Top 10 Films of 2014

10. Stations of the Cross, dir. Dietrich Bruggemann

A structurally rigorous film split into fourteen nearly-static chapters, German religious drama Stations of the Cross is really worth seeking out. Dietrich Bruggemann directs an excellent Lea Van Acken as the devout daughter in a family of maniacally cultish Catholic persuasion. The young girl takes it upon herself to follow a dangerous path of religious extremism, even beyond her family's fanatical understanding. Both chock full of dread and knowingly humorous, the film takes a long, hard look at religious hypocrisy and the tragedy it breeds. You can read my review of the film here.

9. The Wind Rises, dir. Hayao Miyazaki

Beloved Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki has always shown an interest in Japan's historical past. Here, the gorgeous array of his animation spans from the lush green of Japan's unsullied pre-war countryside to the industrialist, snow-capped Germany of the 1930's. The film is based loosely on the life of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed Japan's Mitsubishi fighter planes but strongly opposed the nation's involvement in the Second World War. His unbending kindness and peculiar vision give him the rewards of his talent -- but also put him under enormous personal strain.

In The Wind Rises, we are not exposed to the full horror of the war to come, with talk of Japan's increasing militarism the only direct acknowledgement of the troubled times. Miyazaki renders this mood of oncoming loss as backdrop - and sometime companion - to Jiro's life. The Wind Rises is melancholy without ever feeling maudlin; an ode to the precarious beauty of flight and to Jiro's feverish optimism.

8. Calvary, dir. John Michael McDonagh

I wrote a little something for Grolsch Film Works on this year's preoccupation with religious films; somehow another Catholic has managed to get into my top 10 list. Irish director John Michael McDonagh gives us a depiction of a 'good priest' in this bleakly witty character study of a man out of time. Brendan Gleeson gives a devastating performance as the story unfolds into a moving exploration of dignity and duty. In a modern world of constant sarcasm and cruelty, Gleeson's priest shows a strength of character both rare and admirable.

7. Welcome to New York, dir. Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara - an enfant terrible of the New York independent film scene, if ever there was one - has never made films for the faint of heart. Welcome to New York, a loosely fictionalised version of the Dominque Strauss-Kahn scandal, is as lurid and disturbing as they come. Ferrara casts the morbidly obese acting veteran Gerard Depardieu in the role of a prominent French politician and banker, tipped as a frontrunner in the upcoming presidential election. His fall from grace is imminent when he is charged with the sexual assault of a hotel maid in a luxury New York hotel. The film is a nocturnal horror-show of robotic sex, gluttonous lechery, and a shocking abuse of power - hardly a casual watch. But it's a crown jewel in Ferrara's long fascination with misogynistic male characters - and a chilling, relevant look into the far reaches of male entitlement.

6. Leviathan, dir. Sergei Zygavintsev

I wrote at length about Russian family drama Leviathan, which won Best Film at this year's BFI London Film Festival, over at Verité Film Mag.

5. Under the Skin, dir. Jonathan Glazer

Jonathan Glazer's chillingly ambiguous sci-fi sees Scarlett Johansson, as a predatory alien being, prowling Glaswegian roads in a transit van. A subversive look at the thinly-veiled vulnerability of the female body, Under the Skin is mysterious and multi-faceted, allowing for any number of projections and readings. You can read what I made of the movie here.

4. Boyhood, dir. Richard Linklater

Filmed by Richard Linklater over the course of 12 years, as his stars grew older onscreen, Boyhood is essentially everything it's cracked up to be.  As I said in my original review, it feels like a long dream, reveling in the smell of cut grass and childhood summers spent rolling around on the backyard trampoline. Punctuated by the distant tremors of adulthood, buoyed up by our loved ones, unafraid of the growing pains, it allows us to get the dirt under our fingernails. The passage of time is something all at once bright, terrifying, and unyielding. Linklater - and Mason, his young protagonist - face it with optimism. With all its boundless warmth and sensitivity, Boyhood captures life in a way that is quietly revolutionary. It feels like something that will endure.

3. Goodbye to Language 3D, dir. Jean-Luc Godard

If you're into revolutionary, mind-expanding, convention-exploding cinema - there's nothing better than Jean-Luc Godard in 3D. Here's what I said in my review: 

To see late period work from Jean-Luc Godard is to prepare to surrender to impenetrability. And at eighty-two years old, he is as radical and confounding as he’s ever been. The 121st project from the chieftain of the French New Wave is as charmingly incorrigible and intellectually obtuse as Godard himself. Goodbye to Language is a freewheeling 3D exercise in vacillating montage and mutating images, continually defying any application of logic or structure.

