First lesson learned from Flight: Never take Denzel Washington for granted. After making his bones with Glory, Malcolm X and The Hurricane, and winning a Best Actor Oscar for 2001's Training Day, Washington settled into a groove of action films (Safe House, Unstoppable). With the exception of 2007's incisive American Gangster, they relied more on his star power than his acting skills. Flight reminds us of what Washington can do when a role hits him with a challenge that would floor a lesser actor. He's a ball of fire, and his detailed, depth-charged, bruisingly true performance will be talked about for years. 
 
 Washington, 57, plays Capt. Whip Whitaker, a commercial pilot with a jones for hooch and blow, on the job as well as off. His marriage is a casualty, along with his relationship with his only son. Can Whip stay up all night doing drinks, drugs and sex with a hottie flight attendant (Nadine Velazquez) and still make his 9 a.m. flight to Atlanta? He can. Can he sneak vodka on board in an orange juice container and still fly in a blinding rainstorm? He can. 
 
 But do you want him to? That's the big question that Washington, screenwriter John Gatins and director Robert Zemeckis keep working like a wound. After Zemeckis spent the past 12 years experimenting with performance-capture animation (Polar Express, yikes!), it's good to have him back in the live-action arena he deserted after Cast Away. Flight is Zemeckis at his most emotionally open and thematically provocative. 
 
 It also comes on like gangbusters. In the white-knuckle opener, Zemeckis nails us to our seats as a hung­over Whip dozes, much to the horror of God-fearing co-pilot Ken Evans (Brian Geraghty). The suspense tightens when the jet's hydraulics fail and Whip – roused from his stupor by a line of coke – must literally turn the plane upside down to make an emergency landing. The raw panic is palpable. But what astonishes is Whip's unflappable cool, born of a lifetime on the job and, just maybe, Dutch courage. The sequence is a marvel of technical wizardry. But Zemeckis never lets FX crush the story's human scale. Six lives were lost on this flight. But 96 more were saved because Whip was flying high. 
 
 That is the ethical tightrope that Flight walks with keen intelligence. Whip is cheered as a hero, since 10 other pilots failed to duplicate his feat in simulations. Ironically, that fact enables him to drink more. He's invincible! Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a recovering junkie, shares his bed and tries to steer him toward rehab. But a shot at going cold turkey leads to the inevitable relapse. 
 
 Whip is a pawn. The airline and the pilots union want a cover-up. A hotshot lawyer (Don Cheadle) is hired to spin reports of Whip's high-octane blood-alcohol level at the crash site. At a public hearing, the head prosecutor (a superb Melissa Leo, her honeyed voice a lethal weapon) is determined to make someone accountable for those six lives lost. How can Whip get through an interrogation, especially the morning after a killer bender? The same way he landed the jet, with a little help from his dealer friend Harling (John Goodman, vividly funny and scary as a force of Dr. Feelgood nature). 
 
 At the hearing, Zemeckis has only to train his sights on Washington as he captures a soul in free fall. You might bitch that Flight levels off after its shocking, soaring start. But you'd be missing the point of an exceptional entertainment that Zemeckis shades into something quietly devastating – not an addiction drama, but the deeper spectacle of a man facing the truth about himself. God isn't Whip's co-pilot. His jet even clipped off the steeple of a church on its way down. Whip is a man alone. And all you need to know about him is mirrored in Washington's eyes. Zemeckis couldn't invent a digital effect to match an image that hypnotic, that haunting. ||||| Paramount Pictures Denzel Washington as Whip Whitaker in 'Flight.' 
 
 Four years after Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic and became a global hero, the humorist James Thurber published a New Yorker magazine piece, "The Greatest Man in the World," about a fictional pilot named Jack "Pal" Smurch. Mr. Thurber's aviator flew around the world nonstop in a rickety airplane he had built, then revealed himself to be a braggart, a fool and a generally despicable human being. The airline pilot played by Denzel Washington, Whip Whitaker, is far from despicable—he is, after all, played by Denzel Washington—but he's no Chesley Sullenberger, either. "Flight," which was directed by Robert Zemeckis, soars when Whip is at the controls, struggling to save a seemingly doomed airplane. When he's back on the ground and struggling with himself, the film takes a surprising turn into a drama of addiction and moral exploration. One unwelcome surprise is how shopworn the story's components prove to be. Still, they're enhanced if not redeemed by Mr. Washington's stirring portrait of a skillful, prideful pilot hitting bottom. 
 
