The film drops you into a world you would be hard-pressed to even imagine and finds a story that is both bright and beautiful despite itself. It’s the story of a young woman, held captive inside a shed, and her 5-year-old son, who’s never been outside of “room.”
Never lurid for even a moment, both restrained and urgently raw, the film benefits most from the potentially catastrophic choice to tell the story from the child’s perspective. And here is the miracle of Room: without ever becoming precious or maudlin or syrupy, with nary a single false note or hint of contrivance, the boy’s point of view fills the story with love and wonder. It gives the proceedings a resilience, and lacking that, a film on this subject so authentically told could become almost too much to bear.
Director Lenny Abrahamson (Frank) creates yet another meticulously crafted, lived-in world – a world that should look like nothing we have ever seen or could ever imagine, and yet manages to resonate with beautifully universal touches. He is absolutely blessed with two magnificent leads and one wonderful supporting turn.
The undeniably talented Brie Larson gives a career-defining performance as Ma. On her face she wears the weariness, desperation, and surprising flashes of joy that believably create a character few of us could even imagine. She conjures emotions so tumultuous as to be nearly impossible to create, but does it with rawness that feels almost too real.
Veteran Joan Allen is the normalizing presence, and her characteristically nuanced turn gives the film its needed second act emotional anchor.
Surrounded as he is by exceptional talent, it is young Jacob Tremblay who ensures that the film won’t soon be forgotten. Where did Abrahamson find such a natural performer? Because an awful lot rests on those wee shoulders, and it’s the sincerity in this performance that keeps you utterly, breathlessly riveted every minute, and also bathes an otherwise grim tale in beauty and hope.
Not exactly a novel concept, but one you can expect to find at the multiplex this time of year, so if nothing else, Love the Coopers is punctual.
As Christmas approaches, longtime married couple Charlotte and Sam Cooper (Diane Keaton and John Goodman) have decided to split, but Sam has promised to keep quiet about it until the family has enjoyed one last “perfect” Holiday together.
But as they ready their Pittsburgh home for guests, things are far from perfect.
Their son Hank (Ed Helms) is divorced and now, suddenly jobless. Resentful daughter Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) is bringing home a fake boyfriend (Jake Lacey) just to shut her parents up. Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is upset because his favorite waitress at the diner (Amanda Seyfreid) is moving away. Aunt Fishy (June Squibb) is having memory lapses, while Charlotte’s sister Emma (Marisa Tomei) just got arrested and is trying to psycho-analyze Officer Williams (Anthony Mackie) from the back of a police car.
The big disadvantage with this formula is that as the cast of characters grows, so does the necessity of quality writing to make any of them impactful. Steven Rogers provides a script that’s pleasant enough, but it can’t resonate any more than a random sampling of Hallmark cards.
Love the Coopers wants us to slow down, live each moment, and take the time to appreciate life.
It is a sweet sentiment, truly, but told in an obvious and often contrived manner, right down to the obligatory foul-mouthed little kid (Blake Baumgartner) and reaction-shot dog. Well worn themes can still be vital, but that usually results from less telling and more showing, an approach which doesn’t seem to interest director Jessie Nelson (I Am Sam).
Instead, she invites you over for a likable cast serving up harmlessly disposable Holiday fare.
Love the Coopers? Not really, but The Coopers Are Okay I Guess didn’t seem quite wonderful enough for this time of year.
Few true events lend themselves more perfectly to film than the 2010 Chilean mine collapse. There is more drama, peril, resilience, and joy in the facts of this incident than anything that could believably be created in a piece of fiction.
Director Patricia Riggen tackles the story of the miners trapped about half a mile below ground. With food enough for three days, all 33 men survived an impossible 69 days. The story that mesmerized the world is not just of the unbelievable perseverance of the miners themselves, but also of the tenacity of an international team of engineers who worked against both overwhelming odds and an urgent timeclock to save them.
