Author: Greg Akers

We are all secrets to each other,” The Invisible Woman hypothesizes before setting out to prove the theory. At least the film, about author Charles Dickens and his real-life, secret, long-lasting affair with a woman many years younger, is honest about the prime failing of many a biopic before it: an inability to give a sense of who these people really are or what makes them tick.

Ralph Fiennes directs and acts as the British literary heavyweight, but the main character is Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones), a young actress who catches Dickens’ eye. “She has something,” he remarks to his collaborator, Wilkie Collins (Tom Hollander). Nelly is certainly hot, but what it is he finds so alluring is difficult to ascertain. It’s certainly not her acting talent, as anyone but him can see.

Not much is known about Ternan, though there’s little doubt she was his lover and silent muse during his period of greatest literary achievement. Fiennes literalizes the mystery of who Nelly was by frequently foregrounding the back of her head or over her shoulder in conversation with those who are known in historical record. Nelly is a cypher. But The Invisible Woman makes every effort to at least see the world as she would have. So, the film settles into a lovingly organic piece about the daily life of these Victorian characters, a tactile costume drama down to their wrinkled clothes. The Invisible Woman takes the time to observe the pre-photography paparazzi who hound Dickens as well as London’s impoverished angels with dirty faces who informed his novels.

As for what happened between Dickens and Ternan, The Invisible Woman shows a mostly chaste relationship. It’s more interested in the logistics of the affair, including the complicity of Dickens’ wife and Nelly’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and sisters. How else was it that one of the most famous men in the world kept the many rumors of his mistress off the front page?

The Invisible Woman‘s framing device, taking place years after Dickens has died, might be the real best part of the movie. Given free rein to speculate, the quiet sequences feature a more fully relatable Nelly playing off an inquisitive, compassionate friend (John Kavanagh).

The Invisible Woman

Opens Friday, January 24th

Ridgway Cinema Grill

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is an enjoyable modern spy film but doesn’t bear enough resemblance to the Tom Clancy novels from which it borrows its titular character to be worth the name. The best of all Clancy adaptations, 1990’s The Hunt for Red October, was successful in large part because it understood one of the primary pleasures of the author’s oeuvre: fetishism for military equipment, vehicles, weapons, and tactics. The boy-like appreciation of guns and planes and tanks is like a Jane’s reference edited by Wes Anderson and given a plot by Frederick Forsyth. You’re not going to get through one of those great Clancy novels without learning the differences between Los Angeles– and Ohio-class submarines.

The movie version of Patriot Games worked because it captured the peril of the CIA intellectual thrust unwillingly into physical combat. The Sum of All Fears worked because it translated the Clancy way of framing big international dramatic effects coming from humble, small-scale causes. Clear and Present Danger didn’t work at all.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit head fakes toward some of these Clancy tropes. It’s certainly faithful to the origin story of the character. Ryan (Chris Pine, following in the footsteps of Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck) is a boy scout-type who becomes a man in the Marines before being severely injured in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. In the film, Ryan quits the London School of Economics because of the profound influence of 9/11, making him a kind of Pat Tillman-style true believer who gets chewed up by the War on Terror.

Recuperating at Walter Reed, Ryan catches the eye of a tough but comely med student, Cathy Muller (Keira Knightley). He’s sidelined from grunt work, but his intelligence draws the attention of the CIA. His meet-cute handler, Navy Commander Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner) wants Ryan to finish his Ph.D., go undercover as a wolf in sheep’s clothing on Wall Street, and sniff out terrorists who fund their plots through the financial markets.

Notable in Jack Ryan are the contortions the filmmakers felt they had to go through to make digestible the premise that Ryan works for the CIA, going so far as to acknowledge the Realpolitik controversies of waterboarding and rendition, and making Harper have to say he wasn’t involved in any of that. It’s a far cry from the CIA of Clancy’s Cold War books.

