Theatrical Archives - Page 22 of 66

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

May 22, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Time Travel

***½/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James McAvoy
screenplay by Simon Kinberg
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw The seventh X-Men film including the two Wolverine flicks, Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past (hereafter X7) is a sterling return to form for Singer, exiled after X2 for choosing to helm the spectacularly-underestimated Superman Returns. He brings with him, as he brought to the Superman mythology, a complete empathy with the material. He understands that the X-Men property–comic-book mutants battling human bureaucrats aiming to outlaw them as alien threats–is, just like the Superman property, at its heart about the pain and complexity of being born different. They're assimilation melodramas that present their heroes with the seductive choice to pass as "normals" when possible, to seek vengeance against bigotry as it presents itself, or to rise above it to achieve a sense of self and carve out a corner of the world for themselves.

Godzilla (2014)

May 14, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston
screenplay by Max Borenstein
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw Gareth Edwards's Godzilla, the 32^nd Godzilla film just including the Toho series and the three previous American contributions, manages somehow to walk the line between nostalgia for the guy-in-a-suit heroism of the earlier installments and the demands and expectations of the modern CGI wonderland. It has Japanese actor Ken Watanabe be the mournful, grave centre of the piece, allowed at one point to utter "Gojira" (later, on a radar, we see it spelled out in obeisance to the movie's origins) and given the film's most crowd-pleasing line, right before shit gets real in San Francisco. It cares deeply about the monster's place in Japanese culture as a simultaneous reminder of what happened to the country during the war, its humiliation afterwards, and its ambiguous place in the world as Japan reconstructed its image. What confused me most when I watched the Toho flicks on Saturday afternoons on a 9" b&w television was that Godzilla seemed heroic–every bit as nuanced, as conflicted, as ronin as a Mifune samurai; a hero who would return, like Arthur did for England, when the nation needed him. The Godzilla legend is a fable of reconstruction and self-sufficiency–a Leda and the Swan story, where power is drawn from the very source of victimization. He's a complex national symbol, perhaps the definitive cross-cultural Japanese signifier, and the movies that get that (my favorite is Destroy All Monsters, with its dabbling in female hive minds) are brilliant bits of sociology and history. Edwards's Godzilla gets it.

God’s Pocket (2014)

May 13, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Richard Jenkins, Christina Hendricks, John Turturro
screenplay by John Slattery & Alex Metcalf, based on the novel by Pete Dexter
directed by John Slattery

by Walter Chaw A few things become clear as John Slattery’s God’s Pocket unspools unsteadily in the titular, fictional Philadelphia slum: that it’s perhaps as difficult to adapt Pete Dexter as it is Ray Bradbury, for many surprisingly similar reasons (like him, Dexter’s power is in the rhythm and economy of his prose and the poetry of his characters’ interior lives); that Philip Seymour Hoffman is irreplaceable and doomed to be remembered for too rarely finding roles worthy of him; and that young Caleb Landry Jones is consistently an astonishment and someone to follow. Indeed, the cast is mostly above reproach; the problems are all in the scripting and directorial decisions by first-timer Slattery that betray a certain indecisiveness in pruning repetitive sequences. It’s not a matter of too much patience, but of too little interpretation. As is, it lands somewhere between the voices of Armistead Maupin and Michael Chabon, neither of whom are nearly as dangerous as Dexter, causing one to wonder if God’s Pocket wants to be widely loved rather than admired at arm’s length. It shouldn’t be cuddly or adorable (and it isn’t)–but it tries. What’s left is another exceptional Hoffman turn wrapped in layers of undifferentiated bland. Maybe it seems that way so often because Hoffman was so difficult to match.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

April 30, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Sally Field
screenplay by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci & Jeff Pinkner
directed by Marc Webb

by Walter Chaw A notable improvement in almost every way on Marc Webb’s first film in this reboot series, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (hereafter Spidey 2) sports the same weaknesses, the same bloat, the same catering to the summer cult of boom-boom, but it ramps up the intelligence and a certain comfort with darkness that pays off in a pair of genuinely gratifying character resolutions. Despite what the trailers would spoil, it really only has one antagonist, Jamie Foxx’s Electro–well, him, and our hero’s (Andrew Garfield) struggles with trust in his relationships, whether they be with his Aunt May (Sally Field) or girlfriend Gwen (Emma Stone) or best friend Harry (Dane DeHaan) or lost father Richard (Campbell Scott). It’s a film about class struggle, as May picks up double-shifts and moonlights in nursing school to provide tuition for her adopted boy (giving Sally Field the chance to resurrect her blue-collar Norma Rae), while shut-in Max (Foxx), electrical engineer at monolithic Oscorp and low man on the corporate totem pole, comes clear, fascinatingly, as a riff on the unnamed protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Transcendence (2014)

