DHEEPAN

(Jacques Audiard, 2015)

The way Audiard combines poetic realism with gritty genre material remains unique in modern cinema. Dheepan may not be his strongest film, but it is still sensitive, riveting filmmaking.
It follows a Tamil Tiger soldier who escape Sri Lanka by pretending to be married to a young woman likewise seeking escape. They pretend a young orphan girl is their daughter and find themselves in a banlieue on the outskirts of autumnal Paris. Dheepan works as the caretaker for their housing estate, his 'daughter' learns French at school, while his 'wife' fearfully, confusedly hides away from the world until a job is found for her cooking and cleaning for a disabled old man. As they negotiate life in a country where they do not speak the language (they all appear to be fluent in English, and the woman talks of escaping to her cousin in London), they realise that some facts of life are universal. In this case that includes the men with guns who rule the estate - gangs of drug dealers patrolling the rooftops and stoops. But Dheepan was once just such a man with a gun, and traumatised as he is, it is not long until he is forced to use violence to defend those he has come to love.
That Taxi Driver-ish ending is impressive and hard won by a film that builds character and place patiently and with a fine eye for two hours. Audiard paints these three people with fine strokes; Dheepan himself is proud and in pain, widowed and mourning two children, shellshocked by the war which killed his entire unit, he stoically works and learns and falls in love with the woman pretending to be his wife slowly and despite himself. She is more complex; angry and at odds with her environment until her job allows her to find who she is once again. The scene where she seduces her 'husband' is erotic and realistic in just the right amounts.
The girl meanwhile noisily adapts.
Audiard details all this with his usual intimacy; allowing us into the characters heads at moments, showing the way they perceive things, the subjective truth of moments revealed and then snatched away again. At the same time we learn the life of the estate, its patterns and rules, its geography.
All this pays off in the bloody, dreamlike chaos of the climax.
Which is - brilliantly, surprisingly - followed by a blissfully happy ending.

TRIPLE 9

(John Hillcoat, 2016)

A Cops and Robbers movie!
Hillcoat gathers a really impressive cast here, and embeds them in a world thick with macho atmosphere and sticky Atlanta, Georgia authenticity. Matt Cook's screenplay was on the Black List a few years ago, and it's easy to see why: it's full of great pulp characters and moments, and ripe for muscular action treatment. Hillcoat delivers in that department, opening the film with a heist carried out by Michael Belmont (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Russell Welch (Norman Reedus), two ex-military contractors now working for hire for the Russian Mob in the sinister form of Kate Winslet's cold gang boss. Russell and Michael enlist Russell's junkie ex-cop brother (Aaron Paul in another loser role) and he in turn calls in dirty cops Marcus (Anthony Mackie) and Rodriguez (Clifton Collins Jr) for the heist on a downtown bank, focused on recovering a single safety deposit box. The heist goes wrong and attracts the attention of burned out detective Allen (Woody Harrelson). Meanwhile, the gang have to perform another job, and the decision is made to kill a cop as a massive distraction - the police band code for this is a 999 - and the chosen victim is Chris (Casey Affleck), an Iraq-war veteran and nephew of Allen, recently transferred from a cushy suburb to the gangs unit, where he and Marcus make for uneasy partners.
Along the way, Hillcoat throws in an extended police raid on a projects gang den, the second heist and a handful of tense confrontations in great urban neo-noir locations. He plays with colour and composition. Lost of reds, lots of reflections, visually portraying the bloodiness and duplicity of this world.
The whole thing is more or less ludicrously macho, all shape charges and assault rifles, but the characters are surprisingly rich and convincing for a world as pulpy as the one, and the excellent cast (Ejiofor, Affleck and Winslet in particular) make it extremely compelling.
It's grim - but then isn't every Hillcoat film - but always entertaining.

MAN FROM RENO

(Dave Boyle, 2015)

In what feels like direct opposition to much modern neo-noir, Boyle's film does noir in an old-fashioned, serious manner: slowly, patiently, methodically. That's not to suggest it isn't stylish. It is visually lovely, filled with strong compositions and a palette of muted colours. Boyle's storytelling adds to the strong sense of atmosphere created - this is a quiet, thoughtful piece of cinema.
It centres on best-selling Japanese mystery writer Aki (Ayako Fujitani) who returns to her college hometown of San Francisco, depressed and somewhat suicidal. There she meets a mysterious man, they connect, and then he abruptly disappears. Her halting investigation into his sudden absence eventually intersects with that of a small-town sheriff (Pepe Serna), searching for a man he hit with his car one misty night who later absconded from hospital. This leads them into a murky world of smuggling, money, and identity theft, and it quickly becomes obvious that neither of them really knows what they are doing.
It is refreshing to find a genuine mystery in a noir - one with plenty of dead ends and false starts - but then so much about Man From Reno is surprisingly refreshing. The story starts off as a drama, building the character of Aki, giving us a few glimpses into her past, and making her sympathetic. Likewise the sheriff - a nice man who seems to be good at his job, and who loves his daughter. The mystery only comes into focus about 30 minutes in, and it is almost another hour before the two leads meet. Fujitani and Serna are inspired casting choices; she is all sad eyes and watchful regret, he all laid-back, aged wisdom and nagging worries. The few moments of suspense are nicely-handled, increasing Aki's sense of paranoia.
The whole thing has a quality lacking in modern neo-noir: soulfulness. There are few references to pop culture, barely any violence. Instead there is some emotion in these characters. Aki misses the love of her life, long dead, whose writing gave her the career she has today. The sheriff seems resigned to his daughter leaving him for a place at the FBI. Violence seems to exist in a different cinematic universe from these people.
This means that when it comes, it has devastating, jarring impact. The ending is fantastic.