There is no end to the cinematic possibilities available in this deeply moving, thrilling story, which is why it’s so unfortunate that Riggen layers on so much artificial melodrama.
Antonio Banderas and Lou Diamond Phillips anchor a cast saddled with one-dimensional characters, each allowed a particular flaw to overcome or an inspiring trait to benefit the group. Riggen undermines the miners’ struggles by inexplicably skirting a claustrophobic feel, allowing no one the chance to truly panic or lose hope without Saint Mario (Banderas as inspirational leader Mario Sepulveda) swooping in with a word of wisdom to put everyone back on the right track.
Events above ground are treated with even less integrity, as engineers undergo lengthy, obvious epiphanies, and families offer little more than tearfully unwavering support. Riggen’s script, adapted by a team of writers from Hector Tobar’s book “Deep Down Dark,” leeches the human drama and complexity from all the events surrounding the collapse, replacing it with by-the-numbers disaster flick clichés and easy answers.
Most of the actors struggle with accents (I’m looking at you, Gabriel Byrne), and the back and forth use of Spanish and English only further exacerbates the film’s lack of authenticity.
And yet, when that first miner is lifted from his would-be tomb, it is impossible not to be moved. Because this really happened. Thirty three humans spent more than two months 2300 feet below ground, all the while understanding that their chance for survival was infinitesimal. Their ordeal is incomprehensible, and the fight against hopelessness and financial complacency to free them is genuinely inspiring.
The miners received no compensation from the company that stranded them, and this is the best Hollywood can do?
Three years ago, director Sam Mendes took the reins of the Bond franchise, pitting cyber terrorism against old fashioned knuckle and grit, employing the most talented international actors working, and crafting the single best 007 film of its then 50-year legacy, Skyfall. Hell, it even had the best song. That’s a big martini glass to fill with a follow up, and his Spectre can’t quite live up.
In what’s rumored to be Daniel Craig’s last go-round as Bond, cybercrime and the possible end of the Double 0 program are again the causes of conflict. M (Ralph Feinnes) has a new boss who’s more interested in a global surveillance than man-on-the-ground spying, but Bond can’t be worried about that right now. He has a secret mission and an old adversary to deal with.
Christoph Waltz, an ideal candidate as a Bond villain, is the puppet master, and through him Mendes gets to toss in scores of nods and winks to the entire span of 007 films. There are gadgets, familiar names, enormous henchmen, Bond girls, elaborately staged chases, cheeky one-liners, and cocktails being “shaken, not stirred.” There’s even a board meeting of evil worthy of an Austin Powers film or a Simpsons send-up.
There’s too little else, though.
The film starts off gloriously enough with a brilliantly filmed action piece set in Mexico City’s Day of the Dead parade, but Mendes and crew soon settle into a muddled, anti-climactic mishmash of old tropes and familiar ideas. Spectre offers dozens of gorgeously framed, eerily lit, elegant images, but the drama and style of the previous effort are missing.
Shallow writing full of ludicrous sequencing and convenient decisions rob the film of the resonance Skyfall offered. Lined up against most Bond efforts, Spectre is a fun, lively bit of entertainment. It just so badly misses the high water mark left by Skyfall that it can’t help but feel like a let-down.
Anyone familiar with cinematic boundary-pusher Gaspar Noe probably wasn’t too surprised when the nature of Noe’s latest project began to leak out.
“3D porn? Oh, yeah, that sounds like something he would do.”
Well, Love is here, and while it is in 3D and does feature graphic, un-simulated sex, it’s ultimately anchored by a rumination that manages to resonate beyond pure shock value.
Originally conceived as a vehicle for Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel (the married stars of Noe’s Irreversible), Love was put on hold when the couple balked at sharing their intimacies so explicitly. Instead, Noe entrusts relative unknowns to propel his most personal film to date, and more often than not, it works.