In a rare recent interview, Godard stated that the ‘idea’ of Goodbye to Language is, in fact, to "escape from ideas". If it could be said to resemble anything at all, Godard’s film mostly emerges as some kind of exploration of the primordial, pre-linguistic muddle; the Lacanian mirror stage collapsing in on itself. If the premise is that language organises and structures our world by compartmentalising objects, ideas, and individuals in an ultimately limiting way, Godard repeatedly strikes out at the comprehensible features of that edifice.

2. The Wolf of Wall Street, dir. Martin Scorsese

A queasily mordant, hilarious, and undeniably questionable tale of late '80s avarice, Martin Scorsese's latest features Leonardo DiCaprio as Quaalude-addicted Wall Street dirtbag Jordan Belfort. Touches of Fellini and Billy Wilder combine in a swirlingly repetitive haze of sex, drugs, and white-collar crime. The rumble of suspicion and sniffiness around the film reached full peak last year around Oscars season, and ultimately it proved too unruly for that sort of rank and file success. 

Earlier this year, I spoke to Kubrick on the Guillotine editor Simran Hans about Scorsese's degree of complicity in the film's depiction of rampant misogyny. We disagreed fundamentally about where the film was coming from, but I did mention that I'd be unlikely to return to it very often. I think it's worth pointing out that I was wrong - I've seen it several times since, and each viewing has proven it to be compellingly chewy and complex. Simultaneously damning and self-congratulatory, nauseating and thrilling, The Wolf of Wall Street proves fascinating on repeat viewing.

1. Inside Llewyn Davis, dir. Joel + Ethan Coen

I saw the Coen Brothers' newest and gentlest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, all the way back in January - but no viewing experience this year has managed to eclipse it. The setting is Greenwich Village circa 1961, and Oscar Isaac is a moody, struggling folk singer trying to make his way through a miserable New York winter. By turns cutting and melancholy, the circular, meandering structure almost seems incidental - but the digressions make for a beautifully unravelling, pitiful story of creative failure. Paired with its downbeat folk soundtrack, Inside Llewyn Davis is worthy of being called the Coen Brothers' masterpiece - and a self-effacing one, at that. My full review is here.

Honourable mentions go to: Grand Budapest Hotel, Jodorowsky's Dune, Mr. Turner, Gone Girl, + Nightcrawler.

Grolsch Film Works: Old Hollywood Hating on New Hollywood

Cary Grant and Bette Davis bitch about younger Hollywood. You gotta love golden age gossip - over at Grolsch Film Works. 

Canvas by Grolsch: Ian Pons Jewell's Bolivian Dreamscapes

I spoke to MOBO-winning music video and short film director Ian Pons Jewell over at Canvas by Grolsch. Head over there to take a look! 

Canvas by Grolsch: Russian Film Culture Under the Putin Regime - In Dialogue with Andrei Kartashov

I spoke to St. Petersburg-based film critic and editor Andrei Kartashov about the current cultural climate in Russia, and its influence on the Russian film industry. You can read it here. 

Grolsch Film Works: Bible Bashers + Assorted Religious Freaks

   I wrote about all the priests, nuns, and religious freaks that have been populating our cinema screens this year, from Noah to Calvary, over at Grolsch Film Works. 

Canvas by Grolsch: Greek Historical Memory Onscreen

   I wrote about Greek and Greek diaspora cinema in the postwar era, and you can read about it here!

London Film Festival for Verité Film Mag: Alice Rohrwacher's The Wonders

   I reviewed Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher's second film, The Wonders, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival, for the now-defunct Verité Film Magazine. You can now find the review here:

A lyrical film of endless emotional generosity, The Wonders is the second, Grand Prix-winning feature from Italian director Alice Rohrwacher. A coming-of-age tale with none of the requisite moments that the label entails, it concerns a twelve-year-old girl, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), who lives on a farm with her family in a dry, sparse portion of the remote Italian countryside. The quiet and dutiful eldest sister, she's her father’s golden girl.

Her father (Sam Louwyck) is the foreign-born, stern patriarch of the family, who together practice ancient beekeeping rites and produce organic honey. Sometimes he’s an insensitive tyrant, but mostly he’s a greying, comically irate man prone to shouting and wearing very small pairs of Speedos. It's his bad luck, given the hard graft of the family business, to have fathered only girls. Gelsomina helps tend to the bees and processes the honey, and she is followed, almost constantly, by her chubby, incorrigible sister, Caterina, and two chattering, dark-haired little ones, who jump in puddles and trail behind mischievously. The family live an isolated, almost out-of-time existence, and as a result, are incredibly close-knit.

