MACBETH

(Justin Kurzel, 2015)

Macbeth is - by something like common consent - the most cinematic of Shakespeare's plays. It is noirish in its dramatic setting, dark actions and darker characters, its blood and witchcraft and murder and seduction. It is also uncommonly tight for Shakespeare; taut and relatively pacy. It has a tortured anti-hero, a femme fatale, a few rich supporting roles.
And yet: so many of the screen adaptations of the Scottish play mess it up. Too slow, too literal, too gothic, too stagey, too handsome, too cheap, too silly. Always off somehow. Only Roman Polanski really made a decent fist of turning it into a movie (Orson Welles' seems the least of his Shakespeare adaptations to me) and even that bloody, energetic iteration is a little stiff and awkward.
Well: Justin Kurzel seems to have been commendably focused on making his Macbeth work as a movie. He and his three writers throw out material that doesn't work, and recontextualise whole other scenes, sharpening some themes, abandoning others. His movie is ravishing; an every-frame-a-painting piece of cinema with brutally fine acting from a great cast.
Director of photography Adam Arkapaw films medieval Scotland with pin-sharp precision as if it was a post-Apocalyptic wasteland. There is life here, but somehow the landscape seems desolate, either battered by rain or baking under the sun. The early battle scene is an orgy of slow-motion blood and spittle in the air, intercut with the clamour of the carnage and Macbeth, still on the battlefield, hypnotised by the sight of the Wyrd Sisters.
The boldness of Kurzel's version is in making some definitive decisions about how Shakespeare's ambiguities should be read. So here, Michael Fassbender's Macbeth is firmly a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; hallucinating corpses (the dagger which appears to him is in the hand of a dead youth from that opening battle) and unable to control his seesawing emotions, he is easily swayed by his wife. For her part, Marion Cotillard's Lady Macbeth is mourning the loss of her own child. The film's opening shot is of the body of the Macbeth child, lying upon a funeral pyre. Both Cotillard and Fassbender play it as naturalistically as they can, mumbling and whispering much of the dialogue. There is no declaiming, little attempt at iambic pentameter. Some lines vanish in an attempt to make scenes more believable and flowing. Fassbender is best in the early stages; numbed and hollow. Later he gets a little more mannered and hammy, but he is never less than magnetic. Cotillard is beautifully vulnerable and emotional.
The rest of a terrific cast match them, especially an (as usual) intense Sean Harris as MacDuff. All contribute to the sense of mounting dread throughout, as does the score by Jed Kurzel and Arkapaw's immense work, which make Macbeth work as a movie in a way that too few Shakeseare adaptations can match. It is beautiful, emotional, visceral and exhilarating.
It is also confirmation that Kurzel is a great talent.

TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT

(Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2014)

The Dardennes have yet to make a bad film; which says it all about their understanding of their own ability and their knack of choosing stories perfectly suited to that ability. Their "invisible" style is ideal for that invisibility - it allows for immersion in these stories which are always about real people in with real problems in what is as close as much cinema gets to a proper representation of the real world.
Here they address the recent Economic downturn by telling the story of Sandra (Marion Cotillard), a married mother-of-two recovering from a spell off work with depression who finds out that here colleagues have been given a choice between her lay-off and keeping their own annual annual bonus of €1000. They voted convincingly for the bonus, but Sandra and her friend convince their boss that it has been influenced by their foreman, and he agrees that there can be another, secret ballot after the weekend. That allows Sandra two days and one night to persuade her workmates that they should change their minds and choose her over the money.
The majority of the film, then follows Sandra and her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) as they journey all over Liege to her colleagues houses and tries to reason with them. All the while she battles with her own feelings, fearful her depression will return, taking pills, crying, suffering from huge mood swings, trying to be a wife and mother, arguing with her patient, worried husband.
So much of the success of the film rests upon the performance of its lead, and Cotillard - arguably the greatest actress working today - is  as exceptional as ever, letting us read the swirl of emotions in Sandra's eyes as she endures victories and defeats.
The repetitive structure initially seems irritating but rapidly becomes a strength, the Dardennes using it to show us a cross-section of working and lower-middle class Belgian life, as Sandra's colleagues react to her arrival in sharply varying ways; some with kindness and sorrow, some with violence. The details are beautifully observed but subtle. There is an effortlessness to the verisimilitude here, which gives the few moments of more outright narrative haping real impact - the scene where Sandra, Manu and one of her colleagues sing along joyously to "Gloria" by Them in a car at night is a notable emotional high in a film which is generally quite muted and even guarded.

