Thirteen Lives (2022)

Score: 3 / 5

As a filmmaker, Ron Howard is fascinating because he vacillates so wildly between big-budget blockbuster fare and offbeat, heart-of-gold dramas. His movies are meticulously researched, even when they sometimes sacrifice realism for melodrama or spectacle. But you can almost always tell he's at the helm just because of his unique energy as manifested in the visuals, the pace, and sometimes the thematic material. Thirteen Lives is a bit unusual for him in that I forgot for most of its runtime that Howard was directing. Its urgent, grounded feeling -- and its presentation almost as a documentary -- is exciting from him, because it reminded me that Howard can put the prestige aside and tell a damn good story.

You'll probably remember the media frenzy from summer 2018 when a soccer coach and his team of a dozen adolescent boys were trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand for eighteen days. It wasn't that long ago, it's been told in several news specials and documentaries already, and its miraculous ending make it a readily familiar tale. It's quite a different matter, however, to be part of a dramatized version of those events. Howard has some trouble handling the "behind-the-scenes" scenes, in which a large international team of rescuers convenes to problem solve the rescue efforts, and that takes a lot of time and energy to establish all the characters and motives and concerns and why they matter. He's not helped much by the screenplay, which doesn't offer us much new information nor much emotional intrigue; writer William Nicholson (Everest, Gladiator, and many more) can't decide what parts of the story are most interesting, so he includes a little bit of everything.

Meanwhile, Howard seems determined to force thrills and chills out of the movie by focusing most on the flooded caves. The incredible sets and impressive real SCUBA work by the actors are wonderful, and add arresting authenticity to the film. Underwater cinematography and sound mixing isn't always beautiful, but it is always eerie and claustrophobic here, and really puts us in the Tham Luang Nang Non cave with the boys and the rescuers. I was very glad not to be swamped with unnecessary survival-type subplots, and the long middle part of the movie keeps us tightly focused on the physical and mental toll the six-hour dive through winding, pitch-black caves and tunnels took from the divers.

And while the cast is awesome -- led by Viggo Mortensen, Tom Bateman, Colin Farrell, and Joel Edgerton -- they aren't really playing fully realized characters so much as flat archetypes meant to move the plot along and remind us of the real-life heroes' names. Howard smartly tries to sidestep the "white savior" narrative by frequently reminding us of the Thai Navy rescuers, the Thai soccer coach, and even the local farmers who destroy their own rice fields to reroute incoming water away from the cave system. The closest thing to a complex character in the film is the lame duck governor, who pops in a few significant times to navigate the awkwardness of handling catastrophe while in political power while also being keenly aware that he's one his way out and is uniquely positioned to take full blame if the boys aren't rescued.

My problem with Thirteen Lives isn't in its production design or the dedication of everyone involved; it just isn't a memorable cinematic experience. I watched it about a week ago, and almost none of it has stuck with me, except as some visual reminders of the real-life story over four years ago. Howard's film didn't really teach me anything about the real heroes or survivors, about the geography of the labyrinthine caves, about the international response efforts. It felt like dramatized news reels and comparatively dull reenactments of what should have been riveting action. But if you're in the mood for straightforward, hard-hitting drama that reminds us about an amazing rescue mission, Thirteen Lives isn't the worst way to spend an evening.

The Stranger (2022)

Score: 3.5 / 5

An intensive character study, The Stranger is one of those seemingly random Netflix releases that nobody hears about but absolutely should. It's an understated crime drama -- and it's Australian, which for me correlates to a certain excellence in the craft anyway -- of the sort that will almost certainly alienate anyone who loves true crime miniseries or podcasts. Those tend to be fast, wild, and filled with frisson; this one is pensive, patient, and haunting. It doesn't make its story easy to access, and it certainly doesn't feel rewarding or particularly satisfying. In fact, I'd compare its aesthetic more to a Denis Villeneuve film (like Prisoners), as it seems more concerned with atmosphere, character, and form than with plot or entertainment.

Sean Harris plays Henry Teague, who in the first scene meets someone on the bus who offers him a job opportunity. If he was played by Liam Neeson, you'd scoff and say we've already seen this story before; we know it's a true crime story, and we might assume he joins a "one last time" criminal enterprise to get enough money to finally escape. Not that we're given any details like that, but the film knows what we expect. Harris, being Harris, immediately imbues the character with a suspicious energy, facilitated effectively by his gravelly whisper of a voice and vacant, ghostly gaze. There are major wheels spinning behind that façade, but all we get is the impression of horror. That's why he's a different character than what Neeson might bring to the film. Neeson would be a hero. We're not sure about Harris.

