The films roll on at the New York Film Festival, as screenings open to the general public run alongside press screenings now that the festival is well into its third week. If you’re in this neck of the woods the next couple of weeks you couldn’t do much better than snagging a ticket to one of the festival’s many offerings and then planting yourself in line outside the Walter Reade Theater.

I’ll certainly be there early as can be this Saturday morning for the world premiere of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice—and, yes, that’s sort of a gleeful brag considering the film doesn’t properly open until Christmas.

Daniel McFadden / Sony Pictures Classics

Still, there’s plenty for all of us to look forward to until then, not least of which is the new semi-autobiographical film by Damien Chazelle, Whiplash. Set in the dog-eat-dog world of an elite musical conservatory in Manhattan, the film follows Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller giving a marvelously physical performance) as he aims to secure (and keep) a spot as first chair drummer in the conservatory’s top jazz ensemble, referred to as “the studio band.” Andrew, however, finds himself up against Terrence Fletcher, the group’s conductor who regularly inflicts emotional and physical abuse on his pupils in the name of jazz purity. It’s a method that Fletcher hopes will weed out the merely (and sometimes even exceptionally) competent players, while pushing talented musicians to new realms of ecstatic musical performance.

Playing Fletcher, J.K. Simmons absolutely blows it out. Outfitted in tight black T-shirts and matching trim pants that show off his lean and sinewy body, Simmons goes full Sargent Hartman on his pupils. He tosses chairs and floor toms. He insults moms. He slaps faces.

You get the idea: he’s no John Keating, and he doesn’t inspire any “O Captain! My Captain!” moments. But the thing is, most of the time his methods work. The “studio band” indeed swings hard.

It’s a swing that finds its analogue in Chazelle’s visual style. There’s such verve in the musical numbers here, such panache from Chazelle, that you’re reminded of the pleasurable contact high you get from Busby Berkeley’s choreographed dance sequences in film’s such as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1935 (yes, I went there!). In Whiplash’s musical numbers, the camera swishes at dizzying speed. We get rapid close-ups of fingers flexing on horns, lips pursing on mouthpieces, sticks hammering on drums, and sweat popping out on concentrated brows.

In the post-screening Q&A, Chazelle acknowledged that he wanted the film “to live in close-ups.” And it is from these close-ups that he builds the film’s most memorable scenes, providing infectious rhythm through frenetic cutting. In this way, to see the film in a packed theater with a tuned-in audience is quite affective.

If it seems I’ve made a big deal out of the musical set pieces, then you’re right. These brilliantly orchestrated visual/aural freakouts are the center of the film. This isn’t to say that the narrative is superfluous, but at times it does creep into that overly-familiar, master/pupil genre (think Karate Kid, Mr. Holland’s Opus, et al). Still, Whiplash’s vision—embodied by Fletcher’s disturbing methods and Andrew’s obsession—is much darker. Andrew wants so badly to be the next Buddy Rich that he’s readily willing to ditch his new girlfriend, alienate himself from his father, and continually put his life and health in harm’s way. With just enough narrative curveballs, Chavelle spins this all together at a breakneck pace—it’s a speed, I predict, audiences will find wildly satisfying.

Caitlin Cronenberg / Entertainment One

If Whiplash is an easy sell to wide audiences, Maps to the Stars will most likely find champions from smaller niche crowds. Maps is David Cronenberg’s caustic send-up of contemporary Hollywood culture. Both hyper-violent and sexed up, Maps plays like Sunset Boulevard as directed by . . . well, by David Cronenberg. Prior to hitting a more mainstream stretch with History of Violence and Eastern Promises, Cronenberg made films that explored the relationship humans have with entertainment media (Videodrome), as well as films interested in the corporeal havoc wreaked on man when he pushes beyond the known boundaries of science and technology (The Fly).

In Maps we find Cronenberg circling back to similar themes—only in Maps, his mind is made up. Where his earlier work asked questions and pursued implications, his new film rather un-delicately, and quite didactically, spews bile at its target.

The movie’s grim narrative revolves around a child star (Evan Bird), his cold, self-interested parents (John Cusack and Olivia Williams), a washed-up actress (Julianne Moore), and a fresh-off-the bus girl (Mia Wasikowska) who’s come to L.A. based on a Twitter relationship with Carrie Fisher (as herself). The film’s action is put in motion when Moore’s Havana Segrand wants to the play the part of her actress mother in a movie about her mother’s life.

It’s a bit of an unwieldy plot. And, yes, there’s murder and casual infidelity, and even the question of incestuous relationships. That’s all par for the course, for pretty much any Hollywood film really.

