The Danish Girl (*1/2)

THE DANISH GIRL
Directed by Tom Hooper

*1/2

If you want to watch a prime example of how poor editing can really dismantle a film, I'd suggest watching Tom Hooper's The Danish Girl, which spends two hours with a story that it can't seem to find any interest in. Is it the story of a troubled marriage? Well, of course that relationship is what takes up most of the film, and Alicia Vikander, who plays the wife, easily has the most dynamic, entertaining performance throughout. Of course, what The Danish Girl is really about is the husband, played by Eddie Redmayne, who claims to be a woman trapped in a man's body - this certainly isn't too uncommon these days but in Denmark in the 1920s, it was certainly not something to be too open about. The sex change seems to be the post on which Danish Girl hopes to hang its hat, but it spends so little time actually investing the audience with this subject. And what's to make of the husband's childhood friend, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, who's presence in the movie seems to only be justified by giving the wife a lover to hold once the husband becomes a woman? Or the homosexual, played by Ben Whishaw, who seduces the cross-dressing husband knowing there's a penis underneath it all? The Danish Girl is a very moribund, interminable film, and its scenes are so choppy and haphazard, it suggests that there was a time when the film was even longer. I haven't even gotten to the Parisian surgeon who looks like Ernest Hemingway!

Creed (***)

CREED
Directed by Ryan Coogler

***

The Rocky series is one of the few film franchises that I truly love. The original film is one of the great American classics, mostly because its screenplay (written by its star, Sylvester Stallone) is a masterpiece in commercial cinematic storytelling. The thought of a spin-off within a movie climate already over-saturated with reboots and unwanted sequels was a bit unnerving to me. How much more story can be sapped from this character? Six films stretched Stallone thin, and the sequels succeeded mostly when they became something between shameless self-parody and outright camp (see: Rocky IV). Upon its announcement, Creed had the scent of self-importance, an attempt to start anew with a rough, grittier style - like they've done with Batman and James Bond and I'm sure plenty of other franchises in the future. But much like the original Rocky, Creed has the benefit of a strong screenplay. It's a real story, not a centerpiece for staged boxing nor a cheap attempt to capitalize on the great films of the past. It helps that Creed was actually the brainchild of its director, Fruitvale Station's Ryan Coogler, who used the goodwill he built up with Fruitvale's success and graduated to this major studio film. Creed's concept and story was created by Coogler, and he wrote the screenplay with Aaron Covington. That personal touch is evident in the film's emotional style. Reuniting with Fruitvale's star, Michael B. Jordan, both director and actor prove that their place in Hollywood is legitimate, but with the help of a Hollywood relic, Rocky himself Sylvester Stallone, they deliver a crowd-pleasing dynamo that would do the rest of the franchise proud.

The Good Dinosaur (**)

THE GOOD DINOSAUR
Directed by Peter Sohn

**

The Good Dinosaur feels like such an odd child within the rest of the Pixar films. It seems like their most outright for children since 2003's Finding Nemo, and yet, it feels particularly dark, tackling aspects of mortality and existentialism unlike any other film Disney has to offer. It's take on the dinosaur movie feels a bit off. In the universe of The Good Dinosaur, a family of Apatosaurus are akin to Middle American farmers, seemingly with the intelligence not only to speak but to till the land and harvest corn. When Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), the youngest of the family, is struggling to make his mark within the meritocracy of the family, he leaves the family farm in search of the young feral boy (whom he later names Spot) who has been stealing the family's crops. Why Spot, as well as all other humans in the film, act like dogs is never truly explained, nor why the dinosaur universe is set in an aesthetic of rustic farmland. What does Americana add to this tale? I pondered this often throughout. Arlo's journey off of the farm leads him into great peril, including bloodthirsty pterodactyls, cattle ranching T-Rex's and dangerously inclement weather. With the help of the surprisingly resourceful Spot, Arlo manages his way through the hurdles, hoping to find his way back to the family farm. There's something a bit low-stakes about The Good Dinosaur; the screenwriting isn't as solid as we're used to with the famed studio. A lot of the plot points are borrowed from the Disney classic The Lion King, which is fine, but there isn't enough separation for Dinosaur to feel like its own film. There is some good voice acting (particularly Steve Zahn, Jeffrey Wright and Sam Elliot), and some astonishing animation, but this is one of the weaker films in the Pixar canon. The film is preceded by a great short called Sanjay's Super Team, which in less than ten minutes manages to present the kind of hearty feeling that The Good Dinosaur struggles to reach in its 100 minutes. There are times when Dinosaur's sentimentality does connect with its audience, but there's little more that the film has going for it.