Which is good, because (SPOILER ALERT) he's actually the villain. Not the antagonist, mind you, but still the villain. Henry Teague is a fictionalized version of the real-life main suspect of one of the most notorious missing person cases in Australia's history. By the time we find out -- some twenty minutes in -- that the people around him are undercover informants and investigators, we realize they've been hunting this guy for a while. The elaborate sting operation is headed by Mark Frame (Joel Edgerton), who poses as a criminal organizer in order to get Teague a job and then catch him red-handed. They're convinced he murdered a child, but a lack of evidence means they can't just arrest him. So they develop this false criminal underworld in order to lure Teague in, get him comfortable, and hope that he will confess to his crime or enact a new one they can book him for and then continue the investigation. Apparently this methodology is (or was) legal in Australia; I think it would not be in the US, but I haven't taken a civics or criminal justice class in many years!

For a police procedural, this does not fit the bill. It feels more like an arthouse film, one whose deliberate pacing makes it feel more like a waking nightmare than true crime. Occasional sharp edits cut into what amount to dream sequences or montages, and we're never quite sure if it's meant to convey a dissociative streak in Teague's mind or if it's insight into Frame's fracturing mind under the pressure of the investigation and befriending a child killer. Writer and director Thomas M. Wright skillfully tells the story unlike any other police procedural I've seen, and more than once I wanted to pull out a stopwatch just to calculate times of the long takes and sometimes the time between spoken lines. It's a quiet, calculated film meant to destabilize our awareness of genre conventions. And then there's the chilling score that drones on and sinks under your skin, much as it does for both the main characters, who (as you can see in the promotional poster below) are by design frighteningly similar in appearance. After all, your own reflection is your safest confidant, right? One wonders what Freud might make of this movie in terms of the uncanny.

The Green Knight (2021)

 Score: 5 / 5

As dense and ambiguous as its source material, The Green Knight is a cinematic masterpiece. Writer/editor/producer/director David Lowery, whose work has never been less than visionary, this time turns his unique aesthetic on medieval legend to stunning effect. Lowery tends toward the folksy, shifting ghost stories (A Ghost Story) and fantasies about dragons (Pete's Dragon) into gritty, tangible dramas tinged with mythic tropes, set in vibrant, rural landscapes. His abilities are only heighted in this new film, as his focus on the Arthurian story smartly disregards the romanticism so often bound to the genre in art. Rather, he leans into the Romantic (specifically Dark Romantic) inclinations of the story, which feels much more historically accurate and believable than your typical Camelot fare.

An intimate epic -- the rarest kind -- of life, death, and the mess of what comes in-between, The Green Knight focuses tightly on its main character, whose name was interestingly excised from the title. Of course, the story is based on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the famously indecipherable 14th-century poem that bridged the gap between British storytelling and French chivalry. Perhaps reproduced most famously (and lastingly) by J.R.R. Tolkien, the tale notoriously eschews simple interpretation. Its characters, specific enough to be grounded and relatable, are surely meant to mean something, but the poem denies any easy allusion or allegory; it gives almost no hints to thematic insight or symbolic analogy. Taking his lead from this enigma that has been frustratingly studied for most of a millennium, Lowery seems to take lots of ideas from scholarly and artistic sources and simply says a resounding "YES" to all.

As such, the movie could have been a sort of "yes, and" improvisatorial mess. Instead, it's a "yes, and" of equally well-baked if somewhat inaccessible ideas, handled by a master storyteller at the top of his game.

And what a story it is. Sir Gawain, a young knight (played to devastating perfection by Dev Patel, who buffed up quite a bit, thank you very much), awakens in a brothel with his lover Essel (voluptuous and brilliant Alicia Vikander) before hurrying to court. It is Christmas Day, and King Arthur (Sean Harris) is celebrating in his darkened throne room with Queen Guinevere (Kate Dickie). He invites Gawain, his nephew to sit at his side; we get the impression Gawain is a relatively new knight and eager to please his uncle-king. Arthur seeks to know more about his nephew, and asks him for a story of the brave Sir Gawain; Gawain has none to give, for he has not yet proved his mettle at the Round Table. Thus begins a classic bildungsroman, the coming-of-age adventure that will make Gawain a man and, more important, a proper knight. Right?

With much of the movie, the answer is debatable. For indeed Gawain embarks on his trial shortly thereafter. Into the festive atmosphere walks the titular green knight, a terrifying figure with Ralph Ineson's demoniac voice, seeking a knight to play a game. Whatever harm a man causes the knight, he will repay "one year hence." Jumping up at the challenge, Gawain takes the knight's axe in hand and lops the knight's head clean off. Sure that this will earn him his manhood and honor, he nearly shits himself when the knight calmly picks up his head, which reminds the room of the deal, before riding off into the wilds. Is he a man yet, or will he be in a year? Is he a dead man walking, for surely he cannot survive a similar attack? What will his code of honor allow him to do in the next year? If superhero movies have taught us anything in the last two decades, it is that the choices we make in the interim make us noble, rather than any acts of valor in battle. What will Gawain do?

