Category: Reviews

Straight Outta Compton

StraightOuttaComptonPosterName me another music biopic that opens with a battering ram. “Straight Outta Compton’s” incredible sense of location is so strongly of the streets and of the Compton neighborhood. It knows how crazy things can get, to the point where it needs to begin with the cops bringing an army to nail some black kids doing drugs. Director F. Gary Gray places the film not in the canon of other music biopics but in the league of a racially charged masterpiece like “Boyz n the Hood” or “Friday,” which Gray also directed starring N.W.A’s Ice Cube.

The music of N.W.A. and specifically the album “Straight Outta Compton” is so charged with personality and local identity that it would be a mistake if the movie didn’t also aim for that level of knowledge about the community in which it was brought up. These kids starting out making music show some real effort in a tough upbringing, and their attitude is to rap about that reality. “Speak a little truth and people lose their minds,” the film says, and we can see how immediately crazy things can get. The words matter more than the beats, and the movie doesn’t over intellectualize their music to the point of fawning over its brilliance. It just scares the shit out of people, leaving room for some truly insane rock star moments, like a massive hotel orgy culminating in N.W.A. pulling out their massive glocks at some intruders like it was nothing.

But on a biopic level, “Straight Outta Compton” is rare in how it manages an effective, yet comprehensive story. The film starts with N.W.A. cutting their first single and goes until Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and Easy-E (Jason Mitchell) had all gone their separate solo routes. With the Director’s Cut at nearly 3 hours, it takes its time fleshing out the story of all three characters individually, rather than trying to stuff subplots into the story of one. I imagine it’s how a Beatles biopic would have to be approached were anyone to ever take it on.

“Straight Outta Compton” even plays the biopic game of showy musical performances and celebrity cameos, but embedded within each of these more superfluous set pieces and attractions is a real sense of danger. The cops could be harassing the band or Suge Knight could be threatening to shoot a crewmember in the next room. Paul Giamatti is also officially the go-to guy as a sleazy, manipulative tour manager, having now played the part here, in “Rock of Ages” and “Love & Mercy.”

Music biopics are often concerned with history and personal legacy, but Gray makes “Straight Outta Compton” modern and urgent in its delivery of powerful melodrama, vital lyrics and hyper-relevant themes. This is a Movie With Attitude.

3 ½ stars

Amy

amy-posterWhen Amy Winehouse passed away, the cruel and obvious joke of people reciting, “They tried to make me go to rehab, and I said no, no, no” was repeated on end. She even fit into the superstition of The 27 Club, young artists like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain who all died far too early in their prime. These labels put her into easy boxes, and her music and her personality was never easy to classify.

Director Asif Kapadia’s documentary “Amy” highlights the personality and the intimacy in her life’s choices, not strictly the talent or the hardships or the musical quality. As in his breakthrough documentary “Senna,” Kapadia employs only archival material and no original footage or talking heads in a masterstroke of editing. The choices he makes speak to Winehouse’s character and charm and show hidden depths in her distinctive voice.

Early on Kapadia hints at Amy’s tortured quality with dusty and grainy home movies, the pixely digital footage showing the fragmented pieces in her life. As a teen Amy is goofy, spastic and pimply, and when she finally gets some media attention she stands out in her fashion, wearing big red hoop earrings, dark hair in a messy poof, a small piercing above her lip and flaunting her big bad British teeth. Winehouse is comparable to Adele in her torch singer, jazzy and bluesy quality, not to mention their bubbly personalities, but Winehouse is notably raspier and smokier in her vocal tenor, and her attitude is a combination of edgy and sincere. Rapper Mos Def talks in the film about how Winehouse could drink anyone under the table but that she was an absolute sweetheart all the same.

Winehouse says she didn’t know what depression was because she had an outlet in her music. During a recording session for “Back in Black” Winehouse’s vocals are isolated to eerie effect, the words “black…” trailing off into the vacuum. All these little emotional teases are handled with nuance and build to the heady climax of her passing. We learn that Winehouse could’ve gone to rehab and gotten professional help “before the world wanted a piece of her.” We learn she suffered from bulimia, despite how late night comedians would make light of it. And Kapadia holds empty close-ups of her pale eyes for a scarily long time.

“Amy” is at times a harrowing documentary, but a revealing portrait of a star. That song “Rehab” still taunts her as much as it is her calling card, but “Amy” does well to explain why she said “No, no, no.”

