LOOPER

(Rian Johnson, 2012) With his third film, writer-director Johnson goes up a gear or two. Looper is a tremendously assured science fiction thriller; original, clever and brilliantly made, it surpasses most of this years crop of Hollywood genre cinema, and most of any years, to be honest. The first act is a zippy half hour, dense with incident and wittily slipping in tons of exposition without too much pain. In voiceover, Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) explains that, in this near future world, he is a "Looper", an assassin who kills people sent back from the future by the mob. He goes alone to a field, armed with a blunderbuss, at the appointed time, and he waits. A figure suddenly appears, hooded, and Joe shoots them dead, takes the silver bars strapped to their back as payment, and disposes of the body. Time travel has not been invented yet, but it is already influencing the course of his life. That worsens when he is confronted with an older version of himself (Bruce Willis) who has come back specifically to find the younger version of a future crimelord - the legendary Rainmaker - to kill him as a child. Future Joe's presence in the past/present sends both Joes on the run from Abe (Jeff Daniels) each trying to survive and guarantee their own future as they see it. That first half hour establishes this future world as a gritty, degraded version of our own. Vagrants fill the streets, cars run on battered solar panels stuck to their bonnets and roofs, and law and order seems largely negligible. This is all subtly portrayed with detail and texture, and the action kicks in with a jolt of pace. Johnson skilfully does all this without ever sacrificing his characters - there are few cyphers here, with even Paul Dano as Joe's doomed friend Seth and Piper Perabo as his favoured prostitute given telling little grace notes in their scenes. Jeff Daniels, meanwhile, reunited with Gordon Levitt after their excellent work together in the underrated The Lookout, is quietly scary but almost likeable as Abe, a mobster from the future who prefers words to violence. The film changes gear thereafter, settling in at an isolated farmhouse where a young woman (Emily Blunt, nicely combining strength with fragility) is determined to protect her young son and Joe awaits his final showdown with his older self. Their storyline provides a contrasting emotional strand to that of Willis, clinging to his memories of a dead wife while young Joe's actions mess with his mind. Johnson keeps the potentially complex time travel paradox plotting clear though never less than fascinating, and concentrates on his characters and the issues of choice and free will they face, without ever stinting on spectacle. His plotting is nifty and intelligent in its consistent ability to deliver surprises that seem, in retrospect, to be the only way things could have gone, and his direction is stylish but filled with strong, clean storytelling. There is also a quite appealing strain of nastiness working its way through this story. The sort of gee-whiz ideas common in time travel stories are given a bloodthirsty spin. A Looper returned from the future is captured through his younger self when mobsters begin to amputate body parts and he finds himself suddenly lacking fingers, a nose, legs. The fact that ten percent of the population has some low-level telekinesis means that when we encounter a character with a high-level version of the power, more or less the first thing Johnson has him do is explode somebody. The brutality with which everybodytreats vagrants feels convincingly frank and only adds to the coarse, damaged texture of this world. Perhaps most impressive is the use of Willis here. For the first time in years, a film has made interesting use of his onscreen persona - he was always one action hero with a little more to him - and specific appeal, and he responds with a fine performance. He and Gordon Levitt - who is equally good - have a single, brilliant scene where they talk things over in a diner, the tensions and strain between them bubbling over in some sharply scripted dialogue. Not quite the transcendent masterpiece some have claimed, then, but Looper is still great, utterly satisfying genre filmmaking which marks the newfound maturity of a young American auteur.

PREMIUM RUSH

(David Koepp, 2012) As a screenwriter for hire, David Koepp works on big films. Blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible and Spider-Man. As a writer-director he has preferred to work in a much smaller, quieter register; usually basing his films around a clever, high-concept conceit like the blackout that kicks off the action in The Trigger Effect or the heroes sudden ability to talk to the dead in Ghost Town. Premium Rush is no different. It's a chase thriller set in the world of the bicycle courier, a slight tweak in setting, certainly, but one that works due to the wit of the telling. Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the bike messenger as ninja, zipping down Manhattan's concrete canyons between cabs and buses at ridiculous speed on a bike with no breaks and no gears. Koepp does a good job of illustrating Wilee's understanding of the city as a three-dimensional system of movement with some freeze-frame and slow motion work; Wilee weighs up trajectories and possible routes through jams and across moving traffic in micro-seconds then executes his choice with style and suicidal bravery. In the course of ninety pacy minutes, Wilee takes possession of a delivery wanted by the entertainly cartoonish cop Detective Monday (Michael Shannon) who needs to pay off debts to both Chinese and Russian mobsters, and the chase is on. Koepp necessarily complicates the plot to include Willee's relationship with his messenger girlfriend Vanessa (Dania Ramirez), her Chinese roommate Nima (Jamie Cheung), who has entrusted the delivery to him in the first place, and his rivalry with "roided-out freak" messenger Manny (Wolé Parks). He also sets another cop - a bike-riding officer with no idea what is going on - on Wilee's trail, to mostly comic effect. The majority of scenes take place with the main characters moving at high speed through New York City, meaning that Koepp has to be clever and concise with his dialogue and characterisation. This gives an appealing sense of action as character - we understand Wilee perfectly from our first glimpses of him cutting between cars with an air of smugness (Levitt is fine here but much smugger than usual), and the film only slows down for a couple of second-act flashbacks sketching in some backstory. It's biggest problem is the way it stops and then switches back about an hour in - that and the fact that the bike chases get a little samey the fifth or sixth time around - but it is commendably lacking in any fat or bloat, contains a few genuinely gripping sequences (Wilee evading Monday in a police station in particular), and makes brilliant use of New York City in Summer, depicting the city in all its thrilling, teeming immensity and colour.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

