Brooklyn (2015)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Brooklyn so completely transports its audience into another time and place that we feel a rapturous catharsis with a young woman who discovers herself and, more importantly, achieves what she wants for her own life. It's a beautiful excursion, with detail and culture oozing out of every surface, intent on realizing the journey of an Irish immigrant in the middle of the last century. And realize it it does, though perhaps in less effective ways than some of us might have preferred.

First things first. Bravo to yet another strong woman-led drama this year, showing us (as Carol did) exactly how to properly center a movie around a woman with real emotions, real strength, and who faces real issues. Also like Carol, this film's production design is transcendent, intricate, and detailed in the best possible ways, given a perfect amount of attention so that it neither distracts from the story nor lies ignored in the background.

Saoirse Ronan is dazzling as the lead woman, Eilis, who leaves her home in Ireland to find a new life in America. We see her grow from a frightened girl to a confident and autonomous woman, and Ronan's nuances and subtlety is a marvel to witness. She is never less than pure, a performance that is always vulnerable, raw, and honest, so much so that in our age of dark and duplicitous antiheroes, she reads almost like a heroine from a bygone age of children's fairytales. Emory Cohen matches her almost perfectly, and his slight Italian inflection casts as romantic a spell on the viewer as it does Ronan's character. No other performances in the film really matter, though most are fairly solid, and the couple of scenes with Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters steal the movie away. Domhnall Gleeson shows up near the end as a pathetic excuse for a dangerous plot device, but thankfully his poor presence is short-lived and ineffectual.

I've made a few references liking Brooklyn to the other big romantic drama this season, but unlike Carol, this film has little in the way of intrigue. In fact, I was distinctly disappointed as I left the theater because I felt as though I had just sat through a glorified Hallmark special. A sort of high-caliber, polished-for-awards-season sticky-sweet romantic melodrama with no complexities, no novelties, and no reason to remember it after the fact. The story is rote, the characters broad (except our lead), and we've seen the period before. I'm not really sure, then, why this film was necessary, nor why it has received the acclaim it has. I can't deny the aesthetic power of the film, and frankly its unrelenting optimism and hope is infectious (and distinctly rare in dramas, to my knowledge), but I found the script to be weak, the performances both hit and miss, and the themes to be so watered down that every time Brooklyn tried too hard to pull at my heartstrings, I slapped it back with a guffaw and waited for it to get smart. It didn't.

IMDb: Brooklyn

Spotlight (2015)

Score: 5 / 5

It could easily have given itself over to sensationalism, given its lurid subject. But, much to its credit, it didn't, and it ended up being one of the best movies this year.

Spotlight is that magical movie that shines because all of its comprising elements are so thoughtful, calculated, and impassioned, and they all blend together seamlessly. Everything about this movie is about as perfect as it could have gotten. Not a moment of screen time is wasted. Not a breath of dialogue is cast aside. Even Howard Shore's score is so understated that I often forgot it existed, until I realized its subtle tugging at my heartstrings.

Concerning the Spotlight team of the Boston Globe in 2001, the film follows a group of journalists who labored to, pardon, shine a spotlight on the epidemic of child sex abuse by Catholic priests. As they uncover the conspiracy, they learn that the entire city is implicated, including clergy, lawyers, judges, and even journalists. As one of the characters describes it in a revealing conversation, "If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse them." It's a damning indictment, all the more horrifying because of its truth.

The script is perfect. Written by Josh Singer (The West Wing, Fringe) and director Tom McCarthy, the dialogue clips along at a furious pace, but never sinks into melodrama and never sacrifices plot for clarity. McCarthy's attention to emotional beats and character arcs is pretty amazing, considering that his film could easily have gotten swept away with its frenzied plot, numerous characters, and thematic concerns. He keeps everything anchored on his main characters -- Mark Ruffalo and Michael Keaton are a wonder, but never break ranks with the fabulous ensemble -- and follows them to their climactic end. That keeps the film emotional but never sentimental.

