genre isn’t a satirical cop-out but a sensitive approach to modern confusion; Butler and Fell respect our cultural heritage, as in references to Hawthorne’s great short story “Young Goodman Brown,” identifying the bullying mob mentality now rampant in our supposedly enlightened era.

Not all ParaNorman’s ideas are worked out fully, but its points are worthy: “We thought we knew our way in life. In death we are lost.” And it’s visually exceptional: A vision of Norman’s grandma dematerializes into a young woman screaming on a horror movie poster. It’s positively Dantesque—Joe Dante, that is.

It wasn’t the line New York deserved, but the one it had to wait in last night to see Batman.

Movie nerds, comic book nerds and their reluctant significant others alike lined 13th Street at Union Square’s Regal Stadium 14 yesterday for the opening of The Dark Knight Rises, the highly anticipated final installment of director Christopher Nolan’s fan-favorite Batman trilogy.

By 5:15 p.m., around 30 eager viewers stood along a roped off section of the sidewalk that a security guard was extending along the block as the line grew. The line was a little misleading, however: at 6:30 p.m., two of the theater’s screens were showing the trilogy’s previous two films as a lead up to the new movie’s midnight premier, and the vast majority of people were there for this Batman marathon. That’s close to eight hours of the caped crusader — and the waiting fans couldn’t be happier.

“Been waiting for this one since the day the last one came out,” one man said.

“Some people think [waiting in line for movies] is crazy,” a woman said, “but it’s just part of the experience. It’s just as much a part of the event as the movie is.”

“People talk about the The Avengers, Spider Man,” another said, “but for me, it’s all about Dark Knight Rises. [The Batman movie series] is just on another level.”

The security guard noted that there was in fact another line in the building. The marathon was showing on two screens, so viewers who had tickets to the one on the top floor were permitted to wait inside.

At least one tenacious fan was out staking his claim for the midnight showing. A man about 20 people deep in the outdoor line said he didn’t know about the marathon showing, and that he panicked when he saw the crowd gathering. He laughed that at least now he and his friends would get the best seats — right in the middle after the aisle divide, with plenty of room to stretch legs.

Waiting in line would be  a lot of funny anyways, he said. “My friends are going to show up soon with pizzas. Everyone hangs out and has a good time.”

Asked how long the line would extend by midnight, the security guard simply pointed down 13th Street. The theater has 14 screens, she said. All of them were showing the Dark Knight Rises, and all of them were sold out.

The line got a few disdainful looks from passersby, but in typical New York fashion, most pedestrians didn’t give it a second glance. One young boy had the right attitude, though: “Please can we get in line, please?” he pleaded with his mom, who had to drag him along the sidewalk to keep him moving. “It will be like a sleepover!”

Previous Marvel Comics superhero movies such as Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America and Thor were like roughly cut puzzle pieces that looked odd and unfinished by themselves—pretend movies derived from already established brands. Most of them, particularly Jon Favreau’s dung-colored Iron Man, were poorly directed.

Now, fitted together in Marvel’s The Avengers, the superhero tales still don’t quite cohere; instead, each superhero’s traits and powers have been simultaneously inflated and streamlined (Scarlett Johannson’s Black Widow, barely a cameo in last year’sIron Man 2, is almost a character here) with the sole intent to overwhelm, not merely entertain. That’s why a corporate brand is part of the title.

A live-action version of the comic book series about “The Earth’s Mightiest Heroes,” Marvel’s The Avengers is promoted as the ultimate Comic-Con—the franchise of franchises, the movie contemporary audiences have been trained to anticipate and genuflect to.

This whopping sales campaign manipulates immature, undeveloped adolescent taste into the mistaken notion of cultural fulfillment. The Avengers is neither good nor important, yet the more it consummates Marvel Comics’ current strategy to secure the adolescent comic book/graphic novel/video game market, the more it illustrates Hollywood’s shameless insufficiencies.

To discuss The Avengers as a story—or even a thrill ride—is delusional. Best to tally some of the actors’ deceits—which parallel the media’s complicit self-deception—as they trivialize the emotional satisfaction that is supposed to come from modernizing myth and legend.

The Captain America role traps Chris Evans, who was a great tease as the Human Torch, in an uninteresting anachronism, now a truly faded idea of American Exceptionalism. The same holds for the Halloween freakazoids Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Bruce Banner/The Hulk (a CGIed Mark Ruffalo).

As villainous Loki, Tom Hiddleston, who was so moving in Spielberg’s War Horse and Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, comes closest to giving a performance. He suggests the intense young aspirant Peter O’Toole, though without the glorious voice and no story details to frame his petulance, just a pretext for the superheroes to fight his plan for world domination.

The film’s only probable hero is zillionaire gadgeteer Tony Stark, who Robert Downey has finally learned to make his own using hipster witticisms that lend this basically unhip movie erratic self-satire.

Only a capitalist icon with Stark’s endless resources makes sense to an audience of semi-illiterate consumers catered to by the leisure industries and discouraged from an interest in characterization, theme or ideas. That’s why Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury can simply watch action from the sidelines (occasionally firing off a gunshot or an epithet), pretending to be a leader in his ghetto eye patch. (Insert convenient Obama comment here.)

Director Joss Whedon brings TV squalor (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to this, his second big screen superhero outing. Whedon doesn’t have Zack Snyder’s personal style, the élan that at least made Watchmen and Sucker Punch thoroughly idiosyncratic and fitfully compelling. Whedon directs impersonally, which is to say he manages the proceedings as one runs a fast-food joint.

This analogy ought to appall the very fast-food patrons who flock to The Avengers, yet cannot accept that an artistic enterprise should be more than ground patties of optional substance. Like Whedon, they can’t tell the difference between art and conviction-less product.