(Christopher Nolan, 2012) It is worth establishing one thing straight away: Christopher Nolan makes blockbuster cinema on a level beyond most filmmakers. Not just a financial level - though the film in question cost a rumoured $250 Million to make - but in terms of the epic scale of his vision, the relative intelligence and complexity of his material, and his unquestionable command of the cinematic medium. That obviously doesn't mean he makes flawless films, and indeed all of the films in his Batman trilogy have their problems. But overall, they are quite a remarkable achievement: tonally and thematically consistent, beautifully made and performed, and somehow combining Nolan's personal preoccupations with a mass popular appeal. A big part of that is down to the character at their heart. Batman is for me the great fictional creation of the 20th Century, a character who has gone beyond fiction to become a mythic archetype, which is why so many utterly different interpretations of the basic template all work across so many different formats and media, from video-games to comic books to cartoons and novels. Nolan's vision of the character retains most of the obviously iconic elements and locates him in a gritty, superficially "realist" universe where many of the issues he faces are very topical; terrorism, economic turmoil threatening law and order, political corruption. The Dark Knight Rises takes on all of these themes at once, but it suffers from Nolan's greatest weakness as a serious filmmaker (and he evidently sees himself as a very serious filmmaker indeed) - he gestures at his themes rather than actually investigating them in any meaningful way. So this film is "about" terrorism in that it works as a function of the plot and characters actually discuss it in a few heavy-handed scenes foregrounding the directors ideas, but it never actually burrows into that theme or really says anything about it. If anything, while the film explicitly comes down on the side of its hero Batman (Christian Bale), Nolan seems more interested in and excited by the actions of its villain, the terrorist Bane (Tom Hardy). Finally, while Nolan may condone certain fascistic tendencies evident in the best treatment of Batman as a character - there is much discussion here, as in The Dark Knight, the second and best film in this trilogy, about what a man must do when the law is not enough anymore - it may be best to ignore the films simplistic politics and instead concentrate upon its worth as a Super-hero film, which is great. But Nolan does his best to make that impossible, making politics and a resonant echo of the "Occupy" movement so central to his films story. While Batman Begins stole much from Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's superb "Year One", the Batman comic he cribs from most recurrently here is Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns". Several key plot points come direct from that source - Gotham as a virtually lawless battleground, Batman's return after an absence - and even a few of the smaller, better moments innthis story are lifted from Miller, such as the moment a senior police officer realises Batman is back and remarks to his partner "You are in for a show tonight!" That story unfolds eight years after the end of The Dark Knight. Batman has been dormant for that long, Bruce Wayne a recluse, lurking in the East Wing of Wayne Manor. Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) has been eaten away by the lie he and Batman perpetuated at the end of the previous film, even if that lie has ensured no organised crime in Gotham for most of the previous decade. Meanwhile, Bane is planning to destroy the City piece-by-piece, physically isolating it, depriving it of a Police Force, crippling its infrastructure and financial Market, and a devious cat-burglar, Selina Kyle(Anne Hathaway) has entered Wayne's life, luring him back out into public after so long, where a member of his company's board (Marion Cotillard) attempts to revive a dormant but dangerous clean energy project he dropped some years before. From there the plot only grows more complicated - and occasionally silly - over the two and a half hours of running time, but it rises to a superbly orchestrated final act of more or less ceaseless action. The ending is satisfying and even a little moving for a lover of the Batman character. Batman fans may feel a little shortchanged - there is not all that much Batman in this film. It is more firmly Bruce Wayne's story. But what Batman there is is far more assured than he has been in the previous two films; Nolan seems to have finally realised how best to use his hero when he is in costume and in action. Action is a strange weakness for a director of action blockbusters to have, but it has long been Nolan's major technical flaw; while he creates imaginative, impressively scaled action sequences, his direction of them is flat and relatively uninspired, and his editing has been - at times - downright bad. Not here. The Dark Knight Rises contains the best fight scenes in the trilogy in Batman's two brutal face-offs with Bane, and the scenes of outright warfare on the streets of Gotham are massive, exhilarating and full of the sort of iconic shot-making for which this director has always had a particular gift. This film has also learned from The Dark Knight and there are fewer instances where everything stops while the characters discuss the themes, while those instances are more seamlessly integrated into the action. Nolan has the happy ability to maintain a sense of tension and dread throughout his films - they never ever feel boring, even when nothing of note is really happening onscreen - which is down to his intelligent use of the camera, strong editing decisions and the constant prodding from Hans Zimmer's score, here based around a primal pounding and tribal chanting which are repetitive but also somewhat hypnotic. The cast are generally strong; Bale knows this character by now, finding both the rage and sadness in him to great effect, while Hathaway makes her Selina Kyle an attractively morally ambivalent figure until her conscience is stirred by Batman's example. If their relationship is paradoxically sexless, well that is down to another of Nolan's blind spots as a filmmaker. He doesn't really do humour, and he doesn't really do sex. They're just not part of his worldview, making the scenes here of an attractive man and woman clad in rubber entirely serious and chaste (in stark contrast to Tim Burton's take on the same scenario). The veterans in the cast are all superb - Michael Caine carries much ofnthe films emotional weight, and he is as good here as he has been in anything for years, but Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman (as Batman's Q, Lucius Fox) are almost as good. Joseph Gordon Levitt is solid as John Blake, a conscientious young cop who is largely more of a function of the plot than a character, while Cotillard is good in a similarly limited role. Hardy, his face mostly hidden by Bane's mask, is great as a physical presence, but most of the rest comes down to his eyes - memorably flashing in a few scenes - and the oddly supercilious voice he has created for his villain, which works only some of the time. This film suffers from the absence of a villain as iconic and well-defined as Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight. It suffers in few other regards. Wally Pfister's cinematography is truly remarkable here. He carries off Nolan's magisterial, muscular style with ease, conjuring up a series of beautiful images but always keeping the storytelling tight and fluid. The combination of the IMAX compositions with Hans Zimmer's thunderous, often ludicrously bombastic score is viscerally shaking; this is what spectacle cinema can be, this film seems to say, as it leaves you pinned to your seat. The cast is filled out with recognisable faces in virtually every role, giving some indication of how highly Nolan is regarded in Hollywood these days. And really, it's easy to see why. He has taken a moribund Super-hero franchise and made it into something interesting and provocative without ever sacrificing any commercial appeal.