One afternoon, the girls and their father stumble across a commercial being shot for a local competition named ‘The Countryside Wonders’. A glamorous TV celebrity (played by a forever elegant Monica Belluci), stars in the ad. Gelsomina is clearly bewildered and stunned by this beautiful apparition, who places a sparkly clip in her hair. With her big-city manner, poise and style, she symbolises everything that is enigmatic and sophisticated to a rural girl on the cusp of womanhood. Set up for local farmers, the competition offers a television appearance -- along with a cash prize and a luxury cruise. This is a terribly exciting proposition to Gelsomina, who has no inclination of just how out of step her family is with contemporary Italy, and how jarring the experience will be given their steady, Etruscan traditions.

“Unsparing close-ups encapsulate the trials of youth growing up within the context of a dying old world”

While the rural, antiquated setting might seem positively alien to many viewers, the universality of Gelsomina’s gawky in-between age is not. With burgeoning teen-hood, Gelsomina is beginning to lose interest in the dusty, repetitive work on the farm and developing a growing fondness for boys, particularly a delinquent foster child who is hired as a farm hand. Teenage mistakes lead to adult humiliations, all channelled through the sloe-eyed, watchful gaze of expressive young actress Maria Alexandra Lungu. She observes her surroundings with a kind of vacant surprise, as if half-seeing everything newly for the first time.

Lungu's strange stillness and Rohrwacher’s unsparing close-ups encapsulate the trials of youth in a dying old world. Accordingly, there is a growing chasm between father and daughter where it was once airtight. Spell-binding despite being a touch protracted, The Wonders redeems itself of any meandering by virtue of being so deeply affecting.

London Film Festival for Verité Film Mag: Leviathan Review

   You can read my full review of Leviathan, this year's Best Film winner at BFI London Film Festival, for Verité Film Mag, below:

     A wide-reaching political allegory that squarely targets the aggression of the Putin regime, Leviathan is the award-winning fourth feature from director Andrey Zvyagintsev. Rarely utilising close-up, Zvyagintsev’s camera gazes from the middle distance. Using the visual language of the epic, his wide shots capture the remote, windswept seaside environs of working-class Russia. The  simplicity of these compositions facilitate a searing intimacy with the characters, enlivening what might otherwise have seemed didactic. 

Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov), is a hot-headed mechanic whose land is being appropriated by the local government for construction purposes. Kolya’s teenage son and put-upon younger wife, Lilya, (Elena Lyadova) are resentful and terrified of losing their home, which will be bulldozed under the government’s plans. The crooked mayor who orchestrates this legalised robbery is Vadim (Roman Madyanov), who compensates the family with only a sliver of what the property is worth, leaving them financially bereft. 

Kolya’s old army friend, Dmitry, (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) is a hotshot Moscow lawyer, and out of close friendship, Dmitry offers to help Kolya appeal the decision on his land. He offers cool assurance and neatly articulated arguments by comparison to Kolya’s lumpen, emotional response and on first appearance, Dmitry seems the far more capable and sensible of the two. 

“A film of systemic corruption and inebriation. Tension stings with each gulp of Vodka”

Yet, as the ensuing legal quagmire proves, coolly applied logic is potentially dangerous. Mired in local influences and anecdotally tied to the Orthodox church, the appeals hearing is inevitably a failure, a public official rattling off indecipherable legal jargon, flatly denying any intervention on Kolya’s behalf. Mayor Vadim, human refuse of the worst sort, later visits Kolya’s home, belligerently drunk and gloating about his success. A corrupt, venal man with a portrait of Vladimir Putin on his office wall, Vadim is guilty of any number of terrible deeds. Cleverly, Zyvagintsev leaves us to wonder about the specifics. 

In Leviathan, what begins as a direct take-down of Russian bureaucracy mutates slowly into a forsaken family drama. The plot could be said to contain elements of melodrama, but only if you stripped the dramatic moments of all their artificial tenor, peeling the layers back to their most basic, wounding humanity.

It’s an appropriate emotional temperature for a director whose films are structured and told in beautifully pared-down, elliptical, visual prose. Seamlessly transitioning between scenes without effect, information is consistently withheld from the audience then matter-of-factly stated in conversation. Too smooth to be startling, too commonplace to work as generic twists, there’s an impression of characters constantly on the verge of spilling their guts; unspoken words always on their lips, but routinely stymied. Either through Zvyagintsev’s sudden ellipses or their own inability to communicate, these individuals are isolated from each other in terrible ways, the brittle semblance of community imploding violently on the egotistical whims of those with money and influence. 

Canvas by Grolsch: Women's Lib on Film

     I wrote about women's lib in American films of the '70s. You can read what I said here. 

Grolsch Film Works: The Editor Review

          You can read my review of giallo parody The Editor here, at Grolsch Film Works. 