McCarthy and his editor keep the film streamlined and taut, roiling through the tumultuous plot with a firm resolve to spare no details and to face the evils head-on. Their breakneck pace keep the film feeling more like a thriller than a biography or drama, helped along by an ensemble prepared to go into the dark subject matter. Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi (Silver Linings Playbook, Black Mass) helps with that, too, painting a picture of urban duplicity, where the whitewashed facades are at once pure and decadent, holy and monstrous, reflective and deceptive. Together, they keep our focus on the characters' emotional rollercoasters as they hear stories from survivors, lies from lawyers, sins from priests, accusations, condemnations, revelations, confessions, and ultimately more stories.

It's a brutal movie. Sweeping? No. I don't think a sweeping movie on this subject is possible. Partly because the problem is too widespread. Partly because the problem itself isn't a pleasant one that everyone talks about. Partly because one of the best ways to understand the issue is to hear directly from the victims and survivors, and no movie could possibly have the time or resources for that scope (and my favorite documentary, 2006's Deliver Us from Evil, handles it brilliantly, in my estimation, for reference). As the tagline declares, we need to "Break the story. Break the silence."

IMDb: Spotlight

Carol (2015)

Score: 5 / 5

Carol left even my highest expectations behind in the dust. A dazzling adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt (1952), the film is a thoroughly grounded romance, lacking any unnecessary subplots, sentiment, or melodrama. More important, and unlike the other big queer film this season, The Danish Girl, it ends with affirmation, joy, and a rapturous sense of hope.

Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett are pitch-perfect as the lovers, fiercely aware of social norms but flagrantly challenging their constraints. Digging deep into every nuance and subtlety, Blanchett is the more entrancing of the two, performing as a goddess in a role only she could fully realize. Her striking beauty aside, she has a rich presence and rare command of the screen as we watch her character confront adversity with not an ounce of vulnerability. Pairing her with less fervent energy, Mara plays the less entrancing character, which makes it more difficult to compare the performances. Less of a socialite and more obviously introverted, Mara blends in with the scenery, immediately recognizable as a wallflower in a culture that doesn't approve of her desires. Caught up in her sudden romance, she ekes out strength from her quiet character and, as the film follows what we might call her "coming of age" plot, takes the reins of the movie. The magical chemistry between the two women is hypnotizing.

No less hypnotic, the film's craftsmanship rivals even some of the most breathtaking films this year. Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) has done it again with his signature attention to detail, creating a period world that is at once stark reality and timeless fantasy. He mirrors the complex performances in lighting subtleties and richly layered set pieces. Cinematographer Edward Lachman (The Virgin Suicides, Erin Brockovich) follows the romance with a fluid camera and, in turns, passionate and compassionate attention to its players, lingering over their faces as the world turns around them to catch every tiny reaction. The editing is no less masterful, perfectly blending the characters into their world and drawing our attention to the most stirring of juxtapositions. Frequent Coen brothers and Spike Jonze collaborator Carter Burwell's score is also worth its salt (I was trying to make that match the book's title, but it's just not working), so pay attention to that as you go along, too.

There's not much more to say. It's beautiful. An absolutely beautiful movie. It's one of those that is, from beginning to end, a transcendent pleasure to watch again and again. And I don't usually say that about romances.

IMDb: Carol

The Danish Girl (2015)

Score: 3.5 / 5

It's difficult to criticize the most mainstream queer movie this year and one of the most recognized trans movies ever. And I didn't hate it. I actually rather enjoyed it. But as I left the theater, I felt distinctly unfulfilled, because The Danish Girl leaves a lot to be desired, and worse, leaves a lot to be forgotten.

I'm not going to criticize it on its grounds as an adaptation of a fictionalized account of a real-life trans woman, because that's complicated and ultimately silly. And I won't complain about its joining the long list of films that use cisgender actors to portray transgender people; that I can forgive because, for me (and my privilege), the whole point of acting is pretending to be what we are not. I do take some issue with the film ending in our protagonist's death. Of course, her real-life counterpart, Lili Elbe, died after one of her experimental surgeries, so it's not entirely a fantasy ending. But the film neither explains her death nor justifies it. Despite the script's repeated attempts to describe the dangers involved in early sex reassignment surgery, Lili is shown to be coping well with her recovery in one scene, and then in the next, she is (apparently unsurprisingly) fatally ill.

