Review - American Sniper

Pulling a trigger may be the single most dehumanizing act there is. Every time one person makes the conscious decision to end the life of another, they lose a part of themselves that cannot be retrieved. Most people would grow ill at the thought of performing this act even once. What kind of person would it take to have done it 160 times? How would he/she feel?

In Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, we're introduced to the real-life figure that epitomizes the moral quandary at the root of killing for one's country; NAVY Seal Chris Kyle, who became the deadliest shot in U.S. military history over the course of four tours in Iraq, earning him the nickname 'Legend'. But an introduction is not the same as an examination, and as riveting an introduction it is at times, it does not delve deep enough into the man behind the 'legend'.

Review - Selma

The image we're greeted with at the onset of Selma, staring directly at us, is the face of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But this is not the Dr. King we know from the sound bites and TV footage that immortalized him as a mighty orator with a famous dream. This Dr. King looks uncomfortable, restless and out of his element as he rehearses his Noble Peace Prize acceptance speech in the privacy of his hotel suite.

The Dr. King he himself sees in the mirror is unfamiliar to him as well; All dressed up to accept an award for peace when he knows how much violence and struggle is yet to be endured in his campaign for civil rights. Just as he gazes at his reflection, contemplating how far he's come and how far he's still to go, so too does Selma hold a mirror up to modern America and ask its people to consider the same questions.

Director Ava DuVernay (working from her largely rewritten draft of an original script by Paul Webb) has no intention of taking the easy way around the story of the protest marches King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, or of dampering its echoes in the troubled racial politics of today. Though set in the summer of '65, it is a film very much about the here and now, told with a verve and vitality that historical docudramas often lack.

Quick Review - Inherent Vice

I honestly didn't feel that inspired to write about this one, but since Paul Thomas Anderson is one of America's foremost auteur voices, I figured he at least deserved a separate post for his latest film Inherent Vice, rather than lump it in with the capsule reviews.

Suffice it to say that I land firmly on the thumbs-down side of this divisive L.A. noir as seen through a pair of aviator shades and a haze of pot smoke. It comes off more as an empty stylistic exercise than a trippy work of art to me.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as 'Doc', a perpetually baked hippie P.I. investigating the disappearance of a housing mogul and his ex-girlfriend. That's about as much of the plot as I can summarize, because after that things become impossible to follow.

Review - The Imitation Game

“Are you paying attention?” a blank movie screen asks it audience in an austere British accent. “Good. This is going to go very quickly now. If you are not listening carefully, you will miss things. Important things.”

The voice belongs to Alan Turing (by way of Benedict Cumberbatch), the subject of The Imitation Game. The preeminent mathematician and number theorist is widely regarded the 'Father of Computer Science', but his other claim to fame – which this film dramatizes – is that it was he who cracked the Germans' mind-boggling Enigma Code during WWII, thus turning the tide in the Allies' favour.

I thought it might be fitting to encrypt this review, but since not everyone is as proficient at deciphering garbled letters as Mr. Turing was, good old fashioned English will have to do. Come to think of it, 'good', 'old fashioned', and 'English' are probably the three best terms to describe The Imitation Game.

Yes, the film is very English, like an episode of Masterpiece Theatre that's slightly too good to be relegated to the telly. Yes, the film is old fashioned, mounted with a classical absence of style that your grandmum would love. And yes, for any sniping about how flagrantly it's been groomed to win over Oscar voters, the film is indeed quite good.

Review - Into the Woods

Often I wish more than anything... more than life... that Hollywood would provide us with more movie musicals than it currently does. We musical theatre lovers are lucky if we can get one live-action song-and-dance film a year. Luckier yet if its a good one.

It puts me in a situation as sticky as pitch when it comes to evaluating the big screen adaptation of a stage musical that I don't love nearly as much as the genre it represents. The show in question is Sondheim & Lapine's Into the Woods, translated into cinematic form by director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Nine) and positioned as Disney's big holiday season draw.

The original production which debuted on Broadway in 1988 could best be described as a revisionist fairytale: The paths of various familiar Grimm characters intersect en route to their storybook endings as they venture through the woods. Among them are Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Jack of eventual beanstalk infamy (Daniel Huttlestone), Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), a baker and his wife (James Corden and Emily Blunt), a pair of vain if charming princes (Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen), and a scheming witch (Meryl Streep).