Karl Glusman is Murphy, a young American studying film in Paris. He meets the beguiling Electra (Aomi Myock) at a party, and they begin a passionate relationship. As they push each other to explore sexual fantasies, the pretty Omi (Klara Kristin) moves in next door, and they all begin to explore each other, which seldom ends well.
Jumping back and forth through different phases in Murphy and Electra’s affair, Noe immerses you in the gamut of emotions involved in such an intense attachment. There is no buildup to the scenes of real sex, Noe opens the film with one (of course he does). But more than a selfish move of defiance (I’m looking at you, Lars von Trier), it’s a tactic meant to accustom you to the surroundings, so to speak, while Noe explores his softer side.
When Electra asks “Can you show me how tender you can be?” it’s just one of the many personal markers Noe leaves along the film’s trail.
Murphy’s apartment is adorned with movie posters from some very deliberate titles, there are supporting characters named both Gaspar and Noe, and Murphy proudly declares he believes films should consist of “blood, sperm and tears.”
Check, check, and check.
The three main performers stumble on moments where inexperience is evident, but when mixed with the naïveté of their characters, they emerge as awkwardly endearing.
Ironically, as hardcore as the film is, an unnecessary use of 3D is one of the few aspects that smack of excessive over- indulgence. The graphic scenes get Noe’s trademark extended takes, but they carry narrative weight beyond simple titillation. In the filmmaker’s own terms, think more Irreversible and less Enter the Void.
The sex, and the sexual politics, that Love puts right in your face will not sit well with many, but those in it for the long haul will actually find Noe at his most gentle.
There are thousands of horror films that can be called Canadian horror, in that so many movies are filmed in Canada. But we weren’t looking for Hollywood on the cheap. No, we wanted to celebrate the subversive yet polite genre filmmaking flowing from the Canucks themselves. We were looking for films made by Canadians in Canada.
We didn’t want to zero in on just one guy, either. There are so many films by David Cronenberg that could have made the list (indeed – maybe he deserves an entire podcast?!), but we limited ourselves to one so that we could celebrate some of the horror variety you can find bundled up in America’s Hat.
5. Bloody Knuckles (2014)
Canadian writer/director Matt O’s Bloody Knuckles offers a gloriously nasty, Troma-esque mash note to freedom of speech.
Pasty malcontent Travis (Adam Boys) writes the underground comic series Vulgarian Invasions. One inflammatory comic book too many lands him on the hit list of local thug Leonard Fong, who saws off his disrespectful drawing hand. But even if Travis is ready to surrender, that dismembered appendage is not.
The effort and tone are reminiscent of the bargain basement horror comedies of Frank Henenlotter (think Frankenhooker) – good-natured but wildly tasteless. Unlike Henenlotter or the Troma films O so clearly admires, Bloody Knuckles has a point to make. Art should be dangerous. Safety is the refuge of the cowardly.
Most faults can be forgiven this film, especially if you pine for the silly fun of low-budget horror of a bygone time. Or if you just really like free speech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwvjfv6C_Qs
4. American Mary
Twin sisters, Canadians, and badasses Jen and Sylvia Soska have written and directed a smart, twisted tale of cosmetic surgery – both elective and involuntary.
Katharine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps) stars as med student Mary Mason, a bright and eerily dedicated future surgeon who’s having some trouble paying the bills. She falls in with an unusual crowd, develops some skills, and becomes a person you don’t want to piss off.
The Soskas’ screenplay is as savvy as they come, clean and unpretentious but informed by gender politics and changing paradigms. They also prove skilled at drawing strong performances across the board. Isabelle is masterful, performing without judgment and creating a multi-dimensional central figure. Antonio Cupo also impresses as the unexpectedly layered yet certainly creepy strip club owner.
Were it not for all those amputations and mutilations, this wouldn’t be a horror film at all. It’s a bit like a noir turned inside out, where we share the point of view of the raven haired dame who’s nothin’ but trouble. It’s a unique and refreshing approach that pays off.