I can probably just write this off as one of director Tom Hooper's bad directorial movements. We've seen before that he doesn't really care about plot timelines or editorial continuity -- remember Les Miserables, anybody? But it's a bit more problematic here, because mainstream queer cinema has a nasty history of its subjects dying. A good question here might ask why. Maybe the deaths of queer characters bring more gravity and sentiment to their stories (read: so the hegemony can pity them). Maybe the filmmakers are hoping to recreate tragic real-life stories (read: preventing stories of hope from reaching the mainstream). But I think the real issue is that the privileged masses don't want to see or hear a story of successful, affirming, lively queer characters who aren't bogged down in procedures and policing, who don't succumb to ostracism and brutality, and who self-determine their identities and behaviors in a safe and sane manner. I think we can all agree that we've seen maybe two or three big-budget, A-lister queer films that end in happiness. If that.

And yet, my frustrations with this trend don't really have much to do with this movie specifically. My annoyance with Tom Hooper's style very much applies. He seems to think that severe close-ups on bleary, teary faces make a movie Oscar-worthy, and he often delays in the hopes that he'll strike gold in the silences after dialogue. I wish he'd take some notes from his great success in The King's Speech instead and realize that, with the material he chooses, the gold is often found in the dialogue and when his actors bounce off each other. There are some real gems in the dialogue here (not many, but a few), and it's as if he skates over them so he can have another long shot on Eddie Redmayne's face.

Speaking of Redmayne, he is of course dazzling. I wasn't really feeling his character, though, probably partly because the script does not give him much to work with. Lili as she is portrayed in the film is just not very likeable. Apparently lost in her own mind, she is constantly downcast, weepy, and prone to bizarre turns. Redmayne's performance is fine, to be sure, but I never felt much attached to his Lili, and so her death was more a sentimental indulgence than plot point at the end. Alicia Vikander, however, steals the whole movie away from him, bringing an intense personality to each and every moment, digging into every subtle moment with fierce emotional awareness. She takes tough moments of vulnerability (tough because they aren't always fleshed out well by the dialogue) and makes them profoundly real. Her nuances I would compare to Felicity Jones's in The Theory of Everything in how well she reacts to her leading man. And yet, from her first appearance to the final shot of her over a bluff, she is in many ways the beating heart of the movie. It is her presence, and hers alone, that makes the film a romance, and it is only in her scenes that I ever felt tears come to my eyes. Strange that a movie about a trans woman actually finds its strength in a supporting cis woman.

What else? The production design is everything. Beautiful costumes, intricate details in the sets and props, the makeup and hair. It's gorgeous. Matthias Schoenaerts and Ben Whishaw pop in for a few lovely scenes, though I might have wished for more Whishaw. The score is, on the other hand, pretty underwhelming. I'm usually a staunch fan of composer Alexandre Desplat, but for some reason his string-heavy work here felt recycled and unbalanced. Let's just finish by saying the film got the Oscar nominations it deserved. No more, no less.

IMDb: The Danish Girl

The Revenant (2015)

Score: 5 / 5

It's everything we hoped it would be.

A daring, dazzling adventure-revenge-thriller, The Revenant marks a magnificent triumph for a director who has already challenged our ideas of what a film can be. Much like he showed us in Birdman, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu shows us his flawless execution as a master of the art, fusing realism and fantasy together in a brutal, poetic epic that sweeps away other contenders in this year's Oscar race. He also, and much more to his credit, allows audiences less attuned to the technical excellence of his film to take profound pleasure in the rich material, atmosphere, and effects he presents. I heard screams, laughter, and sobs in the theater during the entire two-and-a-half hours -- I may have participated -- until the lights came up again and everyone left in stunned silence. This isn't just a film. It's an experience.

The otherwise thin narrative serves the film all the better, eliminating any unnecessary plot devices by streamlining our focus to the two leading men. The lack of meandering plot threads allows our awareness to spread not to extraneous characters but to the beauty and thematic powers at work, facilitated by the actors' performances and by the impeccable cinematography.  The latter, perfectly handled by master Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity, Birdman) is perhaps the most engaging I've ever seen. Finding uncanny relations to the characters, plot, and theme in nature, his images of snowy mountain ranges, stark winter forests, and even fog on the water are so perfectly suited to the film that I felt as though I were there (and I suspect the film would be even more immersive in 3-D, one of the few times I would ever suspect that!), suffering in the frigid cold and basking in awe of nature. The lighting is also hauntingly good, all the more so with the knowledge that there was no artificial lighting in this movie; all shots feature completely natural lighting. Moments in firelight, watching embers against the night sky, dawn breaking through the fog, torches through the trees. It's breathtaking.