3 ½ stars

The Revenant

TheRevenantPosterGeorge Miller made a movie this year that is little but a chase scene, with themes of survival, revenge and a showcase for hyper violence and cinematic spectacle. The film has virtually no story, but the nature of its editing and its use of color, movement and staging made it an exhilarating experience, brutal and devastating but also cathartic and purely entertaining.

Alejandro G. Inarritu’s “The Revenant” is a similar revenge fantasy, stripped to its bones in all its animalistic nature and fury, but Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography blunts the impact. The Malick-esque way that Lubezki plays with the elements to create something spectral and naturalistic give “The Revenant” an overstated sense of importance, and watching it is hardly entertaining but dreary, disgusting and devoid of purpose.

Set in early frontier America, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a navigator part of a hunting party gathering pelts. Natives ambush the entire squadron and reduce the team from 45 people to just 10. The scene is ravishing, but immediately numbing. Arrows fly in and impale the Americans from beyond the frame, creating a sense early on that danger is not imminent but seemingly omnipresent. The mise-en-scene is cold and silvery and makes a stark backdrop for fiery streaks of arrows flying through the sky.

Lubezki has the camera dive underneath the water to witness one man being strangled to death, and we realize that despite the camera’s pivots and surveying, it’s more of a godly spectator rather than a human eye. The camera here is far less a gimmick than in Inarritu’s “Birdman,” and the way the camera is freed from a fixed axis is not unlike how Lubezki’s cinematography floated and tumbled in “Gravity.” But seeing it in this way isn’t visceral but bleak, violent, bloody and full of agony.

Glass escapes the natives only to be attacked by a bear. This scene too is an endless, torturous and dispassionate sight done in a single, unbroken shot. The bear claws and stomps on his back and whips him like a doll. It exists seemingly out of time and even ends on something of a grim punch line, a final knife in the back as Glass tumbles down a hill only for the slain bear to roll on top of him.

Miraculously, Glass survives, but just barely. Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) demands the remaining troop care for him and keep him alive as long as possible. When they’re unable to transport the wounded Glass further, Henry assigns John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) to tend to Glass and Glass’s half-breed son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) until Glass dies. Instead, Fitzgerald kills Hawk and leaves Glass for dead. “The Revenant” starts as Glass’s fight for survival against nature, a cold look at how the world is vengeful and how the wilderness governs all. But it eventually morphs into a more simplistic revenge fantasy, Glass’s quest to return from the dead and kill the man who murdered his son.

We see flashes of Glass’s past, of his native bride being slaughtered and skulls being stacked high in a mountain. Except Glass’s remaining existence is no less bleak, and his past plays as a morbid form of adding insult to injury. He survives by eating hunks of bloody, raw buffalo meat and by cutting open the guts of a horse and crawling inside its open cavity for warmth. The film’s gore is disturbing, but the subject matter itself is not the problem. “Mad Max: Fury Road” was no less shocking, and even “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” involves Luke killing an animal for warmth on the ice planet Hoth.

The difference is how Inarritu lingers on the gruesomeness and screams each shot’s importance, not for their ingenuity but their stark reality. The score pounds with thundering drums that signal each moment’s weight, and the way “The Revenant” evokes God as a theme continually burdens us with the idea that this is Glass against the world.

DiCaprio is a victim of the film’s agony, grunting and moaning his way through the entire film and crawling on the cold ground for much of it. There’s only so much of an actual performance here. Tom Hardy is more effective as the dissenting and ruthless Fitzgerald, complete with a thick, broken Americana accent and wide eyes that show his madness.

While Lubezki remains the more interesting entry point to “The Revenant,” the blame for the movie’s depressing and exhausting slog rests on Inarritu’s shoulders. Like how the film treats Glass, he does all he can to drag us through hell but little catharsis or solace to bring us back.

1 ½ stars

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

StarWarsEpisodeVIIPosterI was 9 years old when “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” was released, and despite all the bile hurled at the prequels, at that age I had no concept of good. All I knew was that there was more. More Star Wars was a good thing, and for the Millennials like me who give the prequels the most hatred, “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens” is the first Star Wars movie we’ve been able to see for the first time as adults.

“The Force Awakens” doesn’t need to be as great as “A New Hope” or “The Empire Strikes Back” for it to live up to expectations. It needs to be able to fit snugly into the Star Wars canon in a way the prequels never seemed to belong. J.J. Abrams has delivered less than a masterpiece, but “The Force Awakens” is a Star Wars movie.