And without a breath of ado, Lowery skips the full year and we're back with Gawain as he prepares to go find the "Green Chapel" and face the Green Knight's doom. We aren't given any reason to think he has changed at all during the year, and so in his final days alive, we're treated to his journey. He won't learn many lessons -- at least not in the traditional, moral sense -- and he won't really meet many people. His slice of life, we might say, is far darker than your typical pilgrim's progress or odyssey. As he wanders through the British countryside, the world is shown to be far stranger and more complex than he (or we) are prepared to handle. Weird things, violent things happen and there is often no rhyme nor reason; at each step Gawain is tested, but are the tests of his knighthood, manhood, humanity, or simple existence? In one scene he might be assisting a ghost reclaim her head, and in another he's casually watching giants walk off into the fog. Each feels profound and significant, but they operate on entirely different thematic levels.

I could talk (and have, elsewhere) for hours about each scene, character, and special effect (of which there are remarkably few). We could discuss the thematic conceit of three, and how Lowery has added two original new mini-stories to lead up to the central story of the source material, the exchange of winnings in the Lord's house (featuring Joel Edgerton). We could talk about the talking fox, the cruel and unhinged scavenger (Barry Keoghan), deforestation and climate change, politics and the exchange between have and have-nots, ghosts and giants and women. We could talk about the gorgeous cinematography by Andrew Droz Palermo, the stunning costumes (I want that yellowish cloak!) by Malgosia Turzanska, and especially the haunting, screeching, churning music by Lowery's longtime composer Daniel Hart. We could talk about Sarita Choudhury's mesmerizing and much too-brief performance as Gawain's mother, Morgan le Fay, and the deconstructed vision of women in power a la Shakespearean tragedy. We could talk about the Lady's speech (also Alicia Vikander, in a genius choice of cast doubling) of what exactly the color green represents, which takes place during what could be the sexiest scene but which ends up being the most didactically illuminating and spiritually grounding interaction in the film. And we could gush for ages about the amazing, wordless 15-ish-minute climax, as Gawain's life-to-be flashes before his eyes.

But it would take books to fill it all. This is the kind of movie that will, certainly, engender some of the best scholarly film writing this year. But it's also the kind that will, by design, resist that very impetus. It's made to be talked about afterward, in our own private Round Tables, where everyone's insight, interpretation, and impressions matter. Lowery knows exactly what he's doing here, which is to say that he's comfortable making a consummate work of art through storytelling; it grows faster and -- dare I say -- greener as it takes root in the mind, grows into outside ideas informed by the experience, and eventually rots into a potent memory of colors, sounds, and images. Equally important, I think, are the ideas the film's structure and formal elements suggest but will likely never be articulated in most discussion circles, such as the passage of time revealing an innate judgment by nature on the failing human condition. (I note this based on one of the many shots in the film I simply cannot shake nor understand, when a bound and gagged Gawain lies on the forest floor as a spinning camera shows him decayed and dead before reversing and returning him to living flesh.)

So no, this isn't the most purely entertaining movie of the year, if you're entertained by simplicity or action. But it might be the smartest movie yet this year, in that it only makes any sense if you dedicate yourself to a subjective reflection on it. Does it turn its female characters into sex- or power-crazed witches, or are they proto-feminists exerting their will in a male-dominated world? Is Gawain so determined to be honorable that he's willing to die for it, or is it a performance of policed masculinity he pursues for his own satisfaction? Does the film's setting on Christmas suggest the adventure is a salvific allegory about hope and integrity, or is this a darkly pagan story about man's doomed place in nature? Can we see chivalry as a righteous code for civilization, or are we pushed to question its efficacy against the evils inherent in man? Again, we can really only say "yes, and" to these ideas as presented by Lowery and team. Because as Gawain learns, and we by proxy, the only value or meaning in the world is that which we ascribe to it.

Boy Erased (2018)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Joel Edgerton again flexes his directorial and writerly muscles with his latest drama, one seemed aimed at awards season and, slyly, the current vice president. Boy Erased, though by no means one of the best pictures this year, is something I never expected to see on screen and therefore earned my respect and a whole bucket of my tears.