THE IMMIGRANT

(James Gray, 2013)

James Gray deserves the same status as the most beloved and acclaimed directors of his generation. In terms of talent, he is right up there alongside the Andersons, for instance, both Paul Thomas and Wes.
He will, however, never be fashionable, you feel. He is a classicist, and there is something serious and sober in his work which is slightly out of step with modern taste.
The Immigrant, perhaps more than any other film, is the fullest expression of that classicism. An old-fashioned melodrama in terms of its plotting, it is muted and quietened by Gray until its passions are deep beneath the surface, only visible in the occasional eruption of violence or raw feeling from its characters.
Gray instead finds much of that feeling in the beautifully haunted eyes of his leading lady. Cotillard has something of the silent movie siren about her, and he is able to locate the pain and longing in that face, which takes up much screentime here.
The story centres on Cotillard's Iwa, a Polish immigrant who arrives with her sister Magda at Ellis Island in 1921. Magda is immediately dragged away, suspected of suffering from tuberculosis, and Iwa is to be deported back to Europe when she is spotted by Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), who pays off a guard and takes her back to his house. He offers her work, but is gradually revealed to be a pimp, who first takes Iwa on as a dancer in his troupe at a club, then arranges for her to become a prostitute. All this time she is saving money to rescue her sister, and further, brighter hope arrives in the shape of Emil (Jeremy Renner), a magician who is kind and poetic and takes an instant shine to Iwa.
This is all patiently, calmly paced by Gray, the story moving forth only in increments. But what beautiful, magical increments they are. Shot by Darius Khondji on a relatively low budget, The Immigrant looks ravishing; it's evocation of the tenement world in '20s New York is shocking but utterly compelling. That tenement world is crucial to Gray's work here; this is a creation myth of the American Dream, and it plumbs very deep.
Gray's style is unfussy, classical, but his superb eye allows the odd dazzling composition (such as the ones that begin & end the film). However, his favoured shot here is of Marion Cotillard's face. So much rests on Cotillard here, and she is sublime. Though the film demands that she remains still and reserved for much of the running time, her eyes signal all of the repressed emotion she is suffering, all the pain and shame and loneliness. Renner is a charming match for her, but Phoenix's glowering pimp is a more interesting character. In love with this girl, he nonetheless makes her a prostitute, twists and manipulates her and does his best to ensure she stays by his side.
That sort of psychological complexity - and the arthouse trappings - is what makes such an old-fashioned film feel so thrillingly contemporary. Gray's talent and ability as a storyteller is what makes it so hypnotic.
A magnificent film.

RUST AND BONE

(Jacques Audiard, 2012)