 White-knuckle fliers may want to pass on "Flight" altogether, though they'll be missing an early sequence that's right up there with the best of the incipient-disaster genre: Think "Airplane!" without the laughs. What's unclear is whether Whip, who shouldn't even be sitting in the cockpit, will be up to the challenge. What's abundantly clear from the outset of the midair crisis is that a cascade of malfunctions will make his airplane uncontrollable. (However wildly over the top the sequence may seem to be, it's only a heightening of what actually happened off the California coast in 2000 when a loose jackscrew jammed the horizontal stabilizer of an Alaska Airlines MD-83, sending the airplane into a dive from which the pilots tried, unsuccessfully, to recover by flying upside down.) 
 
 Crisis has been a major food group for many of the characters Mr. Washington has played; he's such a quick-witted star, with his flashing smile and mercurial spirit, that he ingests danger gleefully and thrives on it. Not this time, though. It's a shock to see the shape he's in—overweight, unkempt, a star stripped of his charisma for a role that keeps him in a garishly unflattering light. And Whip's experience and demonstrable skill may not be enough to save him, even though he's first hailed as a hero. Too many secrets threaten to bring him down in the investigation that follows his fateful flight. 
 
 Watch a clip from the Robert Zemeckis film "Flight." An airline pilot (Denzel Washington) saves a flight from crashing, but an investigation into the malfunctions reveals something troubling. Also starring Nadine Velazquez. (Photo & Video: Paramount) 
 
 When movie stars choose roles that make them unattractive, they're often praised for their courage, even though doing so can amount to adventurous career management. I'd rather praise Mr. Washington for the eloquence, solemnity and disarming humor of his performance as a man whose body and soul are beset by the contending forces of probity and deceit, a good man whose addictions to drugs and booze have turned him into a shameless liar. 
 
 That said, the script, by John Gatins, brings mixed blessings at best. Instead of hurtling to a climax, the story moves in fits and starts, loses momentum, injects itself with cockeyed comedy—John Goodman's Falstaffian drugmeister is the damnedest deus ex machina you've ever seen—lumbers through 12-step thickets and finally resolves into an old-fashioned morality play. Mr. Zemeckis's direction is similarly a mixture of thrilling action, incisive characterization, overblown set pieces—the federal crash investigation is staged like a full-scale congressional hearing—and shameless, though effective, melodrama. The cast includes Don Cheadle and Bruce Greenwood, both of whom give the movie's star valuable support, and Kelly Reilly, who, as another addict in Whip's life, turns tepid writing into passionate humanity. 
 
 Watch a clip from the Disney animated film "Wreck-It Ralph." A video game villain (John C. Reilly) wants to be a hero, but his quest brings havoc to the whole arcade where he lives. Also with Jane Lynch & Sarah Silverman. (Photo & Video: Disney) 
 
 'Wreck-It Ralph' 
 
 Can it be that three decades have passed since video arcade games such as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong first unleashed their jumpy, choppy, charmingly blocky characters on a pop-eyed public? Disney's latest animated feature evokes nostalgia for that bygone era of barebones 8-bit technology and simple gameplay rules with a genially simple scheme. Just as Pixar's "Toy Story" trilogy revealed the secret life of toys, "Wreck-It Ralph" follows characters from a game called "Fix-It Felix, Jr.," a takeoff on Donkey Kong. On duty, they're exuberant primitives. Off duty, they're fully drawn creatures in a 3-D world. Ralph, voiced by John C. Reilly, is the game's bad guy, a sensitive hulk who wants desperately to win a medal as a good guy. To that end, he flees his console's confines, travels around the arcade electronically and patches himself, with chaotic consequences, into a succession of modern high-definition games. It's a lovely pretext for dazzling visuals, yet the production is diminished by the clumsiness of an 8-bit script. 
 
 That's a major or a minor matter, depending on how addicted you may have been to those early games, many of whose characters make cameo appearances; whether the film will connect with today's young kids is a major matter soon to be resolved. The story begins promisingly, with Ralph in an envious funk. He has always been compelled to wreck things—the rules of his game are inviolable—while Felix (Jack McBrayer) has always gotten praise for fixing things with his magic hammer. A 12-step group for bad guys doesn't do much for Ralph's bruised psyche, so the first stop on his pilgrimage is, logically enough, a game called "Hero's Duty." There he impersonates a robot and meets Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman), a shrill and glitchy character—she suffers from visual static—who has been evicted from her own game of "Sugar Rush." 
 