When we first meet Jared (Lucas Hedges), he's on his way to Love in Action, one of the more notorious "ex-gay" conversion therapy programs. The son of a proud Baptist minister and car dealer (Russell Crowe), Jared is taken by his beautiful mother (Nicole Kidman) to the program, which immediately establishes all sorts of arbitrary and problematic rules while sucking money out of the hopeful parents. The leader of the program (Joel Edgerton) commands the group of misfit queers as if running a drill camp, and it doesn't take long before Jared has second thoughts about this program. Even his mother suspects something is wrong, but the will of God seems notably difficult to identify. The story escalates to an explosive climax that is all the more powerful because it is based on a biographical memoir.

I knew this would be a difficult movie to watch, as I also went through conversion therapy for several years, but it's a masterful insight into the minds of everyone involved. Though Edgerton's screenplay is skimpy on explaining itself or delving deep into the theology or psychology of the process, it's clear that he understands the whole scenario far better than I would have expected from someone who never lived the experience. He's sensitive and acutely attuned to the minutiae of complex emotions that riddle everyone in the conversion process, so much so that the film becomes a master class in cinematic subtext and theme.

In my opinion, the film works best to understand the intentions behind someone who, like myself, freely chose to enter the program. That's something people seem bewildered by when the topic is brought up in conversation. Further, the film becomes a sort of nearsighted experience that forces us to live in the world of conversion therapy, albeit in episodic form. Everything is close, sensory, vivid,  and sentimental (in a good way), and though Lucas Hedges has performed much better before, here he masterfully accomplishes the thankless work of becoming a sort of every-man, a blank slate that we can immediately project ourselves onto. It's some really difficult filmmaking from both Hedges and Edgerton, and ultimately wildly successful.

While the film will unfortunately be known as the "conversion therapy" movie, it's important to actively try to squash that. It is by no means a sweeping exploration of the process or its various forms; neither is it a treatise on morality or faith or family. It is -- quite simply, and for better or worse -- a biographical story that happens to feature the conversion process. It features a very specific form of the therapy in a no less specific time and place. It also, and this is where the trouble sets in, fails in its final act because it can't decide what to do with itself. After starting with a bang into the plot, it dwindles once Jared (SPOILER ALERT) escapes the program with his mother. This emotional sequence is followed by several dragging denouement scenes including news of the death of another victim, Jared moving away, and then Jared returning to confront his parents.

It doesn't quite work, this ending, because it intensifies the disconnect Edgerton clearly struggles with between biopic and drama. While the story may be true -- that the real-life protagonist escaped, moved to the Big City and had a Big Gay Life -- it's a story that died out in the 2000s and needs to stop being propagated. The queer destiny is not urbania, and phrases like "it gets better" and "wait til you leave this town" are infinitely damaging to queers who hear them. Keep your empty well-wishes to yourself, y'all.

Further, much like one of my complaints about Love, Simon (and I have a lot), the ending of this film loses its steam when it succumbs to a narrative that loses its stakes. When Jared returns, his mother welcomes him, and we see the change his struggles has effected in her. She no longer attends her husband's toxic church, and pointedly tells her son, "I love God, God loves me. And I love my son." While this may be true, it fails to add a few key elements -- "God loves my son" I whispered in the theater before realizing she had recited her entire line -- that might make a significant difference in hegemonic 2018 mindset. Later, when Jared does confront his father, the scene laboriously drowns in its own subtext, and I found myself completely bewildered by both characters, their dialogue, and the pacing. It's needlessly slow, hopelessly sentimental (in a bad way), and limits the scope of impact from the rest of the film.

Finally, the film skates cleanly over the lasting effects of conversion therapy -- and believe me, it's not pretty -- by effectively saying that Jared got out, he's fine now. But that's a matter of personal preference far more than anything else. Go see this movie. Go see this movie. Go see this movie.

Oh, and Nicole Kidman is just brilliant. As always.

IMDb: Boy Erased

Red Sparrow (2018)

Score: 3 / 5

Despite the cacophonous outcries of people who think it's a Black Widow ripoff, Red Sparrow is upon us with the integrity of its source material largely intact. It's a lovely film to behold, richly detailed and determined to tell its story with the style and flair that worked so well between director Francis Lawrence and star J Law in the Hunger Games series. The problems here are that the film is tonally confused and thematically problematic, and that the screenplay is just a little too bland to keep things interesting.

I don't want to totally blame screenwriter Justin Haythe, whose successes include Revolutionary Road and whose failures include The Lone Ranger (2013). I would compare Red Sparrow more to his and A Cure for Wellness, as it attempts to do some fresh and interesting things but only marginally succeeds. Here, the story flirts with "sexpionage" as some have called it, a sort of spy style that relies heavily on sexual prowess and ingenuity to extract information and protect secrets. It's fascinating, to be sure, and J Law delivers a fascinating performance as the duplicitous protagonist. She is a killer from the start: after an injury during a ballet performance, she brutally attacks the culprits seemingly without a second thought. Yet, in turns, she appears weak and fragile, unsure, desperate, even romantic. We're never sure of the truth of her character, which makes the film endlessly watchable.

