Clint Eastwood’s portrait of Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle may as well be titled Call of Duty: American Sniper. Not to further highlight Kyle’s unambiguous dedication to his missions in the Iraq War – which isn’t left in doubt here, but because the repetitive pattern of deployment-battle-sniping plays out like a videogame, eventually leading to a couple of big bosses that need to be taken out. Perfunctory stretches back stateside with his wife and growing family are mere cutscenes, highlighting commonplace laments of the military household before shipping out for another tour. It’s a cycle that never finds discerning commentary or meaningful human interest.
Possibly one of the most harrowing life experiences is having to face is the fear of being laid off. There is a dark cloud that hovers over you as you are left to ponder just what will happen and just what exactly the future has in store. There are many reasons an owner might lay off staff. Business is bad. Performance issues. Seasonal work has dried up. Keeping the employee would prevent others from receiving annual bonuses. (Wait, what?) But that is just the situation that the Dardenne brothers look at in their latest film, Two Days, One Night.
The true life story of Louie Zamperini is remarkable. The movie version is efficient and satisfactory. Unbroken respects the man it’s based on and communicates his tale in a way that resonates on a surface level. The film is well-scripted, directed, and acted, but it can’t shake the biopic and POW genre familiarities. Painting in broad strokes, director Angelina Jolie deserves credit for not relying on heaping helpings of sentimentality to force a response, though there’s a detachment that makes the events feel more like a checklist than a harrowing journey.
In a world of three-act plots and character arcs, Isao Takahata's The Tale of Princess Kaguya reminds us that stories don't have to be neat to be accessible. Studio Ghibli's final film (for the foreseeable future) is a retelling of a Japanese folktale with the intimacy of a bedtime story and the breadth of an epic. It is illustrated with the utmost care – with creative, balanced compositions eclipsing the need for broad illustrative strokes. Takahata's latest masterwork doesn't explain itself, nor is it interested in doing so; its tangents make for a rich tapestry of plaintive beauty and immeasurable wisdom, and what more could we ask for?
I am such a fan of Mike Leigh’s work that it pains me to give his latest offering, Mr. Turner, a mere 6.5/10 rating. On the surface, the subject matter is out of Leigh’s wheelhouse, as it does not focus on middle- to lower-class Brits from the last 60 years. Instead, it follows in the footsteps of his exploration of operatic masters Gilbert and Sullivan in Topsy-Turvy and explores a famous painter living and working in the 19th century. That painter is J.M.W. Turner, a fascinating character about whom a great movie could have been made; I just wish it had been better.
It can be difficult for a remake to justify its existence, and the 2014 version of Annie offers only sketchy modernization to differentiate itself from the 1982 film and 1977 Broadway musical. Changing the name of Daddy Warbucks, turning the character into a cell phone mogul, and integrating social media isn’t nearly enough to avoid a stale sense of familiarity. The superficial contemporary spins from director Will Gluck and his co-writer Aline Brosh McKenna are uninspired in their concept and flat in their execution. It also doesn’t help that the cast (of a musical) is populated with non-singers and non-dancers.
I’m going to have to address this. I didn’t like Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit Trilogy. There, I said it. I didn’t like it. I hold The Lord of the Rings Trilogy in high regard and consider it the best trilogy I’ve ever witnessed. (While I love the original Star Wars trilogy, I had many issues with Return of the Jedi). I have nothing bad to say about any chapter in Jackson’s original trilogy. While this review is for the latest, and hopefully last, entry in the Middle Earth saga, my issues with the film cannot be addressed without mentioning from whence the source of my displeasure comes.
Paul Thomas Anderson is one of American cinema’s youngest auteurs. He has a distinctive voice, yet each picture is diverse. With Inherent Vice, he creates an often absurdist comedy with plenty of dramatic events to spur the movie along.
I have had great difficulty reviewing this film because I so enjoyed earlier Anderson films like Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood. But this film, as with his previous effort, The Master, left me shaking my head. Halfway through this film, I found myself referring to it as “Incoherent Vice” because there were too many storylines, none of which seemed to properly connect to one another. It is a fine effort on Anderson’s part and there are many of the usual Anderson touches present, but it did not connect with me the way his earlier films had.
