


That's no knock on Mr. DiCaprio, who throws himself, heart and soul, into a character with deep deficits in both departments. Let's stipulate that his extravagant embodiment of excess is extremely skillful and very funny, and put other stipulations on record as well.

Jonah Hill, equipped with phosphorescent teeth and a manic affect, is often hilarious as Jordan's partner in the sleazy firm of Stratton Oakmont. So is Matthew McConaughey in a madcap soliloquy on masturbation and the need to stay relaxed. The film does full justice to its denizens' devotion to cocaine, Quaaludes and heroin, and to morphine, which Jordan takes "because it's awesome." The Scorsese touch is everywhere in evidence: swirling set pieces (Stratton Oakmont's boiler room, full of rabid brokers, as a Roman bacchanal), spectacular camera moves (Rodrigo Prieto was the cinematographer), and all of it heightened and sharpened by Thelma Schoonmaker's editing. Some of the settings are enjoyable, up to a point, for their tacky sumptuousness: I liked the trashing of a Lamborghini Countach. And sharp-witted scenes do play out from time to time on a human scale. In one of them, a couple of FBI agents engage the wily Jordan in a game of cat-and-rat.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort. Paramount Pictures

Eventually, though, the pandemonium wears you down; in my case, eventually meant the end of the first hour, with two more hours to go. "Stratton Oakmont is America," insists Jordan, ever the overreacher, in the course of his self-serving valedictory. Maybe so, but any meaningful perspective on the greedfest of the period is obscured by the gleefulness of the depiction. The film may well prove profitable: Lurid outlaws are always appealing, and there's pleasure to be had in the downfall of slimeballs. But "The Wolf of Wall Street" demands a huge investment of time for a paltry return.

'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty'

Sometimes you see failed films and think, well, they tried for this or that but couldn't pull it off. After seeing Ben Stiller's version of the venerable James Thurber story, I don't know what the film was trying for. It's a cipher in every realm but the visual. (Stuart Dryburgh did the stylish cinematography.)


Mr. Stiller isn't the first one, of course, to play Walter Mitty on screen. In 1947, eight years after the Thurber story appeared in The New Yorker magazine, an elaborate MGM production starred Danny Kaye as the wistful daydreamer who imagines himself in heroic situations. The movie was overblown, with a succession of preposterous adventures that grew tedious; its durable reputation is due to its star, a great comic actor who did memorably well with Walter's mood swings between mousy and manic. Mr. Stiller's version, written by Steve Conrad, wisely moderates the derring-do, but unwisely sends its hero on a quest that swings tentatively between the spiritual and the absurd.

Even the starting point feels tentative. The time is the present, but Walter works in the photo department of Life magazine, which closed down as a standalone publication more than a decade ago. (He goes forth in search of a missing negative shot by a legendary photographer.) Walter does have outlandish adventures in the Himalayas, Greenland and Iceland, but the lines between his fantasies and reality keep getting blurred. You don't know, for instance if he's imagining himself jumping from a chopper into arctic waters, or really making the jump. Whether the blurring is intentional or accidental, it vitiates a film that already feels dissociated, as if the basic narrative structure hadn't been thought through.

Impressive landscapes, plus Kristen Wiig's appealing Cheryl, the fellow worker who inflames Walter's passion, make the movie enjoyable enough. Yet its style is a constant bafflement, and nowhere more so than in a key scene on a Himalayan mountaintop—an encounter between Walter and a character played by Sean Penn. One could imagine the scene being played relatively straight, as a moment of fleeting profundity in a comedy, or as the culmination of a shaggy-dog story. What's so baffling is the way it has been played—drained of energy, tone or discernible attitude. Like so much of this journey by a shy guy from Life magazine, Walter's peak experience is weirdly lifeless.

'August: Osage County'

Family dysfunction has seldom been as flamboyant—or notable for its performances and flow of language—as it is in this screen version of the Tracy Letts play, directed by John Wells from a screenplay by the playwright. The cast alone is worth the price of admission: Meryl Streep as the cancer-riddled, drug-addled matriarch, Violet Weston; Sam Shepard as her alcoholic husband; Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis as the couple's daughters; and Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Margo Martindale, Benedict Cumberbatch and Abigail Breslin as members of their extended family. The language, rich in invective, flows from kindred spirits who are rich in aggressiveness, both the active and passive flavors. By comparison to this familial Grand Guignol, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is a crash course in decorousness.

Watch the trailer for "August: Osage County," a new film based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Tracy Letts. Starring Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor and more.

When I saw the play on Broadway some years ago, I had a good seat down front on the left, yet awkward staging prevented me from seeing Violet at the family table at the peak of her rage. Estelle Parsons was formidable in the role, but one of Vi's daughters had plunked herself down between her mother and me. The movie provides perfect sight lines, meaning a chance to see Ms. Streep do all of her stuff at every moment, and she is marvelous. (So what else is new about her work?) In addition to raging, Vi wheedles, needles, seduces and charms, and her mental fogs disperse miraculously whenever she finds a chance to lacerate one of her loved ones with something mean.

Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts. Weinstein Co.

