FILM REVIEW
BUSINESS AS USUAL A MOST VIOLENT YEAR BY M. FAUST
If you’re a fan of urban crime dramas—Coppola’s The Godfather, Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, David Mamet’s early work—you’ll want to see this film. I thought I’d put that recommendation right up front, because anything else I have to say about it is going to be mixed. That’s no fault of the film, or of writer-director J. C. Chandor, whose two previous features—the little-seen Wall Street drama Margin Call and last year’s All Is Lost, starring Robert Redford and a damaged boat—mark him as the most interesting of our upand-coming filmmakers. The problem is that, as is generally the case these days, I saw A Most Violent Year on a screening DVD rather than in a theater. And while one learns to adjust to this, just as filmmakers have learned that most people who see their work will do so in the comfort of their living rooms, some films are clearly diminished this way. I may be wrong, but my feeling is that I won’t be able to say I have properly seen this film until I can see it on the big screen. The title refers to 1981, when statistically the crime rate in New York City peaked. Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis) stars as Abel Morales, a Russian immigrant who has worked his way up to the head of a heating oil delivery business. He bought it out from his former boss (and now father-in-law) and is determined to walk the straight and narrow despite the company’s history of shady practices. Those practices were pretty much industry wide, though he’s the only one under investigation by ambitious district attorney
IN CINEMAS NOW: BY M. FAUST & GEORGE SAX
PREMIERES 2015 OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORT FILMS—Two pro-
grams featuring the nominees for best live action short film and best animated short film. Reviewed this issue. Eastern Hills. BLACK OR WHITE—Drama about a biracial teenager who becomes the subject of a custody battle between the grandfather who raised her (Kevin Costner) and the grandmother (Octavia Spencer) she more outwardly resembles. With Jennifer Ehle, Anthony Mackie and Bill Burr. Directed by Mike Binder (Reign Over Me). Reviewed this issue. North Park. THE LOFT—Remake of the 2008 Dutch drama (by the same director, Erik Van Looy) about a group of married men who share an apartment for extra-marital affairs, until a corpse turns up and they realize that one of them must be the killer. Starring Karl Urban, James Marsden and Matthias Schoenaerts. Area theaters. A MOST VIOLENT YEAR—The title refers to 1981 in New York City, where an immigrant businessman (Oscar Isaac) fights to keep his trucking business alive against legal investigations and hijackers. Co-starring Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo, Alessandro Nivola, and Albert Brooks. Directed by J. C. Chandor (All Is Lost). Reviewed this issue. Amherst. PROJECT ALMANAC—Michael Bay production about time-traveling teens, originally known as Welcome to Yesterday when it was supposed to be released a year ago. Starring Jonny Weston, Sofia Black-D’Elia and Amy Landecker. Directed by Dean Israelite. Area theaters.
ALTERNATIVE CINEMA THE BABADOOK—An exhausted single mother (Essie
Davis in an Oscar-caliber performance) tries to deal with the monster haunting her young son. But is the real monster herself? It may be too intense a portrait of maternal struggles for pregnant women and new mothers, but the feature debut of Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent has created one of the best horror thrillers of recent years. –MF Wed-Fri, Tue 7:30pm. The Screening Room BRINGING UP BABY (1938)—Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, a dinosaur bone, a pair of leopards, and the dog you’ll recognize as “Asta” from The Thin Man are the prime ingredients in the quintessential screwball comedy. Often imitated (not least by director Howard Hawks, who reused bits from it
Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac in A Most Violent Year.