The problem comes from the other characters, and this is where things get murky. She's surrounded by equally brutal men who exploit her time and again, force her to do their bidding, torture her to make her stronger and then torture her again to break her. The women in her life are either weak, stupid, or vile, and all operate at the whims of men. Even the extent to which our protagonist has agency is up for debate (there is no clear-cut argument here). She is invited to the Sparrow program quite unwittingly and somewhat unwillingly, though her violent streak and increasingly deceptive motivations belie her unwillingness. She's aware of being used (and sometimes abused) but she actively continues in her role, perhaps because she feels she has no choice (to save her ailing mother) or because she wants revenge on the people in power (such as her charming and abusive uncle, a character I'd liken to the mother in Manchurian Candidate). Her tenuous relationship with the American spies lead her to physical torment, but she then determinedly continues her work to become a crucial asset as a double-agent.

If this thematic mess sounds a little extreme, you should know it's only my pared-down understanding of some of the stakes of this film. It's really long and really complex, and I got more than a little lost halfway through. Who is in cahoots with whom? And why? Sometimes these questions matter. Here, I think not. What matters here is the film's style, which greatly exceeds its substance. Glamorous life meets unspeakable horror in this series of games between powerful people. It's dark, cold, and vicious, brutal and sometimes difficult to watch, sexy enough but always creepy.

Feminist or not doesn't really seem to be an applicable argument here. This film espouses almost no doctrines beyond exploring a human's capacity for deception. It's not even a totally satisfying movie, and I think that might be the point. It's part of a trilogy of books, and my hope is that they all get made into films like this (Actually, now I think on it, it seems tonally akin to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I also wanted to see more of). I don't want to say it's good or bad, even that I liked it or not, but it was by far one of the most interesting movies I've seen in some time.

IMDb: Red Sparrow

It Comes At Night (2017)

Score: 4.5 / 5

As a mysterious plague ravages the world, one small family has holed up in a remote house in forested foothills. Mourning the loss of their patriarch "Bud", his daughter, son-in-law, and grandson remove the body from the premises and burn it in a shallow grave. The disease (if that is what it is) is apparently highly contagious, and the family redoubles its quarantine. One night soon after, they catch an intruder, desperate for water and shelter, whose family is hiding nearby. Once these newcomers arrive, however, the dynamics of these survivors clash and sorely test the bonds of family and of civilization.

It Comes at Night, the second directorial venture from Trey Edward Shults, is an absorbing work. The definition of minimalist, the film reminds us that in our age of live-streaming and big-budget digital effects the most horrifying things are often what we don't see. In fact, it feels less like a feature film and more like a play: long shots, deliberately stretched dialogue and scenes, almost entirely taking place within a small boarded-up house in the hills. In fact, the only "spectacle" in the film comes, as the title suggests, at night, in the form of hallucinatory dreams had by the protagonists' son. He dreams of his dead, diseased grandfather coming to him, boils on his face and black goo pouring from his mouth. The whole thing is quite Shakespearean, if not as articulate.

The problem is, this film thinks it's up to more than it is. It certainly provokes lots of thought and discussion after viewing, if the clan of middle-aged women huddled in the aisle of my theater was any indication. And while it serves up no small amount of atmospheric tension and psychological horror, this film almost never thrills or chills. Maybe it doesn't have to. Certainly true horror doesn't rely on gore or bogeymen, but this movie leaves us with so very little to hold on to. What is this plague? How is it communicable (because several people contract it, and we have no idea how)? Is it local or global? And, the most frustrating to me, what exactly is it that comes at night?

Maybe most of those questions are unnecessary. We've seen perhaps too many plague/zombie movies already, and Lord knows we can imagine the proceedings well enough by now. Perhaps, too, Shults is emphasizing an esoteric or even symbolic ailment: More than once in the family psychodrama we suspect that paranoia, suspicion, or violence are the real disease, and by the end, I for one felt that possibility was more than justified. By the end of the climactic fight scene, you will too.

Then again, I consider other independent horror masterpieces of the last couple years, especially It Follows and The Witch, both of which we might consider minimalist. They don't answer the questions they raise, and their titles are as ambiguous. I'm left, though, wishing that the horrors of It Comes at Night were a tad more fleshed out. Maybe my real problem is with the title. What comes at night? The plague? The intruder? Paranoia? At least It Follows has the decency to embody "It", even when its precise identity is negligible. I guess the filmmakers wanted my consternation, and to provoke spirited conversation. I wonder, too, if with these themes Shults isn't trying to tap into the horrors of our current sociopolitical climate. Aliens arriving at night, "others" stealing our food and water, violence threatening domestic order, medical disaster, apocalypse and its aftermath; there are reasons, you see, that Joel Edgerton's character had stockpiled and reinforced his remote rural house, and certain characters have certain ethnic texture and color.