But Maps is also the kind of film where dogs are gruesomely shot at near point-blank range and women are bludgeoned with their best actress award trophies. In this morbid milieu, questions of plot like “who did what to whom?” and “how exactly do these stories relate to each other?” take a backseat to Cronenberg’s damnation of the whole lot. After all, it’s a Hollywood run by child psychopaths, slick self-help soothsayers, and their soulless agents.

Cronenberg’s objective distance from the wreckage—manifested in a cold and detached visual style— gives the film a darkly comic undertone. It’s hard not to be tickled at the deadpan mother-and-son dinner exchange in which industry-speak replaces affectionate intimacy.

Caitlin Cronenberg / Entertainment One

For that matter, most characters feel uneasy when conversation slips beyond boxes-office grosses, and at least one character is not beyond a self-reflexive “please no more film noir questions” response when questioned about his past. That the film also features John Cusack as a Dalai Lama-quoting self-help guru who puffs away at his e-cig while sporting those weird five-toed shoes—that’s just the best.

In the end, though, everyone populating this ersatz universe is in howling pain—both emotional and physical. Indeed, this accounts for the abundance of scenes of characters getting massages, practicing yoga-like mediation, and receiving pseudo-psychiatric help—anything to rid the pain.

And perhaps no one is in more pain here than Wasikowska’s Agathe—a center to Cronenberg’s story if there is one. With half her body permanently scarred from a fire, Agathe’s body is a living testament to the carnage others have wrought. But even still, she’s drawn to this weird land hoping for healing that may never come.

Bearden Coleman is Assistant Professor of English at The King's College, where he teaches writing and film. You can follow him on Twitter at @OZUsCamera.

New York Film Festival: “Whiplash” and “Maps to the Stars”

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Daniel McFadden / Sony Pictures Classics

Miles Teller in 'Whiplash'

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Caitlin Cronenberg / Entertainment One

John Cusack in 'Maps to the Stars'

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Caitlin Cronenberg / Entertainment One

Julianne Moore and Niamh Wilson in 'Maps to the Stars'

Two of the more interesting characters in The Boxtrolls are Mr. Trout (Nick Frost) and Mr. Pickles (Richard Ayoade). They are evil henchmen.

The fact that they don’t know they are evil henchmen serves as an unintentional reference point for why this animated film is mostly uninteresting. It suffers from a narrative disorientation that makes what is otherwise a technically laudible animation experience into something vapid. But in narrative filmmaking, the storytelling is an inextricable part of the technical whole. So this film works by trying to create the illusion of movement you might expect from a guide who’s attempting to cover up that there’s little sense of direction.

The film (another stop-motion 3D offering from Laika Studios, home of Coraline and ParaNorman) begins with a flashback in which the Victorian era townspeople of Cheesebridge comes to believe that underground creatures known as boxtrolls exist to kidnap and kill children. However, the minute we encounter Archibald Snatcher, a snarly pest exterminator who is charged with eliminating the boxtrolls, we’re left to question what we’ve been told about the cardboard creatures.

On the basis of the rumors concerning the boxtrolls, Snatcher has an agreement with Lord Portley-Rind that when all of them are killed, he will become a member of the highly exclusive cheese-loving town council known as the “White Hats.”

Cheesebridge is a leaning tower of cheeza that stinks of hypocritical elites enjoying excess at the top while everyone else wallows underneath them in a destitute foundation that cannot stand. At the top, the White Hats are only concerned with power and maintaining the pretense of deserving their position. In part, then, enacting this pretense plays out through preserving town loyalty around a common enemy. A threat to the children is a threat to everyone, and so the Cheesebridge people are precariously united by the mythical threat of boxtrolls.

In a sense, everyone is motivated by self-preservation except for Snatcher, who might better be characterized as wanting upward mobility to elite status, however allergic he is to cheese.

Note that I haven’t mentioned either of the protagonists to this point. “Eggs” (Isaac Hempstead Wright) is the baby boy who disappeared from among the townspeople. Snatcher has the townspeople convinced that the boxtrolls have brought harm to the long-lost boy; however, we discover with Winnie (Elle Fanning)—Portley-Rind’s disregarded daughter—that, in fact, the boxtrolls have been caretakers of Eggs for the first ten years of his life.

Together, then, Eggs and Winnie aim to clear the soiled name of the boxtrolls and restore peaceful coexistence between boxtrolls and human beings by ending Snatcher’s reign of terror and misinformation.

There are some moral lessons attached to this plot: take care of orphans, be an attentive parent, and a heavy dose of “be yourself!” But they’re superficial and add don’t add much. Here’s the essential problem, then, with The Boxtrolls: Its protagonists have mostly uninteresting desires, face uninteresting conflicts, and embody little to nothing that is particularly memorable, save for a couple of one-liners here and there (the shaking hands gag may at least provoke a smile, if not a chuckle). Eggs and Winnie are forgettable characters involved in a thin plot with other especially predictable characters.