April 17, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jack Paglen
directed by Wally Pfister

by Angelo Muredda If his name wasn’t already plastered over the ads for the nerd bona fides the studio hopes it will signal, you’d still know that Transcendence was the work of Wally Pfister from an inimitably-portentous opening shot featuring the long, steady fall of a raindrop: as meaningless a totem as Inception‘s ever-spinning (or is it wobbling?) top. Having lensed all but one of Christopher Nolan’s joyless epics, including that “Twilight Zone” episode told with Miltonic gravitas, Pfister has at last graduated to making his own Nolan film about serious men making serious moral choices in the name of serious ideas–here, sending the first human consciousness up into the cloud to fuse with an artificially-intelligent program, the better to meddle in the affairs of mortals. The Pfister-Nolan collaboration was a fruitful one, the equivalent of a hammer repeatedly meeting its companion gong, but watching the alternately soapy and chilly Transcendence, one can’t help but feel the cinematographer-turned-director would have been better served by a more conspicuous departure, a project that better indulged his more melodramatic instincts.

Hateship Loveship (2014)

April 17, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Kristen Wiig, Guy Pearce, Hailee Steinfeld, Nick Nolte
screenplay by Mark Poirier, based on the short story by Alice Munro
directed by Liza Johnson

by Walter Chaw A knuckle-biting bounty of casting riches, Liza Johnson’s twee, somewhat over-directed, generally overdone Hateship Loveship features dozens of lovely actorly moments that add up to not a whole lot, although the movie tries. Boy, does it try. In its put-on listlessness, it wants to belong to the Matthew Porterfield/Nathan Silver school of contemplative indie flicks, but it’s not quiet enough nor patient enough in withholding its epiphanies and emotional rises and falls. It tends to narrate; it wants to tie up loose ends; and it’s not comfortable with entropy as much as it wants to be, what with its central character odd, awkward caregiver Johanna (Kristin Wiig) and its central setting a broken-down hotel, uninhabited but burdened with poor junkie Ken’s (Guy Pearce) dreams of restoration. It’s a big, clumsy metaphor for Ken trying to rebuild his life after killing his wife, McCauley’s (Nick Nolte) daughter and Sabitha’s (Hailee Steinfeld–thank God she’s getting work) mom, in a tragic speedboat accident. It all kind of sounds like a Wes Anderson sub-story. Anyway, Sabitha and her queen bitch bestie Edith (Sami Gayle) pen fake love letters from Ken to erstwhile nanny Johanna, leading to not the painful story we want, but a different painful story involving why you shouldn’t sway your camera back and forth when shooting dialogue exchanges and how poignant zooms don’t substitute for genuine feeling.

Ernest & Celestine (2012) + Jodorowsky’s Dune (2014)

April 10, 20142012, 2014, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Family, France, Luxembourg, Theatrical

Ernest et Célestine
**½/****
screenplay by Daniel Pennac, based on books by Gabrielle Vincent
directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner

JODOROWSKY’S DUNE
**½/****
directed by Frank Pavich

by Walter Chaw Broad, earnest, unassuming animation from France, Ernest & Celestine is the tale of a little girl mouse, Celestine (voice of Pauline Brunner), and gruff bear Ernest (Lambert Wilson), who overcome their cultural prejudices to become fast friends. Celestine is outcast because she’d like to be an artist instead of a dentist; Ernest is outcast because he’s a busker struggling to eke out a subsistence living. Over a series of misadventures, the two end up doing the Badlands in Ernest’s ramshackle hideaway, awaiting their fate and trying to enjoy their borrowed time. It’s all leading to a grim ending, but it’s not that kind of movie.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