Review - Unbroken

Louie Zamperini has an incredible life story to tell. The odds were already stacked against him from a young age, growing up as one of four children of an immigrant family in Depression-era California. In spite of this, he made a name for himself as a competitive distance runner, represented America in the Berlin Olympics, served his country as a bombardier in WWII, survived a plane crash that left him stranded for 47 days in the Pacific Ocean, and lived out the remainder of the war in a Japanese POW camp under the harshest conditions imaginable.

Just that cursory synopsis of his bio is enough to make one wonder why his life story hasn't been made into a major motion picture already, but we finally get one in the form of Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, which arrived on Christmas Day. Zamperini passed away in July at 97 years of age, and while no one wants to rain on the posthumous parade of a man who endured through so much struggle, the sad reality is that an incredible true story does not necessarily an incredible movie make.

Unbroken is just not that good a film; A clichéd exercise that reaches for artificial inspiration while saying very little about the figure who serves as its subject. The problem is not in the story, but in the storytelling, as it fails to shape Zamperini's harrowing saga into any kind of effective structure.

Mourning in the American 'Wild' and the Irish 'Sea': Double Feature Review

Late December is often a time of great celebration. No matter what your faith or customs may be, there's always an extra emphasis on enjoying time with our loved ones this season, as we prepare to close the book on one year and eagerly welcome another.

But, inevitably, the closing out of the year also becomes a time of solemn reflection, to remember what we've lost while cherishing what we still have. 2014 somehow feels like a disproportionately painful year for the filmmaking community; The tragic premature deaths of geniuses like Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman punctuating an already long list of cinema giants who finally left us after significant, fruitful lives.

Perhaps that's why it's been so much on my mind as I've frequented the movies this year. I don't want to be responsible for giving anyone a case of the holiday blues, but it's been impossible for me not to notice a similar thread running through a number of 2014's major releases; A thread about the way people deal with loss, process grief, and ultimately find closure; A thread about how mourning varies from individual to individual, yet is universally human.

A pair of distinctive and radically different films that are currently in limited release, Wild and Song of the Sea, suddenly seem like distant cousins when viewed through this thematic prism.

Christmas Capsules (Reviews)

Things are probably going to get a bit quiet on this blog (and other award news outlets) over the next couple of weeks. All the Academy shortlists have been unveiled for applicable categories, top ten lists from most critics have been published, and at this point there's not much left to do but wait for the guilds to start piping up in the New Year.

Me, I'll be catching up with all sorts of early releases from this year as well as new ones as they open up in their plush holiday time slots. As I do, I'll keep adding my brief capsule reactions to this space, which you can check up on from time to time (I'll make an effort to tweet new entries). Consider it my Non-Denominational Mid-December Holiday Special to you, whose readership I appreciate all year round!

So have a merry Christmas, a happy Chanukah, a kwazy Kwanza, a tip-top Tet, and a solemn yet dignified Ramadan.

Review - Foxcatcher

If you're a fan of the sport of wrestling, you may be familiar with the story of the Schultz brothers, a pair of Olympic champs who caught the eye of a millionaire philanthropist following the '84 L.A. Olympics.

But you needn't be a wrestling buff to appreciate this stranger-than-fiction true story, brilliantly dramatized by Cannes prize winner Bennett Miller in Foxcatcher. Just like his swell previous feature Moneyball, what Miller has achieved here is a sports movie that's not actually about the sport, but about something far bigger and more elusive. Incidentally, like Moneyball was in 2011, Foxcatcher is also one of the finest films of the year.

Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) is obsessed with being the best, but doomed to never feel like the best. Even his Olympic gold medal seems outshone by that of his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), whose personal life is far more fulfilled.

Dave is more famous, a better wrestler/coach, a happy family man, and still quietly exudes his protective instincts towards his baby bro. A beautifully staged sparring sequence early in the film between the two brothers tells us everything we need to know about their relationship with hardly a single word of dialogue.

Review - Citizenfour

We meet our hero holed up in the Mira Hotel, in Hong Kong. At first glance he seems an unlikely hero; Gaunt, unimposing, wearing a nervous smile that threatens to trivialize what he has to say. Until then, he was only known to documentarian Laura Poitras by his online alias, 'citizenfour'. Within a week his true moniker, Edward Snowden, would become a household name, and the revelations he brought to light in that hotel room in the summer of 2013 continue to reverberate through the public consciousness.

He is the central figure of Poitras' much-talked-about documentary Citizenfour, her first-hand account of Snowden -- then a 29 year old data analyst with the National Security Agency -- exposing the defamed intelligence service for spying on millions of Americans, and then some. His whistleblowing has since caused him to take political asylum in Russia where he remains to this day, knowing well that he would be arrested on sight should he ever again set foot in the United States.