The best of Jack Ryan is Pine’s lively presence and the relationship between Ryan and Cathy, which flirts with True Lies before settling into something more domestic and suspenseful. The worst is that Ryan is more Bond and Bourne than he should be — he complains, “I’m just an analyst” when things get dicey, but by the end he might as well be Ethan Hunt.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Now playing

Multiple locations

I submit that 2013 was the best year in film since 2003 (the latter of which featured the great films City of God, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Lost in Translation, Mystic River, The Fog of War, The Dreamers, Master and Commander, Dogville, and Hulk and three times as many superbly good movies). I’m ready to coronate 2013 having not yet even seen all of the year’s late-season releases such as The Wolf of Wall Street and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom; or mid-season indie successes such as Blue Jasmine and Before Midnight; or some I anticipated that slipped through my net, such as the Ryan Gosling diptych The Place Beyond the Pines and Only God Forgives. And don’t get me started on how many I’ve yet to see of Addison Engelking’s list below.

For me, 2013 will especially be remembered for the great films that were dedicated — “from the feet up,” to quote #3 below — to either narrative abstraction or precision. Contrast my #1A film of the year, Gravity, which is possessed with a raw kinetic inertia that becomes the very essence of cinematic adventure catharsis, with my #1B film, 12 Years a Slave, which is a nearly dispassionate slave procedural that elects to let the audience bring the grief, terror, and anger to the experience. Each film takes a different path but winds up in roughly the same place: epoch markers underscoring the power of cinema.

That same notion is the take away of #6, The Act of Killing, a documentary with a subtext about how Hollywood genre films are so potent that they can equally scourge and scour men’s souls. It sounds hokey, but what else to make of the most hair-raising moment of the year, as the sins of a bona fide genocidal monster come forth as bile. (And you know the camera sees a truth, because Anwar Congo’s not that good an actor.)

The films of 2014 have their work cut out for them. To get a peek ahead, make sure to check out the cover story in this edition of the Flyer (page 18). — Greg Akers

Greg Akers’ Top 10

1A) Gravity: The moment it was over, I couldn’t help thinking Gravity was the best movie I’d ever seen. The conclusion did not follow an intellectual comparative analysis, mind you. It was a gut reaction to the most stunning experience I’d had in a theater. I don’t know if I was right or wrong about the feeling, but the film is certainly the most movie movie I’ve been immersed in. Gravity: about birth and rebirth and surviving a mortal emotional wound, but wrapped up in a relentless action marathon. Gravity: In an interstellar burst … I am born again.

1B) 12 Years a Slave: Steve McQueen’s great slave narrative witnesses, without too much art, inhumane institutions that are part of America’s fabric of being. Watching the film, I’m reminded that the 1850s really were not that long ago. To think that this nation has healed all that much from such racial privation is folly — a fact also considered by the terrific films Fruitvale Station and Lee Daniels’ The Butler (both mentioned below). American racial evolution is still basically an amphibious guppy breathing through primordial sludge.

3) American Hustle: David O. Russell’s movie makes the case that cinema is our sexiest medium, and then aggressively proves the theory. American Hustle is a shout-out to those who prefer side boob and tight slacks to actual nudity, aka the 1970s.

4) Zero Dark Thirty: For the rest of the world, Zero Dark Thirty is a 2012 movie, but the film was actually released in Memphis in January 2013. Kathryn Bigelow’s best is an adult conversation about the unholy confluence of geopolitics, power, bureaucracy, and death, aka the 2000s. Related: Look for Spike Jonze’s Her in the top 10 for 2014, even though everyone else in the country has already seen it. Aaaah, Memphis.

5) Fruitvale Station: A week after seeing Fruitvale Station, I wondered when its melancholic power over me would fade. Five months later and I’m still waiting. I can’t stop thinking about the last images and the loss it personalizes.

6) The Act of Killing: The least hilarious picture of the year is an audacious reimagining of the documentary format. Joshua Oppenheimer somehow convinced Indonesian leaders — war criminals legitimized simply by winning the war — to recreate some of their atrocities in the film genre of their choice, including film noir and Hollywood musicals. Packed around those short film products are interviews and making-ofs, which, naturally, feature the maniacs, comfortable in their surroundings, comfortably owning up to what they did. The last act, though, is when the film becomes something beyond an interesting exercise: decades of guilt finally come forth. It’s hardly justice, but it is certainly something.

7) Pacific Rim: The most fun I had all year was Guillermo del Toro’s giant robots vs. giant monsters popcorn flick. Why isn’t giant robots vs. giant monsters the premise of every movie? Because it should be.