SICARIO

(Denis Villeneuve, 2015)

When a really good genre film comes along, we realise just how crap and childish most genre cinema truly is. Sicario is an outstanding genre film; tense, beautifully made, lovely to look at (Roger Deakins!), and engaged in geopolitical reality without ever becoming dull.
We see most of the story through the eyes of FBI Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt, superbly hollow-eyed and traumatised throughout) after the discovery of dozens of corpses in the walls of a Phoenix house. That is the opening scene: an intensely charged suspense sequence as Macer's team enter the house and encounter some resistance, discover the corpses and trigger a booby-trap. Here the tone for the film is set; quiet, patient, horribly gripping and visually acute, Villeneuve using a magisterial style reminiscent of mid-period Michael Mann to pin this world to the screen.
Macer is recruited to an inter-agency task force and is led to believe she will be working with the DEA. But quickly she realises that Matt (Josh Brolin, just the right combination of jocularity, smug knowingness and chilling calculation) is a CIA agent, and that the mysterious Colombian Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro, showing that all-too rarely-glimpsed movie star charisma of his) may be something altogether worse. Together with a team of Delta Force soldiers they travel in a convoy into Juarez in Mexico to extradite a Drug Baron, hoping to draw out the mysterious lord of his cartel. But Macer is shocked by just how off-reservation and illegal their activities are, and struggles to justify her involvement to herself and her partner Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya), all the while getting more emotionally involved with the case.
Sicario is provocative in its structure. While the first two acts are firmly Blunt's in that they seem to take her physical and moral viewpoint , the last act shifts and suddenly Alejandro is controlling the narrative, and the certainties of Macer's views on the drug war melt away. Matt complicates this throughout. Though unlikable, he seems an arch-pragmatist, focused on results and nothing else, dismissing all moral considerations entirely. Then we have Reggie, dismissed by Matt as simply a "lawyer", who doesn't trust any of them and only wants to ensure his partner is ok.
The story revolves around a series of tremendous set-pieces; most notably the Juarez run, which erupts into a firefight at the border. Jóhann Jóhannsonn's score is at its subtle best here. It rejects melody, instead rising up like a murky cloud of ambient noise, all moans and shivers, employing the dread that hangs in the air of the film. and which culminates in the mission Alejandro was engaged in all along.
This is a great genre film; cynical, sharp and exhilarating, it is also utterly satisfying.

LEGEND

(Brian Helgeland, 2015)

There's something sordid and seedy in the best British crime cinema. Something smalltime and banal. Try as it might, British crime cinema cannot grasp the glamour and slickness of American gangster films. Often, the attempt to produce a British equivalent is what creates a different, eccentric sort of magic.
Legend is conspicuously lacking in any such magic. Written and directed by an American (Brian Helgeland, who has great form in the genre, having adapted both LA Confidential and Mystic River) it never feels authentic or indeed, in any way "right". It relentlessly, almost nauseatingly glamourises the Kray twins (both played here by Tom Hardy) and presents the East End of London in the 1960s as a pretty, twee little neighbourhood playground lacking in any true poverty. In much of this, it is indebted to the spectre of Goodfellas. Like that film and its many imitators, Legend gets around the problem of tons of exposition with a voiceover. Here that features Francis (Emily Browning), Reggie Kray's girlfriend then wife, guiding the audience around their world of nightclubs, casinos and East End pubs. That wouldn't be so bad, if Helegeland didn't try to imbue Francis' narration with a sort of hard-bitten depth that never feels comfortable and instead is often cringe-inducingly trite. She actually refers to the "secret history of London" at one point, a sure sign of a writer who has fallen in love with his research (I wish that applied equally to his visuals, where London is all West End bright lights and East end red-brick terraces).
Another Goodfellas-ism is the way the entire film is caked in period music. Only Helegeland doesn't have Scorsese's ear for matching scene to song, and here it often feels as if he's left his iPod on shuffle.
Tom Hardy almost redeems the film in his dual roles. He is mannered but magnetic, making charming, handsome Reggie a down-to-earth heartthrob with a flair for combat and a head for business, who spends much of his time posing through a cigarette. Ron is a different proposition, literally insane, craving violence and awkward in most social situations, he gives the film most of its great scenes. Browning does well in an underwritten part and the supporting cast is filled with quality British character actors mouthing the kind of dialogue familiar from a dozen bad UK crime tv shows.
For all those problems, Legend is entertaining. The story of the twins is a fascinating one, and this film is just as engaging as Peter Medak's grittier The Krays was, even as it offers less depth and fewer answers.

STATE OF GRACE

(Phil Joanou, 1990)

