Category: Reviews

Slow West

A Scottish boy teams with a bounty hunter to track down his love in the Old West.

SlowWestPosterLying on the ground in the Old West, a naïve boy and a grizzled bounty hunter look up to the moon and constellations in the night sky. The boy cocks his fingers into a gun and shoots holes in the heavens, and the bounty hunter says that when we finally get to the moon, the first thing we’re likely to do is kill all the natives that live there. Even space is a reflection of their bleak reality.

John Maclean’s “Slow West” is a Western as a fairy tale, an often unusual and quirky independent film with more than a few stylized, surprising moments like those above that buck the conventions of the genre. “Slow West” starts as a coming of age story of overcoming naïveté and insecurities, and it at least seems less interested in the violent, bloody resolution where it inevitably ends up. Maclean’s film tries to be economical and subtle in its storytelling but often feels light on strong narrative if not outright contrived.

Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a young Scottish man come to America to reunite with the love of his life, Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius). Lost in the wilderness and in danger, he teams up with a bounty hunter named Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) to get him to his destination in one piece. Except Silas is using Jay to reach Rose first, who has a hefty Dead or Alive bounty on her head, a fact unbeknownst to Jay. Jay is also oblivious to how little Rose actually cares for him. We see in a flashback in Scotland that she thinks of him as “like the little brother I never had” rather than Jay’s true love. When Silas comes to the realization, “You haven’t bedded her yet,” it’s clear just how fruitless Jay’s journey is.

Maclean (who also wrote the screenplay) fills in the gaps of Jay and Silas’s motivation through some clunky voice-over narration. It’d rather tell us that Silas is the ruthless, loner type than actually show us, and surprisingly rarely does Fassbender get to actually perform the stunts and acts of gunslinger heroics that would prove to us just how dangerous he’s supposed to be. Silas even gets sidelined during the film’s unnecessarily bloody ending and even cheesier coda, and his change of heart to protect Jay and his interests comes from nowhere.

It’s the more modest, artistic moments that help “Slow West” stand out as a potential indie darling. In one scene, Jay separates from Silas and happens across an amicable German writer making camp in the middle of an open, desolate swath of desert. The still image cinematography has some otherworldly beauty, and Maclean reaches for more profound ideas of “dreams and toil” that defined the Old West philosophy. In another, Silas and Jay admire a skeleton of a man crushed by a tree he was chopping down. “Natural selection,” Silas crows.

“Slow West” is weirdly stylish and thoughtful in these isolated moments, but they hardly feel baked into a complete whole. It’s a fairy tale without much of an ending.

2 ½ stars

45 Years

Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay star as a married couple in Andrew Haigh’s drama.

45YearsPoster“They found her body…I know I told you about my Katia.” That little word “my” effectively seals the fate of the marriage of Kate and Geoff Mercer in Andrew Haigh’s film “45 Years.”

One week before their 45th wedding anniversary, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) receives a letter informing him that the body of his girlfriend from 50 years earlier has been found, frozen in a glacier in Switzerland after being lost in a hiking accident. Kate (Charlotte Rampling) knows her husband all too well and can sense how this news has instantly made him peculiar and nostalgic.

“45 Years” dredges up the past to show how even a loving, married couple that isn’t complacent, even after so long, can still be unsettled. It’s an endearing, highly realistic story complete with top-notch veteran performances and the same intimate pillow talk and sophisticated human dynamics found in Haigh’s last film “Weekend” (he’s also the director of the short-lived HBO drama “Looking”).

“She’d look like she did in 1962, and I look like this,” Geoff says. The thought alone is enough to signal all the angles “45 Years” can take and how conflicted he must feel. Kate is supportive but grows increasingly irritable at his subtle hints that he’s still longing for her, be it checking out a book on climate change or a late night trip to the attic to find an old picture. When Geoff shares with Kate his memory of the day of her disappearance, Haigh’s screenplay (adapted from a short story called “In Another Country” by David Constantine) becomes elegant and achingly heart wrenching. Geoff describes hearing her scream as an “outpouring of air from her lungs, a low guttural sound not like her voice.”