If the world didn't already have enough low-angle close-ups of Christian Bale's thousand-yard stare, rejoice! Sir Ridley Scott's latest picture gives us another 154 minutes of them. Bale's steely, expressionless acting turns out to be a perfect match with Scott's steely, expressionless direction. Scott seems almost helpless to the tedium endemic to the plots of sword-and-sandal epics, a category whose resurgence Scott helped birth with Gladiator and whose shortcomings are epitomized by Exodus: Gods and Kings.
Chris Rock’s status as one of the best stand-ups of his generation, perhaps ever, isn’t in question. Thus far, however, his winning mixture of insightful social commentary and incising wit hasn’t translated to film. His previous directorial efforts (Head of State, I Think I Love My Wife) largely sacrificed the comedian’s observations for more standard slants, while his slumming with Adam Sandler in the Grown Ups movies is probably fun for them but definitely not for us. The quasi-autobiographical Top Five is the closest Rock has come yet to capturing his on-stage magic, and though the film is often funny, it’s also disorganized and broad in its judgments.
Atom Egoyan is trapped in a malaise that mirrors his usually weary protagonists. 20 years ago, the filmmaker reached the apex of his brand of analytical drama with The Sweet Hereafter, successfully mixing sober tragedy and dysfunction with a grim tone. Something’s been lost since his mid-90s heights, however. Earlier this year came Devil’s Knot, a forgettable take on the unforgettable West Memphis 3 case, which was also wholly unnecessary on the heels of the three fascinating Paradise Lost documentaries. Now comes The Captive, which encapsulates the decline from observant intensity to made-for-cable melodrama by starting as a gutting study of a horrific situation, only to weasel out of messy situations with convenient catharsis.
Some films have narrative but no plot. Wild is such a film. It stars Reese Witherspoon as audiences have never seen her in an unflinching portrayal of a simultaneously strong and brittle woman teetering on the edge as she walks over 1,000 miles up the Pacific Crest Trail. Her physical journey begins in Southern California and takes her to Oregon, and it is a grueling trip. Her emotional journey is no less treacherous and we see it primarily through quick flashbacks meant to be memories that she is reliving as she struggles to make the seemingly impossible trek through the wilderness.
The Pyramid is a monument to stupidity. Ominous opening text tells us a documentary crew went to Cairo in 2013 to film a team of archaeologists and, “this is what happened to them.” But what starts as strictly found footage hokum with the establishing of a cameraman, wearable head cams, and a robotic rover, shifts to unaccounted-for sources, including jarring God’s eye view shots. As horror movie approaches go, positing as found footage only to ditch the style for more conventional chills is unadvisable and undermines any urgency that had been established. The Pyramid never justifies its tactics and, worse, each method employed is handled horribly.
Films about debilitating diseases can be uplifting like The Theory of Everything, sentimental like The Notebook, unexpected like Amour or surprisingly funny like The Intouchables. Some films put the disease front and center while others treat it as part of a character. How the film handles and tackles the drama surrounding the disease can make or break it. The latest film from the directing team of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, Still Alice, is a film that looks at Alzheimer’s Disease, and unlike the aforementioned films, it never rises above being a heavy-handed “disease-of-the-week” TV movie.
The Abduction of Zack Butterfield isn’t the type of film that can easily be explained to someone who hasn’t had the pleasure of seeing it. At its core, it’s a kidnap thriller, but there’s so much going on in this movie that defies any type of logic, character development or cohesive narrative structure that it becomes tough to accurately convey how ridiculous this film truly is.
It is the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Norway is in the midst of an oil boom. The Norwegian government has contracted internationally crewed drill teams to get things set up as the oil rigs are prepped for delivery. Petter (Aksel Hennie) and his brother Knut (Andre Eriksen) are two of the first divers to attempt to set up a hub in the ocean depths. During their mission, something goes terribly wrong, and Knut is lost in a tragic accident. While trying to find out the cause of the accident and ensure this accident doesn’t happen again, Petter finds himself involved in a perceived conspiracy and cover-up.
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