I remember enjoying the twistiness and gadgetry of the first one “Mission:Impossible” movie,  and then thinking the second was too caught up in being “stylish” (all I really remember is slow motion doves flying up in front of a car chase) to be much fun.  The third was just a bad movie (but with a  good villain) that came at a time with the ill will directed towards Tom Cruise was perhaps at its peak.  The franchise looked dead at that point, killed by Cruise’s couch jumping and bad direction.

Cruise has made some attempts to rehabilitate his reputation, mostly by not jumping on couches and wearing a fat suit in “Tropic Thunder.”  Director Brad Bird does the same thing for the Mission: Impossible brand, bringing in Simon Pegg and a wonderfully irreverent script for “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.”  Even that title seems like a sly joke – a colon and then a dash?

Simon Pegg shows, as he did in “Star Trek,”  that he can bring comic relief to action films without being distracting or spoiling the action.  That’s really a balancing act, and I think he should get more credit than he does.  The travesty of “Paul” aside, he might be the best comic actor working today.  I’ll watch him instead Seth Rogen or Jonah Hill any day.

Brad Bird is really in control of this movie.  Without his name attached (I have so much respect for him because of “Iron Giant” and “The Incredibles”) I probably wouldn’t have bothered with this film.  But I love the direction he takes M:I, accentuating its essential silliness without losing the thrill of its action.

The plot is so twisty and ridiculous it’s almost impossible to follow, let alone remember after leaving the movie theater.  Let’s see…Simon Pegg and Paula Patton break Cruise out of jail, and they’re working on an operation at the Kremlin, when the place blows up and they get blamed, so they have to stage a car crash and go on the lam to stop a criminal mastermind who wants to blow the world up in order to start the evolutionary process over again (or something) and just might have the nuclear codes to do it.  Really, does it matter?  It’s convoluted and action-packed and there was at least one sequence where it seemed to me like the sudden twist made the whole operation pointless, but they went ahead with it anyway.

More important that what happens is the way it happens; everything this M:I team tries to do goes wrong.  Everything.  The famous mask-making machine sputters and dies halfway through a mask.  The gadget-gloves that allow Tom Cruise to go all Spiderman on the tallest building in the world…don’t work.  The sexy seductress freezes up in front of her target and barely manages to get him to the bedroom.  If these guys were any more bumbling, Rowan Atkinson should be playing Ethan Hunt instead of Tom Cruise.  We teeter right on the edge of comedy and parody, and yet still Brad Bird still manages to make a thrilling action film.

From director Tomas Alfredson, whose “Let the Right One In” is probably the best vampire movie made in decades, comes another film heavy in mood and atmosphere.  ”Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is based on a classic John LeCarre novel about British top intelligence operatives.  Few authors wrote Cold War spy thrillers as well as LeCarre, and the genius is in the details.  These are guys who pay furious attention to those details, and betray nothing in their actions or expressions.  You don’t want to play poker with these guys. Unfortunately, this film’s devotion to “real” spy work (or what I assume is more real that the James Bond) type also makes it a difficult film to digest.   It’s almost all fiber, no sugar.

The year is 1973, and there’s a mole (a double agent) in the highest circle of British intelligence.  Gary Oldman plays Smiley, a former operative who was fired after an operation gone wrong (through no fault of his own — more of a housecleaning.) He is brought in covertly to discover who the mole might be.  The candidates are an all-star list of actors, including Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, and Colin Firth.  Also involved along the way are a Russian cultural attaché, who might be a double agent, an officer gone MIA (Tom Hardy) who might have been turned by the Russians or might be trying, under deep cover, to bring in someone who knows the mole’s identity.   The case turns on the slightest detail — honestly, it’s a snippet of a conversation that gets played over and over, but I’m still not sure where it originated.  And of course, capturing the mole before he can disappear is almost as difficult as learning his identity was.

Everything that happens here is slow (some might say dull, and not be wrong) but also taut and often tense. The central sequence – one can hardly call it action — hinges on a subordinate’s ability to sneak a log book out of a warehouse full of them. It’s tense for sure, but still…you want  a bit more in a spy thriller.  Many are going to call this a “thinking man’s thriller,” and that’s a slam on those who will find it boring, insinuating that they’re unwilling to think.  But I consider myself a thinking man, I tend to like “thinking man’s” movies, and I still have to say — this one was sometimes dull. It is clear to me why I could never get through a John LeCarre book. Everything happens in such a muted way. If you don’t pay close attention, you’re likely to get lost and never found again. Nothing is obvious, and the film rarely goes back and explains something the characters understand but the audience may not have grasped yet.