8) Stoker: “Sometimes you have to do something bad to keep you from doing something worse.” In Chan-wook Park’s Tennessee-made coming-of-age psychosexual horror Stoker, a mystery is built with glances, hushed whispers, spider crawls, and akimbo camera angles. Eventually, the film gives up its secrets, and after that Stoker becomes ever so mundane instead of impressionistically mad. But it’s all still intoxicating.

9) The Way Way Back: I have not yet given up my hope of giving writer/directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash a great big bear hug for The Way Way Back, another of 2013’s bildungsromans but featuring a much more sweet finish than Stoker or even The Spectacular Now.

10) Frances Ha: Noah Baumbach/Greta Gerwig’s maxi-mumblecore Frances Ha is a needed corrective to Lena Dunham’s increasingly interminable HBO series Girls. Frances Ha chooses grace over coolness and realistic nonjudgment over clumsily brittle self-reproach. I blame Judd Apatow for Girls‘ latent misogyny. I credit Gerwig for Frances Ha‘s wayward charm.

Honorable mentions: Nebraska, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Mud, Dallas Buyers Club, Enough Said, Adore, Amour, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Inside Llewyn Davis, The Impossible

Special local nods: Two long-misplaced films got notable revivals this year. In October, Indie Memphis and Malco’s Paradiso hosted a screening of He Who Gets Slapped, Lon Chaney’s magnificent 1924 silent film about an abused clown. The Alloy Orchestra accompanied the film with a brilliant live performance. Also this year, local filmmaking lede Craig Brewer re-released the Memphis movie that started his career, The Poor & Hungry. Out of circulation for more than a decade, you can now download it for free or buy it with a host of extras at ThePoorAndHungry.com.

Addison Engelking’s Top 10

1) Holy Motors: Leos Carax’s first feature since 1999 actually consists of several discrete episodes loosely connected by actor Denis Lavant, who plays a major role in most of them. Taken together, they pose a remarkable question: Why worry about what kind of movie you want to see tonight, when Holy Motors offers every kind of movie in one place? Mystery, romance, musical, comedy, fantasy, film noir — all genres are present and accounted for here. And the results are stirring, weird and delightful: No other film I’ve seen inspires automatic writing like, “The indescribably haunting rooftop scene with Kylie Minogue lacks the exuberance of the accordion blues number in the cathedral.”

2) The Grandmaster: There are currently several versions of Wong Kar Wai’s Ip Man biography in worldwide circulation. Thanks to the unforgivably imbecilic Harvey Weinstein, the United States release version is one of the shortest. But The Grandmaster is more than another gorgeous Wong meditation on memory, honor, and skill. It offers the return of the great Ziyi Zhang and is bookended by the two most beautiful action sequences — one in the rain, one near a train — of the year.

3) American Hustle/The World’s End (tie): After rewatching Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World this weekend, I felt foolish for giving it an honorable mention in my 2010 Top 10 list. I now think it’s one of the great movies of the decade. (Almost 10 years later, I feel the same way about David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees.) Wright’s sci-fi buddy comedy, The World’s End, is both energetic and heartfelt, and if it isn’t a cinematic landmark on the level of Pilgrim or 2007’s Hot Fuzz, well, what is? He’s still the most sophisticated and imaginative comic filmmaker around. In contrast, Russell’s 1970s fantasia American Hustle already looks like a modern classic. Hustle may be unwieldy and hyperbolic, but it includes the best cameo of the year, and it’s one of the rare movies that gets funnier as it goes along. Its perfect final line — “The art of survival is the story that never ends” — fittingly and politely tips its cap to Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. David O. Russell, meet Roger O. Thornhill.

4) Short Term 12: The big hit of the 2013 Indie Memphis film festival (winner of the Audience Award for Narrative Feature) stars Brie Larson as Grace, the committed and probably crazy den mother to a whole host of kids battered and left behind by the system. Fun fact to ponder after this devastating drama ends: Did you know Larson was in 21 Jump Street last year?

5) To the Wonder: Do not sleep on Terrence Malick.