3. Cube (1997)
Making his feature directing debut in 1997, Vincenzo Natali, working from a screenplay he co-wrote, shadows 7 involuntary inmates of a seemingly inescapable, booby trapped mazelike structure. Those crazy Canucks!
Cube is the film Saw wanted to be. These people were chosen, and they must own up to their own weaknesses and work together as a team to survive and escape. It is a visually awe inspiring, perversely fascinating tale of claustrophobic menace. It owes Kafka a nod, but honestly, stealing from the likes of Kafka is a crime we can get behind.
There is a level of nerdiness to the trap that makes it scary, in that you know you wouldn’t make it. You would die. We would certainly die. In fact, the minute they started talking about Prime Numbers, we knew we were screwed.
What Natali was able to accomplish within the limitations he has – startlingly few sets, a very small cast, a 20 day shoot schedule – is astounding. An effective use of FX, true visual panache, and a handful of well-conceived death sequences elevate this far above Saw and many other films with ten times the budget.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37EjGw7jV98
2. Ginger Snaps (2000)
Sisters Ginger and Bridget, outcasts in the wasteland of Canadian suburbia, cling to each other, and reject/loathe high school (a feeling that high school in general returns).
On the evening of Ginger’s first period, she’s bitten by a werewolf. Writer Karen Walton cares not for subtlety: the curse, get it? It turns out, lycanthropy makes for a pretty vivid metaphor for puberty. This turn of events proves especially provocative and appropriate for a film that upends many mainstay female cliches. Walton’s wickedly humorous script stays in your face with the metaphors, successfully building an entire film on clever turns of phrase, puns, and analogies, stirring up the kind of hysteria that surrounds puberty, sex, reputations, body hair, and one’s own helplessness to these very elements. It’s as insightful a high school horror film as you’ll find, peppered equally with dark humor and gore – kind of A Canadian Werewolf in High School, if you will.
1. Videodrome (1983)
Yes, there are many, many Cronenberg films that could have taken this or any other spot on the countdown. Videodrome was the last true horror and truly Canadian film in his arsenal, and it shows an evolution in his preoccupations with body horror, media, and technology as well as his progress as a filmmaker.
James Woods plays sleazy TV programmer Max Renn, who pirates a program he believes is being taped in Malaysia – a snuff show, where people are slowly tortured to death in front of viewers’ eyes. But it turns out to be more than he’d bargained for. Corporate greed, zealot conspiracy, medical manipulation all come together in this hallucinatory insanity that could only make sense with Cronenberg at the wheel.
Deborah Harry co-stars, and Woods shoulders his abundance screen time quite well. What? James Woods plays a sleaze ball? Get out! Still, he does a great job with it. But the real star is Cronenberg, who explores his own personal obsessions, dragging us willingly down the rabbit hole with him. Long live the new flesh!
In 2005, with her film Our Brand is Crisis, documentarian Rachel Boynton unveiled the puppeteering that American political-strategists-for-hire undertake the world over. Her film followed James Carville’s team as they set their sights on putting their candidate in office during Bolivia’s 2002 presidential elections. With insight, cynicism, mirth and horror she detailed their “no wrong but losing” efforts – and its bloody aftermath – breathtakingly painting the way competition utterly eclipsed the good of a nation.
Director David Gordon Green takes a stab at updating Boynton’s tale, adapted by the generally quite wonderful Peter Straughan (Frank, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). They enlist Sandra Bullock as “Calamity” Jane Bodine, a longtime political strategist who, after a series of embarrassing losses and a spate of even more embarrassing behavior, has retired from the biz.
But she’s pulled out of retirement – What? No way! What’s the lure? It’s not the lame duck Bolivian presidential candidate supported by former colleague Nell and her partner Ben (Ann Dowd and Anthony Mackie – both embarrassingly underused). No, it’s the involvement of old nemesis Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton – the spitting image of Carville), lead strategist for the leading candidate.