April 3, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw A fine companion piece to last summer’s The Lone Ranger, with another hero whose essential goodness has become anachronistic in a world defined by its ugliness and venality, the Russo Brothers’ Captain America: The Winter Soldier (hereafter Cap 2), for all its boom-boom, is surprisingly thoughtful–and surprisingly doom-laden. It’s dark as hell. Gone are the pulp machinations of Joe Johnston–this one is more The Empire Strikes Back than The Rocketeer, where the victories are Pyrrhic and the bad guys are smarter and better equipped. By the end, this most optimistic of superheroes resolves to rescue a friend while his closest comrade-in-arms advises him to look for love again. They’re small goals, the kind of goals that mere mortals happen to share with this demigod. As such, they provide the film with an unexpected payload of pathos and nostalgia for lost selves that used to believe the world would be better if only we had a friend upon which we could always depend and love that would remain evergreen. Cap 2 is about our better natures, and it’s about the realization as you grow older that you may have allowed your better nature to be subsumed by misdirected senses of duty. It’s about what it means to compromise your values on the altar of “maturity” and “sophistication”–even “progress” and “modernity.” And when it works best, it’s about what it means when you don’t.

Noah (2014)

March 27, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins
screenplay by Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw Unapologetic, curious, atavistic in its single-mindedness and simplicity, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is more impactful in the rearview than in the moment. It’s got a hell of a wake. The film is beautiful to look at, it almost goes without saying–as grand and ambitious as its ideas, with one sequence depicting what appears to be the case for intelligent design. It’s truly audacious. In many ways the movie The Fountain wanted to be in terms of scale (and featuring another Clint Mansell score that sounds every bit like a continuation of themes), Noah is a deeply insane interpretation of one of the Bible’s briefest (essentially Genesis 5:32-10:1), most contentious, most instantly-relatable and hence most-beloved of all Old Testament stories. I can only speculate what the Christian response will be (somewhere between mine and Glenn Beck’s assignation of it as the “Babylonian Chainsaw Massacre” is my guess), but for an atheist who counts many strong Christians among his friends, this interpretation is full of the menace and wonder that scripture must hold for the devout. It’s a stirring creation mythology in that it makes no bones about the interference in the affairs of men by a vengeful God. Likewise, it makes no apologies for the atrocities it represents in its visions of suffering and sin. (I can only imagine what Aronofsky’s Sodom would look like.) Noah even finds time for a dialogue about religious fundamentalism and what happens when absolute faith becomes rationale for atrocity. It’s a story about the annihilation of 99.9% of human life on the planet that’s ultimately about the value of compassion, and it’s a critical read of divine texts that skew in that direction. After a series of films attempting to explain the ways of the divine to the mundane, here’s hoping for an Aronofsky adaptation at last of “Paradise Lost”: a most comfortable marriage of material and artist.

Nymph()maniac (2013)

March 21, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical

Nymph()maniac: Vol. I
Nymph()maniac: Vol. II
***½/****
starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Angelo Muredda Partway through the second volume of Lars von Trier’s surprisingly nimble Nymph()maniac, wounded storyteller Joe (three-time Trier MVP Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells her rapt listener Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) about the time she went to a support group for her sex addiction. When the group’s straight-edge policy proved more than she could bear, Joe bowed out, but not before quipping that her fellow sufferers are nothing but “society’s morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the earth so that the bourgeoisie won’t feel sick.” At last, one thinks, von Trier has found his ideal authorial surrogate in Gainsbourg, whose weird Brechtian delivery is halfway between earnest declaration and stiff high-school rendition of The Crucible. Von Trier has been a professional troll, masking his underlying seriousness with outré gestures, since long before he started sporting T-shirts emblazoned with “PERSONA NON GRATA,” in tribute to Cannes’ goofy decision to brand him uncouth for joking that his Wagner fixation owed to a latent penchant for Nazism. (All joshing aside, it obviously stung him.) But he’s never shown himself to be as sophisticated at joking through tears (or crying through nasty punchlines) as he is in Nymph()maniac. Clocking in at over four hours in two rich parts, at least in the edited version debuting this weekend at Toronto’s Lightbox, it’s a landmark of seriocomic storytelling that is simultaneously a satire of biographical tall-tales, a depressive’s bildungsroman, and an alternately tender and lacerating self-portrait, defending all the Joes and Larses of the world for their obscenity without sparing them the lash.