Legend (***)

LEGEND
Written for the Screen and Directed by Brian Helgeland

***

Legend contains such a brilliant fusion of the two personalities that Tom Hardy so often inhabits in his movies. On the one hand, there's the brooding, but suave man behind Locke and Inception, but then there's also the Tom Hardy we're more familiar with - the one that's quickly becoming a movie star - the brutish blunt object of Bronson, Warrior and The Dark Knight Rises. Earlier this year, Hardy was great in Mad Max: Fury Road, where little was required of him other than scrambling around frantically, driving fearlessly and basically being an unstoppable force careening into an immovable object. It's one of the best films of the year, and no short amount of credit should go to Hardy for subduing his own gigantism for the sake of the narrative. He doesn't have to make any of these sacrifices in Legend, where Hardy is allowed to embrace both halves of his cinematic duality. Here he's playing the Kray brothers, two of the most infamous gangsters in English history. One brother, Reggie, is a shrewd businessman unafraid to get his hands bloodied in the underground world of British organized crime. The other, Ronnie, is a bloodthirsty simpleton, whose certified insanity may not be readily apparent until his penchant for gruesome violence makes an appearance. Hardy plays both these roles with an unwavering flair, painting both brothers with equal parts menace and humor, showing a bombastic range unlike anything we've seen from this supremely talented actor.

Carol (****)

CAROL
Directed by Todd Haynes

****

Todd Haynes' ballads of female domesticity are such a treasure to American independent film. His ability to tap into this world with such passion and ferocity, but also with tenderness, has produced what I would call his best cinematic work. I'm not sure it gets much better than Carol, his latest film and his most downright sincere. Like his 2002 masterpiece, Far From Heaven, Haynes takes a pointed view at the 1950's - in Heaven it was the housewife who had to learn to deal with her husband's subdued homosexuality, but in Carol it's the housewife who's sexuality is at the center. Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith called 'The Price of Salt' (Highsmith originally published the novel under the pseudonym Claire Morgan), Haynes is given another opportunity to peck away at the facade of the Greatest Generation, to deconstruct a time that took great strides to suppress the very outsiders that Haynes loves to champion. At its heart, though, Carol is a forbidden love story, a document of a passionate affair fighting against the limited tolerance of a society who hadn't even fathomed racial understanding let alone homosexual sensitivity. As Haynes' first feature film since the fun but troubled I'm Not There in 2007, Carol feels like a stunning return to form, a prime example of the filmmaker's talent for blending homage to classic, movie star-driven Hollywood with the intimacy of independent cinema - a brilliant exploration of the artifice of luxury and a testament to the life-shattering effects of love.

Podcast: Is 'Spectre' Better Than 'Jurassic Park'?

Hey guys, writing material has been slow I know, but here's Episode 2 (click there!) of my podcast with Scott Ward 'Is it Better Than Jurassic Park?'. In this episode, we discuss Spectre as well as a smaller amount of time of the more classical Bond film Goldfinger. Our guest this time is David Danby.