Ultimately, the filmmakers leave us satisfied if curious, engaged but unnerved, and moved yet bewildered with a masterful chamber piece of anxiety. It may not be a new horror staple, but it's a hell of a flick.

IMDb: It Comes At Night

Jane Got a Gun (2016)

Score: 2 / 5

For a run-of-the-mill Western, it's not bad. But in a genre all but dead, we definitely hope for something with a bit more kick.

Leading the otherwise traditional narrative is our female hero, Jane (Natalie Portman), whose skill with a gun is second only to her skill at emoting. While nursing her bullet-ridden hubby (Noah Emmerich), she prepares for the approach of a gang of outlaws, namely the "Bishop Boys" led by none other than Ewan McGregor with a black, triangular moustache and shiny prosthetic buck teeth. To aid her, she enlists her ex-lover Dan (Joel Edgerton) in booby-trapping her little home and fending off the raiders. As the climax approaches ever so sluggishly, we undergo flashbacks revealing the nature of the hatred between all parties involved, including the Civil War, lost letters, pregnancy, a boot in a river, and PG-rated prostitution.

Apart from its irritating title, Jane Got a Gun is a mess to watch. Thinly sketched characters, stock cinematography, and some of the worst pacing I've ever seen make viewing this movie a trip and a half, and that's before you've even broken out the whiskey. There's some nice set work, a nice performance from Portman, and occasionally nice visuals. But since when are Westerns "nice"? Poorly balancing between gritty action (when the movie succeeds) and sentimental melodrama (where the movie could succeed but notably fails), the picture teeters towards waste, forsaking the strengths of its lead talents in favor of shallow action and unfocused storytelling.

Even with its slim 90-some-minute running time, the film feels too long. There's no joy to be found in this world, unlike in Cowboys & Aliens, and even during what should feel like a rousing feminist climax and denouement, you really just pray it'll hurry up and finish. Conversely, if joy isn't your desire for Westerns, there's also only the shadow of darkness, no disturbing violence or moral compromises we have to endure like in The Hateful Eight or even parts of The Magnificent Seven (both of which arguably feature both joy and horror, seemingly perfect for the post-Western Western film).

It's worth a watch, if only for Portman, but only if you have nothing better to see.

IMDb: Jane Got a Gun

Black Mass (2015)

Score: 3.5 / 5

I guess it's officially Oscar season. Johnny Depp ushers us in with an early grab for Best Actor that is easily his best performance in years. Depp plays Whitey Bulger, infamous gangster lord of South Boston, with a monstrous intensity that transforms the character into a devilish force of nature. He disappears into the role, aided by excellent makeup, and transcends the film around him. If nothing else, see this movie for Depp. His chilling, bulbous blue glare is entrancing on screen, and he injects venom into every word he speaks.

The rest of the film is a solid crime thriller, to be sure, but not one I found to be very palatable. We are given precious little insight into Bulger's character, and indeed we are given only shallow and fleeting peeks into the plethora of other characters. Rather than appreciating the scope of the story, I was having trouble keeping tabs on everyone (not helped by the fact that they are all white men in business suits with thick accents discussing a lot of proper nouns that hadn't yet been established visually). The script is immense, spanning several years, locations across the country, and tons of characters; handled well, this type of script can be effective (remember David Fincher's Zodiac?), but here it buries itself in details and names and motives. Whole subplots come and go with seemingly little logic (whether the fault of the writer or the director), and the editing occasionally feels forced and awkward.

That's not to say there aren't shining moments. The performances are solid all around, notably in Joel Edgerton, who has to share several intense scenes with Depp, and in Julianne Nicholson, who shares only one scene with Depp that will probably give me nightmares tonight. Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard, Corey Stoll, and Juno Temple all pop in for a few scenes, which is fun if nothing else. And the lengthy, expository dialogue sometimes gives way to brutal gems, usually delivered by Depp, that often tore me out of my reverie.

Speaking of reverie, I should mention that Masanobu Takayanagi's cinematography is really excellent (he also helped shoot Babel, Eat Pray Love, Silver Linings Playbook, and State of Play), alternating between closeups of our lead actors' faces and grand stillshots of larger, usually remote locations. Though most images are in stark grayscale and in bleak lighting, Takayanagi frames his shots so that even an abandoned alley or the muddy underside of a bridge look as important as a cathedral. I think someone decided to pay attention to the title. Elegant and almost Gothic, his camerawork gives an engaging and hypnotic energy to the film that I found endlessly intriguing.