State of Grace came out in 1990, something of a banner year for mob stories in Cinema. Goodfellas, The Godfather Part III, Abel Ferrara's King of New York and another Irish-Mob movie, Millers Crossing were all released in 1990, and in the midst of those heavyweights, State of Grace got a little lost. But its a great little movie, surprisingly intense, dark and serious, and featuring three terrific performances from its leading men. it tells the story of Terry Noonan (Sean Penn) and his return to Hells Kitchen, the Irish neighbourhood of New York where he grew up running with teen hoods Jackie and Frankie Flannery (Gary Oldman and Ed Harris). Only now Noonan is an undercover cop, charged with bringing down the burgeoning empire built by Frankie, and Jackie is the neighbourhood psycho. Noonan soon rekindles his relationship with their sister, Kathleen (Robin Wright-Penn) and his loyalties are inevitably torn between duty and friendship. While that sounds like your stock undercover cop movie, its the gravity and intensity of the storytelling that makes State of Grace so memorable. Joanou has never put his visual sense to better use than he does here, with his camera conjuring up a vivid sense of Hells Kitchen in all its seedy glory, the gentrifying elements just beginning to crawl in alongside the taverns and the old tenements. The screenplay, by playwright Denis McIntyre, is resolutely serious and dour - it recalls the work of writer-director James Gray in its unremitting focus on the moral dilemma facing Noonan - and the story drifts inexorably towards a tragedy suggested from the first moments by Ennio Morricone's mournful, beautiful score. While Penn does his young-DeNiro thing and Ed Harris is as magnetic as ever, Oldman delivers what is possibly his best ever performance. If, in recent years, he has played one caricature too many, one shallow villain too many, revealed that manic grin one time too many, here he played a character who demanded such a performance. Jackie Flannery is a force of nature, prone to eruptions of ultra-violence, but loyal and sentimental and charming at the same time. Oldman makes him terrifying and hilarious and real, and he owes every psycho part he has gotten since to this performance. Joanou really gets to flex his directorial muscles in the films climax, an amazing slow motion gunfight in a bar while the St Patricks Day Parade passes by outside. Its a really self-conscious set-piece, the director calling attention to himself in the most obvious fashion possible, but it works brilliantly, somehow retaining the mood and style of the film while simultaneously exploding it.

LAST MAN STANDING

(Walter Hill, 1996)

Early in his career, Hill was great at balancing genre pictures on the line right between arty abstraction and pulp detail. When he tries the same thing here, he miscalculates somewhat, meaning that Last Man Standing is a one-note trudge through the story of "Red Harvest" (actually credited as a remake of Yojimbo). The arty abstraction doesn't feel arty or interesting, the way it did in his classics two decades prior (The Warriors or Southern Comfort, say).
Instead this just feels like purest pulp, with Hill struggling to infuse it with some sort of poetry. That works to some extent in his film-making. Lloyd Ahern's beautiful dust-and-sunlight coppery photography and Ry Cooder's score are distinctively toned and make the film always worth watching and listening to. The action sequences are thunderous and cartoonish, with awesomely loud fusillades of gunfire filling the soundtrack while bodies tumble in slow motion through the air.
But the script is less successful. Bruce Willis is minimalist and cool as John Smith, a gunman trying to work both sides against each other in a prohibition-era Texan border town, but his hard-boiled narration is leaden and dull, and the tough guy dialogue feels rote and second-hand, without any sparkle or wit, so that he feels a bit like a strong star performance without a strong film around him, or even a strong character to play. In the past, Hill has dealt - well - with archetypes, but here he is dealing with sketches, and the difference is telling.
Other good actors - like Christopher Walken and David Patrick Kelly - enliven things as twitchy gangsters, but for all it's action and incident, Last Man Standing never really takes off. It's minor Hill, and while that means it's still worth a watch, it's frustrating seeing such a master in such a low gear.

THE RISE

aka WASTELAND

(Rowan Athale, 2012)

The central idea in The Rise is an interesting one; for here is a heist film set in a social-realist world. Not any social realist world, either, no: Athale invokes the entirety of the Kitchen sink movement from 1950s/60s British cinema by setting his story in a rundown Northern city (Leeds in this case).
That setting is nicely evoked early on. Red-brick houses tight on claustrophobic streets, working mens clubs, tacky suburban discos and high-rise flats are all captured with grit, atmosphere and a nice eye. Athale is a young director who makes more or less every shot count - this movie is filled with beautifully composed, lovingly lit frames, long and complex tracking shots and clever editing gambits. It is reminiscent of Guy Ritchie in his early work; flashy and ostentatious, but Athale has an eye for poetry that Ritchie never had and there are glimpses of poetic realism here. The character work is good early on too. The protagonists here are young men adrift in a recession-era Britain, dead-end jobs, no prospects, clinging to their friendship as one of the few worthwhile things in their lives.
This is all more or less lost when the heist component gives the movie a populist surge in the final act, and that too is patiently set up. Harvey (Luke Treadaway) has just been released after a year in prison for drug dealing. But Harvey was set up by local kingpin and thug Roper (Neil Maskell) and as revenge, he wants to steal a lot of money from Roper's safe so that he and his three best mates can escape their hometown for a new life running a cafe in Amsterdam. The whole story is told in flashback by a bleeding Harvey in a police interview room to Detective Inspector West (Timothy Spall). That allows Athale to play with perception and expectation as Harvey twists the tale this way and that, and DI West tries to find the truth. And while it's a shame that Athale couldn't sustain the social realism of the early stages of the story (though it could be argued that young men stealing from a working mens club is a neat metaphor for some of the issues around generational conflict in modern England), the last act is undeniable fun. Stylish, pacy and derivative, it's thoroughly crowd-pleasing.

