Genius: James Ponsoldt's The End of the Tour

Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg in The End of the Tour.

It's only the end of August and it's already been a terrific year for movies. They've arrived from all corners of the globe and each with very distinct sensibilities that set them apart from the demands of the marketplace towards being generic. Besides the quirky enchantment of Paddington, there was Olivier Assayas' sumptuously satisfying Clouds of Sils Maria, the sublime sweet sadness of the Brian Wilson bio pic Love & Mercy, Carlos Marques-Marcet's erotically charged 10,000 km, Alex Gibney's fearless scrutiny in Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and his nuanced consideration of Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, the conventions of the western being freshly reexamined in Slow West, and the new rendering of an old theme in Ex Machina. There was the resurrection of director David Gordon Green (George Washington) returning from the wilderness of mediocrity (Pineapple Express) with Manglehorn where Al Pacino equals the bold work he did last year in the largely ignored The Humbling (which was the movie that Birdman pretended to be). If someone was trying to pose the argument that cinema was dead, I would point to these pictures as signs that the art form is still alive and breathing quite nicely. Now James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now) caps off the summer with the extraordinary The End of the Tour, a perceptive comic masterpiece that cuts to the quick of timely questions about celebrity and artistic authenticity and the movie does it with an intelligent wit that is as probing as it is poignant.

Coming of Age: The Spectacular Now and The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley in The Spectacular Now

American filmmakers seem to have lost the knack of making romantic comedies, but every year brings some good new coming-of-age pictures. The Spectacular Now, which opened late in the summer, has a casual, intimate style that derives from the director James Ponsoldt’s interplay with his actors as well as from the dialogue that the screenwriters, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (adapting a novel by Tim Tharp), give them to work with. Ponsoldt’s leading man is the phenomenally talented Miles Teller; he the haunted teenager in Rabbit Hole who was inadvertently responsible for running down Nicole Kidman’s little boy, and he also played the grinning best pal in Footloose who learns how to dance in that musical’s most exuberant scene. In The Spectacular Now he’s Sutter, a high school kid who’s stalled in every conceivable way as he approaches graduation. He’s skating through his classes and dangerously close to failing math; he hasn’t completed his college applications. He drinks too much; he carries a whiskey flask around with him and sometimes shows up under the influence for his after-school job, in a men’s store. His girl friend, Cassidy (Brie Larson), breaks up with him and immediately starts dating the best catch in the senior class, a football player named Marcus (Dayo Okeniyi) and also the president of the student council. The title of the movie refers to Sutter’s lame claim to a philosophy – living in the present rather than worrying about the future. It doesn’t seem to be serving him especially well: Cassidy leaves him because she thinks he’s cheating on her, but really she’s ready to move on to someone who suits her seriousness about her own future.

My Best Friend’s Wedding and Stereophonic: Too Much Music and Not Enough

Matt Doyle and Krystal Joy Brown in My Best Friend's Wedding. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios)

The notion of a jukebox stage musical based on the 1997 romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding, featuring the songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David and directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall (who has helmed ace Broadway revivals of Kiss Me, Kate, Wonderful Town and Anything Goes), sounded promising. (The movie uses Bacharach-David tunes in key moments.) But the show, which is premiering at Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine, is both synthetic and clunky. The movie, written by Ron Bass and directed by P.J. Hogan, is an unconventional romantic comedy in which the heroine, Julianne, a magazine food critic, plays every dirty trick she can think of to stop her best friend and one-time lover Michael from walking down the aisle with Kimmy, the woman he’s fallen head over heels in love with, but her schemes keep backfiring. It’s a tricky proposition, because we fall in love with Kimmy too, yet Julianne is the heroine and the movie won’t work if we end up disliking her. The movie pulls it off because Julia Roberts, in a wonderful comic-neurotic performance, plays Julianne.