“The Force Awakens” has the spectacle, the whimsy, the humor, the campy, screwball charm, the romance and the invigorating excitement of the original three films. In channeling the same themes of good and evil and the mythos of the Force, this film has the spirit of a Star Wars classic.

In part, it’s because J.J. Abrams has nearly remade “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.” In between films, a new evil entity known as The First Order has risen to power. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) has vanished, and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is the dark lord out to find him and put an end to the rise of the Jedi. A Resistance pilot named Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) hides a map to Luke’s location in a droid called BB-8 and sends it off on a desert planet. The person who finds it is another scavenger, a person without a family and with dreams of becoming a pilot and getting out of this desolate place. Starting to sound familiar? The only difference is that this young person is a woman, Rey (newcomer Daisy Ridley). Along the way a Stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega) will break off from The First Order and even stage a daring, hapless rescue of Poe before meeting Rey, working to protect her and banish his own past demons.

Though “A New Hope” is proud to boast themes of good and evil in the biggest and broadest of space opera, it is a film about growth, finding identity and believing in yourself. Luke makes that spiritual journey and sheds his youthful naiveté, and Rey will go on that same journey, answering the call to believe in the Force and embrace her destiny.

This is what Star Wars is about, and in that spirit Abrams more than delivers. As with the best of the franchise, the film dances between different moments of action on the ground and in the air. There are thrilling lightsaber duels, stunning dogfights, goofy chases and escapes from an amorphous tentacled creature, a scene inside a seedy cantina full of quirky galactic beings, and even something of a new Death Star. Despite the high CGI gloss, Abrams has captured the tempo of these pictures as much as the tone, with cathartic, cheerful action set pieces that avoid chaos and over-stylization in a way that’s classical and tangible.

John Boyega has a lot of uncontained enthusiasm as Finn, Adam Driver has a lot of angsty rage as Kylo Ren, and Daisy Ridley has a lot of scruffy, rugged charm and star power. Yet all three are led by the master, back in character as though he never left: Harrison Ford as Han Solo. Han is one of the great pop culture characters of all time, and he continues to get the best lines, and Chewbacca the best reaction shots. Ford is acting from the seat of his pants, sarcastic and cool yet always in a hurry and thinking on the fly. Finn has brought Han to the new Death Star and reveals he has no plan for taking down its shields, but maybe they can use the Force. “That’s not how the Force works,” Han bellows in his trademark exasperation. This could be Ford’s best performance in nearly two decades.

“The Force Awakens” does at times feel like a reboot, but hearing John Williams’s magical score swell in all the right places reminds us that there’s no harm in not reinventing the wheel. And the film does take one massive risk that will surely be polarizing. But regardless of if the plot has holes or if the twists hold up, this is still Star Wars. More is good.

4 stars

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

“Mockingjay – Part 2” is a fitting end to the Hunger Games franchise.

HungerGamesPosterHow do you have a Hunger Games movie without the Hunger Games? That was essentially the problem of “Mockingjay – Part 1,” the padded first half to the third and final entry in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games book trilogy. “Part 2” finds a way to retain that Hunger Games feel without the repeat of the arena setting, and it finds Francis Lawrence’s film back on track for a satisfying conclusion to what has been an otherwise stellar franchise.

The rebel organization housed at District 13 has rescued Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the Capitol’s imprisonment and brainwashing, but at the end of “Part 1” he tried to murder Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and is still suffering from the after effects of the brainwashing. Katniss hopes to bring him back to the real world while organizing a plan of attack to bring down President Snow (an increasingly excellent, understated and chilly Donald Sutherland). The rebel leader President Coin (Julianne Moore) wants to use Katniss as a symbol for the rebellion, but Coin may be plotting a way to kill Katniss and get her out of the way in the event of Coin’s inevitable takeover and rise to power.

All this has traces of the politicking that bogged down “Part 1,” but “Part 2” is far better at reaching those intimate, character driven pow-wows and moments of conflict. Watching and waiting for the film to get to the action, Director Lawrence keeps the audience of two minds, torn between a craving for excitement and Katniss’s want for peace. For the first time in the franchise “Mockingjay” makes the dividing line between good and evil less clear. Katniss comes to realize the people trying to kill her are not her enemy, every drop of blood lost has less and less meaning, and the impact of each on the audience stings more.