It’s beautiful, and Courtenay plays Geoff as lightly absent minded at times. He seems to piece his sentences together carefully as he goes along, not quite muttering but not quite in the moment. He’s lost in his memory for Katia, and Kate, who Rampling plays with far more calm authority and dignity, is desperate to bring him back to their present.

Easily Rampling’s finest moment comes when, tucked away in their attic, she looks at old slides of her husband’s former love. As she clicks through, the light flickering on her face, Rampling keeps her composure and hunched posture but reveals her eyes just barely drooping in crestfallen defeat. Her performance hits tragically emotional and personal notes, but is never broad and never pitiful. “45 Years” does away with melodrama fore a more modest, even light story that doesn’t let the burden of their marital conflict weigh their chemistry or the film itself down.

Haigh keeps his distance, setting “45 Years” in Britain’s quiet, pastoral countryside and, particularly in the film’s contemplative final shot, at length to show that what lies ahead for this couple is still uncertain. “Funny how you forget the things in life that make you happy,” Kate says in passing. That’s “45 Years” in a nutshell, in which we know what makes this couple happy, loving and enduring, but we’re unsure if at this age they’ll still remember.

3 ½ stars

The Witch

A 17th Century colonial family fights off curses from the devil.

TheWitchPosterIn “The Witch,” the latest in a hot streak of indie horror films, the devil is only half of this family’s problems.

William (Ralph Ineson), his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and his five children are banished from their home on a 1630s New England colony and settle a farm outside an ominous forest. Their oldest daughter, the teenage Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) has just prayed for mercy from God, saying she has broken all Ten Commandments “in thought” and that she knows she deserves “more hellfire” in her life but begs forgiveness. After her prayer, she plays peekaboo with her baby brother Samuel, only for him to vanish when she closes her eyes.

The baby is lost to “the wood,” and Eggers hints at its horrific fate without explicitly showing the act: mutilated, churned to a bloody pulp and covered over a writhing, decrepit woman’s naked body. Eggers illustrates each monstrous deed throughout the film often through a quick percussive beat and cut to black. It’s light on genuine scares and completely without traditional horror jump thrills, but “The Witch” has a sickly, unsettling aura to everything this family must endure. It’s the story of how a pious family is torn apart through tragedy and mistrust.

The film invokes thundering religious overtones time and again as this Puritanical family speaks only of their lord and little else. Ineson himself has the gravely, rumbling voice of God and dresses to resemble Jesus Christ. And yet there is no God in this world, only evil. Everything is washed of color and light, and much of the film illuminates its brown interiors only through candlelight. “The Witch” is a bleak, never showy nightmare made only more disturbing in how it’s a story of witches and demons but relies only on dark realism to create its scares.

Not unlike “The Babadook,” “The Witch” heightens the family melodrama above the fantastical horror. The family’s middle son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) starts to notice his older sister’s burgeoning womanhood, the two toddler twins are adorable little terrors who perpetuate rumors that Thomasin is a witch, William tells a small white lie to his wife after the disappearance of a family heirloom, and Katherine slowly grows to loathe her daughter and seems to blame her for baby Samuel’s loss.

All of this mistrust mounts as the curse upon the family takes hold in small and large ways, and Eggers’s strength lies in walking the line between who are the real devils and sinners of the film, and how even the most righteous can turn to evil. At the same time, the abstract, slow burn horror could be in need of some more startling moments, and with the glut of Old English period dialogue, “The Witch” gets awfully talky.

But with gross out horror and cheap found footage pics the norm in the mainstream, “The Witch” is proof that we deserve more hellfire.

3 stars

Hail, Caesar!

hail-caesar-posterThe Coen brothers’ “Hail, Caesar!” acts as a sizzle reel for all the classic Hollywood film genres the pair could’ve honored and lampooned throughout their career but never got the chance. It shows how the Coens might do a sword and sandal epic, a lush costume melodrama or even a Gene Kelly musical. But “Hail, Caesar!” is a movie about the future, a post-modern mish-mash of genres and styles that hints at where history will take cinema as much as it is a throwback. The Coens are having a lot of goofy fun but still manage a surreal, captivating art picture on par with many of their classics.