It doesn't have the heart of The Town, the sweeping grandeur of an epic like The Godfather, or even commentary on politics or violence like we might see in The Drop or Public Enemies. And watching it, I didn't really care what happened to these people because director Scott Cooper didn't seem to either. But as the last ten minutes came to a strange sort of climax (underscored by a haunting symphonic melody), I realized that the movie works in levels beyond those conventions. It's just an examination of a man's life. Gritty and bleak, the film makes us intimate with a gangster and his methods, including his liaisons with the FBI, and then leaves us with the weight of his sins (and ours, by extension) to contemplate as we leave. If the filmmakers wanted to undermine the cathartic and spiritual (confession/redemption) convention of recent crime dramas, they did so, and this black mass consistently piles on the heavy stuff with no hope for absolution.

IMDb: Black Mass

The Gift (2015)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Easily the most stylish thriller this summer (actually, maybe the only thriller this summer), The Gift presents us with a masterful retelling of a familiar story. It's Fatal Attraction meets Gone Girl, but without much overt play on misogyny. Indeed, the woman in this film, played by Rebecca Hall, is the most sympathetic character, and we largely follow her journey between two opposing men who seem to have staked claims on her and her privileged life. But she doesn't really suffer from the two men in the same ways that they suffer from each other.

As I say, the tale is familiar: Rogue man (Joel Edgerton) with shady motives begins stalking our protagonist woman and her husband (Jason Bateman) in their idyllic suburban life. We get the idea that the stranger is after our heroine until we learn that the victim of his advances may actually be her husband, who had shamed the man many years prior. Rising above the soapy plot, though, the film perfectly captures appropriate dialogue, a stark visual approach, and entrancingly nuanced performances that, together, spin into a nightmarish descent that doesn't relent until the ending credits roll. Actually, the final fifteen minutes or so were possibly my favorite, as the plot ramps up and our sympathies are all over the place. Whereas we initially identified with the woman, we become more invested in the men's game of cat-and-mouse while (in the most brilliant turn I could have expected) we totally lose sight of the woman. In the film's climax, when we think she has become the men's victim, we get one shot of her, and in it she unequivocally (and non-verbally) declares her independence and autonomy with a single look of defiance. It took my breath away.

Joel Edgerton deserves all of the praise for this movie, as he starred, wrote, produced, and directed it, making it his directorial debut, I believe. His ear seems trained to the human voice at its most guarded, by which I mean the film's dialogue tends to take on double meanings, and works best when polite conversation is pulled back to reveal the raw cruelty underneath. Jason Bateman particularly shines in those moments, and he pulls a powerhouse turnaround about two-thirds of the way through the movie. Director Edgerton's eye, however, is trained on sensual patterns and proximity, allowing the rich colors and beautiful sets to frame casual conversations as if they were intimate, and intimate situations as if they were horrific. Indeed, the one overtly misogynist moment in the film (I kept waiting for it, when the plot hinges on two men battling, with a woman in between) happens near the end, and it's a fairly brutal (though not graphic) sequence. Its sexual nature is left ultimately ambiguous, which helps, but my point is that it is filmed not unlike a terrorist's home video, with shaky, theatrical handheld camera, and the victim is helpless as her masked assailant poses for the screen. In this way, even the more sensitive, sexual moments in the film are sensationalized as pure horror entirely as a result of Edgerton's directing.

Really, the only thing I disliked about the film was its title. It's a little too generic, a little too familiar for my taste. That said, it might bring a little insight into Edgerton's motivations for creating the film. His character seems driven by an inner sense of justice, a particularly vindictive higher purpose, and his means of enacting it is through gifts. Perhaps he feels that he himself is a gift to these people, showing them their sins and forcing them to confront their pasts and prejudices. Perhaps the titular gift is he himself, allowing the other characters a chance to change. Of course, given some of his actions, it would also be a haunting view into his mind, as we can trace how dangerous and vicious his behaviors can be.

IMDb: The Gift

Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)

Score: 2.5 / 5

People seem determined to compare this film with others, so I guess I'll start by sharing my own thoughts on that front. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) is the obvious comparison point, but I'm not sure there is any comparison. Each fails in its own way, and each succeeds in others. One was made with enormous scope and became a classic largely because of elements that are not pure artwork, and the other wants desperately to repeat this and fails largely due to bad writing, heavy effects, and bad direction. In short, one is a dramatic masterpiece, and the other a dramatic black hole. Ridley Scott's own success story, Gladiator (2000), also comes to mind because it felt not unlike Ten Commandments when it came out. Russell Crowe channeled Charlton Heston as the heroic man who, unsurprisingly, becomes a hero. But where Gladiator rocked with its focus on an actor's strong performance, Exodus falters by largely ignoring anyone's acting. Finally, Exodus just isn't as much fun as this year's other biblical attempt-at-an-epic, Noah; at least Darren Aronofsky knew to put his tongue in his cheek when he had giant rock monsters help Russell Crowe do Big Important Things.