“Part 2” gives back the “Hunger Games” feel by trotting Katniss, Peeta, Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and her outfit of teenage Marines into the barren warzone of the Capitol. The streets are littered with “pods” or cleverly designed booby traps. Their unmanned nature makes each feel gamelike, with someone from above pulling the strings and all the rules being decided on the fly. “Mockingjay” toys with everything from stormtroopers, flamethrowers, machine gun traps, spotlights capable of disintegrating and even slimy, faceless zombies that resemble the pale monster in “Pan’s Labyrinth.” One incredible set piece has the team running from a growing pool of oil; touch the surface and you’re immediately impaled by spears of the liquid suspended above the ground.

“The Hunger Games” have always stood out in the creative use of deadly traps and special effects, but it’s also one of the few that goes so far above and beyond the YA novel boilerplate romance and “be yourself” mantra. The symbolism here is all on point, with Katniss literally becoming the “girl on fire” after an explosion, with the floating packages previously used in the games as relief now used as harbingers of death, and with the televised murders of children not just used for action but to implicate us as an audience for enjoying it.

The very first “Hunger Games” showed this was not a trifling franchise just for kids. Katniss is a character in grief and anguish, the world is always in disarray, and love triumphs, but at a cost. “Mockingjay” ends this franchise fittingly; the odds were ever in its favor.

3 ½ stars

Chi-Raq

Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq is an urgent statement on gun violence drawn from the Greek play Lysistrata.

ChiraqPosterNo movie this year is as bold-faced opinionated and timely of a political statement as Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq.” That’s because movies are rarely this topical, this aggressive or this urgent. The film is littered with names of African Americans the media has been shouting for months, it has numerous hashtag ready catch phrases, it stops the film for a sermon that is essentially a vicious op-ed, and it declares up front that “This is an EMERGENCY” in giant, flashing red letters.

And yet Lee’s film, easily his best in over a decade, is captivating and harrowing because it is so entertaining. “Chi-Raq’s” message of peace and love lingers in the memory because it’s told in rhyming verse, because it has glamorous musical numbers and because the dialogue has more words for sex than you can count. The film’s humor, color and energy don’t make light of a bad situation; it helps make the movie sing and sting.

Lee draws his source material from the Ancient Greek play by Aristophanes “Lysistrata,” in which women of the Spartan warriors refuse sex for their husbands until they put an end to the war and bloodshed. In modern day Chicago, homicides from gang related violence have killed more since 9/11 than the casualties of Americans in Afghanistan or Iraq. Lee uses the South Side and two rival gangs, the Spartans and Trojans, as a backdrop for how the women of Chi-Raq stage a sex strike (“No Peace, No Pussy”, they declare) to end the killings.

But drawing from “Lysistrata” isn’t just a happy accident or a cute framing mechanism to introduce sex into the story. Women in this film become the catalyst for change, and Lee’s use of this play reframes the conversation on gun violence to include gender and sexuality. The film barks that people are dying everyday, “and you want to talk about how women behave?”

Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) is the girlfriend to the rising rapper and Spartan gang-leader Chi-raq (Nick Cannon), and after a local mother (Jennifer Hudson) begins searching for the killer of her young daughter, Lysistrata stumbles across a successful sex strike in Africa and rallies Spartan and Trojan women to organize and do the same. She leads everyone in a pledge, and they use their sexuality as a weapon, but without killing anyone. In a hilarious and outrageous move they capture a local armory and both force peace talks and rally women around the country and world.

Lee’s politics are relevant on a national stage, but “Chi-Raq” is effective in part because it is localized to these Chicago neighborhoods. The film is highly specific and captures a stark reality that people familiar with watching WGN 9 news will be all too familiar with. Lee even gets inside the culture and color of both this Greek chorus and community. Lysistrata’s outfits alone are worth putting down your guns for, starting in a tight purple cami and ragged cut-off jean shorts before transforming into sexy camo fatigues to show that this really is war.

Chiraq1

Samuel L. Jackson is the film’s eloquent and well-versed narrator Dolmedes. His ass was on the first Wheaties box, as he puts it, and Lee sets the tone beautifully by opening the film by freeze-framing it. Dolmedes stands on a stage and halts the chanting crowd behind him in order to explain the film’s Greek tragedy origins and their intention to rhyme everything. One more stat about homicides is like white noise at this point, but when Lysistrata says the men in this city just live by the “bang-bang”, you remember it.