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) was a real VP and “fixer” in Hollywood up through the ‘50s, but here he’s an executive with the fictional Capitol Pictures, the same studio that employed Barton Fink. His job requires wrangling stars and getting films completed, and he’s the through line connecting all of “Hail, Caesar!’s” disjointed cinematic set pieces that traverse genres. Set during the 1950s, Capitol’s major prestige picture, also called “Hail, Caesar!,” is a story of Christ featuring the massive Hollywood star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney, playing a doofus as he so often does in Coen films). A pair of extras drug Whitlock on set, abduct him to a meeting of Hollywood Communists, and demand $100,000 in ransom.

Meanwhile, Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich, delivering a breakout performance) is a burgeoning Western star reassigned to a fancy production called “Merrily, We Dance.” He can’t really act to save his life, and he doesn’t gel with the loquacious, British thespian of a director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes channeling Vincente Minnelli). It’s Doyle who becomes “Hail, Caesar!’s” unlikely hero instrumental in locating Baird.

“Odd” does not quite capture how perfectly weird “Hail, Caesar!” actually plays. No scene or gag feels cut from the same cloth. The Coens will stage an opulent aquatic ballet in the spirit of an Esther Williams/Busby Berkeley routine starring Scarlett Johansson as a mermaid starlet, with the kaleidoscopic colors and aerial shots at times recalling “The Big Lebowski’s” dream sequence, only to abruptly cut away and become a shadowy noir.

Even the Coens humor ranges from absurd to deadpan to modest to rapid-fire wordplay. There’s Tilda Swinton channeling Old Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper as not one, but two twin sisters, never on screen at the same time and each one-upping the other in terms of their readership. There’s the cleverly circular dialogue between a group of religious experts debating whether “Hail, Caesar!” will pass censors. And of course there’s Channing Tatum, who explicitly reminds everyone why he’s the contemporary Gene Kelly, donning a navy sailor suit and charming the hell out of the audience with a showy tap dance number.

Ehrenreich as Hobie Doyle is the real surprise, a baby faced dolt with a stoic, stilted demeanor. In one shot he performs a lasso routine just to pass the time, and his eyes barely emote a thing in a way that makes his act hilariously Buster Keaton-esque. And in a verbal showdown with his director Laurence Laurentz, a simple line reading, “Would that it were so simple,” becomes the film’s unusually outrageous centerpiece.

What do the Coens have to say with all this madness? If the set pieces seem cold, or if the individual sequences feel disconnected from the rest of the film, it’s the act of showing the movie’s seams that stand out. Between flashy wipe cuts and gorgeously artificial backlot sets, the color and visual design of “Hail, Caesar!” leap out at you. We recognize Hollywood as the beautiful forgery that it was, and we can appreciate the Coens’ tribute to the era in how they call attention to everything it stood for.

Hollywood was all of these things in its Golden Age, and in the subtext are Mannix’s internal malaise, the arrival of the H-bomb at Bikini Atoll, and the coming drama of the Blacklist. “Hail, Caesar!” does this period better than “Trumbo.” But it invokes the arrival of the near future, how genres would be blended and how the world would become less clear. “Hail, Caesar!” is a lot of movies rolled into one, but it captures the spirit of an era in a way very few films have.

3 ½ stars

A War

AWarPoster“A War,” the Danish film nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Oscar, is the rare war film to consider a soldier’s practical war as well as a moral one. It’s not just about coping with life after war, but about how a soldier faces hard decisions and consequences upon returning home.

Claus (Pilou Asbæk) is a commanding officer leading patrols of local villages in Afghanistan. A 21-year-old under his command dies from an IED and his platoon begins to question why they’re risking their lives. Claus’s message is a humanitarian one of needing to protect the local communities, and already this war film has a different feel from the flag-waving American actioners.

It’s all slow burn suspense until on one campaign Claus and his squad is pinned down by enemy fire in a chaotic battle in which we never actually see the attackers. Claus orders an air strike and saves the life of one of his men. The heroics are handled modestly, with the wounded warrior via a remote satellite feed communicating his gratitude through an amusing series of paper signs. But awaiting Claus is an accusation that he bombed a region without having visual confirmation of the enemy’s presence, ultimately killing civilians as a result.