This proves the brainwashing that has happened to pop audiences in the generations since comic books and TV stole their imaginations from cinema and literature. Much of this tragedy has to do with the impact of TV (Whedon’s background), which has destroyed popular understanding of narrative complexity.

Each superhero should represent overcoming some social difficulty; now they’re just gimmicks. Whedon simply makes the action go on and on. He has no sense of dramatic build or rising to a climax. He overloads the spectator with one climax after another (imitating Michael Bay angles, particularly the same skyscraper-devouring turbine f/x from the last Transformers flick).

Unlike the lyrical teen fantasy Chronicle or Neveldine/Taylor’s daring Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which addressed life, death and morality, Marvel’s The Avengers has little to say other than “Buy me!” Millions of mentally hijacked moviegoers will respond like Pavlov’s dog, barking “Wow!”

We doubt that anyone thinks of New York City as a summer camp mecca—but by most standards, it really is. Consider all the children’s activity centers and enrichment programs that the city is blessed with—some go on hiatus and some slow down in the summertime, offering the same programming but less of it, but many others take what they do best and build wonderful day camps around their core offerings.

Academic

Keep your kiddo’s mind fresh this August with the academic day camp offered by Drake Bennett Summer Schools. Divided into two sessions and housed at The Epiphany School, 1st-6th graders can brush up with lessons in literacy, math and science, while chess and drama pepper the afternoon hours. Or join Mathnasium for their Summer Re-Boot Camp. Specifically for 2nd-8th graders, this half-day camp is filled with math-centric games and activities.

Language

Set your kid on the fast track to becoming bilingual. Collina Italiana is offering Italian Summer in the City Camp, which includes Italian-infused music, theater, movies, cartoons and museum outings. Children as young as 3 can start learning “bonjour” and “merci” at the French Institute Alliance Française, where culture and language will be taught through stories and workshops.

The Language Workshop for Children is a great tool to get your child speaking like a native. Offering summer camps in Spanish, French and Mandarin Chinese, immersion activities include costume days, arts and crafts, baking and birthday celebrations.

Media

Future video game creators will love the options in Summer Media Camp through the Museum of the Moving Image, where campers get to flex their software muscles learning animation, live action video and more. Or send your wannabe MTV VJ to New York Film Academy’s one-week Music Video Camp, designed for kids with little or no knowledge (but a passion) for the industry. And let’s not forget about summer camp at Take Two Film Academy, which will show your budding director the ins and outs of production, acting and editing. Each student gets to keep an online and DVD copy of their final product to show off to friends and family!

Nature

Wonder about wildlife? Kids ages 8-12 can get friendly with hyenas and lions at the Bronx Zoo’s Animal Kingdom Camp, where they will observe creatures up close and learn how to best protect an animal’s habitat. Taking full advantage of Prospect Park, the Park Explorers’ Camp Explorers program is ideal for the elementary school set. Be prepared to get a little dirty as this camp takes a hands-on approach to Mother Nature—think sprinklers, hill rolling and a host of field trips. And regardless of where you live, an awesome camp adventure awaits with NYC Parks Experience Summer Camp. With locations in every borough, this über-affordable camp provides structured hiking, swimming and sports.

Science

Inquisitive young minds will love the American Museum of Natural History’s Fossils and DNA Camp, where they can explore the evolutionary timeline. If your elementary school-aged child is more into constructing and electronic, the range of camp choices at Launch Math will give him or her the chance to build rockets and robots or design video games.

Budding scientists can use the city as their laboratory with the SciTech Kids Summer Camp. In Central Park, campers build solar ovens, learn about gravity thanks to the thrills of Victorian Gardens and make a few insect friends.

Visit newyorkfamily.com for even more day camp options.

What a wide-eyed girl his protagonist starts off as. The film opens in the bedroom of Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), where magazine cutouts, pinups and glam shots of friends have been optimistically hung on crumbling walls. Laura’s hopes for escaping the squalor are pinned on winning the Miss Baja California pageant. “What does the winner get?” Laura’s friend Suzu asks. “To sleep with one of those old, rich guys,” Laura says.

The opening scenes show what several pageant contestants later fatuously point out, that Mexico’s beauty, in particular that of Baja California, has been unfairly overshadowed by recent drug wars. This doesn’t last. In celebration of a callback, Suzu takes Laura to the Millennium Club, which is little more than a derelict warehouse whose patrons are brutish policemen and whose bouncers fail at what should be Bouncing 101: Disallow mass murder.

An unlikely survivor of a shooting spree at the club, Laura’s prolonged stay of execution at the hands of gang leader Lino (Noe Hernandez) reveals her to be incredibly lucky. Lino shanghais her services, and what follows is a series of poorly executed drug jobs followed by poorly timed escape attempts followed by forgiveness, more drug jobs and more escape attempts. It’s an unrelenting portrait of impressed bovinity, and realism hedges our inevitable frustration. Laura is a teenage girl. Can we really expect criminal cunning?

Lino’s character, however, is trickier. Why, for instance, does a supposedly capable gang leader repeatedly trust an untrustworthy girl? And why, in between drug deals and firefights, does he rig Miss Baja California in her favor? Publicity for his new pawn can’t be a good idea.

In the end, we overlook these potential implausibilities because we’re preoccupied by the plot twists and the anticipation of gunsmoke. Miss Bala is an action movie with a feel of documentary realism. “We’re fearless,” say Lino’s battle-ready men, and the line is repeated with such authenticity that Naranjo may well have plucked it from the streets.

An epilogue tells us cartels in the country have committed over 36,000 murders since 2006, and you sympathize with how helpless some Mexicans must feel. When Lino first lets Laura go, it’s night in the desert and, for no apparent reason, she soon returns. In daylight you see why. She was on the ocean’s edge. There was nowhere else to go.

—John Blahnik