 Enlarge Image Close Disney Wreck-It Ralph and Vanellope von Schweetz 
 
 The film was directed by Rich Moore, in his feature debut, and written by Jennifer Lee and Phil Johnston. Its narrative core concerns the fraught friendship of Ralph and Vanellope, which in turn poses the question of whether a bad guy can really transform himself into a good guy. (Spoiler alert: Yes, he can.) But character gets trampled as the action goes turbo, Vanellope's voice grows ever more shrill and we find ourselves trapped, along with Ralph, in a Sugar Rush surround of oppressively pretty colors and numbingly repetitive races and chases. A further question posed by "Wreck-It Ralph" is whether brilliant animation alone can sustain a film that comes up short in dramatic development. (Spoiler alert: No, it can't.) 
 
 Watch a clip from the film "This Must Be the Place." Cheyenne (Sean Penn), a retired rock star, returns to New York to find the man responsible for a humiliation suffered by his recently deceased father during WWII. (Photo & Video: Weinstein Co.) 
 
 'This Must Be the Place' 
 
 Sean Penn stars as Cheyenne, a burned-out American rock star living in Dublin and trapped in a second, passive childhood, plus full Goth regalia. At several points Cheyenne says "Something's not quite right here: I don't know exactly what it is, but something…." Before I get to what that something might be, let me touch on several relatively right things about this remarkably lifeless film, which Paolo Sorrentino directed from a script he wrote with Umberto Contarello. 
 
 Mr. Penn's performance, depressed by the nature of his sad-clown character, is self-regarding in ways that are simultaneously dismaying and fascinating. The music, by David Byrne and Will Oldham, is exceptionally varied and characteristically rich. The cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi, finds one striking vista after another when Cheyenne leaves Dublin and criss-crosses the U.S. 
 
 Enlarge Image Close The Weinstein Company Sean Penn and Frances McDormand 
 
 What's wrong here, ludicrously and groanworthily wrong, is the reason for Cheyenne's criss-crossings. He is, it develops, on a hunt for the Nazi war criminal who did some unspecified something to his late father during the Holocaust. As juxtapositions go, regressed Goth rock star and Holocaust could hardly be more bizarre, and bizarre can be good when it's done deftly. In this case, however, it's done ponderously and sententiously. The movie's title is taken from the classic Talking Heads song, which is subtitled "Naive Melody." Cheyenne is a faux naif in a faux tone poem. 
 
 DVD Focus 
 
 'Unstoppable' 
 
 'Unstoppable' (2010) 
 
 Denzel Washington at his most irresistible, in an action thriller, by the late Tony Scott, that gives new meaning to the notion of a one-track mind. The premise is simple to the point of primal—a runaway freight train hurtling through Pennsylvania with a load of lethal chemicals and no one in the locomotive. On the same track, heading toward it, is another freight train pulled by a locomotive with the movie's co-stars at the controls: Mr. Washington is the veteran engineer, and Chris Pine is the rookie conductor. Rosario Dawson is Connie, a yardmaster who knows her stuff. 
 
 Enlarge Image Close Picturehouse/Everett Collection Seth Gordon's documentary 'The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters' is about the quest for the world's highest score in Donkey Kong. 
 
 'The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters' (2007) 
 
 Seth Gordon's documentary sees the craziness of it all—the quest for the world's highest Donkey Kong score; the beeps and boops emanating from the big, retro boxes; the pervasiveness of pinnacle-and-fame disease that prompts outwardly sane people to seek enshrinement in the Guinness Book of World Records. Yet Mr. Gordon also understands the roiling passions that underlie the virtuosity, and he's got a great eye for spotting real-life heroes—or antiheroes, as the case may be. "The King of Kong" is blessed with one of each, so feed this DVD to your player and press Play. 
 
 'Sweet and Lowdown' 
 
 'Sweet and Lowdown' (1999) 
 
 Sean Penn is Emmet Ray, a fictional 1930s jazz musician in Woody Allen's mock documentary, which uses real jazz critics as earnest commentators. Emmet is as lowdown as a man can get. Vain, selfish, fatuous and casually cruel, he is the personification of insensitivity; his idea of good clean fun is shooting rats in garbage dumps. Give him a guitar, though, and he's an angel, channeling the music of the spheres. The movie represents Woody in a minor mode, but it's marvelous all the same. Samantha Morton is the childlike Hattie, a mute waif with a clouded mind. 
 
