Chris Pine has startlingly bright blue eyes, thick, dark eyebrows, and a way of seeming to look for something special even when he’s just staring into space—a gift of intentness that works well for him in “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” where he plays the latest incarnation of the intellectually dazzling C.I.A.-analyst hero of many books by Tom Clancy. Early in the movie, a thug tries to kill Ryan in a Moscow hotel, and Pine also gives a successful impression of a man frightened to death—eyes darting wildly, mouth open wider than most acting coaches would advise. He’s an enjoyably talented actor in these early scenes. Like “Batman Begins,” “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” and “Man of Steel,” the new movie begins as a myth of conception, or, as it’s more commonly known, the reboot of a half-dead franchise. We see Ryan as a marine in Afghanistan, in 2003: his helicopter goes down, his lower spine is mashed, and he has to learn to walk again. He gets help from a medical student (Keira Knightley), who is holding out for a date until he can overcome the excruciating pain and run like a track star, a demand that is supposed to be charming in a feisty sort of way. The movie then skips ahead to his recruitment into the C.I.A., by the super-agent William Harper (Kevin Costner, trying to look mysterious and dangerous by not doing much).
Most of the rest is set in the “new” Moscow, which, despite many cutting-edge skyscrapers and a glass-and-metal office of icy brilliance, is pretty much like the perfidious old Moscow that Clancy prized in Cold War days. A sinister Russian oligarch, Viktor Cherevin (Kenneth Branagh), has been buying up U.S. Treasury bonds through dummy corporations. He orders a terrorist attack on American soil, after which he intends to sell the bonds, crashing the dollar and the economy as a whole. Explaining the plan to Harper, Ryan allows that an American economic collapse might cause Russia’s economy to crash, too, but he quickly adds that the Russians have oil reserves, and will survive. He fails to point out that the Americans have a barrel or two in reserve themselves. Thus ends the exposition of economic warfare.
Tom Clancy was an insurance salesman in Maryland when, in the early nineteen-eighties, he wrote a book, “The Hunt for Red October,” that Ronald Reagan, with a handsome public mention, turned into a best-seller. Clancy’s career took off like, well, like one of his rockets. Too nearsighted to serve in the armed forces, Clancy, who kept a tank on his front lawn, was a military fantasist whose end-is-nigh concoctions spawned a franchise empire of video games, Clancy books by other hands, and, of course, movies. He died last October, and I don’t know if he had an opinion of this movie’s scenario (not based on any of his novels), but I wonder if he would have approved. The movie, which was directed by Branagh and written by Adam Cozad and David Koepp, features some rifles and revolvers but few of the bases, missiles, advanced artillery, and ecstatically enumerated ordnances and ranges that Clancy loved so well.
The Jack Ryan films have never been a proper franchise. James Bond, no matter who plays him, and no matter what the actor’s age, always seems about forty; it’s existentially impossible for him to be much older, just as it’s existentially impossible for Nancy Drew to be any older than a teen-ager. Jason Bourne does age—his story, as recorded in the three movies starring Matt Damon, was consecutive and heart-wrenching. Bond and Bourne, one playful, one serious, are both genuine franchise heroes. Ryan is just a property. He has no fixed identity, and his age fluctuates according to which actor is currently bankable. He was played by a devilishly handsome but puppyish Alec Baldwin in “Red October,” and by a fiftyish, scowling Harrison Ford in “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger.” In the latter, Ryan disrupts a covert war run by the White House against drug cartels in Colombia. The best of the series, the movie is morally ambiguous and complicated in a way the others don’t come close to. Ben Affleck, cleft and eager, took over for “The Sum of All Fears,” which begins with Israel losing a nuclear bomb, and not bothering to recover it, allowing it to fall into the hands of neo-Nazi terrorists. How can you identify with a hero who jumps around in age and gets stuck in stupid plots? The series had hit bottom.
