Counselor – 5

I felt I was wallowing in a Vogue feature, every shot was oh-so-glamorous – and just as artificial. Nothing in the story computed, however. The “Counselor” was a cipher: there was no clue why Penelope Cruz loved him, why Javier Bardem or Brad Pitt befriended him, what he was doing in the movie or where he got the money to live so lavishly (his only visible client was a Latino woman for whom he was court-appointed, another unlikely event). The nihilistic tone of the movie, contributed by screenwriter Cormac McCarthy, made the whole thing slightly depressing without clearing up any of the mystery. The biggest mystery is why there would be all this fuss over a mere $20 million.