6) Upstream Color: You will be confused by Shane Carruth’s movie at first. You will find it too abstract, too precious, and too clever. You will grow tired of working so hard to put together the pieces, and you may never figure out what exactly that guy with the microphones is doing. But you will not stop turning the movie over in your head once it ends. You will find that its logic, its audacity, and its horror grow more powerful as its ambiguities slowly clear up. You may also start to believe that the water in your glass is poisonous.

7) The East: Writer/actress Brit Marling inches closer and closer to the perfect dime-store thriller in her third collaboration with director Zal Batmanglij, about a government agent infiltrating a group of environmental terrorists. As usual, Marling’s performance is marvelous; no actress today is more intelligent or more mysterious.

8) The Bling Ring/Blue Is the Warmest Color (tie): Sofia Coppola’s nightmare version of the idle super-rich is a deadpan assault on taste, wealth, youth, aging, fame, and modern architecture. But don’t cry, don’t raise your eye; it’s only teenage wasteland. And speaking of teenagers, Blue is a coming-of-age movie disguised as a graphic lesbian romance. Its stark sex scenes may fade, but its reputation as the most psychologically acute breakup film since Albert Brooks’ Modern Romance should only increase.

9) Prisoners: I saw Prisoners on a Wednesday night in late October. About 20 minutes into the film, three or four teenagers came in, sat down a few rows away, and started yukking it up whenever they saw Alex, the developmentally disabled character played by Paul Dano. “Hahahaha, lookit the retard! He’s hilarious!” They didn’t figure out that Alex had just been abducted by Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), an angry parent convinced that Alex had kidnapped his daughter on Thanksgiving Day, until a few minutes later. Anyway, the kids were having a blast until Jackman grabbed Dano, shoved him up against a wall, picked up a hammer, and started shouting some very unpleasant things. At that moment, the laughter stopped. And as Denis Villeneuve’s somber, distressing thriller continued its descent into the darkest sub-basements of the male psyche, it was never heard again.

10) Pain & Gain: Some critics have already begun to reevaluate and reconsider Ridley Scott’s The Counselor: One year-end poll called it “one of the most radical experiments in Hollywood history.” But defending that collaboration between Cormac McCarthy and the director of Alien is relatively easy. Why not champion something nobody really seemed to like, like Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain? Why not remind people that Bay’s films have been secretly getting better and better? Why not float the idea that Michael Bay’s latest, most outsized tale of idiot misadventure was one of the year’s best? Why not exalt Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s sensitive performance as a dimwitted bodybuilder who is in way over his head? Why not assert that Mark Wahlberg is one of the finest American actors? Why are you looking at me like that?

I’ve got scenes to remember:

• Matthew McConaughey covered with butterflies, Dallas Buyers Club

• Solomon Northrup burns a letter, 12 Years a Slave

• Frances calls out parents for talking about their kids, Frances Ha

• The Gorfeins’ cat rides the subway, Inside Llewyn Davis

• James Franco’s gangsta Gatsby monologue, Spring Breakers

Five international movies worth seeking out:

1) Drug War (Johnnie To, Hong Kong/China)

2) Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta, Germany/Luxembourg)

3) A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke, China)

4) Byzantium (Neil Jordan, Ireland/UK)

5) No (Pablo Larraín, Chile) ■

American Hustle begins with the tag “Some of this actually happened,” and what follows is a period crime picture based on a true story that is less about exactly what happened and much more about what it might’ve felt like. The film is spectacular. The performances from Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Jeremy Renner explode off and catalyze each other, the acting version of the debris-field kinetics of Gravity.

The basis of American Hustle is the Abscam scandal of the late 1970s. Irving Rosenfeld (Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Adams) are con artists who catch the attention of FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Cooper). The cops force the robbers to help take down other criminals in the underworld of grift and graft, but some bigger fish swim into view, including Carmine Polito (Renner), the mayor of Camden, New Jersey, and some organized-crime figures. Complicating proceedings mightily are Irving’s wife, Rosalyn Rosenfeld (Lawrence) and DiMaso’s boss, Stoddard Thorsen (Louis C.K.)

American Hustle shoots David O. Russell into the rarified air of Martin Scorsese and P.T. Anderson. His film is so intently focused on the performances and emotional sparks it’s almost startling. The mix of camera position, actor, and dialogue creates an intimate humidity. American Hustle is an erotic film because Russell elicits an anticipation of sex rather than the act itself. Within the plot, betrayals of infidelity are about intellectual turn-ons rather than physical intercourse.

