SOUTHPAW

(Antoine Fuqua, 2015)

There is a certain level of automatic audience identification and interest generated by a story about a parent trying to get back their child. There is a similar level of automatic audience identification and interest generated by an underdog boxing story, following a fighter who loses everything and sets out on a road to redemption.
In its third act, Southpaw benefits from a confluence of both of these story types, and rides a mix of action and emotion to a stirring finale. With this kind of material, only bad filmmaking and awful acting can really prevent a movie from working to a certain extent, and Fuqua's best work here is in the boxing sequences, guaranteeing a level of tension as the climax approaches and the stakes are set as man against man. But the film has gotten to this point almost despite itself. Written by Kurt Sutter, the story is hilariously generic. Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhal) is a World Champion Boxer, married to his childhood sweetheart Maureen (Rachel McAdams). Having met in the care system, they do their best to provide a loving environment for their daughter Leila. Billy's fighting style rests on taking a lot of punishment, and using his anger to power his own efforts. Maureen acts as his manager, and she doesn't see a future in such an approach. But a scuffle with the entourage of a title contender leads to a tragic accident, and a newly widowed Billy goes to pieces and loses everything, including his livelihood and Leila. Halfway through the film then, he approaches Tig Wells (Forest Whitaker), who trained the only man Billy regards as having outfought him, and asks him to train Billy in another way.
This all means that the film is split between two basic movements; the tawdry melodrama of Billy trying to put his life back together so that he is worthy of Leila's love, and the overly familiar stuff with Billy adapting his fighting style and disciplining himself so that he can become a far more effective boxer. The melodrama is marked by a collection of "intense" performances led by Gyllenhal as Billy. He emotes furiously and is convincing as a boxer - all tattoos and sweat and blood and muscles - but all the emoting and intensity never really adds up to a convincing or interesting character. McAdams is much better in her scenes as a warmly realist Maureen, as is Whitaker as wise old Tig. The boxing stuff is interestingly detailed, allows for a training montage or two, and yet makes for a curiously undramatic climax, since Billy has learned to fight with patience and caution rather than the blood and thunder of his old style. That all means that while Southpaw just about works, it is too generic, too forgettable and too familiar to be all that good.

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.

ZODIAC

(David Fincher, 2007) The film where Fincher grew up. A tense and engrossing study of obsession and failure, a whodunnit which doesn't really care whodunnit and a policier which meticulously depicts the procedural elements of a serial killer investigation at a crucial point in the 20th century, Zodiac is Fincher's best film. Its also the first where he allows the narrative and themes and characters to take priority over his directorial pyrotechnics. The pyrotechnics, the insane virtuosity, they're still there, they're just better integrated into the film, best seen in a series of remarkable crane shots, and an overhead tracking shot which is breathtaking but doesn't ever pull the viewer out of the story. Instead Fincher focuses on the details and in the process builds a convincing portrait of a time and place as much as he focuses upon the Zodiac investigation. The texture of Zodiac is thick with America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the mainly unseen and unremarked upon social and political upheaval of the era. Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhal) works as a political cartoonist and we glimpse some of his work in passing, but he is more interested in Zodiac, as if seeking escape from his own job. His obsessive investigation gives the film its baggy structure, with extended episodes focusing more on the Official Investigation by various Police Detectives and Departments, and a few chilling recreations of the crimes themselves. We hear suggestions of the schism in American society on a talk radio programme. There are references to the pop culture of the times, too. Detective Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) was the real-life basis for Bullitt, and he is seen attending a special police screening of that other classic portrayal of the SFPD, Dirty Harry (which was partly inspired by the Zodiac case). The soundtrack is full of the music of the period, most of it put to perfect use, in particular Donovan's ever-creepy Hurdy-Gurdy Man - which I don't think I'll ever be able to hear again without thinking of this film, a signal of how well it was used. But mainly we are buried under the details of the case, just like the films protagonists. Each of them is ruined by it, defeated by its blind alleys and dead-ends. Fincher's film is heavy with scenes depicting men talking in offices and on telephones, and yet it manages to build and maintain suspense for two and a half hours. In this it recalls Alan J Pakula's magisterial All the Presidents Men (the deep-procedural aspect also suggested the influence of The Wire, always a good thing). The photography by Harris Savides is frequently beautiful, but it also vividly captures the lighting in the open plan offices of the SF Chronicle and the police department, contributing to the flat, banal tone which suggests the crushing repetitive dullness of the work these men are involved in. David Shire's subtle score is a direct reference to the films of the 70s Zodiac apes. Its few scenes of outright suspense are confidently, expertly staged and handled by Fincher, proving that he is best when holding back. The cast - illuminated by turns from Robert Downey Jr, Anthony Edwards and Elias Koteas - is uniformly great. Most impressive of all, perhaps, is the sidelong way this approaches a Big American subject, its narrative steadily circling a few characters lost in a maze of detail and crumbling because of their inability to find a way out. The film is about the case but also about technology, how we feel about it and how it fails us (there are many references to mimeographing and early fax machines and a key plotpoint hangs upon the expertise of a handwriting specialist), and about the evil that seemed almost to hang in the air in the culture of the 1970s. It possesses a strange kind of density which reminded me of the work of Don DeLillo and Christopher Sorrentino's novel "Trance" (both of which investigate a similar era in US history). The density comes from the aggregation of detail, the depth of characterisation, and the polymathic tangents the narrative constantly threatens to follow before doubling back. All the while, we never lose sight of the evil at the centre of the story, which seems to baffle Fincher just as much as it baffles his characters. In seemingly keeping his focus so narrow, Fincher, together with screenwriter James Vanderbilt, is able to paint a panorama of a 20 year slice of history, and do it beautifully. This is a Great Film.

PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME

(Mike Newell, 2010)

There is an attempt, somewhere within this massive, often beautiful Jerry Bruckheimer production, to recreate something of the spirit of the Romantic Middle Eastern Epics which were once a Sunday matinee staple. But that attempt jostles for breathing space with the interests of too many other focus groups and corporate partners and demographic-pandering ideas, with the end result that the whole thing is loud and busy and confusing, with some fine moments and interesting elements lost within the sandstorm of cgi and gags and action and cack-handed plotting.
Based upon Jordan Melchner's seminal platformer video game - and incorporating that, sort of, with a couple of thrilling free-running sequences and with one distinctly unthrilling cgi surf-the-collapsing-landscape scene - the plot is unnecessarily fussy and complicated. A common orphan adopted as a boy by a King finds himself blamed for the King's death and must flee with a beautiful princess, pursued by his Brothers and in possession of a dagger which allows the owner to travel back in time. It gets worse after that, and that takes a half an hour to set up. That leads to an episodic string of chases, encounters and fights, some lovely design and photography, some terrible dialogue, Alfred Molina as the comic relief, assassins who practice sorcery, lots of screwball love/hate exchanges between a hero and heroine who look good together but lack chemistry, an ostrich race, the criminal waste of Toby Kebell, Ben Kingsley sleepwalking throughout a stock villain role, and lots and lots of swords before it all ends in a big vague cgi climax and an unexpectedly satisfying resolution.
There are compensations; Gyllenhall is a convincing action star, Arterton is beautiful, Newell is a pro, never over-directing anything, and it always looks expensive and lush.
It's fun, mostly, and that might have to be enough in an adaptation of a videogame. But it could be more fun, you feel. It's almost there.

SOURCE CODE

(Duncan Jones, 2011)

Duncan Jones' second film as director shares it's major theme with Moon, his debut. Both films address identity and how we perceive it and it's constituent elements (memory, personality), amongst other things. Source Code is a decidedly high concept sci-fi thriller, but Jones' interest in this theme and insistence on the primacy of characterisation make it feel like something else. It handles what might be a problem - a ton of complex exposition - beautifully, drip-feeding the audience enough to keep them interested but never overloaded, and that allows character to shape the direction of the film. Here, in the interactions our hero enjoys with two women, learning about his own situation and feeling his way toward a solution, theme is gently nudged and prodded by the narrative. But more important are these people, and the way Jones and screenwriter Ben Ripley subtly alter the focus of the film in the last act so that the whodunit at the core of the Mission is displaced by our hero's more personal journey. This makes the ending - which works, and then some - utterly satisfying, and even, perhaps, moving.
Gyllenhal is compelling in a lead demanding he shift modes regularly; he is confused, angry, romantic, focused and sad from one moment to the next, while Michelle Monaghan convinces effortlessly as a woman you could fall for in eight minutes, and Vera Farmiga does an awful lot with the thinnest part.
Jones' direction is slick and even somewhat anonymous; in visual terms this film could have been made by any one of a few dozen young Hollywood ex-advertising directors. But it's in the deeper tissue that we can see his influence, and its the deeper tissue that gives the film it's resonance. It finally addresses big subjects; love and death, the usual suspects, but this it does without pretension or compromise, and with a satisfying genre conclusion attached. This is not an easy thing for a sci-fi thriller to do, but this film makes it look easy.