An unkempt Bullock and slickly creepy Thornton offer fiery chemistry, and as long as they share the screen, Our Brand is Crisis captivates. But the film can’t decide whether it’s a political comedy, a change-of-heart drama, or an underdog thriller.
While Straughan is an almost sure bet, Green’s unpredictable thumbprint as director is more of a question mark. His best films blend comedy and drama with an almost poetic balance, but he cannot find his footing here.
Straughan’s uncharacteristically muddled writing sinks sharply comical jabs at our political machinery with an undercooked conscience, a patronizing representation of Bolivians, and an oh-so-tired White Savior routine.
Although Scoot McNairy is a hoot.
In retrospect, it’s hard to explain the hot mess that is Our Brand is Crisis. It had all the elements it needed to be a winner – talented director, wonderful writer, heavy-hitting cast. Sometimes, though, even a sure bet comes up a loser.
James Vanderbilt’s Truth is hardly the first film to point out the folly of marrying journalism and profit. From Sidney Lumet’s 1976 masterpiece Network to last year’s creepily spectacular Nightcrawler, cinematic history is littered with brilliant examples of this disastrous partnership.
Truth stands apart for two reasons. 1) The recent history lesson is, in fact, a real life event, and 2) Cate Blanchett stars.
The film is at its best as an excavation of the bits and pieces of a 2004 story produced by Mary Mapes (Blanchett) and reported by Dan Rather (Robert Redford) for Sixty Minutes II, a now-defunct Wednesday night airing of the CBS news program.
In 2004, Mapes – having recently broken the story of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse – chose to dig in to George W. Bush’s less-than-impressive Texas Air National Guard records. It was the middle of an election during which his opponent John Kerry’s military record was being “swift boated.” It was also the dawn of an age in journalism: make enough noise about an inconsequential detail and the story itself becomes nothing but background noise.
Vanderbilt’s screenplay, based on Mapes’s book “Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power,” chronicles both the details of the reporting and the larger machinations of political power-wielding and corporate gutlessness, landing on some tragic consequences for a population interested in the truth.
Conservative bloggers insisted Mapes used forged documentation – a fact that could never be 100% corroborated or dispelled – and in one of the ugliest scenes of corporate media overreaction and cowardice, CBS fired Mapes and her team and forced Dan Rather into disgraced retirement.
Like Vanderbilt’s screenplay for the David Fincher film Zodiac, Truth is alive with details. Unfortunately, Fincher’s skill behind the camera gave Zodiac the compelling pull of a mystery, where Vanderbilt’s focus waffles between minutia and big picture without an elegant flow.
There are moments of real greatness here, especially as the story begins to crumble before Mapes’s eyes, and decisions made in the heat of story construction come back to haunt her. Basically, Blanchett is perfect, even when the writing fails her, even when the direction feels underwhelming. She’s fiery and raw, creating a character who is naturally in battle at all times.
Redford, on the other hand, comes casually to Dan Rather. He does not look the part. He looks like Robert Redford, which is curious given that he’s playing a public figure. But it isn’t long into the performance that you find an understated, dignified man whose professionalism and scruples have fallen out of fashion.
The film is a scary, flawed, but fascinating look at a frighteningly flawed and fascinating business.
The first voice you hear in Steve Jobs is from legendary writer Arthur C. Clarke, explaining in a decades-old interview the many ways computers will one day affect human life.
It’s not only a clever way to introduce a film anchored in the rise of personal computers, it’s a subtle reminder that some people just see the future better than others.
From there, writer Aaron Sorkin and director Danny Boyle take a visionary approach themselves, crafting an appropriately intense and completely engrossing profile of Jobs’s history with Apple, Inc.