“Chi-Raq” has some incredible set pieces. In one a man wearing Confederate Flag underpants rides a big black cannon and figuratively makes love to his gun. And to end the film Lysistrata and Chi-Raq partake in a sexual showdown broadcast live. But the one that sums up the film best is a sermon given by one of the film’s few white characters, Father Mike Corridan (Chicago local John Cusack). Less a sermon and more a fiery op-ed and call to action, Father Corridan screams repeatedly that “You will not murder our children” and that what’s happening in this city is “self-inflicted genocide.” His words stop the film’s plot in its tracks and boldly assert all of Lee’s politics. It’s bloody, it’s messy, but damn if it’s emotional and devastating.

“Chi-Raq” is as rebellious and invigorating as Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” was in 1989, and as scarily relevant and poignant as “25th Hour” was in 2002’s Post 9/11 New York. But this time he’s taken root in my city, and this truly is an emergency.

4 stars

Youth

YouthPosterNo filmmaker is more of a modern day Fellini than Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino. His films are opulent wonders, but while his extravagant visual style has for some become a sensory overload, it was Sorrentino reckoning with that same opulence in his last film, the Oscar winning foreign language film “The Great Beauty”, that made that film’s fantasy a welcome escape.

With “Youth”, the colorful set dressing places us in a dream state. Like his previous English language film “This Must Be The Place”, “Youth” is a movie about aging artists in their twilight years, and it grapples with ideas of memory and love across lucid dreams and nightmares, as well as the more practical reality of old age. It’s enchantingly lush, abstract and fascinatingly stylized, but the self-indulgent cinematic flourishes aren’t as central to the narrative as Sorrentino made possible with “The Great Beauty.”

The film is set in a luxuriously fantastical hotel and spa in the Swiss Alps, where the legendary English composer Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) and American film director Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) holiday over the summer. Fred is approached by an emissary to the Queen, who would like for him to come out of retirement and conduct a performance of his “Simple Songs,” arrangements that made him famous but that he considers trifling. But his reasons for his retirement and his apathy are personal, and Caine plays Fred as guarded, a little jaded, but still in good spirits as he waits out his life. Mick has recruited some young, hipster screenwriters to pen his last film and swan song, which he calls “Life’s Last Day.” But Fred and Mick together rarely talk work or feelings, instead one-upping the other on how few drops they got out going to the bathroom that morning, or reminiscing about an old flame they both had a crush on.

Fred and Mick’s conversations about pissing are amusing, but not without merit. These daily tasks, along with the entirety of their life’s work, take tremendous effort, yet produce an often modest result, Fred says. At his age, Fred can still conduct with grace, leading an orchestra of cows in nature in a beautiful aria, but what is the point of creating memories if we know we’ll lose them?

Fred is burdened by the loss of his wife Melanie, and his daughter and assistant Lena (Rachel Weisz) tries to encourage him to leave this hotel and at least leave flowers for the first time in 10 years. But no one is leaving this place. And how could you, when everything is so gorgeous?

Young and old, supporting characters color the decorum of this hotel, and “Youth” becomes less a movie driven by its plot and more by its contemplative assessments of character. There’s Jimmy Tree, a brooding artist of Christian Bale’s caliber with Johnny Depp’s oddities and facial hair, and yet played by Paul Dano. Like Fred, Jimmy played a robot in a mindless entertainment and has his other artistic achievements virtually erased among the people who recognize him. Another is a Spanish football star with a giant tattoo on his back that has made him into something of a messiah figure. He now has a giant gut, but can do wonders with a tennis ball. One sophisticated couple never speaks a word at dinner, each of them seething at what this marriage has become. And even Miss Universe makes an appearance, becoming a literal bathing beauty to further pull us into this dream world.

Sadly these characters are just coloring, with Sorrentino perhaps showing too unhealthy of a fixation on the female, and sometimes male, body, and it takes Jane Fonda channeling an ultimate diva to yank us back to reality. “Youth” is at its best when Caine, Keitel, Weisz and Dano are all being bluntly honest with one another. The four, along with Fonda in her scene stealing moment, are all as good as they’ve been in years. They act their age; they have chemistry and a personable quality that grounds them in this free-floating film.

