Arts & Entertainment

This Week at the Movies

'Iron Man 3' is an average kickoff for the summer movie season and 'Something in the Air' is a decent period piece, but 'Post Tenebras Lux' falls short.

“Iron Man 3” is a slight step up from the second film in the series, but it’s also a franchise that appears to have run its course.   

If anything, the “Iron Man” pictures are running solely on the back of Robert Downey Jr.’s persona and, to his credit, he brings the right amount of charisma, charm and witty banter – especially during several sequences with a young boy – that we’ve come to expect to this third installment.   

On the other hand, an extraterrestrial element that was introduced to Tony Stark’s world in last year’s “The Avengers” is grudgingly referenced throughout “Iron Man 3” and it makes for an awkward fit.   

If anything, one of the most compelling elements of the first movie in the series was that Stark did not contain supernatural powers and his story was a human one. Now that aliens – and, in “IM3,” molten lava-looking creatures created by one of the film’s villains – have been introduced, the franchise is on a narrative downslide.   

The film’s highlights include the aforementioned sequences between Downey Jr. and a young boy that provide some of the picture’s best lines and an intense sequence in which several characters free fall after being ejected from a plane.  

There are several villains in this sequel and Ben Kingsley  - as the Mandarin – is the best, but for reasons I can’t divulge without giving away too much.   

At this point, “Iron Man” is a series on overdrive. Once an original entry in the comic book genre, it is now an excuse for expensive-looking set pieces, the opportunity to blow lots of stuff up and Downey to provide one-liners. This latest entry – while not bad – is merely standard summer fare.   

The weekend’s other two new releases find two acclaimed filmmakers working in a minor key following recent career highs.  

Olivier Assayas follows up his 2010 masterpiece “Carlos” with “Something in the Air,” which also tells the tale of 1970s radicals. But while his previous film was an ambitious, sprawling epic of a massive ego, his latest is a loosely autobiographical period piece that is narrower in focus.   

It’s still a pretty good little film. Assayas nails the period details – the clothes and, especially, the music. The picture, which is set outside of Paris in 1971, has an excellent soundtrack that manages to avoid the type of nuggets that typically populate films set in this era.   

The film’s French title is “Apres Mai,” which translates to “After May,” a reference to the 1968 riots in Paris. As this film is set three years later, its counterculture youths have mostly missed the revolution and aimlessly mill about in search of a cause.   

One of the more interesting elements of the film is how its revolutionaries – who, at the start, are politically motivated – eventually become more interested in their own personal endeavors, such as filmmaking or painting, rather than changing the world.   

This is not one of Assayas’s best films, but it’s still an evocative and compelling coming of age period piece.   

Carlos Reygadas, whose previous film was the remarkable Mennonite saga “Silent Light,” has returned with his latest, the experimental “Post Tenebras Lux,” a film that unveils some memorable imagery before going completely off the rails.   

It is useless to describe the film’s story, which is a term I use loosely. “Post Tenebras Lux” follows a Mexican family, jumping back and forth in time over a period of several years.   

The movie kicks off with one of its finest sequences – a young girl stands in a field as the overcast sky looms behind her. Dogs and cows roam about as the sky quickly darkens and rain pours down. Meanwhile, her brother awakens from his slumber, steps out of his bedroom and spots a devil – cloven hoof and all – creeping around his house.   

Reygadas’s film contains several other sequences of note, including a hallucinatory visit to a sex spa, but also some baffling choices, such as a seemingly meaningless series of segments involving a British soccer team. There’s also a subplot about a former drug addict who is befriended by the film’s patriarch that only takes on relevance toward the picture’s end.   

I’m perfectly content with a director’s choice of leaving an audience in the dark in terms of intentions. Leos Carax’s inexplicably weird “Holy Motors,” for example, was one of my 10 best movies of 2012. But “Post Tenebras Lux,” despite a few memorable sequences, keeps us at too far a remove.   

“Iron Man 3” is playing at AMC Loews Bay Terrace 6 and Douglaston’s Movie World.”   “Something in the Air” is screening at Manhattan’s IFC Center, while “Post Tenebras Lux” is at theFilm Forum.


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