Canvas by Grolsch: Transcending the Horror Film

    I'm interested in movies that straddle the line between generic horror and something far more deep-rooted - things like Freaks, Come and See, and Titicut Follies. Read what I had to say about them and about the kind of horror they elicit at Canvas. 

Mayhem Horror Film Festival 10th Anniversary

 

Photo courtesy of Peter Bakewell

October 30th kicked off the 10th Anniversary of Broadway Cinema's Mayhem Horror Film Festival, and amazingly, it's come and gone already. Prior obligations ended up preventing me from seeing as much as I normally would have, but the programme was really varied and exciting, and I wanted to provide a brief overview of some of the highlights. Programmers Steven Sheil and Chris Cooke really made an effort to do something special for their 10th anniversary, and they've included everything from '70s-throwback slasher films to vampire parodies to 50's oddities in their selection.

Excitingly, Mayhem has more plans for 5-7 December. They've paired up with the BFI to take part in its ongoing Sci-Fi season, 'Days of Fear and Wonder' - and will be screening some gems around the theme of 'The Created Woman'.  Their screenings will include Solaris, The Stepford Wives, Metropolis, and Weird Science.To that end, Mayhem will be branching out to explore the female body as a symbolic site of transformation, anxiety, and fear of sexual difference.

Back on the subject of this year's Mayhem Festival, here are some of the things I managed to check out:

Astron-6 Shorts:

Matthew Kennedy, Conor Sweeney, and Adam Brooks - otherwise known as The Canadian filmmaking collective Astron-6 - were in person to introduce and discuss their work on Thursday evening. It began with a little anthology of their short films, all filmed with an '80s VHS aesthetic but a very 21st-century self-awareness. The subjects of their parodies range from the zombie film to the Troma horror, with trailers for imaginary films like Bio Cop, featuring a grotesquely squidgy-faced mutant forced into a uniform. These playful DIY films poke fun at a huge range of sci-fi and horror tropes, and star the filmmakers themselves, who also do their own special effects, stunts, writing and producing. With names like 'Objectified Woman #3' rolling through their credits, Astron-6 aren't ever going to be accused of being earnest or highbrow. For that we can all be thankful.

The Editor (2014) Dir. Adam Brooks + Matt Kennedy 

You can find my full-length review of Astron-6's feature film at Grolsch Film Works.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown (2014), Dir. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon 

Borne from a 1976 cult horror film of the same name, and serving as a sort-of sequel to that work, The Town That Dreaded Sundown is a stylish, referential slasher film made by one of the producers of hit TV show American Horror Story. Based on a series of actual late-night murders on lovers' lanes in the early 1950's, the film is set in the aptly-named Texarkana, a small border town between Texas and Arkansas. The 'phantom killer' of innocent teens - who was never brought to justice - still mars the town's history, and it is this checkered past that encourages a copycat killer to go out on the prowl. A teenage girl who survives the killer's rampage starts digging into the history of the murders, and puts herself in grave danger by doing so. With precise, weathered production values capturing the look and texture of contemporary Texas, the film is expensively shot and requisitely twisty, but falls a little flat by the conclusion. As is often the case with slasher movies of this type, the preceding 3/4ths are much more fun than the reveal. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973), Dir. Tobe Hooper

The 40th anniversary restoration of this low-budget, grisly masterpiece genuinely looked great - it avoided the trap of any pre-packaged digital cleanliness. As it goes, nothing can make this film feel less grimy. Hooper, who included real rotting animal carcasses on set, gives a texture of grubbiness and gristle to the film. And to say that a large chunk of the latter portion involves little more than hysterical running and screaming, there isn't a moment that isn't oppressively frightening.

One can't help but to see the twin woes of the early 1970s - the Vietnam War and economic recession -  creep their way into the film. There is, of course, a portrait of dispossessed slaughterhouse workers looking to continue the family tradition - right down to their eerie recreation of domestic bliss. From the cheerful front-porch facade of Leatherface's family home to Marilyn Burns' invitation to a grotesque dinner, something is deeply amiss in those much-avowed 'hearts and minds' of the American public.

Ultimately, Marilyn Burns' catatonic eyes and incessant screaming are the most disturbingly memorable elements of the film; they worm their way into your skull. A simpering madman pursues a brutalised innocent; and the final few shots show a man tilting at windmills. With the imprecise brute force that it entails, Leatherface swings away wildly when there's nothing left to destroy. He will pulverise anything in his wake. It's clear that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's twisted black heart has an allegorical impulse at its centre; and Hooper's vision of his nation's moral degradation is as blisteringly traumatic as it was in 1973.