The chaos of that scene actually serves a narrative purpose. The back half of “A War” becomes a courtroom drama in which Claus faces charges that all hinge on what exactly happened. Director and screenwriter Tobias Lindholm poses a practical dilemma in which a good man who made a tough decision in the heat of the moment, choosing one life over the lives of innocents, now has to face the consequences at the hand of the country he serves.

Lindholm previously wrote and directed the equally modest drama “A Hijacking”(also starring Asbæk), a film that, like “A War,” concerns a man trapped in a practical dilemma imposed by a broader institution, not just an internal moral conflict. But “A Hijacking” made villains out of the larger institutions and had plenty to say about human nature on a broader scope. “A War” is heavy courtroom drama but doesn’t raise as many questions about the purpose of such a military campaign or the nature of the law. We only fear Claus’ unfortunate fate, in which if he served jail time, he would have to leave his wife Maria (Tuva Novotny) and three children.

“A War” also struggles to find its footing and energy until it returns to the home front in its second hour. Part of that hinges on how Lindholm constructs melodrama. Time and again Claus’s moral decisions boil down to the lives of children. One terrorist uses a local boy as a human shield against sniper fire. Another Afghani father pleads with Claus to allow his children to stay protected on the military base. And Maria, who receives surprisingly ample screen time, is on the brink of being overwhelmed with their kids. If Claus gets convicted, the kids are at risk yet again. It’s carefully calculated to make Claus appear to be a good man, but it’s drama centered more around easy plot devices rather than complex character growth.

But American and foreign war films never even begin to tackle the institutional issues Lindholm’s “A War” does even superficially. It’s at war with the idea of what a war film can be.

3 stars

The Finest Hours

The_Finest_Hours_posterThe members of the Coast Guard don’t get the credit that cops, firefighters or soldiers do for saving lives. “The Finest Hours,” Disney’s telling of an historic rescue mission, is full of heroics but also people just doing their job. It’s a sentimental, old-fashioned thriller but is also endearingly modest.

Chris Pine is known for playing the hot-shot, loose cannon Captain Kirk in the “Star Trek” movies, but here he’s Bernie Webber, stationed on the coast of Cape Cod in the winter of 1952. Webber is timid, sheepish, apologetic and looking to please. In front of his bride-to-be Miriam (Holliday Grainger) he practically melts. Miriam is everything he’s not: confident, forward and even willing to ask him to get married.

Webber isn’t the only timid one. A few miles out to sea Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) is aboard a sinking tanker caught in a violent storm. In a remarkable shot, a seaman stops short on a broken bridge to discover that the entire ship has split apart with the front half suddenly barreling toward him before plunging into the ocean. Sybert knows the boat up and down, but no one quite likes his introverted demeanor or appreciates him tucked away in the engine room. When we see him nervously explaining their situation to a reluctant crew looking to abandon ship, Affleck plays Sybert hunched between bodies, quietly and calmly stating his plan as he peels open a hard boiled egg. Both Pine and Affleck are uncharacteristically understated and are the heart of the movie’s sentimental charms.

The twist involves a second tanker that has also split in two and has dividing the Cape Cod crew, leaving Webber, his inexperienced team and a tiny, 36-foot motorboat the only chance for Sybert and the remaining sailors biding their time.

Will the Coast Guard save the day? Take a wild guess. “The Finest Hours” remains bloodless and predictable, even contrived as Miriam forces her way into the office of Webber’s commanding officer (Eric Bana) or when one of the trapped sailors (John Magaro) pettily challenges Sybert’s manhood. But the film is not without danger or suspense. The waves keep getting bigger, the sea grows darker, and the stakes more impossible as time runs out.

Director Craig Gillespie (“Million Dollar Arm,” “Lars and the Real Girl”) has the finest special effects available to him, whether in its impressive set design, some stunts that take the Coast Guard’s small boat inside the curl of a wave, or in its flashy digital, 3D cinematography that swoops from the ship’s deck to its hull in a single unbroken take. And everything has a wintery color palette that makes the film look decidedly classical.