Review - The Theory of Everything

"Cosmology," responds PhD candidate Stephen Hawking when asked about religion at a Cambridge mixer in 1963. "It's religion for scientific atheists."

This answer may seem like an odd way to pick up girls (especially proper Christian ones), but it strikes a chord for the young woman who's asking him – and who just so happens to be his future wife, Jane. Perhaps she too sees the beauty in his pursuit of a single universal equation that can explain all the mysteries of time and space; A 'theory of everything'.

It's not the equation, however, but the two lovers who become the subjects of The Theory of Everything, directed by successful documentary filmmaker James Marsh in his narrative feature debut. From that first cosmic spark of attraction to their gradual growing apart and everything in between (including the renowned physicist's long battle with disease and disability), the film chooses to deal more with humanistic romance than scientific philosophy, though packaged as a by-the-numbers biopic with Oscar aspirations for its stars Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne.

Review - Force Majeure

If you and your family were faced with a life-threatening situation, how would you react? Would you put yourself in harm's way to protect your loved ones, or would your self-preservation reflexes compel you to flee?

Obviously, the more valorous answer is the one you would give to anyone who asks, but the truth is we never really know which instinct will rule our actions until we're actually faced with a real force majeure. That legalese term for an extraordinary or dangerous circumstance is also the title of Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund's new dramedy, which probes this hypothetical for some revelations as slippery as a double black diamond ski run.

Östlund sets the scene at a luxury resort in the French Alps, where we meet a seemingly idyllic family: Tomas, Ebba, and their kids Harry & Vera. And yet Östlund suggests that they're not nearly as solid as they let on.

Review - Nightcrawler

Just a quick take on this one, before the deluge of prestige biopics and foregone Oscar nominees start creeping their ways into theatres. Speaking of creeping, Jake Gyllenhaal does his fair share of it in this slick thriller, in which he plays a ghastly parody of the self-made man.

Louis Bloom is a tenacious young go-getter who accurately pitches himself to prospective employers as a fast learner who's willing to do whatever it takes to get a job done and done well. Yet even the most positive corporate attitude isn't worth the paper it's printed on if nobody's hiring.

Ever the entrepreneur, Lou tries his hand at the nocturnal profession of nightcrawling, an ethically borderline job that has him tracking down violent crime stories and shooting video for the highest bidding news network. If Lou is one thing, he's driven.

Review - Big Hero 6

With Marvel Comics now securely locked beneath the turrets of Sleeping Beauty's castle, Walt Disney Animation is finally trying their hand at the superhero genre with Big Hero 6; A sanitized adaptation (directed by Chris Williams and Don Hall) of a comic book series so obscure, you'd never guess it was a Marvel property were it not for the obligatory Stan Lee cameo.

Set in the vaguely futuristic city of San Fransokyo – essentially San Francisco with some Asian facades – Big Hero 6 starts as a story of two orphaned brothers... because it wouldn't be Disney without some tragic backstory. The youngest, Hiro (Ryan Potter), squanders his prodigious robotics aptitude on seedy underground bot fights, much to the chagrin of the eldest, Tadashi (Daniel Henney), who applies his equally impressive knack for engineering at a cutting-edge technical institute.

Review - Interstellar

Shoot for the moon, and if you miss, you'll land among the stars. That ancient adage serves to remind us that dreaming big and daring to achieve the impossible is often its own reward, even if it does turn out to be, y'know, impossible. Christopher Nolan sets his sights well beyond our puny moon in Interstellar. He's not even aiming for the same galaxy! So if he launches a misfire, it sure as hell is an intriguing misfire, and probably the most essential science-fiction of the year.

His space opera begins on Earth sometime in the future (Nathan Crowley's weathered production design suggests a future that's distant in technological advancement but aesthetically not unlike our present), when violent dust storms are a routine bother and most of the planet's crops have gone extinct due to blight. There's plenty of corn though, both in the fields and on the page in Nolan's typically creaky expository dialogue.

One of the cultivators of this vital food source, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), bemoans that his education and training as a pilot/engineer are going to waste in a vain attempt to sustain a global population that won't last past his kids' generation. He doesn't merely want his children to survive. He wants them to grow up with the same awe and wonder of the universe that he has.