Audiard here takes two of the stories from Craig Davidson's fine collection, "Rust and Bone", and fuses them into one gritty, emotional melodrama. That fusion shouldn't really work. The stories - one about a bare knuckle boxer, the other about an Orca trainer injured by an animal - are utterly different in tone and setting. But it helps that Audiard keeps few of the details from Davidson, and that so much of the story of this film is of his own invention, expanding upon what he has adapted from the book.
He transforms the material into a bruising love story. Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) is newly arrived on the French Riviera with his young son. They stay with his sister while he moves between jobs - as a bouncer and a security guard. Working at a club he meets Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) an attractive, possibly dangerous party girl. Later, she is crippled by an accident at work, and she contacts Ali again. Slowly, a strange relationship forms between them as both seek to find themselves once more.
The leads are crucial to the success of this film. Cotillard has more of the standout moments - her discovery that her legs are gone, her sexual reawakening and excitement at Ali's physicality - and she plays each with a sensitivity and rawness of emotion that is powerful and believable, but Schoenaerts is a fitting partner for her, making Ali a wounded brute, capable of surprising sensitivity and feeling yet also never far from an explosion. They make the union between the characters feel inevitable and fascinating.
Then there is Audiard's evolving style. He finds a key to each scene which makes it ring with a visceral sense of the truth of the moment - whether its the texture of the ground upon which Ali is fighting, a tooth spinning onto it, or the way he and Stephanie pant together during sex, or her flashes of memory of her accident, the water swirling with debris and blood. Every sequence has this exhilarating pulse of life in it. Some moments feel almost like the Dardennes tackling a torrid melodrama, others recall Michael Mann in their sensual poetry and attention to the fleeting beauty of the everyday. His use of sound is sublime too, and the soundtrack choices are particularly perfect, from Katy Perry to Bon Iver, each amplifying the emotional impact of the visuals they play over.
That is the main impression of any Audiard film; the emotion. Once the love story kicks in here, the muted chemistry between the principals becomes something far more powerful and intense, and the fine cast here make those feelings sting. The lovely moment when Stephanie returns to the Ocean Park to see old friends and communes with her Orca through glass is a great example of his art - it is beautiful, yes, with a natural sense of cinema, but it also feels emotionally wrenching. Just like this film, then.

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.

PUBLIC ENEMIES

(Michael Mann, 2009) A synopsis makes Public Enemies sound like dozens of other crime movies; it details the efforts of the FBI, and in particular Agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale, turning a lead role into an eccentric little character part) to capture celebrated Bank Robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp, bringing both his charm and intelligence to the fore) in the American Midwest in the 1930s. At the same time it addresses Dillinger's love for Billie (Marion Cotillard) and touches, with a panoramic view, upon many quirks of American culture and politics in that period. Here is an art film disguised as a Summer blockbuster; an uneven but coldly poetic story of the impossibility of true communication and of outrunning fate dressed up as a '30s gangster picture, all sharp suits and tommy guns. Mann, a genuine visionary, doesn't play with convention, he utterly ignores it, it is an irrelevance. Instead hes after immersion, immediacy, a quicksilver study of the fleeting instant, and he gets that, alright, with his use of digital photography, with his shot-choices and passages of beautifully edited dreamy visual poetry. That DV photography, controversial upon release, is not an issue. Mann is trying to change the way movies look, and yet he is capable of making this a film loaded with amazing tableaux, with breathtaking shots. That those shots are undeniably raw, feel as "real" as fictional feature films ever feel, is a massive part of what makes it all possess such a fresh tone. Mann's style has shifted and loosened in the last few years, with more and more handheld work meaning that his camera is always moving, and much of the beauty lies in this motion, in the fleetingly lovely glories it finds as it glides. That and the fact that there is little or no exposition, that the supporting characters drift in and out without explanation or introduction add to the odd, unique tone. And the fact that the characterisation avoids the usual spoonfeeding beloved of most Hollywood cinema in favour of trusting the audience to find these people themselves. When Dillinger gives Billie a potted summation of his life and likes ("What else do you need to know?"), it is as if Mann is daring the audience to go with him, promising that this film offers more than such reductive dialogue, more than tart, glib "explanations". What it offers is an impressionist trip through a fast and brutal life, with death forever hanging overhead. It is an extended meditation on death, with multiple scenes of one man watching another die. Dillinger and Purvis even discuss it in their brief prison-set exchange. The particulars are undeniably impressive; Dante Spinotti's photography is frequently astounding, Elliot Goldenthal's score mixed superbly with some contemporary standards, and the supporting cast is filled with excellent turns by a variety of great actors, most notably Stephen Graham as Babyface Nelson and Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover. But like all Mann films it is primarily a movie of great moments - like the many action sequences, particularly the nocturnal gun battle at Little Bohemia, the black of night starred with yellow muzzle flashes, the sounds of tommy guns and revolvers thunderous. Or the two sublime scenes of Dillinger in cinemas, watching himself on a wanted poster and in a fictionalised form as played by Clark Gable. Or that perfect ending with Stephen Lang and Marion Cotillard in a small room, when the emotional payload finally hits on three little words: "Bye Bye Blackbird". Or possibly the finest scene of all - Dillinger's sunlit stroll through the "Dillinger Unit" at police headquarters, his glee at pulling it off, at getting away with so much.