Coming Soon:
Carol
Legend
The Good Dinosaur

Spectre (**1/2)

SPECTRE
Directed by Sam Mendes

**1/2

The James Bond franchise is one that I'm not totally familiar with, I will openly admit. Spectre clocks in as the fifth Bond film I've seen overall, along with Goldfinger, Goldeneye, Die Another Day and last year's Skyfall. The allure of the Daniel Craig Bond is very easy for me to comprehend. Most of the Bonds we know are unflappable, but Craig seems to be giving this infamous secret agent some inner torment. He's too good an actor to give off the kind of laissez faire that Connery gave off so effortlessly; Craig has to give us something. Under the direction of former-art-house-filmmaker-turned-commercial-director-for-hire Sam Mendes, James Bond has some reluctance, and doesn't tip-toe his way across the tightrope of being a 00 agent so elegantly. Spectre felt less compelling to me than Skyfall. Most of it has to do with their villains. Where Javier Bardem was at his sadistic best in Skyfall, there's an element to Christoph Waltz here - he plays Blofeld, a terrorist leader who holds a devilish partnership with a surveillance squad planning to make British espionage irrelevant - that feels a bit undercooked. The character is too hackneyed to really stand-out and the actor is simply doing Christoph Waltz karaoke at this point - I've seen him look much more interested, let's just say that. But the action set pieces are truly impressive here. There's one sequence in a helicopter and another on a train, both show that the Craig-Mendes partnership is one that can make highly entertaining thrillers, if not particularly substantial ones. Lea Seydoux plays Madeleine Swann, the daughter of a former assassin who Bond must fight to protect once that father dies. Seydoux is one of the sexiest women on the planet, and a talented actress to boot - if she didn't have that French accent, she would be a movie star. Ralph Fiennes reprises his role from Skyfall, but like Craig and Seydoux, the script doesn't really provide anything for this collection of talent to do. This is a romp, it has all the classic lines you want to hear, and a nice tip of the hat to the classic Bond movie formula (a bad guy explaining his plan too soon?!). It should make it's base audience happy, but I found myself having a bit of fun as well.

Brooklyn (***)

BROOKLYN
Directed by John Crowley

***

The sincerity of a movie like Brooklyn is something to behold. It takes place in world that's inherently cinematic, with a hard-felt belief in lasting romantic love and the unbreakable bond of family. It's utter sweetness never becomes overbearing because it has a very sensible consideration of its characters, most importantly its main character, Eilis Lacey, a young Irish girl who's given the opportunity to travel to America. Eilis is played by Saoirse Ronan, a formerly precocious child actress who has morphed into a truly talented performer. She was already an Oscar nominee when she was thirteen years old, with a devilish, surprisingly nuanced performance in Atonement, where she played a malevolent child bent on ruining a passionate affair. Brooklyn is a coming-of-age tale, a story about a young woman learning about herself, while also learning about the true capabilities of love and adulthood. The screenplay is written by Nick Hornby, a novelist who's made a nice side-business for himself adapting popular literary works for the big screen. Interestingly enough, his last three scripts have all been female-focused, and all three have a good understanding of the way class and culture color the female experience. It's a bit ironic that the guy who made his name writing Fever Pitch and High Fidelity would then turn to the movies and become so adept at crafting such strong female characters. Yet, here we are, and Brooklyn is another in that tradition.

Spotlight (****)

SPOTLIGHT
Directed by Tom McCarthy

****

A movie like Spotlight almost feels like a miracle. To find screenwriting so precise, an ensemble performance so sharp, in an understated film made for adults is truly rare. Films like this do indeed have an audience, even if it's a small one. It's procedural tone - it's a film about journalism that for the most part takes that journalistic temperament - does not quench what is an obvious, binding tension. In a lot of ways, this film is the inverse of Truth, another film about journalism that came out just last month. That film contained a strong emotional component, it felt the need to shout out about an institution that had been wronged (it also had an Earth-shattering performance from Cate Blanchett). For all it's grandstanding, Truth was essentially about how Dan Rather and an award-winning news team got the story wrong. Spotlight is about reporters getting the story right. At the turn of the new millennium, there were few stories bigger than the one that the Boston Globe unearthed about the Catholic Church's seemingly pathological sexual abuse of young children. Tom McCarthy's film tracks the Globe's crack investigative team, known famously as 'Spotlight', as they delve into the controversy, meticulously carving out each detail, making sure the story is solid before exposing it to the world. In an America so recently exposed to 9/11, emotions are raw, unprepared for even more trauma. Spotlight is an exceptional film that understands the reporter's responsibility to the public, that never underestimates the exhaustive effort it takes to nail the story down correctly.