It’s no surprise Disney made a movie in which the heroes are transformed into underdogs who have to overcome their insecurities and fears. More surprisingly, “The Finest Hours” feels muted in its storytelling and its heroics. These characters are the humble second-string guys just doing their job rather than the first responders. And the film remains epic despite being a rescue mission for just 30 people instead of 30 million.

For telling a good story well, give the Coast Guard and “The Finest Hours” some much deserved and long overdue credit.

3 stars

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

13HoursPosterMichael Bay’s “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” is the perfect storm of stereotypes, fear mongering and questionable politics in an overly stylized, testosterone-fueled, action thrill ride. Give Bay a little credit: hand him a real world war story that has become the subject of heated conspiracy theories and he’ll still find a way to pack it with explosions, unseemly blue lens flares and canted angles designed to make his beefed up soldiers look like Transformers.

Despite being called “13 Hours,” Bay’s film takes place in the few days prior to the September 11, 2012 attack on an American consulate in Libya. He follows six ex-Marines and Navy SEALs considered a secret security team stationed on a compound near the American ambassador’s consulate and how they took up the fight in the 13 hours of the attack.

All six soldiers are “alphas,” hulking bros who constantly flaunt their ego and all have incredible facial hair. We see them hauling monster truck tires with their shirts off or, despite being undercover, just looking boss in aviator sunglasses. One even has a tattoo of an open scar that shows he “bleeds” red, white and blue. Everyone who’s not an “alpha” just gets in the way, whether it’s their uptight, pencil pushing commanding officer, the windbag political diplomat or the CIA field agents with other priorities. They call them “tools” and “cockbags.” They tell one woman they need her eyes and ears, not her mouth. And they brag about “chubbing” one officer’s clothes, also known as rubbing their dicks on everything.

This first hour of flexing lays the groundwork for 90 minutes straight of chaotic firefights and explosions. The camera movement is violent and turbulent, the editing is frenetic, the action is impossible to track, and Bay still finds room for quippy jokes and tough guy clichés.

For a war movie, Clint Eastwood was able to deliver more visceral and coherent action in “American Sniper.” But “13 Hours” isn’t anything we haven’t already seen from Bay, if not a retread of visual motifs across all his films. He remains obsessed with slow-motion explosions and shooting domineering low angles that gives everything badass proportions. Even the quieter moments are filled with chatter and the camera unable to hold focus on just one thing at a time. Bay has no interest in simmering tension, only action.

This is all harmless fun in a mindless “Transformers” movie, but in a film about Benghazi, Bay’s apolitical treatment of the material teeters from indifferent to irresponsible. “13 Hours” doesn’t concern itself with conspiracy theories, but little Easter eggs are scattered throughout, like a vague memo suggesting there could be an attack, or one agent commenting, “Does it seem like everybody knows what’s going on here but us?” They play like after thought teasers for a more sinister government cover-up.

Movies have long gotten away with making Nazis and zombies plausible villains in whatever situation you stick them in, but Bay may have finally elevated another figure into that canon: shifty-eyed terrorists. “American Sniper” didn’t score any points with the Muslim community, but although Bay has some Arabs playing for the home team, he’s far worse in suggesting that “it’s impossible to tell the good guys from the bad.” And don’t forget the shot of terrorists blasting AK-47 bullet holes into an American flag!

The incredible body count the six soldiers amass is mostly bloodless, but once an American goes down Bay holds nothing back. He can truly milk a death for all its worth, and in the same way that “American Sniper” brought out the military colors in its closing moments, “13 Hours” to its credit drops the machismo and manages a gut-wrenching finale.

But Bay isn’t fooling anyone that he’s really more interested in explosions than anything. There’s no conspiracy here.

1 ½ stars

The Hateful Eight

Quentin Tarantino’s 8th film is an overwritten slog.

HatefulEightPosterQuentin Tarantino, a truly favorite director of mine, can be called a lot of unsavory adjectives, but I never thought “boring” could be one of them.

“The Hateful Eight,” his eighth film as he proudly boasts, is an overwritten slog. At three hours and filmed in 70mm Panavision, Tarantino has the audacity to take those cinematic tools reserved for epics and apply them to a cozy, claustrophobic character drama set in a cabin in the woods. Tarantino bottles all his despicable characters and ideas about race and gender into a room and takes forever for them to explode, then even longer to clean up his mess.