Canvas by Grolsch: The Photographic Eye of the Auteur

In the lead-up to the release of photography doc Reely + Truly, directed by Tyrone LeBon, I wrote about famous auteurs who bookended their cinematic careers with extraordinary photography work. You can click here to read about Stanley Kubrick, Dennis Hopper, and others. 

London Film Festival for Canvas: Aleksei German's Hard to be a God

   I reviewed the epic Russian sci-fi/medieval drama Hard to be a God, which screened at the BFI London Film Festival. It's as insane as it sounds, and you should read about it at Grolsch Canvas. 

London Film Festival for Verité Film Mag: Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language 3D

 I reviewed Jean-Luc Godard's incredible Goodbye to Language 3D, which screened at the BFI London Film Festival. The review was over at Verité Film Magazine, but now you can find it right here:

 

To see late period work from Jean-Luc Godard is to prepare to surrender to impenetrability. And at eighty-two years old, he is as radical and confounding as he’s ever been. The 121st project from the chieftain of the French New Wave is as charmingly incorrigible and intellectually obtuse as Godard himself. Goodbye to Language is a freewheeling 3D exercise in vacillating montage and mutating images, continually defying any application of logic or structure.

In a rare recent interview, Godard stated that the ‘idea’ of Goodbye to Language is, in fact, to "escape from ideas". If it could be said to resemble anything at all, Godard’s film mostly emerges as some kind of exploration of the primordial, pre-linguistic muddle; the Lacanian mirror stage collapsing in on itself. If the premise is that language organises and structures our world by compartmentalising objects, ideas, and individuals in an ultimately limiting way, Godard repeatedly strikes out at the comprehensible features of that edifice.

Generally speaking, the film is split into two sections, titled ‘Nature’ and ‘Metaphor’. Mostly, it concerns two lovers (Héloise Godet and Kamel Abdeli) with a seemingly great distance between them, expounding on death, political engagement, metaphor and nudity in oblique snippets of conversation. As they fall apart through charged but scattershot diatribes, their canine companion Roxy looks on, filmed with a mixture of improbably regal close-ups and lighthearted humour.

“The absurd and the scatological frequently come into play, and the result of all this discord, bar considerable eye-rubbing, is not easily discerned”

The absurd and the scatological frequently come into play, with jokes about forests and pubic hair, and 3D that frequently folds in on itself completely or rends itself in two, leaving the audience struggling to make sense of the image. The camera is flipped upside down, schizophrenically shifting focus and jaggedly cutting between sounds. Images reoccur frequently or appear apropos of nothing, as in a recreation of Mary Shelley’s writing of 'Frankenstein'.

The result of all this discord, bar considerable eye-rubbing, is not easily discerned, but it certainly shifts our perceptions of the commonplace. In a characteristically unclassifiable way, Godard seems to address semiotics. Repeatedly, we see trees, washing machines, beds, hands, cities, rivers. What impressions are left on objects and spaces by history, emotion, or death? What margin is there between the supposed precision of words and the actual existence of a thought or even a physical object?

It seems to Godard that this is the perplexing margin we all live in - the margin between language and thought, or language and existence. As such, we are all incapable of truly communicating with one another, or of truly conveying one’s ideas. When a dog is put onscreen, the audience recognises that the invention of language is the very cornerstone of being human. With that recognition comes malaise and confusion. In that vacuum of understanding, there is Roxy the dog, and there is Jean-Luc Godard. I think they both know something we don’t.

Canvas by Grolsch: The Cinema of Upstate New York

     I wrote about cinema set in the rural region of upstate New York - where I hail from - for Grolsch Canvas. Have a look here...

Review: Gone Girl

Obligatory spoiler warning.  Plot details contained herein.


The margin between the public and private faces we wear has always seemed to interest David Fincher, who is perennially concerned with the inner rot of seemingly shiny surfaces. Thus, his adaptation of Gillian Flynn's bestselling novel, Gone Girl, is ripe territory for the director. It is the mystery of a seemingly perfect missing wife, and the husband who may be involved with her disappearance.

Gone Girl is, as its many shuffling viewpoints might suggest, a thoroughly postmodern work which is by turns a murder mystery, a relationship drama, and perhaps primarily, a tragedy of unrealistic expectations. Like Fincher's last great film, Zodiac, it uncoils at a serpentine pace; chilling, downbeat, and poisonously humorous in such a way that the laughter often dies in your throat.

Filtered in a coolly distant, grayish light, everything in Nick and Amy Dunne's life has a sort of dull glimmer to it. From the glass-clinking Manhattan soireés where their romance first blooms to the picture-window suburbia of middle America -- they seem like the ideal successful couple. The potboiler material of Gillian Flynn's novel is elegantly reconstructed here, fashioned into some kind of perverse mirror held up to romantic relationships.