 — Email Joe at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com and follow him on Twitter: @JoeMorgenstern. ||||| Director Robert Zemeckis gives good plane crash. He did it well in the early frames of Castaway, and the one here is even better. A short commercial flight, in heavy rain, from Orlando to Atlanta. Sudden mechanical breakdown, the uncontrolled dive, one engine fails, a calculated roll to stall the plunge, second engine fails, the eerie silence of a plane shorn of power, then the deadly quiet glide to a patch of open field. Crash. However, of the 102 souls on board, only 6 died, and the reason is clear. Skilled, decisive, with ice-water in his veins, the pilot was indisputably heroic. But this too is indisputable. Those same veins contained high levels of alcohol and traces of cocaine: The hero was also legally intoxicated. 
 
 Screen grab from online trailer for "Flight" Movies Flight: The official trailer 
 
 But we already knew that, since the opening scene, just as good, coolly reveals “Whip” Whitaker’s morning ritual. Wake up groggily light a cigarette, drain the dregs from last night’s beerfest, snort a revivifying line, shower and don the uniform and aviator glasses and report for duty. Since the addled fly boy in question is Denzel Washington, looking rather pot-bellied and doughy for the occasion, this first sequence plus the subsequent crash have us riveted and hoping for more of the same, for an uninterrupted journey towards a great movie. Alas, this isn’t a direct Flight. 
 
 Instead, there’s an extended stopover when the script, tearing off on various tangents begins to resemble a room-full of errant luggage. Some of the tangents are interesting – like the gathering of officialdom in the aftermath of the tragedy. Reps from the National Transportation Safety Board, from the pilots’ union and from the airline company convene to pursue both their separate and common interests. All seem keen to mitigate the legal liability, thereby placing some of the blame on God and the rest on that real mechanical failure. As for Whip’s really damning toxicology report, the union’s lawyer (Don Cheadle) sets out to “kill” it on a technicality. Unfortunately, when he succeeds, the picture goes into its own tailspin. 
 
 That’s because the focus shifts from an intriguing aeronautical drama to a bland psychodrama, as boozy Whip refuses to admit he’s an alcoholic – albeit a remarkably functioning alcoholic, which raises another problem. Torn between lionizing and villainizing its star attraction, the screenplay keeps emphasizing Washington’s in-flight heroics, and thereby blunders into a case of truly impaired judgment: the tacit yet blaring assumption that, buoyed by an emergency’s adrenalin, a great pilot sober is still a great pilot drunk. Now that’s a sobering thought indeed, which, the next time I’m sandwiched into an aisle seat staring past the drinks cart at the locked cockpit, I dearly hope to have forgotten. 
 
 Anyway, from there, the baggage marked Days of Wine and Poses gets unpacked, leaving Washington to strike whatever pose is demanded by the story’s increasingly convoluted twists. He’s a good fella, he’s a bad fella, pulled off the wagon by his old friend Harling the flamboyant enabler (John Goodman chewing the scenery), then urged back on by his new friend Nicole the reformed junkie (Kelly Reilly swallowing a Georgian accent). So, oscillating to and fro, Whip stumbles towards the climax of the big NTSB hearing, where the suspense is meant to build around this puzzler: Will our flawed hero be falsely exonerated or truly redeemed? 
 
 In the hands of a less sentimental director than Zemeckis, that might be a compelling quandary; but here, for us no less than Whip, it feels like being stuck between a rock and a soft place. That makes his choice easy and our verdict easier. This movie is captivating until it gets uplifting – Flight soars when it crashes and crashes when it soars.
– The new release Flight, starring Denzel Washington as drug- and alcohol-addicted pilot, gets a solid 78% on Rotten Tomatoes. Most critics seem to think the acting and directing are superb, but at some point, the movie takes a bit of a nosedive: Flight starts out with a thrilling plane crash, and after that "takes a surprising turn into a drama of addiction and moral exploration," writes Joe Morgenstern at the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, the latter parts feel "shopworn"and "instead of hurtling to a climax, the story moves in fits and starts, loses momentum." Rick Groen at the Globe and Mail praises director Robert Zemeckis' ability to deliver a good crash scene, but thinks his sentimentality hurts the movie. "This movie is captivating until it gets uplifting—Flight soars when it crashes and crashes when it soars," he writes. Good music, strong supporting actors, and great special effects are Flight's strong suits, but the "downward addiction and denial spiral" is all too familiar, writes Tom Long for the Detroit News. "It's that movie, done well, but done again." Peter Travers, writing for Rolling Stone, disagrees. He says those complaining are "missing the point of an exceptional entertainment that Zemeckis shades into something quietly devastating—not an addiction drama, but the deeper spectacle of a man facing the truth about himself."