I expect there is a high degree here of plausibility here, and that’s why it’s so slow – such a devotion to the way real spy work is done, behind blank faces, and with a high degree of attention played to the smallest detail.  It reminded me of “The Good Shepherd,” a movie from a few years ago that was about the birth of the CIA.   “Tinker Tailor” is undoubtedly superior,b ut both are super muted spy chronicles, with a focus on the toil this kind of life spent in secrecy and distrust takes on the spies and their handlers.

This film has gotten great reviews, and is certain to make a strong showing at the awards shows this spring.  It’s well-made, and there’s a great deal to admire about it.  But there’s sometimes a difference between admiring a film and enjoying it, just as there’s a difference between thinking about a film and watching one.  My suspicion is that this might be a film about which critics rave, but leaves audiences feeling a bit cold and underwhelmed.

This movie, with the impossible-to-remember-title, is certainly one of the best of 2011.   It’s the story of a young woman who escapes from a backwoods cult after suffering serious psychological and emotional abuse.  She was never imprisoned by the cult, except perhaps in her mind.  She takes refuge with her yuppie sister and her husband at their vacation home, and they have plenty of issues of their own, ranging from stored up resentment against her for simply disappearing years before, to a nearly cultish devotion to style, status, and success.  The parallels “Martha” draws between backwoods, brainwashed radicals and the more mainstream, widely accepted cult of success are penetrating and illuminating.

Elizabeth Olsen plays the titular protagonist.  I was shocked to discover that she’s the little sister of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen; she’s certainly embarked on a different career path.  She looks more like a young Maggie Gyllenhaal than a young teen idol.  She might turn out to be the one in the family with actual talent; her performance here is nuanced, restrained, and never false for a moment.  Opposite her (at times, not often enough) as the cult leader  is John Hawkes, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors.  His unconventional looks complement a deep gravity and screen presence that can’t be denied; here is a man who is capable of brainwashing and manipulating the multitudes.  I suppose, to an extent, what makes him an effective cult leader is also what makes him a fascinating actor. His mere presence is captivating.

Director Sean Durkin handles his duties like he’s in charge of a horror film, which is sometimes effective, and sometimes confusing.  The soundtrack maintains that same low, ominous hum that works so effectively in the “Paranormal Activity” films to suffuse everyday scenes with a sense of dread.  But, as with many films lately, I found myself wishing for more classical camerawork.  Shots are too often filled with ears, boobs, and chins.  What’s wrong with framing a face?  Especially in a movie where all the action is happening behind that face.

Also like a lot of recent movies, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” ends suddenly, and with no resolution.  The last thirty minutes drag a bit, after a tense beginning, and then it just stops. I don’t know why.  This is a fantastic film, certainly one of the best of the year.  I only wish it had gone on a little longer, and brought itself to a more satisfying conclusion.

“The Adventures of Tintin” is a rollicking action/adventure story that never sits still, hearkening back to an age of comic book serials, when the writer had maybe ten panels to pick up where the story left off, take us on an adventure, and then end on a cliffhanger to make you buy the next issue.   So much happens so fast in this film that I’m not quite sure I kept up. Our hero, Tintin, is a newspaper reporter of indeterminate age (late teens?  early twenties?) on the track of the greatest story of all time.  A quick glance at the framed headlines on his walls show that he’s always on the track of such a story; it’s a glamorous life, that of us journalists, and few can keep up.   Do your best.

Tintin buy a model ship at a flea market that contains a secret message.  Actually there are three model ships with secret messages, and a gran villain (Daniel Craig) has the other one.  A great deal of the action happens in pursuit of the third ship; it belongs to a sheik and is encased in bulletproof glass.  One of the many pleasures of “Tintin” is the return of classically exotic adventure locales; in quick order we are aboard a giant steamer, then adrift at sea, then wandering through the desert, then ambushing a Middle Eastern palace.   Few action movies enjoy their locations as much as this one.

The cast of characters around Tintin salt the swashbuckle with generous dashes of humor.   Snowy seems like the real hero most of the time – where would Tintin be without his smart and incredibly resourceful dog?  Simon Pegg & Nick Frost bumble along as police inspectors Thomson and Thompson, and, of course, there’s drunken, melodramatic Captain Haddock. It might be troubling for some parents that Haddock, Tintin’s other sidekick, is only useful when he’s drunk, which is most of the time.  At one point, his sudden soberness is a real problem that must immediately be “fixed” for the story to go forward.  I don’t remember him being drunk quite this often in the comics, which I started reading around the age of 12, and then got my little brother addicted to when he was about 12.   (He thinks “Adventures of Tintin” is the best movie of the year.  He might be right.)