Of course, the film is hardly a chamber piece on the foibles of married life, but it does seem to tug at the normality of marriage to suggest a psychosis beneath. It hints at the dozen smaller ways in which we all lie to one another.  In spite of their wry jokes and aversion to stereotype, two individuals dominate, bully, and manipulate each other endlessly. Fincher blends an apparently objective eye with a knowingly overwrought narrative, right down to the symbolic husband/wife clichés. Amy is a J. Crew-wearing, icy blonde perfectionist, and Nick is a blandly handsome slacker -  a philanderer who masks his ego with shuffling diffidence.

And yet, the gendered power dynamic that runs uncontested through Gone Girl is deeply troubling. By reversing the narrative of female victimhood in matters of sexual assault and domestic violence, it undermines the overwhelming extent to which such crime is exacted by men on women. Both the book and the film run close parallels to the horrific 2002 murder of pregnant Californian woman Laci Peterson, where the media circus was shockingly similar. Her husband and convicted murderer Scott Peterson even bears a passing resemblance to Ben Affleck, to nicely tie the meta flavour of Gone Girl to real-world events.

And even with an allusion like this one, the narrative steams straight ahead, presenting women as the driving force behind their own abuse. Amy, with her two elaborately-faked rapes (in which she even damages herself in shocking ways), is like the ultimate male chauvinist imagining of a villainous female. Even the exceptionally creepy Desi, played by Neil Patrick Harris, has his stalker-esque behaviour played down in contrast to the outrageous evil that Amy is capable of.

At a crucial point in the film, Amy justifies herself with Flynn's much-discussed 'Cool Girl' diatribe, taken nearly verbatim from the novel. In an on-the-nose monologue, she angrily talks about what modern men expect of women. Paraphrased, guys want girls to eat cold pizza, drink beer, watch sports, maintain a size 2 and be willing to offer a constant supply of blow jobs. We can feel that Nick, on some level, deserves her wrath - at the very least for being so predictably macho. For a few minutes, it feels as though a righteous streak of feminine anger has elevated Amy into more than a villainous shrew. Yet Fincher pulls the rug out from under her; her actions become so OTT psychotic that any valid statement she makes about gender relations are totally subsumed by that psychosis.

A casual trawl through certain corners of the Internet - Men's Rights websites, to be exact - will reveal some of the disturbing reversals Gone Girl wallows in. The supposition that women can ruin men's lives by falsely accusing them of rape. Or that women can act as victims of domestic violence where they will always get the benefit of the doubt. They can even use pregnancy as a bargaining tool and force men to stay with them out of guilt. Because of this litany of crimes against Nick, what little sympathy we have must remain with him - boring and smug though he is - because his is the side of sanity. Whatever may have been intended, Amy ultimately becomes a Men's Rights Activist's paranoiac vision of a 'conniving bitch' come to life.

Having said that, it's also fair to say that, technically speaking, Fincher is one of the finest commercial directors dealing with genre material today. His emotional intelligence, his pristine sense of construction, his subtlety, and the screenplay's viciously ironic humour - help to elevate Flynn's novel in a teeth-grindingly gruesome way. And in spite of seemingly regressive impulses in Gone Girl, there are odd, winking traces of self-awareness that chafe against simple value judgments. Fincher is a purposeful director; little onscreen seems accidental.

Chiefly, the case against Nick plays out as an uninterrupted news cycle, forcing him to undergo a trial-by-media that is mostly a matter of expert timing and putting one's best PR face forward. Amy's disappearance is essentially a public witch-hunt, and for both Nick and Amy, a matter of navigating a false persona. That Amy turns out to be much better at this than Nick - in spite of Nick's hotshot defense attorney - is telling.

It might be easy for Amy to hide who she is because she's a psychopath; but it might also be easy for Amy to hide who she is because she's used to it. She's a woman, after all.





Now Showing at Cineworld Nottingham + Broadway Cinema Nottingham

Review: Magic in the Moonlight

Woody Allen's latest, Magic in the Moonlight, is a frothy romantic comedy once again doting on a bygone age, joining the nostalgia parade where 2011's Midnight in Paris left off. Somehow, the whimsical titles of both films tell us much of what we need to know; they have the sticky-sweet consistency and, frankly, all the weight of a meringue.