Review - Birdman

Ids, egos and superegos collide and combust (in a single take!) on stages as concrete as the Broadway theatre and as fantastical as the imaginings of a self-obsessed actor in Alejandro González Iňárritu's Birdman. As in the myth of Icarus, to which his wily script often alludes both visually and verbally, Iňárritu has high-flying ambitions for what is possibly his most personal film to date. But rather than crash and burn, his satiric slant on the artist's odyssey soars magnificently on its dark feathery wings.

Michael Keaton stars – in a performance that vies to redefine his career – as Riggan Thompson, a washed-up former movie star seeking respect and validation by directing and starring in his own adaptation of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love on Broadway. He had once played a popular superhero (the eponymous Birdman) in a series of lucrative but disposable comic book blockbusters that brought him fame and fortune, but not artistic fulfillment.

Now, some twenty years after hanging up his dopey bird suit, he's risking so much more than just his money and reputation by mounting this prestigious production. The tenuous relationship with his recovering drug addict daughter (Emma Stone), his fragile sense of self, and even his grasp on reality hang in the balance while the pressure mounts.

Review - Whiplash

“There are no two words in the English language as harmful as 'good job',” a teacher tells his student. 'Good job' means being content with mediocrity. 'Good job' means just doing what's required instead of doing all you could. 'Good job' does not describe greatness.

And so those are two words you won't find me using to describe Whiplash, which is an exciting, involving, invigorating, absolute lightning bolt of a film; As keenly observed as the most refined of dramas, and yet as pulse-raising as the most intense of action movies; An electrifying combustion of artistic crisis, coming-of-age and jazz music, announcing the arrival of an extraordinary new talent in writer-director Damien Chazelle. 'Good job' doesn't come close to describing this film. It is great.

Review - The Tale of Princess Kaguya

Guess what: Today is Isao Takahata's birthday! What better day to review his latest film.

Apart from his 1988 masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies, the works of animator Isao Takahata have never had much exposure in North America. They may have less crossover appeal than other outputs from Studio Ghibli – the revered and beloved Tokyo-based anime company that brought us My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, among others – because his are less dazzling in a fantastical sense.

Nevertheless, Takahata has built a superb resume over the last thirty years at Ghibli. So what a rare and special treat it is then, to be able to see his latest (and possibly last) feature in theatres: The somewhat slow but visually splendid The Tale of Princess Kaguya. The narrative itself is a simple one (perhaps too much so to justify this film's leisurely 140-minute runtime), but Takahata gleans from it several adult themes about the pursuit of happiness, truth and artifice, and the cyclic yet finite nature of life.

Review - Fury

It is April, 1945. The second world war draws to an agonizingly bloody close on German soil. Materializing out of a haze of sunlight and gun smoke, a German officer atop a weathered white horse trudges through a scorched battlefield, floating in silence like a ghost amongst the dead bodies and burning debris. There's a sad beauty to this image that greets us at the onset of Fury, steeped in an eerie serenity that the film's title does not suggest.

Naturally, this moment ends in an abrupt and brutal fashion more typical to the rest of this rockem' sockem' war story. Written and directed by David Ayer, many of whose previous films and screenplays (End of Watch, Harsh Times, Training Day) have been gritty studies in rock-hard masculinity, Fury follows the perilous travails of a tank unit as it pushes the Allied advance deeper into enemy territory in the dying days of WWII.

Brad Pitt headlines as Sgt. Don 'Wardaddy' Collier, commander of a 30-ton M4 Sherman tank (the eponymous Fury, whose moniker is scrawled across the cannon barrel as if the bow of a ship) and its testosterone-oozing crew. This includes Shia LaBeouf as its devout trigger man, Michael Peña as its empathetic driver, and Jon Bernthal as its certifiable mechanic. No, not “certified”, “certifiable”.

Review - The Boxtrolls

Laika – the Portland-based studio that specializes in a unique hybridization of stop-motion and computer animation – manages to draw ever-growing mountains of praise with every new feature they release, and not without good reason. Though geared primarily towards children, they never coddle their young audience, choosing stories that aren't afraid of being a little scary, a little dark, and even a little morbid. It's also impossible not to marvel at the studio's meticulous hand-made process, which has even become the lynchpin of their marketing identity.

But it begs the question: Even though the stories they tell are great, and the techniques they employ are great, is Laika churning out movies that are great? I'm not so sure they are. Of the three entries in their modest portfolio to date, 2009's Coraline is probably the closest thing to a complete film. Their follow-up, 2012's ParaNorman, exhibited exciting artistic growth but flagged in the story department. And now their latest, The Boxtrolls (directed by Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi), might be their most technically evolved, but overall weakest film yet.