At first glance, “Submarine” looks like a film in the school of Noah Baumbach and (especially) Wes Anderson, but looks can be deceiving.  Because while director Richard Ayoade uses the same tools as Anderson et al – precocious prep school kid, overly stylized/formalized sets & costumes, etc. – he’s using them for different purposes.  The wonder of Anderson’s films is how such unbelievable characters can actually become real over the course of the film; they reveal hearts, they grow warm even while remaining stiff, and they feel like people we know after two hours with them.  Odd people for sure, but we love them because of their oddities.

That’s not what Ayaode’s up to.  The characters in “Submarine” remain frustratingly opaque, never revealing their true intentions or motivations, rarely emerging from the shells they have built to keep the world out.  And this isn’t bad writing; it appears to be the very purpose of the film.  Protagonist Craig Roberts lives in a world of inscrutable people; he can’t figure out what anyone wants or needs, least of all himself.  In contrast to that is the horrifying ability these people – again, including himself – have to cause each other harm and injury.  In “Submarine,” everyone runs around in terribly ineffective suits of armor.

Roberts has a crush on Yasmin Paige, that blossoms into a relationship – his first girlfriend.  Except that she’s only going through the motions (even the most intimate motions) and doesn’t seem all that into him.  Or is she?   She’s hard to read.  Everyone is.  Meanwhile, his mother’s old flame(Paddy Considine) has moved in next door, and he can’t understand why his father isn’t more upset about the growing warmth – and maybe more – between his mom and this other guy.  Or is he upset?  He’s also hard to read.

“Submarine” is about people who have locked their emotions so deeply away that even when they go to look for them, they’re not sure where to look.  There’s a great scene where Roberts breaks into Considine’s house, intending to do something really terrible and outrageous to his father’s competitor — but can’t think of what to do.  And then when he does thing of something, can barely bring himself to do it physically.  He’s trying so hard to act out of control, but it’s foreign territory for him.   Control has been his bulwark; schemes and plans determine how he acts.  It’s not that he’s unemotional – he’s a raging sea on the inside – it’s that he doesn’t have any idea how to simply let his emotions determine his actions.

This is Richard Ayoade’s first film, and one hopes for many more similar to it.  He’s earned the right to be mentioned alongside Wes Anderson, who I consider one of the best, most interesting filmmakers working.   Yet his film has its own distinct tang – Anderson’s characters warm up and we love them; Ayoade’s stay cold and we love them just the same.  It’s quite a feat for a first time director.  And this is quite a film.

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You’re familiar with the twist ending.   How about the twist in the middle?  That’s not something you see very often.  And “The Debt” shows why.

This is a film about three Mossad agents on the track of a notorious Nazi killer – the Surgeon of Birkenau.   It’s 1966, and they’ve tracked him to East Berlin. The agents are Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington and Marton Csokas.   They are all young and in over their heads, but highly motivated by personal loss.  The Holocaust wasn’t that long ago.

The three shack up near their target and wait for a plan to materialize from their superiors.  Things heat up between them, as both men vy for Chastain’s affections.  Worthington is silent, idealistic, and intense.  Csokas is smooth and calculating.  She falls for one, but sleeps with the other.  I won’t tell you why, and the film barely will, either.  I wish we had more time to spend with these characters; or rather, I wish they were more sharply drawn.  The actors are doing sufficient work, but there’s just not much to work with.

That’s only one of the problems with the script.  The main problem, as I mentioned above, is that it plays all its cards before the third act.   Things are happening, from the beginning, in flashback; in the outer layer Chastain has aged into Helen Mirren, and her daughter is about to publish a book about how she killed the Surgeon of Birkenau.  But things are not quite what they seem, or, at least, the official account of what happened isn’t quite right.  In the final act, Mirren sets out to make the two match up better (have I mentioned how much I HATE trying to write about movies with surprise twists?  It’s like talking through clenched teeth) and the plot goes really slack.  The conclusion feels foregone.  This film was over a long time ago.  With a bit of finagling and some sleight of hand, the two storylines could’ve played out in parallel, and the twist could’ve come at the end.  That would’ve have been a much more complex, and probably superior, film.