And that's to say nothing of the action sequences. The movie is a thrill ride, from one disaster to another, and each presented by a beautifully fluid camera, weaving in and out and around the action but never straying far from the actors' faces, allowing us to experience the horrors of the frontier while remaining firmly anchored to their effects on the terrified men. Lengthy action shots -- not as lengthy as Birdman, though -- keep things taut and raw, and the special effects cast each shot in magic. I don't know how any of the effects were done so convincingly and seamlessly, and obviously the winner of that cake is the bear attack scene. But there are others that aren't getting as much attention, and I'd like to highlight the opening battle scene as well as the one in which our protagonist flees attacking natives on horseback right over a cliff.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy are the secondary heroes of this movie, and both are fierce in their portrayal of rough frontier life. DiCaprio's All is Lost or Cast Away performance will likely win him the Oscar this year, and though it may not be as emotionally articulate as in The Wolf of Wall Street or The Aviator, it accomplishes something even more profound here. Having had his throat ripped open by the bear, he makes it through the film mostly in groans and grunts, relying mostly on physicality and endurance to embody the man who becomes so much more than a man. And, even more intriguing, he somehow lets his eyes do all of the dramatic work in the film, and through some arcane power he projects his inner turmoil out from his eyes and onto the screen, brilliantly highlighting the pain, fear, hatred, and love his character experiences until he finally becomes an extension of the brutal forces of nature around him. His eyes mirror the flames, the starlight, the snow drifts, and ultimately the soul of man in the face of impossible odds. Howl, howl, howl, howl!

The real surprise for me here was Tom Hardy. Not because I don't think he's good  -- on the contrary, after Leo, he's one of my favorites -- but because the movie is basically Leo's and he's been getting all the hype. But here, Hardy matches Leo in flawless marriage of talent to physicality, and of intelligent character work to poetic strength. His eyes are no less telling than Leo's, wide and glassy, darting to and fro in shifty guile, lapping up greed and weakness like a wolf in the wild, ever calculating his heinous crimes. His voice work is also stunning, arrestingly effective, at once both calming and wicked, calculated and fierce, the stuff of nightmares while also slightly singsong in its lilting rhythm. I don't know how he did it, but it's brilliant. Perhaps my favorite moment in the film is his story to a young companion (Will Poulter) of finding God in the forest. I wish I could recall the exact quote, but essentially suggesting that when you're starving, maybe God is a squirrel, meaty and spry, and you can shoot and kill and eat him. Hardy is entrancing and cruel, and his moment of contemplation after relating the story is one of the most chilling shots on film this year.

I could go on and on about how much I loved this movie. You may notice it's earned a place on my top 20 favorite films list. I would compare my pleasure upon seeing it to the pleasure I found in Gravity two years ago. It's one of those rare films that I feel has inextricably grafted itself to my soul, one that I will never tire of watching or contemplating. It's hard to watch, painful even, in moments both emotionally violent and physically brutal. Do yourself a favor and go see the best film of the year. You'll remember that come Oscar night.

Oh, and I almost forgot. The score is amazing, too. Actually, I'll compare that to Gravity as well. Never overstepping its bounds, it swells and drifts in flawless union with the film and echoes the operatic grandeur it accompanies. I'll be buying this soundtrack soon. Bravo, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto!

IMDb: The Revenant

Joy (2015)

Score: 3 / 5

It's a David O. Russell movie, take it or leave it. Despite lacking much of its titular emotion, Joy is a love letter to both women and capitalism, complex in its emotional terrain but trying really, really hard to be the feel-good movie of the season.

Leave it to Russell to let the movie rest on Jennifer Lawrence's performance. She nails it, as we might expect, and does so with great fortitude and endurance. But she also isn't given much to work with. Based on the real life story of Joy Mangano, inventor of the Miracle Mop, the movie follows its protagonist through her dysfunctional household and her repeatedly sabotaged business breakthroughs to her final victory. Lawrence pushes through her chores with verve in what might be the best Cinderella story we've seen in the last few years. Which really isn't saying much.