The film involves bounty hunter John “Hangman” Ruth’s intentions to collect $10,000 reward by bringing in Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) alive, a principle of his to personally see all his victims hang. Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) is a former black officer in the Union Army and now full-time bounty hunter who still enjoys killing white boys who would rather see him dead. Warren hitches a ride with Ruth and former marauder, now Sherriff, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) to a haberdashery where they’ll wait out a blizzard.

This set up consumes the film’s first of three hours, a drawn out procession of formalities and mistrust in on the nose period dialogue. It’s theatrical play-acting, and Tarantino still confines all their conversation to the two walls of a cramped stagecoach. Tarantino leaves very little to subtext, with Warren, Ruth and Mannix each speaking detailed personal histories despite how much they seem to know about each other already. This is conversation for the audience, a way for Tarantino to show these allies are still at odds with one another, Mannix just a little racist and Ruth very much on edge. The mystery is Domergue, who spends the stagecoach ride with a black eye and a streak of blood down her cheek from Ruth’s blow to the head. She’s a monster, not a lady, we’re told. How much of her abuse can we endure? Tarantino is goading us, and the movie has barely started.

Waiting for them are four other travelers, each an Old West stereotype more likely drawn from cinema than from reality, as is Tarantino’s penchant. Tim Roth plays Oswaldo Mobray, complete with a thick and eloquent British accent that suggests Christoph Waltz could’ve been in mind for the part, as could’ve “Unforgiven’s” English Bob. Demian Bichir as the Mexican keeper of the haberdashery is Bob, easily a surrogate of Eli Wallach in “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Bruce Dern is a grizzled and apathetic Confederate General made enraged by Warren’s taunting. And Michael Madsen is the reserved, anonymous cowboy Joe Gage, just off to visit his mother. Of course Tarantino takes the time to have Ruth and Warren reintroduce themselves to all four individually.

No one can be trusted, and Ruth warns that one or some of the remaining four could be in cahoots with Domergue. But to what degree are we invested in seeing whether this woman gets to the rope or not? We have more doubt as to whether they are innocent rather than whether they are guilty. It’s just a matter of how long Tarantino takes to arrive there, and how much we choose to tolerate along the journey. His cards are all on the table.

Or maybe not. Tarantino back tracks in a clunky, narrated aside to fill in the gaps that we didn’t see, rather than allow those twists to emerge through character or dialogue. It’s too contrived to not be exactly as Tarantino intended. We’re made to realize that this genre setting, this overly theatrical dramatizing, this will they/won’t they scenario is in service of how much he can get away with and how hateful he can make his eighth film.

Violence here serves as an exclamation point and punch line rather than a consequence or for stylish entertainment value. The Ennio Morricone score is fascinating, operatic and lovely but staged over extended sequences of Ruth’s driver walking out into the cold to use the bathroom. The N-word rankled some feathers when Tarantino used it as coloring in “Django Unchained,” but here it seems notably superfluous. And there’s not much more to be said for measured storytelling nuance when your characters start projectile vomiting blood onto a woman’s face.

“The Hateful Eight” isn’t just hateful, it’s depressing and a drag. Tarantino has used his time to say everything despicable and nothing in particular.

1 star

Creed

Ryan Coogler directs this Rocky sequel about Apollo Creed’s son.

creed-finalposter“Rocky” is one of the finest examples of Americana ever put onto film, and “Raging Bull” is among the absolute best movies of all time. But outside of those two obvious choices, the most memorable boxing movies are the ones that go beyond just being a boxing movie. “The Fighter” plays with genre conventions by invoking family dynamics and a drug addicted brother who is more interesting than the protagonist. “Million Dollar Baby’s” final fight isn’t in a ring at all.

It’s easy to see why Ryan Coogler’s “Creed” is so rousing, and beyond swapping “Rocky’s” racial roles, it even plays with ideas of legacy and living in someone’s shadow, with Coogler (“Fruitvale Station”) smartly drawing from previous “Rocky” sequels in order to make something more meaningful and modern.