UNCERTAINTY

(Scott McGehee & David Siegel, 2009)

Starting with an attractive young couple discussing an important decision they must make while standing in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge on July 4th, Uncertainty seems rather too high-concept for it's own good.
The couple (Joseph Gordon Levitt and Lynn Collins) toss a coin to decide whether to spend their day in Manhattan or Brooklyn, then each runs to a different end of the bridge, where they are reunited with one another and two different versions of the same couple enjoy two different stories.
Those stories are colour-coded green and yellow in title cards and by the clothing the characters wear. One is a paranoid chase thriller, kicked off by the phone they discover in the back of a cab, leading gunmen and threatening strangers to track them across Chinatown and Manhattan. The other is a family drama, as they return to the Brooklyn home of the girls parents for a 4th of July dinner, and they struggle with the secret they are keeping - her pregnancy.
It plays more smoothly and easily than it sounds, even if it does take perhaps 45 minutes before the film has fallen into a nice rhythm, cutting back and forth naturally between the twin stories and playing them off each other for resonances and echoes. The thriller story is necessarily silly but it's momentum is so relentless that that is easy to ignore, and, shot with handheld cameras in New York in Summer, it is a great film of that city, dancing across rooftops and through parking garages and sidestreets, casually capturing the way the subway feels and the streets bustle in a way many films miss entirely.
The family drama is more subtle, more interesting and perhaps a better fit for these directors, whose previous work has generally leaned more towards arthouse than multiplex. The history and complex relationships in the family are patiently sketched in, naturalistically, and through dialogue and nuance - informed by a few details revealed in the other story - and a plotline about a stray dog somewhat leadenly emphasises the lead couples' issues with sudden parenthood. The leads are both good; portraying a realistically normal young couple in love but unsure of their future, they have chemistry and feel right together, and the improvised dialogue never feels improvised, instead seeming tentative and true to life.
In the thriller story they are in over their heads and react with desperation and fear but also ingenuity, until they realise how overmatched they are.
The drama is more sensitive to the currents in their relationship, the glances and facial expressions of two people intent upon the feelings of one another. The two stories intersect - sort of - as they watch fireworks over the city in both realities and later sleep together. Each story is left partially unresolved, awaiting a decision - in a film about choice, this is either very clever or extremely frustrating.
It is, doubtless, an odd film. Arty in some ways, accessible in others, it never quite works despite the appeal of the cast and Rain Li's pin-sharp cinematography. Strangely, for a film so determinedly split in its personality, you get the feeling it never quite knows exactly what it wants to be in either personality.