It has plenty of charm, and tension, in its first two acts.  Director John Madden clearly owes a debt to Steven Spielberg’s “Munich;” most notably in the mise-en-scene of late ’60s Iron Curtain big cities.  That film is superior to this one, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of it.  For about two-thirds of the way, I thought this was going to be one of the best films of 2011.  But the third act is a big letdown.  ”The Debt” is good, not great.

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Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond sets out in “Reel Injun” to document the evolving image of the Native American on the big screen.  He aims to explore not only how Hollywood images have shaped white culture’s perceptions of Indians, but how it’s shaped perceptions among the Native Americans themselves.  “I grew up playing cowboys and Indians,” he says, “and never realizing that I was the Indian.”  He couches his documentary’s journey in a journey of his own, setting out in his “rez car” to visit iconic sites across North America.  He visits the Pine Ridge reservation, where he rides a horse across the Great Plains, and declares “finally I feel like a real Indian!”

Early depictions of Native Americans on film were curiously academic. The Indians are viewed with a degree of respect, but also clinical detachment In films like “The Silent Enemy” (which is starvation, not the Indian,) the desire seems to be to document a dying people before they are gone forever. But in the ’30s, with the introduction of John Wayne and John Ford Westerns, the Indian became a brutal enemy.  Westerns capture a certain American ideal about themselves; the rugged wanderer braving the massive, dangerous Wild West, and inside that mythology, the Indian is nothing more than the embodiment of the savage side of Nature — it’ll kill you as soon as look at you.

John Ford made almost all of his movies in Monument Valley; his Indians dressed (vaguely) like Plains Indians, but lived in the American Southwest.  His movies have become so iconic that thousands of tourists visit Monument Valley every year, not because it is a beautiful, majestic place, but because it’s a place they’ve seen in the movies.  I’ve been to Monument Valley, and can report back: almost none of those tourists are white Americans.  They are Japanese and European.  I spent a night there once and the only person I met who spoke English was the Navajo guy running the food stand.  Hollywood’s idea of the Native American has been exported to the entire world.

There’s always been a legend that the Native Americans in John Ford’s films joked around by speaking in their own language; Ford never cared, as long as they “sounded Indian.”  Perhaps the highlight of the documentary is a sequence in which what they actually said is finally translated.  It’s pretty funny.

Things didn’t change much until the countercultural revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s; then Indians became “groovy” and “spiritual” and everyone wanted to claim some Indian heritage somewhere in their past, or past lives.  Depictions of Native Americans in cinema changed as well; they became stoic, spiritual warriors; the embodiment of all that modern society had left behind.  Natives became heroes and icons, but they still were little more than symbols.  They weren’t real people.

Diamond interviews Lakota activist Russell Means, who was in the middle of the 1973 Wounded Knee standoff when Marlon Brando denied his Oscar for “The Godfather,” instead sending Sacheen Littlefeather to the podium to (very politely) scold Hollywood for the treatment of American Indians by the film industry — and by the government.  Means recalls how those at Wounded Knee were watching the awards program on the TV at the trading post, and their spirits, almost defeated, were supremely lifted by that act of courage and defiance.

Westerns fell out of popularity in the late ’70s and ’80s, and there wasn’t much work for Native American actors, even as extras.  One notable exception was the 1976 Clint Eastwood film “The Outlaw Josie Wales,” in which Chief Dan George managed, through keen comic timing, to put a slightly more human face on Native peoples.

After a brief stop to examine the problems of 1990′s “Dances With Wolves” — perhaps the biggest “Indian” film ever made– Diamond moves on to the more recent Indigenous film movement, which allows him to end the documentary on a deeply moving and hopeful note.  He interviews Adam Beach, and looks at films depicting like “Smoke Signals,” “Pow Wow Highway” and “Dance Me Outside,” which depict Natives as real people with both strengths and weaknesses, not as icons or symbols.  But these films are still made about Indians for the wider majority culture: Diamond, and the people he interviews, wax poetic about “The Fast Runner,” a film made by Native people, for Native people, telling a Native story.  This is Native cinema.

The image in “Fast Runner” — of Atanarjuat escaping from his certain death and running naked across the ice — captures the moment of Native cinema that we are in now.  After years of being beaten down and used, Natives have escaped the suffocating confines of Hollywood, and are breaking free, making, with great vulnerability, exhilarating films that tell their own stories, in their own ways.  As the radio DJ in “Smoke Signals” broadcasts, “It’s a good day to be indigenous.”