WE OWN THE NIGHT

(James Gray, 2007)

James Gray's third film as writer-director, We Own the Night, feels generally a little too familiar. It covers territory audiences know well from a clutch of other films - New York Cops hunting down a drug ring, a man caught between friends and family, loyalty, violence, the dark streets of the American city in the past three decades, guilt, justice, revenge. You've seen it all before. You've seen it a few time sin the last decade, in fact. You've seen American Gangster or The Departed. We Own the Night is like a younger brother to those two films - its stars are less starry, its director less of a name, its budget and running time obviously less inflated.
Gray is a true auteur - he has written and directed each of his films, and they share his thematic concerns. He is interested in family, in violence, in guilt and responsibility. He is a gifted director. Each of the films is directed with a confidence and inventiveness that is remarkably assured. The problem seems to lie with his writing, which can be uneven. He writes some beautiful scenes - sparkling dialogue and powerful emotions brought to the surface, realistically and painfully - but also some real clunkers. The plotting - particularly in We Own the Night- can seem horribly second-hand and derivative. When in doubt, resort to violence, seems to be Gray's way. But his characters can ground the films with their painful dilemmas, each of them conflicted and agonised by their lives.
What is most distinctive is Gray's seriousness. Each of his films is sombre and darkly atmospheric, intent on its own little tragedy. The Yards seems bent on turning itself into a mini-Godfather with its seeming mission to look like a John Alton-shot film noir in colour and its operatic heights of tension and release. Indeed, each of his films is beautifully lensed, and Gray deserves praise for his classicism, his determination to shoot films uncorrupted by modern editing styles and lighting techniques. It gives his work a timeless look, warm and lived-in yet never shrinking from the grubbiness of the urban underbelly they observe. His skill as a director is most apparent in the impact each of his set-pieces delivers. We Own the Night, for instance, delivers a couple of stunning scenes. The first, a deafening, bloody police raid on a drug factory in a tenement building, is preceded by an equally impressive build-up of tension as one character feels that exposure as a police mole is close. The second is a car chase along a highway in a rainstorm. Here Gray's cutting and shot choice is exemplary yet never predictable, keeping the scene exciting yet intimate, horrific and convincingly confusing as it is. The film's finale - a bracingly suspenseful and visceral pursuit on foot through a field of reeds - is another example of his gift for set-pieces, as is the central fist-fight in The Yards, perhaps the most realistic ever put on film. He is adept at evoking clammy fear, the dread of discovery, the adrenaline of sudden violence, always a you-are-there feeling of inhabiting a scene, perhaps because his approach to such scenes is always fresh and different.
Despite all this the best scene in We Own the Night is the opening credits. I say "credits" although there are none. The movie's title is only visible as part of a badge in one of the photos making up the opening photo montage. This montage is composed entirely of period photos of NYC police at work - and a few evocative crime scene shots - from the 70s or early 80s. These photographs tell their own vivid and intriguing tales, with the faces looking out from some of them, the perfectly captured moments of real life, real police, real criminals, drug paraphernalia. You can almost smell some of the rooms, the stink of sweat and cigarettes. The photos are all black & white, full of subtly textured greys, and reminiscent in many cases of the work of legendary crime scene photographer Weegee. An instrumental, loungey lite-jazz reading of "I'll Be Seeing You" by Jackie Gleason's Orchestra plays over the top, its elegiac sadness counterpointing the bleak starkness of some of the images. Its a strangely potent sequence, and a reminder of the unequivocal power of the still photograph to capture an instant. It sets an aesthetic standard the rest of the film has significant trouble reaching, though Gray and his excellent cast give it a good go.

RUN ALL NIGHT

(Jaume Collet-Serra, 2015)

Neeson has an obvious advantage over all of his current competitors for the title of King of Action Movies: he can really act. When the Rock or Vin Diesel or Jason Statham turns in a performance with any depth or emotion, we are surprised that they've managed that "Any". With Neeson, it's expected.
His only real current rival in that area is Keanu Reeves, who has added a surprising amount of melancholy and gravity to his persona as age has taken hold.
But Neeson has always been melancholy - he wears it like a cloak, swishing in his massive wake - its just that these days his action parts seem tailor-made for his presence. In Run All Night he plays an ageing, useless hit man for the Irish mob in New York, Jimmy Conlon. Apparently kept around out of sentimentality by mob boss Sean Maguire (Ed Harris, adding to his list of Irish mobsters), a childhood friend, Jimmy is a broke alcoholic , crippled by memories of all the people he has murdered. A convoluted first act sets up a situation whereby Jimmy ends up killing Sean's reckless gangster son in order to protect his own, civilian boy Michael (Joel Kinnaman), setting the two of them off on a night of chase and survival through New York as Sean sets hit men and flunkies after them. Also in on the hunt are the NYPD, though the detective who has been after Jimmy for decades (Vincent D'onofrio) may be their only hope of survival.
Collet-Serra is one of the more talented craftsmen working in mainstream American cinema right now and his classy, slick touch makes Run All Night one of the better Neeson actioners of the last few years. If the action scenes are somewhat underwhelming - and the low-key, small scale, determinedly local feel to the whole thing may even explain that to some extent - then the fine work by a great cast is more than enough to compensate. Crucially, Neeson is actor enough to rise to the task of playing opposite the likes of Harris and D'Onofrio, and his scenes with the former, particularly, lend this film an oddly poetic sense of longtime male friendships in the twilight years.
That's not to criticise the action scenes - a brutal, to-the-death fight between Neeson and Holt McCallany in a public toilet is a highlight, closely followed by a lengthy car-chase that avoids most of the cliches of that convention - rather to emphasise that the elements that really set Run All Night apart are the gritty feel it has for New York and the character acting throughout.
Probably the weakest element is the one that feels most like it has come from a different sort of genre film - Common as a preppy assassin Price, sporting a trench-coat and a laser-sighting on his pistol.
But generally Run All Night works splendidly; it is an unusually emotional, visceral  mix of crime, thriller and action movies, and it uses Liam Neeson about as well as any recent film has.