The movie also gives us a chance to see Ms. Roberts in action, and she's marvelous, too, in an austere style that perfectly complements Ms. Streep's volcanism. Her Barbara has the dubious gifts of clarity and self-irony. She sees her mother, and her family, for the tortured people they are, but she's still her mother's daughter. In a dark, determinist comedy about the transmission of rage from one generation to the next, this seemingly vital woman is incurably infected.

'The Invisible Woman'

Ralph Fiennes's elegantly crafted, agreeably leisurely period drama does a public service by making the woman of the title visible. Born Ellen Ternan into a family of actors, she was often called Nelly and, as an 18-year-old, became the very young and secret lover of Charles Dickens, who was more than twice her age. The service lies partly in bringing Nelly out of obscurity—her story is one of a steep price paid for the passionate attention of a literary giant who may have had no love to give anyone but the characters in his books. It also lies in casting Felicity Jones, who is as eloquent and beautifully modulated in the role as she is physically beautiful. Still, Dickens dominates the story; he's a fiery presence as played by Mr. Fiennes, who directed from Abi Morgan's adaptation of a book by Claire Tomalin.

Ralph Fiennes as Charles Dickens and Felicity Jones as Nelly Ternan Sony Pictures Classics

This immeasurably famous writer and amateur actor doesn't mean to enslave Nelly to him. Still, he's at the height of his career and engulfed by writing, amateur acting and a gift for giving spellbinding readings. It's tempting to call him a 19th-century London version of a rock star, but Dickens was far more accessible than that: Londoners knew him, flocked to him and drew pleasure from his proximity. Nelly draws pleasure too. She's inexorably attracted to him, even after she comes to understand that their relationship will remain secret. The film overemphasizes Dickens's emotional repression; in fact he was devastated by a terrible accident that, in the film, leaves him relatively cold and mainly concerned about preserving the secrecy of Nelly's status. But "The Invisible Woman" gives us a plausible image of the great man in the fullness of his celebrity, and an affecting portrait of the woman who lived much of her life in his shadow.

'Lone Survivor'

Peter Berg's screen version of Marcus Luttrell's book is remarkably good at dramatizing the notorious 2005 Navy SEAL operation that went horrifically bad. The power of this production isn't evident in the preface, a standard-brand account of the rigors of SEAL training. And familiar themes of combat movies make up most of the operation's initial phase—cocky banter, macho preening, talk of wives and girlfriends back home. The first hint of what's to come is someone's casually ominous observation about the complexity of the joint military planning: "A lot of moving parts."

"Lone Survivor", the story of four Navy SEALs on a covert mission to neutralize a high-level Taliban operative. Universal Pictures

The parts were set in motion for Operation Red Wings, a covert mission intended to kill or capture a Taliban commander in northern Afghanistan. A four-man team of SEALs was ambushed by Taliban fighters, and the book's author, then the team medic, was the lone survivor of a debacle that also took the lives of 16 men aboard a rescue helicopter shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade. Mr. Luttrell, now retired, is played by Mark Wahlberg; the other team members are played by Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster. All four performances are first-rate, and the action is staged with shattering intensity.

Literally and graphically shattering. The film is a celebration of courage, and the brotherhood of warriors facing unfathomable danger in the service of their country. These, too, are familiar themes, but they take on new meaning in "Lone Survivor." The SEALs aren't just shot at in a merciless firefight. They are shot, time and again. They are almost aerated by Taliban bullets, and they fight on. Their training has turned them into fighting machines, and their equipment employs technologies undreamed of in earlier wars. Yet their high-tech edge is blunted by faulty communications, their support is compromised by limited resources—the film doesn't try to score political points on this score, but questions are implicit in the narrative—and their flesh and blood are anguishingly vulnerable when all the planning comes unraveled. A lot of moving parts in a moving film.


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'Mean Streets' (1973)

This is the wellspring of Martin Scorsese's career. Every potent element of his art flowed from it: the violence, the sense of evil, the tribal warfare, the fascination with criminality, and the explosive style. It's a small-scale film with enormous impact even now, four decades after it hit the screen. The setting is Little Italy, where Mr. Scorsese grew up, and the cast includes the stunningly young Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. The script was written by Mardik Martin and the director, who also played a gunman in a car.

'Greenberg' (2010)

Ben Stiller was uncompromisingly brilliant, though widely unpopular, in Noah Baumbach's comedy, which scintillates with intelligence, razor's-edge humor and austere empathy for its struggling lovers. Mr. Stiller is Roger Greenberg, a middle-aging misanthrope whose anger is matched only by his narcissism. Greta Gerwig gives a performance of heartbreaking delicacy as Florence Marr, a wistful young woman falling into a love affair with him. "I've gotta stop doing things just because they feel good," Florence says, but there's no evidence she feels truly good about anything.

Coriolanus (2011)

In choosing one of Shakespeare's more opaque plays for his directorial debut, Ralph Fiennes emulated the character he portrays, a refractory Roman general, Caius Martius Coriolanus, for whom compromise equals surrender. But the general comes to a bad end, while Mr. Fiennes achieved a great beginning as a director, and his performance stands as a chilling exemplar of psychomartial ferocity. The cast includes Jessica Chastain as the hero's ardent wife, Virgilia; Gerard Butler as Tullus Aufidius, his mortal enemy; and Vanessa Redgrave as his mother, Volumnia, alongside whom today's tiger moms seem toothless.