Ross McElwee's autobiographical documentary Photographic Memory has a Baby Boomer's worst nightmare at its center.  McElwee's son Adrian is the prototype Millenial, as imagined by a person who spent their college years protesting war and the patriarchy.  Whereas the 21 year old of the 60's might picture that time spent on opening their minds with drugs and trying to make the world a more peaceful place, 21 year old Adrian is happy to live day by day on his parents' largesse, shooting amateur ski videos and drinking giant iced coffees.  McElwee's documentary tries to address the universality of that kind of late-teenage ennui, and whether or not he was like his son at Adrian's age.  Of course, when Adrian is looking back on this time 30 years hence, he might idealize his drug use or classify his time spent on his ski videos as honing his artistic voice.  The idealized past is always an interesting facet of human nature, and Photographic Memory interrogates this idea through McElwee's thorough documentation of his own youth.

As a lifelong filmmaker, McElwee is well-suited to make a film about himself and his son.  Juxtaposing footage of Adrian as a cheerful kid with the now-sullen and shiftless adult is striking in its universality, Boyhood if the titular boy was just awful.  The joy of taking apart a delicious crab cake melts into the banality of slugging down the hundredth iced coffee.  This clever editing sells the viewer on McElwee's love for his son, because the adult Adrian is a chore to be around.  Uninterested in college, he sits at home and works piecemeal on several different projects.  There's a novel in the works, and he's designed some t-shirts, and there's always ski videos to edit, which basically come down to footage of his friends horsing around on the slopes.  While many people have likely gone through a period like this, documenting the drudgery of witnessing it must have been a frustrating task for McElwee. 

Utterly stumped by how to get his son out of this rut, McElwee leaves the country for France, where he spent a few years in his early-20's.  He attempts to find his old girlfriends from this time, as well as a man who hired him as an assistant photographer to capture weddings and other events.  McElwee remembers this time very fondly, and hopes to gain some insight into how he can get his son onto a similar path.  Upon return to the French coastal town where he spent these formative years, he notices how tourist-y the place has gotten, while allowing for the possibility that it was always tourist-y and he just didn't notice it previously.  He runs into a few people from his past, or who at least remember/knew his boss/girlfriends, though they are at best, moderately helpful.  Ultimately unable to reconnect to this idealized past, McElwee returns home to his family.

Photographic Memory has some interesting things to say about the transience of memory, and how it changes over time to edit out the bad and accentuate the good.  It also depicts a father's dilemma, while coming up with no easy answers.  The kind-voiced McElwee, always narrating, is a welcome companion on this trip, and it's easy to see how the French town could occupy such an exalted place in his life.  As the instigator of the documentary, however, Adrian is a black hole, a complete stereotype that doesn't display a shred of joy or warmth or motivation.  The childhood footage of him is a must, lest the adult be utterly intolerable.  The love McElwee has for his son is rooted in the kid that was, and the man that might be.  This middle stage, though, is tough.  Photographic Memory's big takeaway is empathy for all the parents of drifting young adults out there.  May you one day get your homes back.  B-

By Jon Kissel

It's difficult to imagine someone watching Glengarry Glen Ross and not falling in love with the dialogue between those salesmen of varying talent levels.  That film is driven by a superlative script, written by David Mamet.  Expecting the same from his 2004 spy thriller Spartan, which Mamet also directs, I have a hard time believing Spartan and Glengarry have the same man behind them.  Where the back-and-forth of Glengarry is memorable and quotable, Spartan is utilitarian and hackneyed.  Where the characterization in Glengarry is intricate and thorough, Spartan relies on genre cliches or just doesn't try very hard.  Spartan is so derivative of earlier spy thrillers, and such a bad imitation of something starring Jack Ryan or Jack Bauer, that I am inclined to think Mamet is playing a joke on his audience.  If so, I don't get it.

A wooden Val Kilmer stars as Sergeant Robert Scott, a special forces commando recruited into a vital mission.  The President's daughter Laura (Kristen Bell) has been kidnapped, presumably by slavers intent on selling her into prostitution.  However, the slavers didn't realize who she was when they initially abducted her, giving Scott and the government time to recover her safely.  Scott finds himself leading and participating in multiple operations to find Laura, many of which fail or are called off at the last minute.  He gets a series of sidekicks played by Derek Luke among others, though none of them make an impression.

The dialogue is Spartan's greatest offender.  It's completely lacking in humanity, and would be better suited for a video game. Its only purpose is to move the action forward to the next doomed-to-fail plot.  Mamet attempts to cover the mechanical aspects with snappy zingers on the end of conversations, and Kilmer is no Schwarzeneggar.  Because so many characters are disposable, Scott continuously has to restate the details to his next sidekick.  If the viewer can't recognize the characters as humans reacting in a human way, then no amount of ridiculous stakes can rescue the film.