Podcast: Is 'Crimson Peak' Better Than 'Jurassic Park'?

Hello all,
In a new wrinkle, click here for the first episode of my new podcast called 'Is It Better Than Jurassic Park?'. In our first episode, me and my co-host Scott discuss Crimson Peak along with our fellow friend and moviegoer, Caroline. Stay tuned for further episodes from me and Scott, discussing both new releases and old classics. Enjoy!

Suffragette (**)

SUFFRAGETTE
Directed by Sarah Gavron

**

Suffragette is a purposefully-directed film with good intentions. It gets a performance out of Carey Mulligan that proves that she is one of the best young actors working right now. In a time where the reproductive rights of women are still being decided by a mostly-male government, its story - of a rebellious group of working class women fighting for the right to vote in late 19th Century London - is still palpably topical. And yet, the film feels entirely too low stakes, even it's most emotionally-charged scenes feel telegraphed to the audience. It seems to lack nuance. When well-meaning mother and wife Maud Watts (Mulligan) sees firsthand the effect of the Suffrage movement, she decides to join a local group of women called the Suffragettes, performing acts of civil disobedience, stirring the pot under the guidance of their leader, Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep, in a glorified cameo). This group includes Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham-Carter), a local doctor with a strong loyalty to Pankhurst, Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff), a rabble-rousing launderette in an abusive marriage, and Emily Davison (Natalie Press) a soft-spoken protestor with a lot more in store than it may initially seem. They face the violent punishment from the police, as well as an Irish detective named Steed (a solid Brendan Gleeson) brought in especially to squash the movement. Despite constant arrests and police beatings, as well as the alienation of their husbands, the Suffragettes continue to blow up postal boxes and throw rocks through store windows, sure to be heard. Aside from Parkhurst, the Suffragettes here are all fictional, and perhaps that explains why the film lacks an emotional weight. Despite the solid work Mulligan does here, Suffragette doesn't feel like the kind of watershed film that it thinks it is. Director Sarah Gavron shoots with a lot of handheld, meant to give the story an immediacy, but it too often distracts. Some of the scenes are strong, almost all of them are lead by the performances, but this film feels flat, more steadfast than effective.

Truth (**1/2)

TRUTH
Written for the Screen and Directed by James Vanderbilt

**1/2

Truth is based on the memoir of Mary Mapes, the CBS news reporter and 60 Minutes producer fired after the Dan Rather scandal. Whatever objectivity James Vanderbilt reflects upon Mapes and her journalistic integrity, Vanderbilt does not hold himself to the same standard of objectivity - the film is completely and unapologetically sympathetic with the disgraced newswoman. Even to the extent that the film admits Mapes made mistakes when she ran with a story disputing then President George W. Bush's military record, it does so while stating that any and all groundbreaking reporting is done with a degree of faith - you can never be 100% sure, you just have to trust your sources. Furthermore, Vanderbilt's film makes Mapes a psychological construct, a character pieced together by a stiff upper lip and daddy issues. She's not great at her job because of her skill, but because she had to fight, and because Dan Rather was there to be the father she deserved. Luckily, Truth cast Cate Blanchett in the role of Mapes, and I'll be damned if she doesn't perform the hell out of this role. The Australian actress is approaching peerlessness, performing at such a high level here, with such pinpoint certainty, such perfect delivery, it's hard to imagine anyone else being able to take this material and churning out this level of work. Truth has a very moral, humanistic view on the network news, and it sees the Dan Rather scandal as the moment everything turned against them, but it's best moments come when we're allowed to see Blanchett smolder along, fraying with growing frequency as the noose tightens around Mapes' neck.