And what a Cinderella story it is, one replete with Russell trademarks: bizarre character turns, dialogue that tries to be more important than it is, and occasional outbursts of cathartic, comedic agony. While I say it reads as a love letter, I don't mean to ignore the rather caustic worldview Russell still employs in his films. It's a profoundly melancholy look at a particular slice of American life, far from the reaches of the upper crust. Unlike this year's earlier Cinderella, this film doesn't delude itself into playing a classist irony, nor does it prevent its characters from articulately exploring their motivations. But that doesn't relieve the tension we feel looking at the generations of a dysfunctional family living in the same small house, with the charming but lazy ex-husband in the basement, the monstrous father attempting to reclaim some lost power, the knowing grandmother who cares for everyone in her own small ways. It's claustrophobic and noisy, with bits of dialogue (probably partially improvised, as in American Hustle) shouted and overlapping in its own perverse kind of musical score.

I think my only real takeaway from this movie is that it's not as cerebral or artful as Russell's last two hits, but it really wants to be. It's stylized and interesting, to be sure, but in a way more befitting a coming-of-age story or an adventure movie than a family drama or even a feminist manifesto. It's got good performances that are mostly washed over by cheap dialogue and meandering, inconsistent plot devices that turn the film into a tonally chaotic mess. And the final act plot turn (a watered-down deus ex machina) is so gimmicky that I found it hard not to snort aloud in the theater.

IMDb: Joy

Concussion (2015)

Score: 4 / 5

I really liked this movie. It's not nearly as good as it tries to be, but it does several things that I think deserve a lot more attention than they're getting.

First let's start with the basics. This is a melodramatic biography film that centers on the life work of one Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian-born forensic pathologist who researched brain trauma in football players and fought the NFL's efforts to silence him. Of course, all this is based on reality, and I can't say much about the factual basis for any of this, because I don't football.

Concussion, though perhaps misnamed, focuses on the efforts of Dr. Omalu and the effects of his fame/infamy on his personal life. Will Smith. Yes, Will Smith -- and I can't believe I'm saying this -- gives an amazing performance. Sure, maybe his accent falters here and there, ringing a little thin when it counts (not unlike Chris Hemsworth's faulty Nantucket effort), but it doesn't take long before you realize that the character's accent is one of the least important things in this movie. Smith imbues his eccentric character with idiosyncrasies and nuances that left me speechless, only to then add layer upon layer of unbridled passion and compassion. He captures first your attention and then your heart, and he carries the film with grace and finesse. Bravo.

A few other high points, shall we? David Morse delivers a heartrending performance as Mike Webster, a tragedy of the sport who incites the main plot when he dies in disgrace at only 50 years of age. Our protagonist uses Webster's fame and fans to repeatedly declare that football is killing people, even as the memory of Webster remains fresh and vivid in his psyche.

And then, of course, there are my favorite elements of the film. Though it is structured as a typical sports drama, its primary antagonists come from the highest levels of the sport in question. The NFL is presented as a sort of ubiquitous, monolithic Goliath, while our hero-David is a doctor. A foreign doctor. Who speaks differently. Who acts differently. This isn't another "Oh, he's black, but he's the same as us, I get it" discussion. This is a "Oh, he's not American, but he's in America and he's trying to destroy an American institution, but he's smart and kind and right" discussion. Timely? Hell yes. I love the little moment when Dr. Omalu's comrade says that he'll be an American hero: But you're not even American? Even better. (I should note that the often-repeated use of the identifier "American" is a little overkill, but it's not as bad as certain other words we might hear in theaters this week).

The supporting actors are all solid, no question there. But the plot suffers from being a little too unspecific. It seems that, in trying to be sweeping and grand, the film loses some of its footing and begins to tumble in a chilly Pittsburgh breeze. And it falls into a few shallow pitfalls of the genre, namely toying with a thriller-genre subplot, such as when Omalu's pregnant wife Prema attempts to evade a car seemingly tailing her, or when their phone rings with (presumably) yet another hate-call and the lights dramatically shift and they look at each other like the killer's in the attic. I get why the filmmakers included these bits, but it takes away from the face-to-face drama when Smith's character confronts his adversaries.