As high as those stakes are, the set pieces are so logic-defying as to make them meaningless.  Snipers show up to fire a little life into the film, but after briefly thinking about how long they must have been sitting there or what their orders must have been, it all falls apart.  A climactic confrontation is undone by coincidence and villain-monologuing, something so parodied to death that I have to think Mamet included it on purpose.  I would be more inclined to see him winking from behind the camera if there were any jokes here, but all the actors are playing things perfectly, dully straight.  If things were 25% more over-the-top, I could maybe see the comedy, if that was even in Mamet's motive in the first place.  As is, Spartan is a failed imitation of 24.  It falls woefully short of even earning steak knives, much less that first place Cadillac.  D

By Jon Kissel

The prolific Alex Gibney turns his very busy eye onto Wikileaks with We Steal Secrets.  Tracing root causes back to before September 11, Gibney's film explores how Chelsea Manning was able to effortlessly transmit millions of classified documents to an Australian hacker with no interest in redacting them for safety.  It also functions as a biography of Manning and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, addressing everything from their childhoods to their present legal issues.  Though Gibney does not get either principal on camera, he does paint a clear and (mostly) fair picture of both through their instant messages, personal and public footage, and copious interviews with coworkers and acquaintances.  The finished product is another win for Gibney, a thorough investigation on a small scale that finds the larger implications for the world.

After some brief history and introductions, We Steal Secrets gets into tracing the step-by-step process of Wikileaks's greatest successes.  With the verve and tension of a spy thriller, Gibney chronicles the back and forth between Assange, Manning, and third hacker Adrian Lamo, followed by all-night debates on what to do with the raw data Manning has delivered to Wikileaks.  Once everything gets out into the ether, the media split between castigating Assange as a reckless traitor or praising him as a courageous whistleblower.  The criticism hardens his resolve and the adulation inflates his ego. 

Gibney is much kinder to Manning than Assange.  Painting the army private Manning as a deeply unhappy individual, conflicted over her gender and her work, We Steal Secrets has a lot of sympathy for her, emphasizing that she never asked for money and was earnest in her moral distaste for the reports and intelligence that came across her desk.  With his thin frame and giant eyes, Manning does not appear suited for the military, and analysts that served with her describe an isolated loner amidst the masculine military culture, even in a mixed-gender IT group.  Chat logs between Manning and Lamo depict a person near suicide, desperate for any kind of companionship and spiritually wounded by the acts of his government.  Assange, on the other hand, is depicted as self-aggrandizing, using his fame for sexual conquest and speaking arrangements while Manning languishes in solitary confinement.  He dismisses efforts to shield Afghani informants in his first big data dump, condemning them as collaborators who deserve whatever happens to them.  Though no evidence has been found that the Wikileaks disclosures resulted in loss of life, Assange's coldness in the face of colleague's arguing for discretion hangs over the rest of the film.  An unflattering scene of Assange clumsily dancing in a nightclub doesn't help in his depiction, and is beneath Gibney.  Assange already comes off as supremely arrogant and narcissistic, and doesn't need any extra diminishment.

Assange's legal troubles, ostensibly unrelated to his work with Wikileaks, form a big part of the latter half of the film.  Currently stuck in Ecuador, hiding from Swedish extradition on charges of sexual misconduct, Assange mixes his personal life and his professional life in a distasteful way.  In his mind, the charges are inextricably linked, and fundraising for Wikileaks has been used to pay personal lawyers.  He is Wikileaks, and Wikileaks is him.  Gibney gets respectful interviews with Assange's accusers, and they appear perfectly reasonable witnesses who Assange ignored until they were left with no other recourse than the police.  He also asks his employees to sign non-disclosure agreements, a puzzling development from a man who insists that all information should be public.  The charges ultimately lead to the dissolution of Wikileaks as it had been, supplanted in the news by Edward Snowden and in the Internet by groups like Anonymous, who eschew a charismatic leader, perhaps because of Assange's example.

The tragedy of We Steal Secrets is that it's instigated by a government that would continue to needlessly keep so much from its citizens.  Gibney traces the explosion of secrecy culture to shortly after 9/11, when the intelligence ethos went from need-to-know to need-to-share.  More eyes are on intelligence, but everything gets classified, citizens know less, and it's more difficult for whistleblowers to escape prosecution.  Wikileaks burst into the national consciousness with footage from a gunship, not exactly something integral to national security.  That the journalists trusted by Edward Snowden have done such a better job than Assange at disseminating information shows that people are paying attention and learning from his mistakes.  Meanwhile, Manning will likely spend decades in prison, after a period of near-certain torture by his guards and a State department report that found no lasting damage to the US or its interests from his actions.  Gibney's documentary is alternately empathetic and suspicious towards its complicated principals, while also slotting them into a broader picture.  As one of his better films, We Steal Secrets is a vital and valuable deconstruction of those who would attempt to pierce the national security state.  B+