The setting is 1928, in the sun-dappled climes of the Cote D'Azur, and the effervescent performers are Emma Stone and Colin Firth, who are pitted against one another in a battle between rationalist skepticism and light-hearted faith. In true screwball style, Stone is Sophie, a supposed clairvoyant who is wracked with 'mental vibrations' and contacts the dead in extravagant seances for the wealthy. Firth is a clever stage-show magician who decks himself in Chinoiserie and opts for a Far Eastern persona. Off-stage, he is a brittle, emotionally distant Englishman who denounces the fools taken in by phony swindlers. His chatty verbosity recalls Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours, though the comparison essentially ends there.  While it's always a pleasure to watch both actors, one can't help but to feel a certain contrivance in the air - mostly due to how awkwardly certain lines are stuffed into their mouths.

Borrowing from the great screwball comedies of the classical age, the tone is affectionately trivial - and the wily woman is forever getting one over on the suave gentleman. The thing that distinguishes Allen's film from his beloved Lubitsch and Sturges, then, is that the very best from the screwball age are determinedly memorable, in spite of their inconsequential posturing. Whether it be by deliciously pattering dialogue or romantic matches made in Hollywood heaven, those films undercut any minor-note affiliations through their wit and edginess.

Magic in the Moonlight, sadly, never seems to lift itself out of triviality. As a result, it's almost instantly forgettable - an amusing slice of distraction and nothing more, without even the gut-twisting melancholy and artistic contemplation that Midnight in Paris left us with. It's supposed to be about submitting to the terrifying grandeur of life's uncertainty, while never fully relinquishing one's cynicism. Within that rather belaboured theme, Allen finds many witty lines but very little to actually say.

Magic in the Moonlight is, ultimately, a lot like a handful of penny sweets. Nostalgic and fun, perhaps, but they've soon dissolved - and it doesn't take long to realise that they're not very satisfying.


Now showing at Cineworld Nottingham + Broadway Cinema Nottingham

Canvas by Grolsch: Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller Filmmaking Today

I wrote about Gypsy, Roma and Traveller filmmaking for Grolsch Canvas. An ethnic group that has been maligned and misrepresented in cinema for many years, gypsy filmmakers are now providing honest, alternative representations of their community and history.  To read the article, you can click here. 

Canvas by Grolsch: Different Perspectives on the Vietnam War

I wrote about counterculture movies of the late sixties and early seventies and the Vietnam War for Grolsch Canvas. You can check it out by following this link.

Here's a little background.....

Vietnam was a trampling ground for Japanese and French colonial forces from the 17th century onward. In 1954, after a series of brutal revolts, The Geneva Accords granted Vietnam its independence from France. The U.S, initially pledging to aid the democratic process for fledgling nations, backtracked considerably when Communist revolutionaries, led by Ho Chi Minh, gained momentum in the North. America threw its weight behind the Southern puppet state, installing autocratic leader Ngo Dinh Diem and ignoring appeals from Ho Chi Minh to uphold ideals of self-determination. When a North Vietnamese takeover in 1964 led to the alleged Gulf of Tonkin incident, Lyndon Johnson officially declared war on North Vietnam.....   

        

Verité Film Magazine: Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida

You can find my review of Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida in the September issue of Verité Film Magazine.

Review: Two Days, One Night (2014)

Two Days, One Night, Dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne 

The Dardenne brothers offer a psychologically realistic portrait of a working-class Belgian woman in Two Days, One Night. Within this tense, restrained personal story, there is also a superb deconstruction of the corporate mentality, with its short-term labour contracts and dog-eat-dog lay offs.

It takes place, like their previous films, in a nondescript part of contemporary Belgium, dotted with industrial estates. Marion Cotillard is Sandra, and her weary, drawn face and skinny frame fill nearly every intimate frame. Her beauty is like a distant memory; she is bare-faced and fragile, in a performance of desperate, quiet dignity. Sandra exudes a constant nervous energy; that anxiety is always on the verge of spilling over into wild-eyed terror or hysteria.

With the support of her kind, long-suffering husband (Fabrizio Rongione), Sandra has gone through a long spell of depression. She has just been deemed fit to return to work when a backstabbing foreman and the big boss, Dumont, decide she must be sacked. In the film's opening moments, we witness Sandra receiving a phone call - sobbing - and popping Xanax, something she does periodically as her emotions grow increasingly erratic.

The fresh humiliation, you see, is not that Sandra has been let go, but that her co-workers have been faced with a traumatic ballot vote: receive a 1000 euro bonus, or let Sandra keep her job and get nothing. They cannot have both. Unsurprisingly, the majority vote to jettison Sandra in exchange for their bonus - but when Sandra is able to postpone a new vote until Monday, she must spend the weekend convincing her co-workers to vote against their bonus and let her keep her job.

