Movie Reviews: Bob Marley One Love, The Taste of Things, Adam the First 

Bob Marley: One Love
In a post-Walk Hard world, it is to the credit of director Reinaldo Marcus Green and his screenwriting team that their film biography of reggae legend Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) doesn't make all the mistakes represented in the now-classic genre satire; instead, they mostly make a bunch of new ones. Rather than tell a cradle-to-grave story, for example, they focus mostly on 1976-1978, with Marley already a star in his native Jamaica and trying to navigate the political divisions of that country as his popularity ascends internationally; in flashback, we occasionally see the early days of Marley's music career, meeting eventual wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) and his conversion to Rastafari. Sure, we do also get some Walk Hard-esque moments, like the studio recording session where a specific song gets someone's ears pricked up, or cameos by other artists of the era. And while It's a bold decision to hinge a story of social upheaval around a character who is so generally mellow, Ben-Adir finds the vibe of Marley's unique brand of zealotry, for better or worse. But for mostly worse, One Love plays out largely as a Rasta recruiting film, focused on spreading its message of racial justice and world harmony to a very specific audience, to the extent that its un-subtitled Jamaican patois is frequently incomprehensible. As an authorized biography, we do get the benefit of plenty of great music; we also get decisions that might eventually inspire its own very specific parody. Available Feb. 14 in theaters. (PG-13)

The Taste of Things
For approximately the first 30 minutes of writer/director Anh Hung Tran's deliriously romantic feature, we watch the preparation and consumption of a single meal in an 1880s French chateau: head cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) bringing in produce from the garden and leading the preparations; the house's master, gourmand Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), frequently assisting; a young would-be apprentice chef (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire) learning the ropes. The expression "food porn" has dominated discussion of this and other long stretches of The Taste of Things, but it feels almost cruel to reduce the experience to that level, as Tran—adapting Marcel Rouff's novel La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet—turns the act of sharing a love for something into pure visual poetry. The loose narrative involves the fact that Dodin and Eugénie have engaged in a decades-long love affair, with Eugénie having rejected several proposals of marriage even as she begins experiencing fainting spells. That relationship is the real heart of Tran's film; as lovingly as the camera captures the preparation of food, it's the expressions on the faces of those who take joy in creating and enjoying it that make it sing, juxtaposed with the ritual consumption of ortolans while hidden under a napkin. It all leads to a final exchange of dialogue that absolutely wrecked me, capturing what it means to be truly kindred souls. Available Feb. 14 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

Adam the First
There's an important distinction between "what is this movie about" from a synopsis standpoint and "what is this movie about" from a thematic standpoint—and while I can certainly explain to you the former, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the latter. It's the tale of Adam (Oakes Fegley), a 14-year-old raised off the grid in a remote forest, who—after the death of the man who raised him (David Duchovny)—sets out with a list of three names to find out which one of them is his biological father. The schematic nature of the plot structure really dampens the sense of drama, because let's face it, we know that that will be like a search for missing keys in the sense that dear old Dad is going to be in the last place Adam looks. But it's never even clear what Adam is supposed to be learning from his non-fatherly encounters, or why the people in writer/director Irving Franco's movie keep behaving in ways that are writerly contrivances. Fegley does his best to convey a mix of scrappiness and longing, even when Franco decides to use an interminable pan during one scene to focus on someone else's response to an emotional meeting. The diversions into quirky sorta-comedy and violent confrontations make it all the more difficult to figure out who this movie is for, or what lessons we're supposed to take away from it. Available Feb. 14 in theaters. (NR)