CHAPPIE

(Neill Blomkamp, 2015)

Blomkamp has nothing to say about anything. Three movies in, and he has included themes and references in his movies that are consistently interesting and topical - the gap between rich and poor, racism, violence in law and order, crime, what constitutes consciousness, corporate influence - and yet he has never really investigated any of them in any meaningful way. They're there. And that's it.
What he seems really interested in is technology. That and ultra-violence. Preferably a combination of the two.
Chappie follows the Blomkamp formula in that it includes many elements reminiscent of his first 2 films, only it is less successful than either. Set in a very near future Johannesburg (lacking a single major black character, let it be noted) where the police are using robot "Scout" officers to deal with the overwhelming rate of violent crime, Chappie is really the story of Dev Patel, the engineer creator of the Scouts, who decides to repurpose a damaged unit in order to test out his new AI program. Only this test coincides with his own kidnapping at the hands of lowlife small-timers Ninja and Yolanda (the members of Die Antwoord) who want him to hit the off switch on all the scouts so that they can pull off a massive heist, and pay back their crimelord boss Rhino. When the criminals spot Chappie, awoken into the world like a baby, all blank slate innocence-cum-stupidity and clumsiness, Ninja immediately spots a way to exploit his abilities for financial gain, while Yolanda takes to motherhood like a natural, bonding with her baby instantly.
Complicating this is Hugh Jackman's dangerous rugby playing, gun-toting, ex-soldier Christian engineer, envious of Patel's success and just itching to be allowed test his massive Robocop ED 209 rip-off, "the Moose". When all these interests converge for the climax is when Blomkamp seems at his most comfortable. Mayhem, lots of firepower, blood and guts and the apocalyptic destruction of a warehouse.
Blomkamp loves lingering on the damage hardware can do to the human body, and he shoots action with a real feel for the visceral impact of combat. Combine these traits with a love of video-game tropes (lots of HDU shots and POV 1st person shooter cutaways) and a distinctive nose for a grungey cyberpunk tech fetish, and what you have here is nine tenths an almost generic Blomkamp film.
That other tenth is filled by Chappie himself, a beautifully seamless cgi creation, sensitively, and at times hilariously voiced by Sharlito Copley. Chappie has an actual arc here, losing his innocence before finding something new to replace it, and much of the film's humour comes from watching him act like a gangster, mangle swearwords and misinterpret simple instructions.
The cast are fine, the wooden Die Antwoord aside. Jackman is having a rare old time as this bad guy, all mullet and shorts, and Dev Patel is believably geeky and terrified when called to do so.
What it's really missing, though, especially in the draggy middle section, is a point, a reason to exist.

INHERENT VICE

(Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)

It's rare these days that a film stays with me quite the way Inherent Vice has. Circling slowly in my brain, key scenes echoing, ambiguities illuminating, lines of dialogue repeating. It is a wonderful mess; a combination of pitch-black comedy, stoner slapstick, sly satire, grimy sunshine noir, and romantic drama. Anderson, it seems, can do anything, and here, in adapting the novel by Thomas Pynchon, he more or less abandons traditional plot in favour of an episodic series of encounters between Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix, brilliant as ever), a hippie P.I. in 1970 Long Beach and various eccentrics and personalities he encounters in the course of an investigation.
That investigation is for his ex-girlfriend (ex old-lady in the parlance of the film), Shasta (Katherine Waterston, glowing) who presents him with the disappearance of her current boyfriend, real estate mogul Wolfman (Eric Roberts), and involves him in a hilariously complex web of nazis, black power militants, loan sharks, surf horn players, smugglers, dentists and FBI men. Complicating this is the strange mutual dependence Doc and local police detective Bigfoot (Josh Brolin) share, his relationship with a horny Assistant D.A. (Reese Witherspoon), and the fact that he is clearly still in love with Shasta. That love - and the loss and regret with which is entwined - give the often idiosyncratic, distinctively odd encounters of much of the rest of the film a powerful resonance. Doc is hurting, wearing a baffled look of suffering, even as he trades quips with actors like Owen Wilson, Martin Short and Benicio Del Toro, and Anderson keeps the camera trained on Doc's face, allowing us to confront the darkness in Phoenix's work. It makes for a slightly claustrophobic, densely layered film, and the way all these characters mount up only increases that sense. Doc takes on another case - then another - and yet all three turn out to be related.
Much of this is narrated by his friend and earth mother, Sortilège (Joanna Newsome), who also seems to accompany him, in spirit at least, as he drives around L.A., and who appears to possess some sort of second sight.
Anderson's work here is subtle and restrained, classical and always effective, with few of the flourishes from his earlier work. He charms some exceptional performances from his cast. The standout is probably Brolin, who imbues Bigfoot with pathos and humour ("Moto panacuku!!" has been in my head for days now) and even a hint of tragedy. Waterston is also fantastic in her scenes; careful around Doc and trying to squash her own feelings, and yet, still, somehow, in a manner unique to this movie: a femme fatale.
That is the thing; I've never seen a movie quite so unique. You can see influences, but Inherent Vice has its own tone and register, its own rhythms and flow. And they are oddly bewitching. Doc and Shasta are at the heart of this film, their relationship, its dissolution, the damage it caused, and that is as true in the last scene as it is when we first meet her. The edge of pain running through that storyline gives Inherent Vice it's peculiar charge, and echoes the theme of the souring and death of the hippie dream.
That forgets the key to the film: it is so much fun. Hilarious, informative, provocative, sexy, it even ends with a scene of grimy, ugly violence, before immediately undercutting that with a joke about the situation.
A great film from a great filmmaker.