Branagh doesn’t go for the fragmented, glimpses-of-action style perfected by the director Paul Greengrass and the cinematographer Oliver Wood in “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum.” The images produced here by Branagh and his cinematographer, Haris Zambarloukos, are stable, glossy, gleaming—a crisp black-on-black look that delivers paranoia in the chic style of a coolly disdainful fashion show. In Branagh’s favorite trope, C.I.A. people pass one another secret materials in the Moscow streets like Olympic runners handing off batons. Branagh, who started out in movies directing Shakespeare, has turned into a speed freak. He and his editor, Martin Walsh, have increased the tempo of the international thriller without spinning into incoherence. “Shadow Recruit” is fun in a minor, winter-season way. If the producers stick with Chris Pine as he ages, they may end up with something worth caring about.
In the Chilean film “Gloria” (opening January 24th), directed by Sebastián Lelio, and written by Lelio and Gonzalo Maza, Gloria (Paulina García), a good-looking and adventurous woman in middle age, regularly visits singles bars in Santiago. Placid and fifties-European in ambience, these establishments cater to substantial-looking people who dance tamely to retro pop and look for a bed partner. The atmosphere is congenial and relatively quiet, and conversation is easy. At one bar, Gloria, who is the divorced mother of two grown children, meets a somewhat older man, Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández). Is he right for her? Moviegoers instinctively crave sexual egalitarianism in romance—Hollywood has always understood this—and at first it may seem that Gloria needs someone younger. Rodolfo has a fine, modulated voice and melancholy eyes—he is given to nobly romantic sentiments and the recitation of terrible love poetry—but he appears tired. He stumbles a bit: he says that he, too, is divorced, and the father of two adult daughters who remain dependent on him (his mobile phone keeps ringing with urgent requests). But, smitten with Gloria, he presses ahead, and she goes to bed with him.
Lelio shoots explicit sex scenes between these two matter-of-factly, demonstrating a striking good sense that, among other things, makes the jokey nervousness about middle-aged sex in a pair of recent Meryl Streep movies—“It’s Complicated” and “Hope Springs”—seem even more embarrassing in retrospect. It’s a little hard to understand how we are supposed to take Rodolfo, though. Is Sergio Hernández miscast? Perhaps not. Judging from this movie, you’d think that Chile is a country without irony or even much humor. The culture clearly isn’t as media-obsessed as ours is—for instance, people sing together at home for entertainment—and conversations are blunt, rather than knowing. Rodolfo’s earnestness fits right in with this tone, and Gloria wants to believe in him.
On the surface, she’s an ordinary, rather lonely middle-class woman. She has an office job that she doesn’t much care about; her son, a musician and a single parent, is remote; her daughter, whom she adores, takes off for Sweden to live with her boyfriend. Yet there are mysteries in Gloria’s character, and the movie chronicles a strange, upsetting month or two in which everything in her life threatens to unravel. Paulina García, who won the best-actress award at last year’s Berlin film festival for the role, has a magical smile and a mobile face and body—at times, Gloria seems a young woman—and she reacts so idiosyncratically to events that she keeps us fascinated, even when the script turns inarticulate and patchy.
Lelio puts Gloria at the center of each scene and gives her moments alone when trifling incidents and even the quiet passing of time feel like an interrogation of her life. Is she on the verge of diminishing into old age? Various signs of the end appear: a hairless, scary-looking cat; a puppeteer’s dancing skeleton in a shopping mall. Talking to Rodolfo, she marvels at the black holes in space. She fears death, perhaps, or at least disappearing into nothingness, but at the same time she may be drawn to it. When she finds herself stranded in Viña del Mar, a beach resort on the Pacific coast, she drifts into a night of drinking, makes out with a stranger she meets at a casino, and wakes up on the beach, at dawn, alone and missing a shoe. This long night of dissipation and its sordid aftermath make up Lelio’s most intense and sustained sequence, but he and Maza build a sense of Gloria’s disintegration in many small touches. Nothing in her soul or her body changes abruptly; she doesn’t experience anything as dramatic as despair. Gloria slips a little, the way any of us might slip in a crisis of morale, from one minute to the next, one day to another. Yet she is also brave, and her escapades are meant to be taken as a refusal to go quietly. At the end of the movie, when Gloria looks at herself appraisingly in a mirror, we seem to be seeing her for the first time. ♦