Lawrence (David Oyelowo, Martin Luther King in the current Selma). Abel’s biggest worry is the hijacking of his trucks, presumably carried out by one of the competitors who claims to be honorable to his face. And because he’s trying to close a tenuous deal which would put him in charge of an abandoned shipyard that would give him space to rise to the top of the oil business, it’s a lot of stress on his squared shoulders. At the top I implicitly compared Chandor to other great film-
throughout his career) but never equaled: a leading contender for the best film comedy of all time. With Charles Ruggles, Barry Fitzgerald, May Robson, and Fritz Feld. Presented by the Buffalo Film Seminars. Tue 7pm. Amherst Theater
ROBERT FROST: A LOVER’S QUARREL WITH THE WORLD (1963)—Shirley Clarke’s Oscar-winning doc-
umentary built around an interview with the great American poet. Thu 7:30pm. Hallwalls
IN BRIEF
AMERICAN SNIPER—Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of
the memoir of Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), who as a Navy SEAL sniper killed between 160 and 250 targets in Iraq, is hardly the only recent film “based on a true story” to play fast and loose with the facts. But the goal here seems to be less dramatic shaping than hagiography, a disappointment given Eastwood’s more nuanced films of recent years. The script doesn’t only ignore Kyle’s human failings (which is understandable if unfortunate); it erases most of what might have made him interesting as a character. Eastwood remains the consummate craftsman, but the film serves no real point. With Sienna Miller, Jake McDorman, and Luke Grimes. -MF ANNIE—Latest remake of the musical adaptation of the 1930s comic strip—or was it a radio serial first? It’s been a long run. Starring Quvenzhané Wallis, Jamie Foxx, Rose Byrne, and Bobby Cannavale. Directed by Will Gluck (Friends with Benefits). BIG EYES—Tim Burton’s biopic about Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), the artist whose kitschy portraits of distressed children were a national sensation in the early 1960s. In the days before Andy Warhol, he turned the art world on its ears, earning a fortune (mostly from prints and posters) even though critics loathed his work. Except, as the film tells it, the paintings were actually made by his wife Margaret (Amy Adams). It’s as close to a mainstream film as Burton has ever made; he confines his visual interest to recreating the hipster paradise of San Francisco in the late 1950s (where the Keanes lived) and in such other flourishes as a visit to Hawaii awash in blue and pink pastels. The first half is an enjoyable lark as the Keanes enjoy their unexpected success, but it turns sour with the couple’s break-up and ensuing legal battles. The paintings themselves are a weird artifact of the time, but there’s no real story in them; they’re only a MacGuffin for a story about two sad people. With Krysten Ritter, Terence Stamp, Jason Schwartzman, and Danny Huston. -MF BIRDMAN—Too much and not enough. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s “meta-movie” stars Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson, a once famous actor whose career took a downturn after he stopped
20 THE PUBLIC / JANUARY 28, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM
makers, but he’s no imitator. While he has certainly absorbed their influences, his work is unmistakably his own. (I can’t think of many debuts more assured than Margin Call.) From its odd color palette of greens and yellows to its steady pacing, A Most Violent Year is clearly precisely what it wants to be, which is never exactly what you think its going to be. On first viewing I thought the only thing that really hurt it was a deus ex machina ending. Maybe I’ll change my mind; I’m looking forward to seeing it for real.