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

There seems to be a quest for a certain kind of lost movie magic in the theaters this year.  I first noticed it in “Super 8,” a pretty good movie that might have been better if it wasn’t trying to hard to be “E.T.”  (Really, it made me just want to watch “E.T.” again, and when I did, I marveled at how effortlessly that film achieved what “Super 8″ was straining so hard for.) And now, I get the same feeling from Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo.”  This is a film that really wants to capture that sense of childlike wonder, of magic and miracles.  It wants it so bad, it practically sweats with effort.  And as a famous fashion designer told us in the ’80s, you should never let them see you sweat.

Asa Butterfield (who looks like a young Elijah Wood) is an orphan living in a train station in Paris.  I’m not quite positive of the timeframe, but I would guess it’s the ’30s.   (Just those three elements alone – an orphan, a train station in the ’30s, and Paris – are so loaded with trope and cinematic cliché that they ought to give any film an overload of sentimentality and “movie magic.”  It’s like Scorsese is saying, in the first ten minutes, that he’s not going to hold back – at all.  This movie is meant to warm your heart, to make you cry, to make you hug your neighbor and send Christmas cards to your worst enemies, and, by golly, he’s going to pull out all the stops to make that happen.)

Back to the plot.  When he suddenly died in fire, the orphan’s father had working to repair a mysterious mechanical man he found in the attic of a museum.  His son carries on the work, but in order to do so, he must steal parts from the toy maker whose shop is in the train station.  One day the toy maker (Ben Kingsley) catches him and confiscates his notebook, which is full of diagrams and notes on the repair work.  The toy maker has an annoying granddaughter (Chloe Grace Moretz, who seems to know she’s the current “hot child actress” – she ruins almost every scene she’s in with her smugness and smirks) who is keen for adventure, so agrees to help the orphan recover his notebook and repair the mechanical man.  I don’t want to give too much away, so let me just say that in doing so, they discover that Kingsley has a secret past and is in desperate need of the kind of emotional/spiritual redemption orphans who live in trains stations are so talented at bringing about.

“Hugo” is a visual marvel.  One senses that Scorsese grasps the possibilities of 3D cinema better than anybody except James Cameron — or that he decided, in light of his remarkable career, that he wasn’t going to do a 3D movie unless he was sure he could do it right.  ”Hugo” goes on my (extremely) short list of movies that are actually worth the extra price of admission and hassle with the glasses to watch in 3D.   The breathtaking visuals are probably where “Hugo” comes closest to the feeling of magic it strives for.   And, really, the tone of this piece is awfully critical, but “Hugo” is a pretty good, very enjoyable movie.  It’s just not the grand magical spectacle it sets out to be.  It feels overstuffed,  jammed with characters falling in love, finding redemption, remembering to hope, and being captured by the magic of nostalgia.  There’s just too much going on here.  And sometimes less really is more.

There’s a lot of buzz about how this story is a parable for Scorsese’s own growing up, his own story of being a sickly child who couldn’t go out and play with the other kids, so found refuge in movies.  But I wish he would’ve just told his own story instead of cramming his love for movies and their magic into a sentimental “orphan’s quest for connection” story.  The stuff about the movies – especially the Harold Lloyd and Trip to the Moon bit – are some of the best sequences in the film.  They also feel like the most effortless.  Around them are a crowd of scenes that, like “Super 8,” feel like they’re trying so hard to be magical they can barely breathe.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Ready for a break from your typical Christmas movie, with its forced magic, emotional manipulation, and vague commentary on the Christmas spirit?  Here’s a film that will go down like a big drink of seltzer water, cleansing your palate, resetting your clock, and making you positively long for another Tim Allen ho ho ho.

Set in northern Finland among the reindeer-herding Sami people, “Rare Exports” takes place in the days leading up to Christmas.  In the shadow of a small mountain, a small community scratches out their existence, fighting off the wolves and the weather and waiting for a lucky break, or one that will finally kill them.  There are no women in the community.  One wonders how they procreate.  There are children.

An American scientist is excavating their mountain; he believes it is actually a burial mound.  Something goes terribly wrong at the excavation site.  Livestock in the community start to disappear, and one of the men (Jorma Tormilla) builds a wolf of trap — that is, he digs a pit, fills it with spikes, and hangs a pig’s head over it.  His little boy (Onni Tormilla – he really is his son?) doesn’t think it’s wolves.  He thinks it’s Santa Claus, unearthed up on the mountain, and out to get all the little kids.  He’s got a book full of grisly pictures to prove that Santa’s not as nice as he appears on TV, and that naughty kids really ought to be terrified.