We get a character study in three acts: the launch of the Mac brand in 1984, Jobs’s start of Next computers in ’88 after his ouster from Apple, and his triumphant 1998 return to the company he co-founded. A more traditional biopic style may still have been compelling, but it would never be the mesmerizing time capsule film Steve Jobs is.
Sorkin and Boyle understand that a man so self-aggrandizing and obsessed with design deserves a treatment that is both. Sorkin’s wordplay – always of the smartest-guy-in-the-room variety (because, let’s face it, in most rooms he probably is) is piercing and ambitious, barely pausing for air before another sharp line finds its mark.
The settings seldom move beyond the backstage areas of convention halls, but Boyle – as he did so masterfully with the claustrophobic 127 Hours – expands the film’s universe with effective flashbacks and fluid camerawork. The look is appropriately sleek and almost poetic, highlighted by a beautiful image of Apple board members voting to fire Jobs beneath windows being pummeled by the pouring rain.
Michael Fassbender delivers a masterwork as Steve Jobs, making him an utterly fascinating enigma. This is miles away from a complete biography, but Fassbender takes full advantage of the chances Sorkin and Boyle give him to offer glimpses behind the bluster and into Jobs’s psyche.
The sublime supporting cast offers more greatness. Kate Winslet (as Jobs’s longtime marketing exec and all-around right hand Joanna Hoffman), Jeff Daniels (Apple CEO John Scully) and Michael Stuhlbarg (computer scientist Andy Hertzfield) display the nuance and humanity that they so often do, while Seth Rogen doesn’t shrink from his call up to the big leagues.
As Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Rogen brings impressive dramatic chops to a role integral to some of the film’s most powerful scenes, as “Woz” pleads with his old friend to give a small measure of credit to someone other than Steve Jobs.
It is a movie that’s overly dramatic in spots and yes, idealistic as well, but that feels more than fitting for a look at the wages of genius. Challenging and ferocious, brilliantly conceived and performed, Steve Jobs is nothing short of thrilling cinema.
It’s October, so if you hear “Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, two hour twenty minute historical drama” and think Oscar bait, you’re not alone.
But Bridge of Spies also walks the walk, emerging as a taut, effective and absorbing film, as finely crafted as you would expect from the talents involved.
It’s also a wonderful slice of history, especially for those not familiar with the story of Jim Donovan.
As the Cold War rages in the late 1950s, Donovan (Hanks) is an insurance lawyer with three kids and a wife (Amy Ryan) in a big house in the New York suburbs. When the CIA nabs Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), the head of Donovan’s firm (Alan Alda) volunteers him to help the Feds and give Abel just enough of a defense to make the trial seem legit.
Going through the motions doesn’t sit well with Donovan, even as his commitment brings a cost “to family and firm.”
Complications arise when the Russians capture one of ours, and a prisoner exchange seems in the best interest of both parties. That’s not the sort of thing governments want to officially participate in, so Donovan is sent to Berlin to negotiate the deal.
Standing alone, the true events are undoubtedly compelling, but onscreen they unfold like an intentionally old school genre thriller, crafted by veteran artists wearing their considerable skills like a perfectly broken-in pair of shoes.
Spielberg’s sense of pace and framing is casually impeccable, Hanks perfectly embodies Donovan’s inner journey, and Rylance is sure to get Oscar consideration for his scene-stealing perfection.
But there’s more. Composer Thomas Newman (what, not John Williams?) provides a gently evocative score, and Matt Charman’s script gets an assist from none other than the Coen Brothers.
As the tale moves from courtroom motions to clandestine spy games, it’s punctuated by perfectly realized moments that speak to more universal themes. Schoolchildren frightened by the thought of war, a mad dash to make it over the Berlin Wall, or a pledge to be a justice system that doesn’t “toss people in the trash heap”, all linger just long enough to resonate without manipulation.
By the time Donovan heads to the bridge for the prisoner transfer, the only chance of letdown in the film comes from being lulled into complacency by the skill of people who just know what the hell they are doing.