From that point, the Dardennes follow Sandra as she literally goes from door to door, asking for her fellows' vote. The camera is often in close-up or tagging closely behind its protagonist; the occasional wide shot feels jarring after so much intimacy.  She suffers rejection, buoyed up by some to be knocked back down again by others - it would be exhausting for anyone, but especially for a frail Sandra. She speaks to immigrants, other working-class families; some seem genuinely in need of extra cash, others merely greedy. The most illuminating element of the film are the responses to her plea; the tiny nuances and variations. We learn much from the workers' little evasions - their earnest lines of reasoning - or merely their living conditions. Financial condition is no barometer of one's willingness to help.

In this way, Two Days, One Night feels like an ode to compassion, or perhaps a swan song; and it is fiercely attached to the notion of workers' solidarity. Sandra and her husband's journey over the weekend, for all its harrowing moments, is wonderfully tender; their marriage is testament to all that is humane rather than self-serving. Relief comes not with success, per se, but with a sense of being connected to others. Over the course of the weekend, Sandra reaches some sense of wholeness; there is the vaguest suggestion that her alienation is of the Marxist sort. The corporate game, after all, is rigged - no matter who wins, someone will lose, and it will invariably be the common worker.

Although they are not manipulative filmmakers, the Dardennes transform the commonplace into the stuff of great tension and drama.  When, in the car with her husband, Sandra finally cracks a smile, it's almost startling. We realise she hasn't once smiled or laughed, as weighed down as she is by her troubles. It's a relief; like slivers of sunlight breaking through. There is something so richly edifying about the simplicity of her emotions, and the equilibrium they eventually reach. That Two Days, One Night can turn this tiny moment into something monumental is testament to what a profoundly sensitive film it is.


Now showing at Broadway Cinema Nottingham

Verité Film Magazine: Abel Ferrara + Welcome to New York

I was very pleased to write for Verité Film Mag's August issue about the work of American indie director, Abel Ferrara. I focused on the themes of sexual violence and rape as a through line in his Ms. 45 (1981), Bad Lieutenant (1992), and this year's Welcome to New York.  You can read the article for free by following this link! 

Review: Blood Ties

Blood Ties (2014), Dir. Guillaume Canet 
Starring: Clive Owen, Billy Crudup, James Caan, Marion Cottilard, Zoe Saldana

In Brooklyn, 1974, a livewire ex-con called Chris, played by Clive Owen, meets his brother Frank outside of prison. Billy Crudup is Frank, an essentially decent cop in an essentially understated performance. Chris, on the other hand, is prone to armed robbery and fits of psychotic violence. His redeeming feature is seemingly his hard-bitten loyalty to his family; he'd do anything for them, with the exception of ending his criminal ways. The tension between the brothers increases as Chris' bad behaviour comes to bear on family relations; police pressure is put on Frank to bring his brother under control.

Blood Ties is an ambitious period crime drama, directed by Frenchman Guillaume Canet and co-written by the well-respected American auteur James Gray. Part of the problem is that any sense of genuine '70s grit is dispensed with. So, too, is the taut narrative economy that marked so many seventies genre films.

With frequently loud but rarely interesting supporting roles for Marion Cotillard, Mila Kunis, and Zoe Saldana, Canet is clearly more interested in the inextricable links between the two brothers. Those links are tested by their obsessive pursuits of oppositional career paths; the archetypes of the cop and the criminal become the stuff of domestic drama. Yet the characters never seem fully sketched out. They all revolve around one another in complex movements, shouting and crying. And because we lack any connection to them, their histrionics seem distancing - even silly.

Blood Ties comes off as a buttoned-down and tasteful relative to David O. Russell's campy 70's crime caper, American Hustle. It maintains the dodgy Brooklyn accents and signpost jukebox soundtrack. But in its striving for a more muted, stylish variation on the genre, it becomes one thing that I daresay American Hustle is not: a little bit dull. The Iceman, a recent period film in a similar vein, had many of the same problems. It, too, had style in spades, attractive production design and ostensibly talented actors involved - in this case Michael Shannon and Ray Liotta. And it, too, was unjustifiably po-faced, something that Blood Ties inherits.

That isn't to say the film is entirely without merit; Billy Crudup is a memorable and nuanced performer, and James Caan, as the hard-as-nails family patriarch in declining health, is notable. Cotillard, too, is difficult to diminish, even when her role is underwritten. As such, Blood Ties is peppered with promising scenes, whether it be a cathouse police bust or a tense family dinner. Its conclusion, too, is crisp and engaging.

Overall, though, these glimmers cannot sustain what otherwise feels like drudgery. Blood Ties aspires to be a formulaic, retro genre piece, complete with macho back-slapping and painfully sincere tough-guy pathos. For whatever success it has, it remains tedious in the extreme.

Currently showing at Broadway Cinema Nottingham