American Hustle is hot-blooded cinema. At times, it achieves a heightened, feverish abstraction where it seems like the summation of every ’70s movie, every con movie, every stylish camera dolly, pan, and zoom. It contains an infinite mirror of con games but doesn’t make you have to keep up with them. To find out where you are in the funhouse, you need only take the temperature of the affairs between the main characters. The script is twisty and mad and rambling and not overly interested in procedure — but still keeps all the mechanics in. Like most Russell films, American Hustle is concerned with big, loud, messy families — the ones we inherit and the ones we make.

Adams gives the performance of the year. Her Sydney/Lady Edith Greensleeve is every bit as indelible as Joaquin Phoenix in The Master or Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, the last two performances that were this hungry. As Rosalyn, a “Picasso of passive-aggressive karate,” Lawrence is a snort of coke.

American Hustle

Opens Friday, December 20th

Multiple Locations

A lonely old man walks down a highway in black-and-white in Alexander Payne’s latest, Nebraska. He’s disheveled and possibly mad, but he looks like he knows where he is and where he’s going.

This is Woody Grant (Bruce Dern). When his son, David (Will Forte), finally gets to him, Woody says he was on his way to Nebraska, and no one can stop him from going again. The old man believes he has won a million dollars from a company in Omaha, and he’s going to claim it. Whether or not Woody has had a mental break is up for debate among his family, but he convinces David to drive him to Nebraska. David agrees to the road trip not because he believes that the prize is real but because he senses his father needs something to live for, and this will do. David’s mom, Kate (June Squibb), and brother, Ross (Bob Odenkirk), are faced with the challenge of having to convince David otherwise as well as Woody. But it’s not like there’s much keeping David in town. He has a few days he can take off from selling audio and home theater components, and his girlfriend recently dumped him.

The pair wind up for an extended time at Woody’s hometown, where he is reunited with his family and old acquaintances. The word about Woody’s cash prize gets out, and he becomes a hometown hero for some. It brings out the worst in others.

Payne has made a career out of geographically focused dramatic comedies. Election and About Schmidt tackled the Midwest; Sideways drank in California’s Napa Valley; and The Descendants was a Hawaiian excursion. Nebraska takes Payne back to his home turf. The film travels from Montana through South Dakota and down to the titular place. There’s a specificity to the upper middle western states that is slightly different from the suburban and urban Midwest of Election and About Schmidt. Payne largely evokes it with the vast scenery: rolling hills dominated by steel-gray clouds, nothingness stretching to the horizon. Remember: Even William Least Heat-Moon, who found something beautiful everywhere else he went, found nothing to commend about this part of the country in Blue Highways.

Many of the pleasures of Nebraska are observational. David’s house includes touches such as a jar of aluminum-can tabs, dead plants, and delivery-food magnets. In Nebraska, there are Husker koozies, Eagle Scouts, Methodist churches, and Masonic lodges. Family members who haven’t seen each other in years settle back into old routines. The men sit around and watch TV in silence while the women gossip acidly in the kitchen. “Uncle Ray’s foot hurts” updates everyone on what Ray has been up to the last few years.

The satire, though, opts for mild and plain and kind of sweet rather than mean-spirited. The script by Bob Nelson generously chooses moments that redeem the protagonists rather than focusing on the small of spirit. Dern is terrific as a grizzled, naive drunk. Forte is quietly moving, and Odenkirk brings a nice alpha edge to the older brother. Squibb steals every scene in the movie.

Nebraska was filmed in B&W; it’s lovely and lends a timeless feel to the film, but it’s also sly commentary. There are fewer things less classically rendered in black-and-white than a Subaru.

Opens Friday, December 20th, Ridgeway Cinema Grill

Thursday features a treat for fans of local film with “Memphis Fried Movie,” a presentation of short films made by the Corduroy Wednesday Film Company and filmmaker G.B. Shannon. If you’ve attended any Indie Memphis or other short-film screenings in the last seven or eight years, you’ve probably seen something by one of these creators. Their films are festival regulars, and for good reason: These are high-quality productions with excellent acting, incisive scripts, and huge entertainment value. Seeing them all at one shot at Malco’s Studio on the Square will make for a great time.