But “Creed” is still a boxing movie. A very good one, but it still has a big final showdown with an unbeatable opponent, an ego-driven, yet talented underdog of a fighter working his way up from the working class, and not to mention a training montage. How many different ways can you shoot the speed bag being pummeled and carefully worked over, or the jumping ropes moving faster and faster until they’re hurled to the ground?

Coogler from the film’s first moments frames Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) as something of a God, as is fitting with his name. His physique is hulking and hunched over in our first glimpses of him. But the strength of “Creed” lies in how Adonis has to grapple with that persona. Apollo Creed’s widow adopts him at a young age and Adonis works to hide his silver spoon upbringing; he wants to succeed not because he’s Apollo’s son or because his wealth was handed to him.

Coogler’s message is to embrace legacy while still carving one of your own. “Use the name; it’s yours,” Adonis’s girlfriend says, before he’s gifted with a pair of American flag boxing shorts that read CREED on one side and JOHNSON on the other.

Coogler also plays with cinematography in interesting ways to reimagine how a “Rocky” sequel can look. Rather than striving to reach the top of some steps, Coogler slows down time around Adonis in a ravishing look at the Americana of the urban streets, with ATVs rocketing around a sweating, menacing Adonis. There’s also a mid-movie fight that steals the show from the finale in that it’s accomplished in a single take over two rounds and several minutes. Rocky’s own personal struggles overwhelm whether we care about the final fight’s ultimate outcome, but at the very least it aims to put a pin in the idea of more “Rocky” movies.

Jordan as an actor seems extremely confident in his own skin, aware of his body and using it to get at Adonis’s brashness and ego. Like Jake Gyllenhaal in “Southpaw,” the physical transformation is not just a practical feature of the character Jordan is portraying but very much a part of Adonis’s energy. As for Stallone, the appeal of his performance is that he’s aged into the gruff, seasoned veteran role full of wisdom and discreet fatherly affection, but he’s retained Rock’s dopey charm. Whether his still garbled Philly accent is Oscar worthy is up for debate.

3 stars

Son of Saul

son_of_saul_posterThe foreign drama “Son of Saul” finds a way to give us yet another new look at the Holocaust, but its innovation is in finding the imminent danger in every moment of these prisoners’ lives. Director Laszlo Nemes shuttles us into the back of the head of Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig) and shows us things only in his immediate field of vision. There’s a palpable, hushed tension coursing through every scene, and yet it remains impossible to foresee the threat even seconds ahead.

Saul is a Sonderkommando, a Jewish prisoner of Hungarian descent forced by the Nazis to work in the Auschwitz crematoriums. In the film’s opening scene, hundreds of bodies strip naked, blurred to us as he quickly works in a haze. After the swarm of prisoners has been shuttled into the gas chamber, he immediately goes to work collecting clothes as though he’s done it a dozen times before. He’s then forced to clean the “pieces” from the killing floor and put “it” out of the way. A young boy survives the gas chamber and quickly gets snuffed out by the Nazi guard. But when the boy is delegated for an autopsy, Saul makes a deal with the doctor to give the boy a proper burial, believing the boy to be his son. “Son of Saul” follows him over two intense days as he works to find a rabbi who can bless the burial.

Saul’s determination and conviction is heart-wrenching in a movie where all the prisoners know they’re in constant danger and remain brash, defensive and only looking out for themselves. Saul however carries a defeated look on his furrowed brow, and the film tests his psychological resolve as he defies the odds and logic in order to complete this symbolic gesture. “You failed the living for the dead,” one prisoner says to him.

The film is violent and intense not strictly because of the setting but because the camera work, all done in a classical aspect ratio, is so volatile. The extended takes tethered closely to Saul’s back feel like what the gimmicky, yet virtuoso nature of “Birdman’s” cinematography could be. One scene stuns with a fiery backdrop that in the camera’s constant close-ups throws everything into intimate chaos, and the closing revolt scene is reminiscent of “Children of Men’s” warzone long take.

“Son of Saul” is a Holocaust movie unlike you’ve ever seen before, but that’s because it specifically plays with how closely you witness this horror.

4 stars