CONTAGION

(Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

Taking a particular subgenre of the popular 1970s disaster movie, the pandemic thriller, and thoroughly modernising it, Soderbergh, together with his screenwriter Scott Z Burns, demonstrates again that there are few better filmmakers in America currently making adult entertainments. Contagion is a procedural, a precise account of how a virus spreads through the world, and also an account of how the bodies put in place by the human race identify it, classify it and eventually counter it. But it is also, in it's inimitably Soderberghian, chilly way, an utterly gripping thriller. We see people we like put at risk and tested by this virus, we wonder who it will take next, and the deaths of two major stars tell us early on that nobody is safe. Then we are with the scientists racing to create a vaccine in order to save not one, but millions of lives.
Then there is the fact that it is an epic. Almost casually epic, a globetrotting, international story with a massive cast of speaking parts and at least five separate and equally important narrative threads running simultaneously. And nobody - except perhaps Micahel Mann - captures the real world, "the now" quite as well as Soderbergh does. Each location feels different and distinctive, from Hong Kong to the American Midwest, largely due to Soderbergh's ability to pick up on detail and texture in his environments.
Detail is crucial here; early on the camera lingers an almost subliminal beat longer on certain objects and surfaces until the viewer queasily realises that these are all subject to communal touch; a bowl of peanuts on a bar, a door handle, a handrail on public transport. Later the visceral fear of germs, and by extension of other people, is vividly communicated in the arc following Damon's character, immune to the virus himself but terrified his teenaged daughter might get it.
He is as solid as ever, but each of the stars here dials down the wattage on their starpower in order to slip seamlessly into the impressive ensemble. Jennifer Ehle is perhaps the great standout, but she too is outshone by the film's focal character and protagonist; the virus itself.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

(Woody Allen, 2011)

Opening with a loving near three minute montage of static shots of many of the most familiar and touristy parts of central Paris seems more foreword than prologue; a statement of theme. Paris is lovely, Paris is inspirational. That's it. Allen seems content with that, adding the admittedly minor theme of the power and fallacy of nostalgia later. But then this is a film of modest scale; modest laughs, modest pleasures, modest ambition. It's minor key period Allen, with less substance than any of his other excursions into the past, and a disconcerting dose of fluffiness to it, which might partly explain why it's been his greatest commercial success for decades.
The high concept: a Hollywood screenwriter with hopes of becoming a serious novelist vacationing in Paris with his fiancee and her parents finds himself transported back to that City in the 1920s each night at midnight, partying with the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso and Dali, and having Gertrude Stein critique his book.
Based around such an insubstantial gag - Wilson's Gil professes shock to meet his many heroes in the flesh as they live up to their popular images - Allen has fun with his material, having Hemingway go on about hunting, War, boxing and bravery at any opportunity, while Dali (played by a single scene-stealing Adrian Brody) is obsessed with incorporating a "rhinoceros" into his work and hangs out with Bunuel and Man Ray. There is a light love story, with Marion Cotillard displaying yet again just how great she looks in a 1920s frock, but the scenes of the tensions between Gil and his fiancee (a spiky Rachel McAdams) together with realistically strained social events with her parents and friends are probably the best in the film. The social unease, foibles and pretensions of pseudo-intellectuals are Allen's true, natural subject matter, and he shows an ease whenever he approaches that territory absent from much of the rest of the somewhat contrived narrative here.
Still, it's mildly entertaining, Michael Sheen is terrific as a classic pretentious Allen romantic rival, Wilson is a surprisingly natural Allen hero, and the sensual pleasures are manifold; from some lovely Cole Porter on the soundtrack to Darius Khondji's cinematography, an attractive cast rounded out by Carla Bruni and Léa Seydoux, and of course the beauty of Paris itself. Which is where we - and Allen - came in...