Le Week-End (2013)

March 20, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Jim Broadbent, Lindsay Duncan, Jeff Goldblum, Olly Alexander
screenplay by Hanif Kureishi
directed by Roger Michell

by Walter Chaw Nick (Jim Broadbent) has been fired from his professorship, and, not to celebrate but maybe to memorialize it, he and wife Meg (Lindsay Duncan) take a romantic trip to the City of Light. Well, a trip, anyway. After two awful films (Morning Glory and Hyde Park on the Hudson), Roger Michell returns to form (and to screenwriter/playwright Hanif Kureishi) with this bitter little pill, Le Week-End, whose title, read the way I think it was intended to be read, just drips with acerbic disdain. It reminds me of an exchange about midway through where a desperate Nick tells Meg that he loves her and Meg hisses, in a way that only a British actress at the absolute peak of her powers could hiss, “Love… DIES.” Yet Meg doesn’t hate Nick and Nick, for his part, isn’t quite the milquetoast he presents himself as in moments like these, when he falls on the street and injures his knee to the ringing, castrating laughter of his mate, or when he infers that Meg wants to leave him and starts to whimper like a child. Also at about the halfway mark, the couple encounters an old colleague of Nick’s, Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), who promptly invites them to a dinner party in honour of Morgan’s latest literary success (“It could happen to anybody,” he says; “It didn’t happen to me,” Nick responds), and suddenly Michell and Kureishi have the meat of professional and personal jealousy to worry off the bone, too.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

March 13, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Edward Norton, Tony Revolori
written and directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw I’d be hard-pressed to think of many sequences in the movies better than the two minutes from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums where Richie gets picked up at the Green Line Bus by his adopted sister Margot following a lengthy absence. It’s beautifully composed, emotionally weighted, and punctuated with the best use of Nico in a sentence, ever. There’s a rub there–my favourite Wes Anderson films are the ones that use music in this way; I ally him in my mind with artists like Sofia Coppola and, sure, Quentin Tarantino. I think the full potential of film is only really reached when all the elements that go into a movie–the seven arts, as it were–are used in concert. Wes Anderson, as he utilizes fewer and fewer pop songs in his films (his latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is his first without any), is losing emotional complexity as his hermetically-sealed, obsessive-compulsive dreamscapes become increasingly complex. Consider the moment from Django Unchained where our heroes ride into act two to Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name.” It’s iconic, transformative; the scene has a quarter of its power without the agency of that song. Tarantino truly gets it. When Anderson opens The Darjeeling Limited with The Kinks‘ “This Time Tomorrow,” letting the scene play in slow-motion as Adrien Brody’s character tries to outrun the ghost of his father, wow. I remember hearing about the introductory tracking shot of the research vessel in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, how Anderson was possibly planning on scoring it with a Radiohead song (“How to Disappear Completely,” if memory serves) and how that potential marriage gave me a shiver of anticipation. The farther Anderson falls into his navel, the clearer it is that he no longer gets what he used to get, swallowed whole by the grey beast solipsism.

RoboCop (2014)

February 11, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Joshua Zetumer, based on the screenplay by Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner
directed by José Padilha

by Walter Chaw There’s a scene at the end of José Padilha’s RoboCop reboot where nearly-widowed Clara Murphy (Abbie Cornish), nervous about being reunited with her nearly-murdered husband, Det. Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), takes care to put on makeup and something nice. (For me, Cornish trying to get prettier is like a tree trying to get tree-ier.) Padilha lingering here tells me a lot about both him and a film that doesn’t touch the Verhoeven original, of course (few movies could, just in terms of sheer force of personality), but does care about developing its relationships, if not necessarily its characters. It reminded me of the kind of helpless love I feel when my wife tries to dress it up for me–I mean, honey, you don’t have to do that. It’s human, in other words, and if the franchise–a subgenre of machine/man existentialism–is about anything, it’s about the difference between the little moments that make us human and all the other ones that align us more closely with machines. You could go deeper and describe it as an Apollonian/Dionysian thing–a mind/body dichotomy, the marriage of Heaven and Hell and on and on; or you could simply look at RoboCop as a pretty good action flick with lots of PG-13 fatalities that features more than its share of good actors in supporting roles as familiar action-movie staples. It’s clear after the halfway point that that’s what it’s really aspiring to be. Either way, it manages a few times to make a case for this mythos to be, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, one of those things each generation should consider adapting to their particular dysfunctions. It’s no satirical masterpiece, no Grand Guignol exercise, but as slight entertainment, there’s some meat on the bone.