It can’t be said enough how gorgeous and elegant “Youth” looks. “The Great Beauty” had a shot that literally tipped the camera on its head, and “Youth” begins in a similar fashion. Sorrentino’s opening shot places us on a revolving stage, always disorienting his audience and placing us in a reverie without knowing why. And another seems almost impossible, with the camera rising out of a pool and then seamlessly floating overhead to the soccer star sunbathing.

But unlike “The Great Beauty”, the majesty of “Youth” is in the simpler story at its center, and the dreamy mise-en-scene is at best lovely but at worst distracting. Jane Fonda’s diva actress sums it up best: “Life goes on, even without all that cinema bullshit.”

3 stars

Carol

Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara star in Todd Haynes’s first film in 7 years.

CarolPosterRooney Mara as Therese Belivet in Todd Haynes’s “Carol” has perky, rosy makeup, frayed bangs beneath a plain black hair band, cute plaid outfits and a checkered fall hat. She looks like one of the toy dolls in the department store where she works. Enter Cate Blanchett as Carol Aird, who wears a movie star aura with a giant coat of golden fur, a stylish red French cap and later in the car an elegant green shawl to keep her looking perfect.

In fact, both characters are particularly magnetic, and the attraction they form in “Carol” is mutual. “Carol” is a coming-of-age story for the young Therese, but it’s a movie about two people entering into separate worlds and learning to feel at home. Haynes’s film is lush, poetic, and ravishing, a stellar romance in which the unsaid words and thoughts seep into the movie’s background and color everything.

After all, “Carol” is all about backgrounds. Haynes admires the patterned sewer grates in his opening crane shot and the beads of rain on a taxicab that give the whole film an elegiac tone. There are soothing green backdrops viewed through windows and individual stills that have painterly beauty.

Haynes adorns these details with care because the many words and themes of Carol and Therere’s courtship go unsaid. Set in 1952, when being gay was considered a psychological illness, Haynes avoids the thorny jargon and the explicitness of their affair. Carol and Therese are desperate to feel close to each other, and Carol begs Therese to “Ask me, please!” They want to speak their emotions and not have them be taboo.

Unlike the racial tension of Haynes’s other ‘50s period piece “Far From Heaven”, “Carol” is not a social issue film. It’s a deeply personal love story; Carol’s desires are tearing her apart from her husband (Kyle Chandler) and her young daughter, and Therese’s uncertainty about her sexuality complicates her relationship with a potential fiancée (Jake Lacy).

Mara and Blanchett have impeccable chemistry. When they first have lunch together, Therese again echoes her innocence, with Mara ever so slightly propping herself up in her seat as though she’s never had a cigarette before. It’s a wonderful little touch, and she as an actress maintains the film’s mystique by never appearing too indecisive or too waifish. Mara’s an accomplished actress, but here she channels a young Audrey Hepburn’s natural graces.

Blanchett meanwhile channels just about all the rest of Old Hollywood, and slowly she reveals herself to be a flustered, hurt woman without ever losing her poise or leaving her bubble. It’s not unlike the work she did that won her an Oscar in “Blue Jasmine”, but here she’s likeable and ultimately as vulnerable as her innocent young lover.

Phyllis Nagy’s debut script from a novel by Patricia Highsmith (“The Talented Mr. Ripley”) is poetic, profound and beautiful. The cinematography by longtime Haynes collaborator Edward Lachman is dreamy. And the aforementioned costumes by three-time Oscar winner Sandy Powell are impeccable.

But above all the technical brilliance, heed a piece of advice given to Therese: “I have a friend who told me I should be more interested in humans.” “Carol” delves deep into the world of these two human beings and finds a home.

4 stars

Spectre

Spectre, the fourth Bond film in the Daniel Craig era fails to live up to its predecessor.

SpectrePosterDo we need James Bond in 2015? After 2013’s incredible “Skyfall”, the answer was absolutely yes. It was first off unheard of that an action movie, as shot by Roger Deakins, could look that good. But Bond also felt like a human relief in a world of superheroes, wizards and teenagers fighting in dystopian universes. Give me a hard drinking and vengeful Bond with a tortured past, casual misogyny and all, and let him take on a contemporary computer hacker and show why there’s still a place for an analog assassin.

With Sam Mendes back at the helm and Daniel Craig giving 007 another go, “Spectre” seemed to be right in line with “Skyfall”. Bond’s here to stay… or that was until another movie this summer, “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation”, had more memorable fun with the same concept of an outdated agent in a surveillance state of drones and technology. Continue reading “Spectre”

Spotlight

Thomas McCarthy’s film retells how the Boston Globe uncovered the Catholic Church sexual molestation scandal.