This is more irksome than boring because, on the whole, Eggs and Winnie are the only two likable human beings in the movie. And they’re kids. Nearly all of the other human beings—and most, if not all, of them adults—are some variation of idiotic.

The implication here is that the only mature human beings are kids, and one of them was raised by boxtrolls. If the big takeaway in the end is “be yourself,” then one wonders what essentially human quality might fit that directive in the world of this film. Put differently: What ought being human look like?

I don’t see much of a compelling answer in the boxtrolls or The Boxtrolls. One is more likely to leave this film with the thought that maybe human beings can start being more like boxtrolls, and the content of even that imperative offers little encouragement.

That said, Laika’s stop motion animation has never been more impressive to watch on screen. The inventiveness embedded in every detail of Cheesebridge’s world surpasses the inventiveness of the boxtrolls. Its brilliant technique creates an illusion of motion for the characters.

And yet, part of the illusion here must include creating characters who feel human to the viewer. That is to say that part of animation is animating characters with human qualities—a special sort of liveliness. The Boxtrolls exhibits wonderful achievement in stop motion animation, but it delivers lifeless characters.

Mr. Trout and Mr. Pickles are henchmen devoted to Archibald Snatcher, and they’ve been convinced, much like the townspeople, that they’re the good guys committed to getting rid of evil monsters. I suppose there’s another thin moral here about the human tendency to devolve into fear mongering—particularly as it relates to “others.” I would appreciate a film which thoughtfully explored that line of thought—plenty certainly have done so quite well—but I can’t help but think that The Boxtrolls lacks any worthy direction to do so.

For most of the film, Trout and Pickles suffer the worst form of narrative disorientation—they have no clue whether their works are for good or evil. The conclusion to their story of lostness doesn’t give many details as to the difference between those. And that casts a dull redemption. They’re like the traveler who stumbled upon the correct destination by sheer luck, and couldn’t return or tell someone how to get there if she tried.

I felt indifferent when the end credits rolled, and that’s rooted in the film’s failure to simply tell a good story populated by great characters. If you don’t give us that, we’re bound to lose our way.

Caveat Spectator

The Boxtrolls features a dark world with some disturbing creatures and moments. The film relies on a general thrust of cynical thematic tones, including comedy that is reliant on innuendo that can’t adequately be described as “mature.”

Nick Olson is Assistant Professor of English at Liberty University, and he writes on film for Christ and Pop Culture and Filmwell. You can follow him at @Nicholas_Olson.

The Boxtrolls

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Laika / Focus Features

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Laika / Focus Features

Is it always a sin to tell a lie? Even to save your own life—or that of a loved one?

Could there be such a thing as “a good lie”?

These are questions worth considering when watching The Good Lie, which tells the story of a handful of Sudanese refugees—better known as “The Lost Boys of Sudan”—and their incredible journey . . . first to escape war in their native country, and then to adjust to their new homes and lives as they resettle in the United States.

The main characters in this moving film are fictional, but the story behind them is harrowingly true. Sudan’s Second Civil War, from 1983-2005, left more than 2 million people dead—and 100,000 orphans. Many of those children ultimately found sanctuary in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, and in 2000, about 4,000 of these “lost boys” relocated to the U.S. as part of a program to give them an opportunity to start anew.

The Good Lie focuses primarily on five of these refugees, beginning when they’re young children. Brothers Theo and Mamere and their younger sister Abital are orphaned when soldiers attack their village, killing most of the adults. On their perilous flight to safety, they join up with brothers Jeremiah and Paul, orphans fleeing from another village.

Kelly Walsh / 2013 Alcon Entertainment, LLC

One morning, the five youngsters are sleeping in tall grasses when Theo, the oldest, wakes first—and is spotted by soldiers. Theo raises his arms and surrenders, telling the soldiers he is alone. They take him prisoner while the other four remain safely hidden.

Was Theo’s deception the good lie of the film’s title? You decide.

The four remaining children finally make it to Kakuma, joining tens of thousands of other refugees. The film then fast-forwards 13 years, when all four of them get the call to board a plane for America.

When they land at JFK, they learn that the three boys—Mamere, Jeremiah, and Paul—will go to Kansas City to begin again on their own, and that the girl, Mamere’s sister Abital, will join a family in Boston. Apparently protocol dictated that males could set out on their own, but that females had to be taken in by a foster family. After tearful goodbyes, they go their separate ways, with the guys vowing to reunite with Abital at their first opportunity.