The Monuments Men (2014)

February 6, 20142014, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, War

*½/****
starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett
screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov, based on the book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter
directed by George Clooney

by Angelo Muredda There have been far worse prestige films than George Clooney’s delayed Oscar season also-ran The Monuments Men, but there’s rarely been a more misguided one. Hinging on a conceit that even the filmmaker appears to realize is weak sauce and based on a true story that’s probably worth its weight in magazine articles that really make you think, the film follows the exploits of a team of ragtag art dealers and curators turned Allied troops, sent into Europe in the closing days of WWII to save the Western world’s finest paintings, sculptures, and, yes, monuments, before Hitler could destroy them. It’s perhaps a mild credit to Clooney the humanitarian that the overwhelming gaucheness of the premise–that European art is the thing most worth preserving amidst a war that saw the systematic genocide of 6 million Jews–rates not just a mention but a guilty structural response, too, in the form of a framing story that sees Clooney the actor, as team leader Stokes, lecturing his overseers on the ambiguous value of the mission. It’s also to his shame as a screenwriter (alongside usual partner Grant Heslov) that the response is so ill-considered–the same canned “Art is all of us” spiel politicians who couldn’t give a damn about art give in the promotional material for government-funded cultural events.

Ms. 45 (1981)

January 17, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Revenge, Theatrical

Ms. .45
***½/****
starring Zoë Tamerlis, Bogey, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto
screenplay N. G. St. John
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I first saw Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 the way I suspect most men my age saw it: furtively, in my bedroom, on VHS. It had about it that aura of skeeviness I spent a good portion of my time hunting for at the local video store. My nose for such things had been rewarded with likes of I Spit on Your Grave and The Last House on the Left, films that never failed to be prurient in their rape sequences, no matter their nods to subsequently avenging our fair, fairly defiled, maidens. What Ferrara presents with this, arguably his second-most notorious film (The Addiction is unbelievable, and still only available on VHS), is a rape-revenge tale that does nothing to de-feminize its heroine–rather correctly, powerfully, identifying that the loci of a woman’s power is indeed her sexuality, even as that sexuality draws the objectifying, dehumanizing gaze. It’s why, after all, so many fertility goddesses are also destroyers, isn’t it? There’s a moment in the third Terminator where the female Terminator, played by the already-intimidating Kristanna Loken, makes a decision to enlarge her breasts prior to confronting a male victim. If only the rest of that film were so wise.

Stranger by the Lake (2013)

January 17, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

L’inconnu du lac
***½/****
starring Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou, Patrick d’Assumçao, Jérôme Chappatte
written and directed by Alain Guiraudie

by Angelo Muredda Late in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, a detective sent to investigate the murder of a young man at a nude male beach designated as a gay cruising spot breaks from his procedural script to unload his exasperation on a potential suspect. “You guys have a strange way of loving each other sometimes,” the investigator (Jérôme Chappatte) points out when it seems that no one can provide him with so much as the first names of their recent conquests, much less recall the moment the handsome guy with the ballcap vanished without a trace, save for his abandoned beach towel. His assessment cuts two ways in a film that, before veering into the territory of gothic sex thrillers with uncommon ease, takes a wry anthropological approach to good sex and bad love in a space designed to indulge both in their most rarefied forms. On the one hand, the detective is an anticipatory mouthpiece for the conservative critics who would rain down on the movie he’s in, eager perhaps to brand this tribe he’s wandered into as perverse, borderline sociopathic death-seekers with no regard for their fellow neighbours. Yet his curiosity and suspension of judgment might also mark him as Guiraudie’s ideal audience: a serene observer held in thrall to the strange lengths people will go to satisfy their desires.