Spotlight Poster“Spotlight” may be the only journalism movie actually about journalism. “All the President’s Men”, this film’s closest companion, is about seeing in the dark and finding the needle in the haystack. “Ace in the Hole” is about escaping a trap through sketchy ethics and deceit. “Sweet Smell of Success” is about power achieved through words, wit and gossip. “Citizen Kane”? Well, that’s about a lot of things.

Thomas McCarthy’s film is not a thriller, a caper, a neo-noir or a melodrama. It does not have an ominous villain, a series of disturbing threats as the conspiracy unravels, or any suspense set pieces. Like “All the President’s Men”, “Spotlight” is a movie of hunches, discovery, research and hard work. The film embodies the philosophy of slow journalism, and it endlessly piles and escalates its stakes until finally both the journalists and us have a real story. A good journalist knows there’s always a follow-up to be had, there’s always more questions to be asked, more digging, and “Spotlight” just keeps going.

McCarthy’s film is the story of how the Boston Globe uncovered a series of child molestation cases among Boston priests, a revelation that eventually stretched far beyond Boston and all the way to the Vatican. The Spotlight team that uncovered the scandal started under the prodding of their new editor-in-chief, the stoic and emotionless Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber). A priest was accused of molestation, and there’s a suggestion that Boston’s Cardinal Law may have known about it, leading the paper to sue the church and try and find the deeper story.

Michael Keaton plays Spotlight’s editor Walter “Robby” Robinson, and when we first meet him he’s giving a goodbye speech to a retiring editor just before Baron has arrived. “What the hell do you know,” he asks jokingly. These guys can smell a story, and as his team (played by Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian d’Arcy James) starts to ask questions, their obstacles are not only those who want to keep quiet, but their colleagues who are professionals, who have been around and know that many of these angles have already been done.

McCarthy’s screenplay along with Josh Singer (“The Fifth Estate”) is so perceptive to the journalism industry. These characters have persistence, they listen, and they constantly clarify. One of their sources even barks at them, “Why do you keep repeating everything I say?” And when they reveal their initial findings to senior editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery), he reacts in the same straight-faced enthusiasm the audience is thinking: “90 fucking priests?”

And yet “Spotlight” is so sharp and tense because it avoids the bastions of many journalism films. “Truth”, starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford is currently in theaters, and “Spotlight” never even utters the word. It doesn’t try and position journalists as noble men and women exposing corruption and scandal; they’re just doing their job. Only occasionally do they allow moral high ground to take over and remind themselves that kids are being raped, but time and again they withhold reporting until the full story is told. When all is said and done, Baron congratulates them with the praise, “A story like this is why we do this, but we have to get back to work.”

McCarthy is more interested in the subtle ways this investigation gnaws away at these characters’ psychology. “Spotlight” is a film as much about losing faith in religion and belief as it is uncovering the truth. McAdams’s Sacha Pfieffer can’t look her church-going aunt in the eye the same way. James’s Matt Carroll has a priest living a block away. And Keaton’s Robinson ultimately takes the weight of the lives at stake onto his own shoulders.

Such complexity in characters is essential for an ensemble piece like this, and “Spotlight” has a stellar one. Mark Ruffalo is relentless and enthusiastic in the part, but he’s calm and likeable when doing his job, and we can feel the stress he’s exerting when he finally lets loose in a rage. Keaton is a mile away from the bigness of his “Birdman” work but feels right at home, modest and reserved but with a rumbling and subtle Boston accent that makes him feel like a local and a veteran. Schreiber is the biggest surprise, monotone to the point that he can’t be read. He withholds his words and hints that he’s harboring a vendetta against the church, but Schreiber’s work is too good for us to peer inside that vault.

“Spotlight” is all soft shades of blues and tight, carefully constructed static shots that give the film a docu-realistic, testimonial quality. Unlike the dark, even surreal flavor of “All the President’s Men”, “Spotlight” is neutral in both its themes and its aesthetics.

The sting of the Catholic sexual molestation scandal has dissipated since the story first broke. “Spotlight” and its shocking credits stinger will surely reignite that attention. But “Spotlight” is a journalistic film about objectivity. There are still questions to be asked and work to be done.

4 stars