Now let's focus on this picture, and explore my claims. Moses, played by a stoic Christian Bale, is so underwritten and underperformed that I never felt a twinge of sympathy for him. He's a hardheaded man who likes to flex his muscles and look grumpy. God in the film is portrayed by a little boy (actually I think the boy was an angel, not God himself), which I kind of liked at first. But then he starts popping up at odd times, which is obnoxious, and nobody else can see him, which makes Moses look crazy at times: It is an inspired choice for the character I really liked, but both Scott and Bale ignore its implications. As a boy, God (or whoever he is) is a match for Christian Bale in grumpiness and angst. I suppose that works well enough with the God of the Old Testament (he's a jerk, let's face it; he only cares about one people group at the expense of countless others, and he pushes people to do impossible things and then punishes them for failing), but it feels funky and contrived in this film. Joel Edgerton plays Ramesses with possibly the only good performance in the movie; his character is complex, and he performs with both nuance and strength as the primary villain, and won my sympathies which is probably not Scott's intent. The rest of the cast is largely irrelevant. John Turturro shows some notable acting strength as the Pharaoh, but he dies before long. Sigourney Weaver, Aaron Paul, and Ben Kingsley pop in for a few scenes, but are largely ignored for some tragic reason.

Large sets (both digital and practical) and beautiful, extravagant costumes steal the film. Unfortunately, the characters that inhabit this world have no development and almost no drama, and so the stunning visuals lose almost all of their significance. The dialogue is poor, and the script's pacing is severely uneven. And though there are moments of great special visual effects, they are empty because we don't care about anyone in the shots. I had more sympathy for the masses being tortured by the plagues than for Moses himself. Scott seems to have forgotten that an epic is not made simply by huge visual scope, even with heavily graded picture.

No, this movie does not stick strictly to the biblical narrative, so let's just nip that in the bud. It's an adaptation, people -- we've had this discussion before. But as its own narrative, Exodus doesn't work well. Poor dialogue and severely uneven pacing reveal a weak script that wanted to be an epic; it's one thing to criticize a film for its problems, but when you gauge its failure of reaching its own aspirations, the whole thing quickly becomes pitiful. The beginning starts with an attempted bang, but since the details of the battle are left ambiguous at best, all we can take away from it is an idea that the Egyptians are fierce in battle. And the buildup to Moses's mountaintop revelation is woefully unclear; one scene has him denying his Hebrew blood, and literally the next scene has him hugging his mother and sister before walking away in exile. Even having read the story for most of my life, I wasn't sure what was happening before my eyes. It's just sloppy filmmaking. And then the ending sort of fizzles out into a downright silly post-climax couple of minutes. Instead of attending to the now-free nation of Israelites, we see Moses carving the Ten Commandments above a vague shot of a golden calf, none of which is explained. Then we see him return to his wife, talking about how much he loves her. What a waste of cinema.

That said, there are exceptional high points in the movie. Honestly, the lengthy sequence in the middle of the film when plagues assault Egypt is one of the most engaging bits of film I've seen this year. Exciting and enormous, the plagues are shown with a kinetic energy not unlike that in those huge domino art experiments. Scott shows them not necessarily with scientific accuracy (if there is any), but he does seem to play with the idea that if these horrific events were to take place, this might be what they'd look like. The plagues are no less miraculous, as some have claimed, as a result of this, but they do make more sense in the realm of reality. The crocodile attack (which results in the Nile running red with blood) is just wonderful, too, but maybe I love those beasties too much. Similarly, the parting of the Red Sea is a really beautiful scene, and it feels more grounded and realistic than any other version of the story I've seen (remember the walls of water in The Prince of Egypt, with the silhouettes of fish looming over the Israelites? That happened.).

A final thought. People like to talk about whitewashing because it makes them feel smart and edgy. But I do think that here it has some merit, not just because the characters are whiter than chalk under their heavy makeup, but because their accents are all over the place. We have generic British, attempted generic British, Bale's American with occasional generic Britishisms, and vague attempts at a vague ethnic accent that could be just about anything. Not acceptable, Scott. When we have had a mainstream film of Christ's death done entirely in authentic languages, there is no excuse for this kind of uninformed blundering.

IMDb: Exodus: Gods and Kings