playing the superhero character he was famed for. In need of a comeback vehicle and artistic validation, Thomson mounts a Broadway play as a vehicle for himself, a troubled production that forms the basis of this film’s increasingly wild proceedings. It’s certainly challenging, dynamic and technically fluid. But it’s also erratic, lurching from scenes of banal domestic confrontation and confession to deliberate comic excess to surreal flights. In the end it’s too much structural complexity for one film to handle. Co-starring Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, and Andrea Riseborough. –GS BLACKHAT—After Miami Vice and Public Enemies, this makes 0 for 3 for Michael Mann, once our most dependable crafter of intelligent crime dramas. A miscast Chris Hemsworth stars as a hacker released from federal prison to help a team of Chinese and American intelligence agents track a cybercrook who has scammed Wall Street and crashed a nuclear reactor. The technological issues devolve into gobbledygook in a script that plays like a lesser James Bond entry. Mann amuses himself with a few lively action sequences, but taken as a whole it’s as entertaining as reading computer code. With Viola Davis, Wei Tang, and John Ortiz. –MF THE BOY NEXT DOOR—Thriller starring Jennifer Lopez as a teacher who regrets a moment of passion with the neighbor kid (Ryan Guzman) when he turns out to be a psycho. With Kristin Chenoweth and John Corbett. Directed by Rob Cohen (Alex Cross). CAKE—Was Jennifer Aniston denied an Oscar nomination here because she campaigned too hard for one? Maybe, but the film as a whole seems crafted for the sole purpose of showing off her performance as a woman driven to consider suicide by chronic pain following the accident that killed her young son. The self-congratulatory screenplay parcels out hard evidence about her backstory as a way of simulating drama. It may be most notable for its parade of supporting roles and cameos by actors whose moments seem to have passed them by: Oscar nominees Felicity Huffman and Anna Kendrick (can you name the films they were nominated for without going to imdb.com?), Avatar’s Sam Worthington, and Chris Messina. Directed by Daniel Barnz (Won’t Back Down). -MF THE GAMBLER—Even if you haven’t seen the 1974 film on which this is based, this glossy remake is a facile waste of time, retaining most of the macho posturing from the original but none of the plausibility. Done up like a slumming rock star, Mark Wahlberg is hard to take seriously as a literature professor (his self-aggrandizing lectures are hilarious) with a gambling addiction that seems born of a death wish. The script by William Monahan (The Departed) is ripe with writerly dialogue, much of which is entertaining, especially as delivered by
Michael Kenneth Williams and John Goodman (who has a classic speech on earning the right to say “Fuck you” is almost as good as Monahan thinks it is). But director Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) gives it a superficial sheen that doesn’t make any sense. And its treatment of gambling is shameful—any virtues the film has are negated by a bullshit ending. With Jessica Lange, Brie Larson, and George Kennedy. -MF THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES—The last of Peter Jackson’s six J. R. R. Tolkien’s adaptations is the shortest but feels like the longest. After perfunctorily dispensing with the dragon Smaug, the remainder of the film becomes a sword and sorcery take on The Treasure of Sierra Madre, with dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) refusing to share the treasure with his now homeless Middle Earth neighbors. A subplot inspired by references in other Tolkein work finds the White Council (Gandalf, elf king Elrond, Lady Galadriel, wizard Saruman) on a parallel quest to solve the mystery of the Necromancer, setting up the reign of evil Sauron in Lord of the Rings. This padding out of The Hobbit’s relatively simple storyline is the equivalent of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, though fans are less likely to mind its inclusion. At the end of the day, Jackson and his army of collaborators have achieved something remarkable with this series, but I’m glad it’s over and Jackson can concentrate on other endeavors. This final entry feels like the last half hour of a traditional feature, stretched out to five times the length. Starring Martin Freeman, Orlando Bloom, Richard Armitage, Cate Blanchett, Ian McKellen, and Christopher Lee. –Greg Lamberson. INHERENT VICE—Whether or not the densely contrived novels of Thomas Pynchon provide proper material for the movies, this first attempt to do so shows that Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t the guy to do so. Anderson is certainly fond of rambling, overstuffed narratives, but he has trouble bringing them into focus (which is why his best films are the ones with the fewest characters—There Will Be Blood, The Master). Pynchon’s 2009 book, a private eye homage set in Los Angeles at the end of the 60s, is his most broadly appealing novel, but it still features a story that comes apart instead of congealing, which brings out the worst in Anderson. His film feels haphazardly stitched together from pieces of the book., and while there are many rewarding scenes and amusing performances, the whole thing goes nowhere. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Katherine Waterston, Michael Kenneth Williams, Benicio Del Toro, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, and Martin Short. -MF THE IMITATION GAME—The story of English mathematician and logician Alan Turing, who was instrumental in breaking Germany’s Enigma code