JOHN WICK

(Chad Stahelski, David Leitch, 2014)

John Wick achieves a strange sort of perfection.
It keeps certain elements blessedly simple; the plot, for example, finds former legendary assassin Wick (Keanu Reeves, arguably the leading action star of the last couple of decades in terms of pure strike rate - The Matrix, Speed and this is some action c.v...) brooding on the recent death of his beloved wife (a Bridget Moynihan seen only in flashback and on iphone videos). Prior to her death she has arranged for a puppy to be delivered to give him something to love, but when nasty Russian gangster (Alfie Allen) takes a fancy to Wick's vintage Mustang, a nocturnal invasion of his house leaves Wick badly beaten, without his car, and with a dead puppy.
Thus we have a revenge thriller, and you know it is going to be bloody by the response of the elder gangsters to the youngster's impulsive act - their terror of Wick evident in a few facial expressions and awed dialogue exchanges. After the first big action set-piece we realise that this film is set in a sort of comic book universe wherein the criminal underworld exists by a set of odd rules, trading gold coins for a body clean-up service or access to a hotel and bar called the Continental, where there is no violence or business permitted. That explains the heightened colours of the photography here, which is stylish and often beautiful.
Even more beautiful is the action choreography. Action scenes are often misleadingly labelled "balletic", when more usually they are chopped up and hyperactively edited for visceral impact. But this film - directed by two former stuntmen and second unit directors, who obviously intimately know their stuff - is shot like a classic musical. While the camera moves steadily, the takes are long and beautifully choreographed and blocked; combatants dart and tumble in and out of frame as Reeves despatches them in ludicrous numbers, generally with a pistol but also with his fists and feet, blades, assault rifles and even automobiles. There is a dark wit to some of this - notably in the inventive, quick solutions Wick improvises to certain problems in combat -and it is all incredibly satisfying on a couple of levels. It has the obvious pleasure of the righteous revenge film - they killed his puppy!! - and the satisfaction of watching action that is coherent, stylish and pleasingly impactful.
It goes on a little too long but it has lots of great character actors in minor roles (a couple of The Wire alumni, Willem Dafoe, Ian McShane and John Leguizamo all pop up), always looks and sounds beautiful, is brilliantly serious in its goofy silliness, and generally makes you wish every action film could be so good. It is also great to see Reeves embrace action, where he is effective as Liam Neeson; brawny, broody and elegant of movement, he is perfect here. And in those intricate, hilarious action scenes, it feels almost transcendent and tremendous; perfect.

THE DROP

(2014, Michaël R. Roskam)

Dennis Lehane's "Animal Rescue" is a near-perfect little story with a pleasing twist in the tale. It establishes its world and people quickly and economically, and it has a beginning, middle and an end that make it feel heftier and more grounded than it actually is. In adapting it and expanding it out to make an actual screenplay, Lehane has sacrificed some of it's lean beauty. But crucially he has kept that ending - still tremendously satisfying - and this cinematic version has its own specific compensations.
The story focuses on sad, lonely Brooklyn barkeep Bob (Tom Hardy) who finds a pit bull puppy in a bin on the way home from work one night. The bin belongs to Nadia (Noomi Rapace), similarly lonely. She persuades Bob to keep the animal and he finds his life transformed by it and his acquaintance with her. Transformed for the better until the arrival of Eric (Matthias Schoenarts), her violent ex-boyfriend, who claims he owns the dog, and trades on the reputation he has in the neighbourhood for the murder of one of Bob's old friends a decade before. All of that comes pretty much straight from the story. Lehane adds more material on Cousin Marv (James Gandolfini), Bob's cousin and the bar owner, and his dealings with the Chechen gangsters who back him and organise the drops to the bar, and a dogged police detective (John Ortiz) who just can't help himself dig into the robbery that occurs in the first act of the film.
Roskam directs with a fine feel for wintry grit and seedy banality, from the bar itself to Bob's house, a mausoleum of sorts to his dead parents, and the whole thing recalls Sidney Lumet in it's minor-key pathos and quiet sense of menace.
The performances sell it - Hardy is terrific as the introverted Bob, allowing his slow realisations and determined decisions to play out in his eyes, while Gandolfini gives a great reading of bitterness and thwarted ambition in his last role, and Schoenarts is effortlessly threatening as Eric.
It all works, but never adds up to very much, however fine that ending is.

NIGHTCRAWLER

(Dan Gilroy, 2014)

Instantly announcing itself as one of the great Los Angeles films, Nightcrawler does so many things so well. It is a gripping, utterly atmospheric thriller. It features the best performance of Jake Gyllenhal's career. It says some scary, hilarious things about the way the current US Economic situation demands a certain amorality and even creates and rewards sociopaths. And it looks absolutely beautiful.
That is mainly down to veteran cinematographer Robert Elswit, who together with debutant director Dan Gilroy (brother of Tony) depicts L.A. as we rarely see it; street-level, devoid of cliches, an exciting, living, beautiful sprawl of a city, pulsing with colour and energy.
And Gilroy's story ensures that we see an awful lot of it. Following Lou Bloom (Gyllenhal), an eager, intensely focused sociopath getting by as a petty thief when we first encounter him, the film traces his burgeoning career as a freelance "Nightcrawler". Armed with a police scanner and a camera, he prowls L.A. by night, filming crime scenes and accidents and selling the results to local TV news, where he strikes up a creepy, co-dependent relationship with News producer Rene Russo. As he learns his trade and begins to make money he takes on an employee, Rick (Riz Ahmed) and develops a rivalry with Bill Paxton's cocky veteran. And then Lou's real personality begins to emerge - the positive thinking and corporate jargon he spouts fails to hide his ruthless willingness to go to any lengths to succeed, leading him and Rick into dangerous territory.
Gyllenhal plays Lou as a force of nature, lacking in any scruples or shame, totally focused upon success, the people around him only tools he can use. If the film has a real flaw, it's the queasy glee it seems to take in pointing out the creepiness of his character. There is no insight or empathy here, only a sort of "look at the weirdo" feeling which is a tad disappointing in a film that is otherwise so cleverly conceived and made.
Even that is leavened by the way it is developed as a theme; the world is full of people like Lou, Gilroy seems to be saying, in fact they are rewarded for the inhuman qualities they possess. People like Lou end up running things in this world. That's a dark, ballsy thing for a little crime thriller to articulate, and a big part of what is so impressive about Nightcrawler is that it is able to express that without ever sacrificing any of it's tension or excitement.
It climaxes with a terrific action sequence, though the scene where Lou reveals his true self to Russo over dinner might just shade that one as the film's most thrilling.

