Cormac McCarthy wrote The Counselor as a straight-up screenplay and teamed up with director Ridley Scott, which makes it hard to figure out why The Counselor doesn't work nearly as well as it should: McCarthy offers a reliable serving of dour philosophy and new and exciting ways to kill people, and Scott reigns in the aloof goofiness that plagued Prometheus. The Counselor's plot is vague but propulsive; the performances, aside from a few iffy moments from Michael Fassbender and a whole lot of iffy moments from Cameron Diaz, are solid; the visuals, as one would expect from any Scott production, are very pretty. But by the time it ends, The Counselor feels like a series of sequences that never make a coherent movie. by Erik Henriksen