From there, the film mostly follows the young men to Kansas City, where they are met at the airport by Carrie Davis (Reese Witherspoon), a harried social worker whose gig is to help the newcomers find jobs. The middle third of the film explores the difficult cultural transition for the young men, some of it played for laughs. For example, when they visit a cow farm, one of the refugees asks if there are any lions in the vicinity. Ha ha. Only later do we learn why that question was especially important to one of the young men.

Carrie is an independent woman with an obvious chip on her shoulder. She dutifully does her job—helping the young men find employment—but without much compassion or emotional investment. Initially, she is clueless, even insensitive, about their plight; she simply drops them off at the curb of their apartment building on their first day in America. They don’t know how to find their unit, how to use a key, how to turn on a light, how to use the stove, how to open the fridge, how to use the phone . . . anything.

Predictably, as time goes by, Carrie warms up to these young men, and they become friends. She then makes it her mission to help them reunite with Abital, and it’s not hard to guess where the story goes from there.

But what was impossible to guess was a twist involving someone back in Kenya at the Kakuma Refugee Camp. Suffice it to say that this development sets up a touching finale involving yet another “good lie,” one that will likely have you reaching for the tissues.

Sudan’s Second Civil War, which resulted in these “lost boys,” was triggered in part by some of the same issues plaguing the world today. Sudan’s Muslim government sought to impose sharia law on non-Muslim southerners, many of whom were Christians. And if that meant essentially an ethnoreligious genocide, so be it. Two million dead bodies were evidence enough.

Bob Mahoney / 2013 Alcon Entertainment, LLC.

Significantly, the three young men at the heart of the film—Mamere, Jeremiah, and Paul—are portrayed as Christians. We see them reading Scripture, praying, singing hymns, and going to church, but never does the faith element feel forced; this is not a “message movie” with an agenda. Faith is a natural, organic part of their tale, as much a part of their daily lives as eating, sleeping, and going to work.

More significantly, the main characters are portrayed by men who, in real life, have a direct connection to the story, bringing extra gravitas to the film. Ger Duany (Jeremiah) and Emmanuel Jal (Paul) actually were “lost boys” who were forced to become child soldiers, enduring brutal treatment at a young age. (Jal, a rap musician now living in Toronto, told his story in an autobiography called War Child, later adapted into a powerful documentary of the same name.)

Arnold Oceng (Mamere) was born to a Sudanese father and a Ugandan mother, who fled the war zone with 2-year-old Arnold after his father died. Kuoth Wiel (Abital) lost her father, a doctor, to the war when she was five; one of her brothers was one of the real “lost boys” who emigrated to the U.S.

Director Philippe Falardeau had worked on a documentary about Sudan’s war in the 1990s. Twice he was caught in the crossfire and evacuated by the UN, and he has since been wracked by guilt for “leaving people behind who would probably die. I had this feeling that I had abandoned them.”

When Falardeau read Margaret Nagle’s script for The Good Lie, he decided he had to direct the film—and pitched himself accordingly to the producers. They hired him on the spot.

Bob Mahoney / Alcon Entertainment, LLC.

Falardeau decided to cast the film mostly with displaced Sudanese people, because “they hold this story in their hearts. For them, it’s not about being in a movie. It’s about bringing their story to the world.”

In The Good Lie, it’s a compelling story, entertaining, informing, and told quite well.

Whether the movie’s “good lies” are acceptable (or not) is up to you to decide. There are no easy answers . . . and that’s the good truth.

Caveat Spectator

The Good Lie is rated PG-13 for thematic elements, some violence, brief strong language and drug use. Early in the film, an African village is attacked by helicopters and soldiers, and people—including children—are killed, though none onscreen. Many dead bodies are seen, including bodies floating down a river. Obscene language is minimal, but strong. A few characters smoke pot and get high. The film raises important questions about America’s—and the rest of the world’s—responsibilities toward refugees and displaced persons, and how they can best be helped. There are also moral and ethical questions, including what constitutes a “good lie,” as the title implies. Good discussion fodder with few easy answers.

Mark Moring is a CT Editor at Large and a writer at Grizzard Communications in Atlanta.

The Good Lie

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Kelly Walsh / 2013 Alcon Entertainment, LLC

Reese Witherspoon, Arnold Oceng, Ger Duany and Emmanuel Jal in 'The Good Lie'

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Bob Mahoney / 2013 Alcon Entertainment, LLC.

Reese Witherspoon and Corey Stoll in 'The Good Lie'

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Bob Mahoney / Alcon Entertainment, LLC.

Reese Witherspoon and Ger Duany in 'The Good Lie'