BRIDGE OF SPIES

(Steven Spielberg, 2015)

Whether you love or hate Steven Spielberg, it is impossible to deny his talent as a visual storyteller. The talky dramas which are scattered throughout his later career (Lincoln being the most recent example) are chiefly interesting for the ways in which he tries to keep them visually exciting. Sometimes it can feel as if he is struggling against his material rather than attempting to adapt it.
That is not the case with Bridge of Spies, which feels like a large-scale '60s prestige drama, all big themes and important moments. Spielberg treats it that way, shooting it with a respect for classicism which is pleasing and which works.
The script - written by Joel & Ethan Coen, whose presence is evident in a few repeated phrases, alongside Matt Charman - is a little disjointed in its transition from the USA to East Berlin and different phases of the story crank into place without any elegance of subtlety (never a Spielberg strength, to be fair).
Tom Hanks does his honest, intelligent thing as Jim Donovan, a Brooklyn Lawyer chosen to defend Soviet Spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) when the Government, his family and an angry public all just want it to be done and dusted. But Jim takes this duty seriously  and makes the trial a problem, securing life imprisonment for Abel when execution looked likely. This means that a few months later, when the Soviets capture SpyPlane pilot Francis Gary Powers, Jim is the man chosen to travel to East Berlin - as the Wall is being constructed - and negotiate an exchange.
Much of the action, then, revolves around men (invariably) engaged in important conversations in various rooms. Spielberg focuses on keeping it handsome, coherent and well-performed, all of which it is. When the screenplay gives him a chance to cut loose, he takes it: making Powers' shooting down a short, frightening vignette, and showing the capture of US student Frederic Pryor on the very day the wall is erected. His feel for place and atmosphere is still precise and nuanced, for all that he puts a Hollywood sheen on every shot and moment. At this point in his career, Spielberg's strengths are his weaknesses, and that storytelling ability sometimes seems too smooth and too easy ( a late shot of children climbing a Brooklyn fence chiming with an earlier shot of people scaling the Berlin Wall is a groan-inducing moment).
The cast help keep the many expository scenes flow painlessly. Rylance is especially superb, making Abel goo-humoured and melancholy; inimitably human.
Classy grown-up Hollywood entertainment, then, and I would expect no less of Spielberg.

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

(Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)

Great filmmakers - great artists, in fact, be they novelists, playwrights, comedians, poets -  have the ability to capture how it feels to be alive. The Coen Brothers absolutely possess this ability. It gets forgotten, almost, lost in the rush to praise their brilliant screenplays, beautiful visual sense and their storytelling talent. What the mainstream brands as "quirky" is their incredible ability to combine comedy and drama so that certain scenes and passages in their best work play out. Half the audience will be laughing at the deadpan wit, the beautifully observed characters, the other half sit in silence, appreciating the human drama on display. Sometimes of course, they lean more in one direction than the other. There are the outright comedies, like Raising Arizona or Intolerable Cruelty. And the dramas: No Country for Old Men or Millers Crossing, say. But it is never simple. Anton Chigurgh in No Country for Old Men is as funny as any creation in the Coens' filmography for all that he is a terrifying character in a mostly serious film. There is pathos in Raising Arizona, despite its Tex Avery comic invention.
What never changes are those moments of truth: what it is to be alive, captured in an instant, an image, a beat. Songwriters and singers do that too, which is one of the subjects of Inside Llewyn Davis. A character study of the titular figure, a struggling folk-singer in '60s Greenwich Village, played with world-weary cynicism and muted sadness by Oscar Isaac, it is a classic Coens mix of comedy and drama. Llewyn is on the downslope of a career that never really went anywhere, and he only truly realises that during the course of the story, appalled as he is by what passes for folk music around him.
His life is a ruin. He sleeps on the couches of friends, many of whom he doesn't even seem to like or respect, has no money to buy himself a coat despite the fact that it's winter, and doesn't plan for the future. His sister's suggestion that he give up music and return to life as a merchant seaman is met with the words "Just exist?"
His closest friends are Jim (Justin Timberlake) and Jean (Carey Mulligan), a folk duo. Jean is pregnant, possibly by Llewyn, and her every word in his direction positively drips venom. It becomes apparent that he uses people, and though he is never warm or nice, his essential humanity, the loneliness of his situation and his effortless capacity for self-destruction, does make him sympathetic.
A long, surreal road trip to Canada alongside a loquacious hipster (John Goodman) and his laconic driver (Garrett Hedlund) is Llewyn's breaking point, and perhaps features the film's most beautiful and haunting sequences, as Bruno Delbonnel's exquisitely soft and dank cinematography captures several breathtaking scenes of nocturnal driving; snow drifting across highways, cities glimpsed off in the night.
The music is great, the cast perfect, the clockwork collapse of Llewyn's hopes and dreams hilarious and gruelling in equal measure.

TRUE GRIT

(Ethan Coen, 2010)

The Coen Brothers, in this mature phase, seem more rewarding than ever before, their cinema more reflective and with more shades and tones than they were once either capable of or interested in. Here they adapt Charles Portis' superb novel into a blackly comic, violent reading of the American creation myth and in the process come up with their most moving and perhaps most accessible film.
The pacing is classically true to the genre, and that suits the Coens' loquacious, rambling style, allowing them to showcase a series of eccentrics in their first act as the principles meet and prepare for the pursuit to come.
When that pursuit does come, it's leisurely and chatty, with character the dominant element until the plot finally sparks to life in the last 40 minutes or so. That means that these actors are allowed to work on their characters, and they all feel lived-in and comfortable, each of the principals quite superb. Bridges has fun as Cogburn, never apologetic about his own personality and with a streak of steel in that one eye, but Damon finds both the humour and pathos in his Texas Ranger and Stanfield more or less effortlessly carries the first act alone.
Roger Deakins was born to shoot Westerns, on the evidence of this film and Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and he finds and lights textures that bring this world to life throughout, from snow falling in woodland scrub to the whitewashed primness of turn of the century Memphis.
This is the Coens at their most mainstream, but still filled with their many virtues: great, witty dialogue, dynamic visual choices, both in shot and editing selection, instantly appealing characters, and easy but thrillingly inventive storytelling. Perhaps only their old weaknesses have melted away with time: an over-reliance on irony, which has been replaced with a more soulful, even serious sense of engagement with their material - their last few films have seemed to grapple more intently with notions of mortality and fate than their early works flirtations could ever manage. And then there are gambits beyond the imagination of most filmmakers here; most notably the final moonlit ride and the coda, which introduces an elegiac, emotional strain to their work quite unlike anything they've ever attempted before.