LUCY

(Luc Besson, 2014)

Besson has always had a knack for establishing a simple, gripping high concept dramatic device quickly and economically. The first 10 minutes of Lucy features two examples of this talent; in the first we watch Lucy (Scarlett Johansson, beautifully cast), plainly a bit of a party girl studying in Taipei, as she argues with a newish boyfriend who is trying to persuade her to drop off a mysterious briefcase in a hotel. Of course this errand leaves the boyfirend dead and Lucy in the hands of a Korean gang run by Mr Jang (Choi Min-Sik) who want to use her as a mule, an experimental new drug surgically concealed inside her stomach ready to be transported to Europe. Secondly there is the scene where a terrified Lucy is forced to open the the briefcase she has delivered while Mr Jang and his men hide behind cover in case it is a bomb.
Besson shoots these scenes simply and classically. Some of the style - we must remember that the "movement" of which Besson along with directors like Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax belonged was known as the "cinema du look" - which so enveloped his earlier work seems to have dropped away, and though Lucy always looks good, there is nothing all that distinctive or remarkable about its visual style.
Instead - and this is new for Besson - the content is fascinating. The ideas in Lucy about human beings only using 10% of our brains and the possibilities if we ever accessed more may be half-baked sci-fi, but at least there are ideas. And Besson expresses them visually, or at least tries to. His film has passages that recall a lobotomised Tree of Life, others that suggest 2001 and Koyanisqatsi. And yet, sometimes the effect is like nothing so much as an extremely well-shot and cut Powerpoint presentation. And that is without mentioning the dissonance created by juxtaposing all that with the international crime drama (the kind of thing Besson's Production company, EuropaCorp, specialises in) that the first act suggests Lucy will become. It never quite becomes that. Instead, that story - of Lucy's attempts to track down the rest of the drug that has allowed her to access more of her brain and hence given her what are in effect superpowers - runs alongside the changes Lucy is registering within herself and how they are effecting her.
As she begins to transcend time and space the film has one foot bogged down in a familiar, predictably violent action film. While Johansson is excellent - this role suggests a sort of dumber companion to Under the Skin - this strange schizophrenia is both the films strength and its great weakness. It makes for a movie that is entertaining, weirdly self-aware, and utterly brainless.

22 JUMP STREET

(Phil Lord, Chris Miller, 2014)

Directors Lord and Miller's stock in trade is the hyperactive meta-fictional comedy, and here, seemingly emboldened by the success of 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie, they push that as far as it can go while remaining (just about) true to the action-comedy genre.
The self-referential story follows Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) as they begin another case, this time posing as College Freshmen, investigating the source of a new drug called WhyFy on a Californian campus. Jokes about the lameness of sequels, the pointless budgetary increases and the tweaking of formula inevitably follow, but the film nimbly allows all that to co-exist with a nice emotional narrative about the pairs relationship unravelling (explicitly compared to the break-up of a long-term couple), slapstick, some brilliant pop cultural references (the Benjamin Hill School of Film Studies flashes by during a chase scene) and loads of gags about both the college movie sub-genre and college age kids in general.
All that and there are action scenes too.
Jenko has never been to College and he finds himself the perfect specimen to become a frat-boy football player, enjoying a beautifully-played homo-erotic relationship with the College Quarterback while also embracing his Human Sexuality course, while Schmidt falls in with an artier crowd, performing slam poetry and being used by a girl (the repeated "walk of shame" gag works because of Hill's sour little mouth).
Ice Cube and his outraged scowl return and this time he is given much more to do; destroying a buffet being a particular highlight.
The oddity here is how hard it is to know just what to take seriously. When the film shifts to Mexico for a Spring Break-set climax, the establishing shots of high rise hotels and crashing breakers could come straight from a Michael Bay movie, and the temptation is to see even that as Miller & Lord teasing the industry in which they are thriving. They mock and skit at every opportunity, undercutting and satirising merrily, making the movie an almost exhilarating riot.
And yet, some of the best gags are the simplest - Jenko's use of the term "Cate Blanchett" is a joke for the ages. Just when you think it is over comes the closing credits, a brilliant in-joke on movie franchises which ends this on a perfect note.