Lone Survivor (2013)

January 7, 20142013, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, War

***/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Eric Bana
screenplay by Peter Berg, based on the book by Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw Peter Berg is a great action director. He does it with verve, a good sense of space (which is increasingly rare these days), and a sense of both weight and humour. He has excellent timing, as well as an understanding of what’s meaningful visual information in there among the dross of motion and impact. Moreover, he seems obsessed with working through issues surrounding what it means to be a man–how, too often, it means your social interactions are limited to violence, threats to your sexuality, and hazing rituals dangerous and bestial. I’m a huge fan of his debut feature, Very Bad Things; visually, I think it’s wrong to underestimate how influential is his romantic rack-focus gimmick from Friday Night Lights. I love Berg’s Hancock, the movie that Man of Steel aspired to be (and if we’re talking secondary influences, Zack Snyder owes much of his cinematic vocabulary to Berg). I love The Rundown, and while Battleship is inarguably a misfire, it’s also less of a misfire than it could have been. With Lone Survivor, based on the memoir of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, the titular lone survivor of a botched four-man special forces mission in Afghanistan, Berg’s examinations of the masculine take their logical turn from bachelor parties to football to superheroes to military action. And for long moments, Lone Survivor is fantastic.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

December 24, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Jean Dujardin
screenplay by Terence Winter, based on the book by Jordan Belfort
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Angelo Muredda “For us, to live any other way was nuts,” Ray Liotta’s schnook turned gangster Henry Hill explains early on in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. With that, spoken over a montage of permed Italian men in tailored suits gorging themselves at an upscale restaurant, Hill at once launched a wave of lesser, faux-conflicted pictures about the swanky perks and ethical compromises of organized crime, and raised the fundamental moral question of Scorsese’s latest, The Wolf of Wall Street. An unashamedly indulgent, ribald, and formally troubled biopic of Jordan Belfort, this unofficial Goodfellas follow-up likewise revolves around the kind of work that makes living like a pig in shit possible. His kinship to Hill aside, Belfort has had an unusually clear-sailing trajectory to garner the interest of a filmmaker who tends to be drawn to Catholic tales of excess followed by redemptive suffering. Belfort is still a born stockbroker and swindler, despite his working-class origins and federal inquiries and stints in rehab; the fact that he debuted on Wall Street the day of the crash and remains in demand as a guru well after the financial crisis of 2008 seems to give Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter pause, as well the astonishing survival rate of cockroaches should. What better way to make a film about such a man, Scorsese and Winter appear to have concluded, than to structure his story as a Roman orgy?

American Hustle (2013)

December 19, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence
screenplay by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell
directed by David O. Russell

by Angelo Muredda “The world is extremely grey,” a con artist intones in American Hustle, which, for all its ineffectual stabs at ambivalence, is a curiously prescriptive heist movie, the kind that constantly updates its ledger about who deserves what in the end, in case someone should go unrewarded. It’s hard to say when David O. Russell–a formerly prickly sort so effectively housebroken in recent years that he’s now on the fast track to Academy Award nominations four through five–became so square as to depend on this sort of moral calculus for his dramatic fulfillment: Its equally big-picture pronouncements aside, I ♥ Huckabees seems an odd way station between the redemptive U2-scored montage that closes Three Kings and the brotherly hug of The Fighter, as well as a far more pugilistic film than the one about boxing. Whatever the genesis of his newfound softness (which Russell has insisted is the mark of his maturity as an artist), it’s never been as out of synch with either his manic sensibility or his aesthetic of distended, freewheeling set-pieces and outsized actorly emoting as it is here.

Her (2013)

December 18, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johansson
written and directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw Two moments early on in Spike Jonze’s Her. The first when our hero, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), initiates his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and is asked to characterize his relationship with his mother; the second when, in flashback, Theodore and his ex, Catherine (Rooney Mara), pretend to choke each other. They’re waypoints Jonze establishes for his piece: in one direction, there’s Blade Runner and its questions of proximate humanity; in the other, there’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and its mad love. Jonze establishes, too, that this will be a work of science-fiction owing its parentage to the best sources, that its premise will be fantastic but grounded in characters and their place in the world. Of all the compliments I can think to pay this film, the best is that Her is at least the equal of its waypoints. More, when its solution recalls the metaphysical coda to the great The Incredible Shrinking Man, it’s the equal of that as well.