It’s perhaps worth nothing here that the Santa Claus myth isn’t based on some Scandinavian monster story.  It’s based on 4th century Turkish bishop St. Nicholas, whose generosity towards the poor became legendary.  I have yet to see a movie about St. Nicholas.  All the same, “Rare Exports” is enjoyably creepy flick that turns the Santa Claus myth on its head without descending into cheap slasher tricks and tropes: “Santa’s Slay” this is not.

I can’t say that the ending was terribly satisfying.  ”Rare Exports” began its life as a short film making its rounds on the internet, and when it gained enough attention and popularity, director Jalmari Helander decided to turn it into a feature film. It’s a promising début, showing a mastery of mood and atmosphere; it’s wonderfully creepy and dreadful.  But it’s also clear he didn’t have much of a budget; a film like this ought to lead to a climactic fight between the protagonist and the monster, but the best it can manage is a helicopter flight and an explosion.  We never actually see the real Santa Claus; we only see a 40 foot block of ice with grotesque horns protruding, and then it gets blown up.   Kind of a letdown.

Nonetheless, I liked this film.  I can imagine that many of my friends and family wouldn’t.  (My little brother would.) If you’re of a certain bent, if you need a nice Christmas gargle, or if you’ve ever thought “he sees you when you’re sleeping” was a bit creepy and weird, check this one out.  It’s good fun.

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Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Errol Morris has lately used his unique documentary techniques to cover some pretty heavy material in fascinating ways: his last film was about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, and before that, he interviewed Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.   He’s also focused his camera on the death penalty in two films, one about an innocent man on death row, and another about the life of an executioner.  But “Tabloid” is a reminder that Morris isn’t always serious-minded; one of his best films, “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control,” covers several men with interesting/bizarre job, one is a lion tamer, another is a robot scientist.  Like that film, “Tabloid” takes a faux-serious look at people we can’t quite take seriously.

This is the true story, truly told of Joyce McKinney and the Manacled Mormon.  McKinney spends a great deal of time on the screen, explaining her side of the story; unfortunately, the Manacled Mormon refused to be interviewed.  Morris does interview a number of other people associated with the case, and they provide a fascinating counterpoint to Joyce McKinney’s perspective.

From the beginning, it seems like there could be no one more normal than this woman McKinney, with her southern accent, blunt mannerisms and way of confiding in the camera like it’s an old friend.  She tells a story about a young man who fell in love with her, and she with him.  His name was Kirk Anderson. They made grand plans to be married and have lots of kids.  Only problem: he was “enslaved” to the Mormon church.  They whisked him away from her, forbade him to talk to her, and sent him off to Britain on a mission.

So McKinney goes after him, as any red-blooded American woman who’s experienced true love would.  This is where it really starts to get weird; she hires some very interesting, and rather seedy, characters to go with her.  They kidnap him — according to McKinney, he was so brainwashed by the church he barely knew who he was — and take him to a cabin in a small England town, where McKinney proceeds to deprogram him– by having sex with him.

Anderson escaped during a trip to town (McKinney, of course, says he was never imprisoned, and went to buy a paper and never returned) and the thing blew up into a court case that was a tabloid writer’s dream come true.  McKinney, sure that she had done the right, loving thing and determined to expose that vast, criminal brainwashing conspiracy that was the Mormon church – told her story with confidence, humor and wit to the court, and the reporters.  She became a celebrity, hung out with rock stars, and received truckloads of fan mail.  Then she disguised herself as a deaf/mute nun and fled the country.

Morris never really tries to determine the actual truth of what happened in this case, and it’s just as well, because, really does it matter?  The entertainment value here is how bizarre the whole thing is, and it’s only made more so by the conflicting stories told by McKinney vs. the reporters, investigators, friends and accomplices involved.  The whole thing is wild and loopy and fun, regardless of who’s telling the truth.  (There’s a great epilogue, too, about a cloned chihuahua, that has nothing to do with the Manacled Mormon case.)

I won’t pass judgment on Joyce McKinney.  I don’t know if she’s telling the truth, or being smeared by the tabloids.  Probably some of both. I don’t particularly care, either.   Hearing the story was good, bizarre, loopy fun.  If that’s what you’re looking for in a movie, this is your ticket.  If you’re looking for the truth about this strange case, you might need to go elsewhere.  I hear she’s writing a book.  Maybe you could look there.

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