It feels a little weird, seeing this movie in the last stretch of Oscar season, but then this Oscar season is just generally weird. It started too early, it's ending too late, and there was a lot of trash in the mix. As far as Concussion goes, it's a melodrama, for better and for worse. It's a streamlined, straightforward story, and it tries to be more artful and important than it is. But it's also timely and daring, two qualities I would not expect from a "sports drama", though I'm not sure that's even an accurate descriptor here. It's a feel-good movie, and yet ultimately it left me feeling worse (which is not a bad thing here!). Because this problem is happening now. Because the wealthy owners and the quasi-religious spectators are so fervently determined to let the game go on that they don't care about murder. Because, overblown as it may sound, we in 2016 America enjoy throwing our strongest men into arenas to attack each other while we watch and cheer. Because we enjoy watching heroes get "jacked up", and we ridicule them when they stumble, and we forget about them as they die.

Even as Dr. Omalu celebrates his victory, he sees young kids playing football on a field. And he knows that he will continue to perform autopsies on those battered bodies that America tosses aside.

IMDb: Concussion

The Big Short (2015)

Score: 4 / 5

It's a strange thing to enjoy a film but have no idea what's happening. The Big Short is all about the housing market, Wall Street, and the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Basically, a lot of things I don't expect to ever really understand. But the film works precisely because it caters to those of us who share that bewilderment. Of course, it also caters to people who do understand the crisis and vilify the villains behind it.

Hell, I even got angry with them. I didn't always know exactly why I felt that way, but director Adam McKay (in what might be the first film of his I've ever seen) shares his outrage so bountifully that even his kinetic directorial style here serves to heighten the anxieties and tensions at work. We flit from brokers and bankers to salesmen and victims with such fervor that we feel vexed not only by the duplicitous and voracious money-mongers, but by the filmmakers and their fierce understanding -- and criticism -- of the crisis.

If that makes sense to you, you're already a step ahead of me. But the primary way McKay caters to us know-nothings is by breaking the fourth wall in periodic, stylized exposition monologues. We have Ryan Gosling delivering voiceovers, trying to help us understand the forces at work. When even he needs help, he presents us with celebrities in various comical situations who then explain in hilarious and somewhat less-than-totally-enlightening terms a particular concept or construct. The logic, I suppose, is that Margot Robbie in a bubble bath can explain something as dull as subprime mortgages (??) in an entertaining and pleasant way, while maintaining a sort of aloof, satirical manner. Similarly, Selena Gomez stacking chips in Vegas can explain synthetic CDOs (??) about as well as Anthony Bourdain can make fish chowder out of three-day-old fish while explaining something else. It's a sly move.

It's also one that laughs at us as much as we laugh at it. I mean, isn't part of the problem with these complex business concepts that the majority of Americans really have no idea what's happening? I think it's one of the characters early in the film who decries Wall Street for coming up with big words and complex procedures simply so that its grip on international finance remains firm. So whereas McKay and his team seem to know what's going on, and while he seems willing and able to share it, he does so by condescending to a populace that only really cares about "reality" television, breaking down the fourth wall on celebrity life, and sipping champagne in a bubble bath.

It's a damning judgment of a couple institutions, to be sure. And all this has been to say nothing of the biting dialogue, razor-sharp and with more wit than it can sometimes handle. We see young men calculating their way into the field from their garage, and we see those same men later lounging in their commercial offices while the financial world collapses. Their performances -- particularly those of Christian Bale and Steve Carrell -- are stunning, even (and perhaps especially) when they prove to be less than heroic. Of course, this is movie almost exclusively concerns white men, but then I suppose that's a bit of a statement in itself, even with the likes of Melissa Leo in supporting roles. And by the end, they all work together, through perfect timing and flawless dark comedy, to infuriate the audience.

This movie isn't a drama thriller that carries a warning, like Margin Call. This is a white-hot, scathing indictment against all kinds of things I just don't understand. And it's one of the funniest movies I've seen this year. And that's exactly the point.

IMDb: The Big Short