THE RAID 2

(Gareth Evans, 2014)

Given a bigger budget and a lot more confidence, Evans returns to the world of The Raid, taking his hero (Iko Uwais) and placing him in an undercover cop story which starts off as a prison movie, then transforms into a gang war story, never once losing sight of the fact that at heart, its really a martial arts fight movie.
It has the same flaws as the original. Evans writes, directs and edits, and two out of three ain't bad, but he's not much of a writer. The plot here is simple - a hoary old tale of jealousy, betrayal and turf disputes - and yet Evans manages to make it bafflingly opaque and difficult to follow. It doesn't help much that there are no real characters. Uwais' Rama is the good guy, and that's about all the personality he's given. The villains are defined by their props - the dangerous young half-Arab Bejo (Alex Abbad) wears shades, gloves and carries a cane - or, in a Tarantino-esque notion, by their weaponry. Except Evans doesn't write dialogue or personalities like Tarantino, so the fact that he features a deaf girl who fights with a pair of hammers and her partner who uses a baseball bat like its a samurai sword works only in the fight scenes.
But then that does seem to be all he cares about. And some of those fight scenes are extraordinary: unbelievably violent, hilariously extended, cartoonishly gory...and yet; beautifully choreographed and brilliantly shot and edited. People fight with fists, knives, machetes, guns, cars. They fight endlessly.
Everything is grotesquely bloated around those fights - Evans seems to believe that his film is somehow deeper than it actually is - but those fights make this film worthwhile. They go with many of the cliches of martial arts cinema, just as The Raid did, but they work despite those cliches, almost by overloading them. Evans goes further and more outrageous than most filmmakers would dare. He flips cameras upside down, follows people through shattered windows and into tumbling cars. He manages to use shaky, immediate handheld cameras in some scenes for visceral impact but rarely sacrifices coherence to do so.
It's everything else that lets the film down. Truly great action films feature great action scenes, of course. But they make you invest in those scenes. You care about who wins, who survives, what happens. Evans isn't quite capable of that just yet. You watch his action scenes dazzled by the technical virtuosity and the physical feats on display. But you don't really care about anything beyond that.

STARRED UP

(David Mackenzie, 2013)

Mackenzie's talent and control is evident in the first few moments of Starred Up. His camera follows 19 year old Eric Love (Jack O'Connell, sensationally good) as he is led into a prison building by a series of Guards. He is searched, he is dressed, he is ordered about, he is locked up in a cell. The camera observes all this from middle distance, calmly, without much judgement in its placement or the editing of the measured shots. And yet it is handheld, and soon, once Eric erupts into the violence that has seen him "starred up" (prison slang for what happens when a young offender is transferred to an adult facility for repeated violence), it is right in the middle of the action, juddering and whiplashing about as men smash into men. This combination of a sweaty handheld immediacy and a more controlled distance is a tricky one to navigate, yet Mackenzie does it seemingly effortlessly.
And more; his use of depth of field to suggest the levels of this prison - doorways within doorways, cages behind netting, gate after gate under balcony beyond bars - is subtle and brilliant, while the queasy palette of the building and its walls; entirely sickly yellow and pallid green, nicely captures the sickness of the system running this place. He has taken a good screenplay and directed the hell out of it.
That screenplay was written by Jonathan Asser, based upon his own experience of working as a voluntary therapist at a London prison, and it follows Eric after his arrival at the same prison holding his father Neville (Ben Mendelsohn), a respected con on a life sentence. Eric is puffed up with cocky aggression, determined to stand up for himself in this hostile environment, and angry at the world for what it has done to him.
O'Connell plays him as a clever, insecure little brooder, liable to volcanic rages, and it is the genius of his performance that midway through the second act we begin to soften towards Eric, and recognise him as teh vulnerable kid he is. That is partly because he has been identified as such by  Baumer (Rupert Friend), a voluntary therapist who works with a group of prisoners and takes Eric on despite his challenging attitude.
Slowly Eric changes, but the prison is the same (literally) cutthroat world it always was, and politics among prisoners and guards may threaten his existence there.
Brimming with imminent violence and stifled terror, Starred Up is a bruising, intense watch. The father-son relationship underpinning much of the drama gives it a little more emotional heft than many films in the genre, allowing it to transcend the many cliches it deals in. Asser's unique perspective on the material helps too, allowing him to analyse the violence and machismo of his characters - a confrontation in one of Baumer's sessions is one of the most realistic I've ever seen - while Mackenzie understands its allure and usefulness in the creation of tension.
All of this would be little use without the performances of O'Connell and Mendelsohn, ably supported by Friend. They make it intimate and personal, messy and painful, in a way few prison movies can be.

HOMEFRONT

(Gary Fleder, 2013)

Very much like an action thriller from another era - theres a lot of the 1980s here, and possibly even more of the 1970s - Homefront is never quite brave enough to go all-out to satisfy the sort of pulp cravings those movies effortlessly catered to.
Despite the presence of Jason Statham in the lead as retired undercover cop Phil Broker, director Fleder makes it all a little too slick and a little too mainstream to work. The screenplay - by Sylvester Stallone, a reliably canny creator in terms of base action thrills - is brutal and simplistic and classical in construction. Broker and his 9 year old daughter are living in a small Louisiana town after his (pre-credits) involvement in a massive operation to bring down a Biker gang ended in much bloodshed. A schoolyard altercation between his daughter and a bully escalates until the local drug kingpin, Gator Bodine (James Franco, surprisingly bland) becomes involved, discovers who Broker is, and calls in the Biker gang for help in disposing of this quiet man with devastating combat acumen.
The smalltown Louisiana setting works well, and the cast is unexpectedly starry for this sort of material, with the likes of Kate Bosworth and Winona Ryder both good in small parts as desperate women of different stripes, and Frank Grillo reliably nasty as a Biker assassin.
Fleder can do action competently, too, and Statham has a few impressive fight scenes. But competence is about as good as it gets. Its never delirious enough or offensively violent enough or bleak enough or funny enough. It sets up its familiar story, you know exactly what will happen, then that happens.
Which is perhaps what many Statham fans want of a Statham film. But he's capable of more. Films like this - with a sprinkling of cinematic pedigree - are small steps towards something more.
And its frustrating when they don't get there.