Corduroy Wednesday is the collective of filmmakers Edward Valibus, Benjamin Rednour, and Erik Morrison. Shannon is a frequent collaborator, and they all share a complementary style and wit and call upon a troupe of actors.

There are many highlights of “Memphis Fried Movie,” but perhaps none fresher than Songs in the Key of Death, a terrific 12-minute film that premiered at Indie Memphis last month. The mockumentary was written by Shannon and Valibus and directed by the latter. It takes place after a zombie apocalypse (the Dark Resurrection of the Undead) has occurred. The one bright spot about zombies: They have perfect pitch! Billie Worley stars as FJ Ackerman, an entrepreneur who tunes pianos with zombie vocalizations and rents the monsters out for parties. The film is organized as a fake CBS News Sunday Morning-type piece, with the Flyer‘s Chris Davis as a Charles Kuralt stand-in. The whole thing is exceptionally fun.

Songs in the Key of Death was just accepted to the Oxford Film Festival, taking place in February 2014, a fact which underscores why “Memphis Fried Movie” exists in the first place: Admission to the event is pay what you can, because the filmmakers are trying to raise some funds for expenses such as festival entry fees.

The films are virtually no budget, but you can’t tell. Valibus says, “The films we are screening are very DIY but with the idea that if we can make the audience think we spent a lot of money to produce it, well, that’s just as good if not better than spending lots of money to make a high-production-value film. If you gave us a million dollars, we’ll try to make it look like 10 million was spent.”

Two other standouts in Thursday’s omnibus are Genesis on Demand (a brilliant piece starring Ben Siler as a god-like designer stuck on deadline in corporate hell) and Woke Up Ugly (a tale made by and starring Shannon that strikes at the heart of what it’s like to not feel good enough to be loved).

Oh, I also can’t fail to mention the hilarious CottonBallLand, which is like an episode of Drunk History set in Memphis.

On hand at “Memphis Fried Movie” will be special-edition posters for Songs in the Key of Death, designed by Memphian (and Flyer graphic designer) Lauren Rae Holtermann.

For more reviews of the short films and music videos, go to memphisflyer.com, and for more information on the event, go to corduroywednesday.com.

“Memphis Fried Movie”

Thursday, December 12th

7 and 9 p.m.

Studio on the Square

Pay what you can

Lance Armstrong has been about as public an athlete as we’ve seen the last few decades. His life story was compelling, dominating his rivals as he won seven Tour de France titles, but only after beating cancer and a deathly prognosis. He was Captain America. He was a Texas cowboy destroying puny European mortals at their own cherished game. He dated a rock-star hottie. He popularized cycling in America. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research and provided hope for the sick and dying everywhere. He overcame a death sentence and France’s Mont Ventoux. And he did it all because he wanted it more than anyone else. Armstrong was the American dream writ large.

It was, of course, all a lie. Armstrong cheated his way to the top, and he twisted his friends and teammates into complicity to ensure that his secret never got out. He was a bully who lied on TV, lied under oath, lied to his fans — lied, probably, to himself. For years there were rumors, innuendo, accusations, and tests. Armstrong kept his head above water throughout it all, with determination to stick to his story and damn his enemies. At all this, too, he was elite.

Alex Gibney tackles the cyclist in his newest film, The Armstrong Lie. But, he began his project in the good ole days, when Armstrong was staging a comeback at the Tour de France, a few years before his great downfall. Gibney enjoys the opportunity to have documented the man’s lies when people still believed him and to ask the follow-up questions when the truth came out.

It doesn’t break any new ground and draws its drama from long-over events, so The Armstrong Lie is worthwhile mostly for contextualizing a story that played out via headlines. Interviews with Armstrong’s former teammates and other ex-friends are riveting. Armstrong, however, isn’t nearly as interesting a character in his own drama. The reason is obvious, in retrospect: You can’t believe a word he says, even when he’s talking about the lies he told. Gibney can’t plumb those depths, possibly because Armstrong himself isn’t ready to confront who he is. Like with Pete Rose, the truth of Lance Armstrong may never be told, or heard, if it ever is. ■

Opens Friday, December 6th

Studio on the Square