Crimson Peak (**)

CRIMSON PEAK

Directed by Guillermo del Toro

**

Guillermo del Toro sure knows how to make a movie look good. The main set of Crimson Peak is a crumbling mansion in rural England built upon a vast landscape seeping with red clay. It's seeping so much that the decrepit building is actually sinking into it. The inside of the place is creaky, a lot of pipes rusted black, a hole in the ceiling where snow falls neatly in a pristine pile in the middle of the entrance floor. The whole scene is delectable - it's meant to come off as unsettling, it instead seems sugary and enticing. Del Toro can't help but make it pretty, but this film doesn't match the frivolity of Pacific Rim and Hellboy, it's story is more tender. The Mexican director often deals with stories so brutal and grotesque, and tends to excel within grand set pieces and wondrous costumes. Pan's Labyrinth is his masterpiece, a film that so perfectly translates his career long obsession with blending the blessed fantasy of imagination with the true horrors of real life. Crimson Peak, is about the same thing, but it is also rooted in the gothic romances of the nineteenth century, filled with monsters both human and inhuman. Sticking this in theaters a few weeks before Halloween seems like an obvious choice, until you realize that del Toro's creepy thrills are not the cheap kind that comes with most horror films these days. His taste is bloody, malicious and the philosophies of his scripts are untrusting of the human spirit. Watching this film feels almost autobiographical, because what other conclusions can one draw about humanity when you see what the characters of Crimson Peak are capable of?

Room (****)

ROOM
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson

****

When Room surprised many by winning the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival - besting what many saw as the easy favorite, Tom McCarthy's Spotlight - it was confirmed that it was more than just your garden variety best-seller adaptation. The film is based on a novel by Emma Donoghue, and she also wrote the screenplay. There was a time when novelists were usually considered the worst candidates to adapt their own work, but after Stephen Chbosky's film take on his Perks of Being a Wallflower in 2012, last year's Gone Girl and now this year's Room, that line of thinking should change. Donoghue's script and Lenny Abrahamson's direction of it is an emotionally devastating experience, a tale of the fragility of the human spirit. At times glaring, and at other times sweet, the film watches over a vast landscape of human experience and serves it all to you within a deceptively simple tale of tragedy and survival. The film is led by a couple of powerhouse performances, one from Brie Larson and the other from the fresh-faced Jacob Tremblay, a nine-year-old who's playing even younger. Their mother-son relationship is the crux of the film's narrative, and the key to what makes Room work so well. Their performances are phenomenal, and set the stage for what Donoghue and Abrahamson are bringing to the table: a shattering maternal tale about grasping for salvation in a desperate situation.

Bridge of Spies (**1/2)

BRIDGE OF SPIES
Directed by Steven Spielberg

**1/2

Steven Spielberg has been living in the past for quite a while now. Not since War of the Worlds has he made a film taking place in something resembling contemporary times, and in that film he destroyed the world. Of course, both Munich in 2005 and his previous film, Lincoln in 2012, were pieces of historical narrative drenched in metaphor for the issues of the present. Munich could have been decoded as a strong criticism of the US's occupation of Iraq, and Lincoln simply IS a salute to Obama America, even if Spielberg continues to insist that it isn't so. His Bridge of Spies is a strong piece of filmmaking, a testament to just how good a director Spielberg can be, despite how intriguing or not intriguing his story is. Of course, this story is intriguing, an in-depth drama exploring the most talked about American war that never happened. The Cold War was a decades-long staredown consisting of paranoia seeping from both sides, as two world powers used not-so-veiled threats of complete world destruction to see who would blink first. It birthed so many agencies and counter-agencies, and yet, the movies have never seemed to have much interest in dramatizing it. The way Spielberg goes about it here is interesting, he doesn't see himself as duty-bound to do everything he can to paint America as the benevolent protector, nor does he coyly play the Soviets as sadistic monsters. Instead, he's neutral, the film itself is procedural. If Joe McCarthy had seen this screenplay during his reign of power who knows what he would have made of it.