SPOTLIGHT

(Tom McCarthy, 2015)

Spotlight has a great real-life story as raw material. It also has an outstanding cast of character actors and movie stars all committing fearlessly to this treatment of that story. What it does not have is a writer-director with any real feel for cinema.
That's not to say there is nothing to recommend in Spotlight; it is an engrossing, beautifully-acted procedural, with plenty of finely-observed details that bring the story and world to life. It's screenplay has some nice moments and a few fine characters.
Previous true-life procedurals like All the Presidents Men and the Insider combined sharp scripts and great actors with bravura direction. It's just that I don't think McCarthy is capable of "bravura". He is fantastic with actors, and this film is really well paced, giving out just enough exposition to keep an audience interested but never enough to slow things down so much that they might become bored.
The story follows a specialist team of reporters at the Boston Globe as they investigate a story of the Catholic Church and it's decade-long cover-up of paedophile priests. Those reporters are played by the likes of Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams while Liev Schrieber appears as the new Editor of the Paper, an outsider and Jew, who pushes for the story to the displeasure of most of the city, it seems.
McCarthy shoots it all like it's television. From 1997. Flat, "realistic" lighting, dull blocking and compositions. The camera moves little, and never with any real sense of purpose, either thematic or aesthetic. It feels as if he has learned to direct from a book of How to Direct. Directing: a Fools Guide, perhaps?
It's a shame, because this could and should be an important film about a hugely controversial topic. Instead it is a mediocrity; never bad - its far too tasteful for that -  but never great either.

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

(Joss Whedon, 2015)

This is a film which is so dense and crammed - with gags, one-liners, action sequences, characters, easter eggs, plot twists and cgi - that it is curiously exhausting. It feels like watching an entire season of a tv series in one sitting. But crucially, it's a really entertaining, fun tv series, made by a writer-director who understands and loves the genre he's working in.
Setting the Avengers up against a villain partly created by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr, as comfortable and funny in this role as ever) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, still finding new depths in this character), Whedon manages the tricky job of balancing storylines and arcs for each of his principals while also keeping an epic, propulsive guiding narrative in ceaseless motion.
That involves Ultron (nicely voiced by James Spader), an artificial intelligence with multiple bodies whose ultimate goal is the usual destruction of the world. He enlists twins Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), who give the Avengers a bit of trouble with their respective "he's fast, she's weird" abilities before eventually switching sides to fight against Ultron.
Whedon loves and understands these characters, which is why this film is always better during their conversations and exchanges than it is during the many cgi-heavy action scenes studded throughout the two-and-a-half-hour running time.
Perhaps most interesting is the relationship between Banner and Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow. She talks him down out of his Hulk state, and reveals an unexpected vulnerability to his dorky integrity, which terrifies him, so afraid of hurting anyone around him. Their tentative romance is the emotional core of the film, and gives the ending much of its sting. Jeremy Renner is given much more to do this time around, revealing a solid, warm, normal home life with a wife and children, while also acting as the human glue bonding the "Gods" around him together. Evans and Hemsworth as Captain American and Thor do more of what they have done with aplomb across three films each at this point, their highlights mainly coming in their banter with Stark as Whedon ensures much of the focus is on the trinity at the heart of any decent Avengers story. There is a little set-up done for the next big film involving the characters, as the idealogical differences between Cap and Iron Man are emphasised, the battle lines subtly drawn.
That is the strangest thing about the Marvel films: because they are all part of one big ongoing narrative, it sometimes feels like nothing can ever really matter. We know another film is just around the corner, another villain, another threat, another epic battle. This is written in the DNA of the comics, but they are structured around it, whereas the architecture of a motion picture is different and built to supply a certain amount of third act catharsis or satisfaction that the Marvel films by necessity are unable to deliver.
Another problem is action. For an action genre, super-hero films generally don't handle action all that well. It is the achilles heel even of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy (which do splendid spectacle but fudge combat consistently until the third film), and has been uncertain in most of the Marvel films so far. Captain America: The Winter Soldier perhaps fares best here, but Avengers: Age of Ultron struggles. Whether it is down to Whedon's limitations as a director - unlikely, given that the fight scenes in Serenity are pretty good - or, more likely the overuse of cgi and accompanying spectacular camera movements to track it, many of the big action sequences here are visually incoherent and chaotically choreographed.
Luckily: there are ancillary pleasures and many of them.
Whedon has always had a gift for one-liners and Avengers: Age of Ultron is stuffed with them, from the others chiding Captain America for his dislike of bad language, to Thor and Vision discussing the perfect balance of Mjolnir. Of the newcomers, Bettany is most arresting as Vision, ably handling some great gags and action beats, while Olsen and Johnson act as crucial new blood to the mix.
The details here are crucial and brilliant: from the Irish accent (Voiced by Kerry Condon) of F.R.I.D.A.Y to Stark's asides during his battle with Hulk to Ulysses Klaw (Andy Serkis) being involved in supplying Vibranium from Wakanda, to Stark and Thor bragging about their girlfriends and War Machine's (Don Cheadle) angst that his story does not impress the Avengers they all play well and give the story and the world more texture and life.
The cast is filed out with some unexpected class in tiny roles: Linda Cardellini, Julie Delpy, Idris Elba, Anthony Mackie and Hayley Atwell all pop up alongside Serkis and Cheadle, again making this world feel populous and lived-in.
For all its flaws, as summer blockbusters go, this is a sumptuous piece of purest entertainment; funny, exciting and consistently impressive.

FOXCATCHER

(Bennett Miller, 2014)

There is no air in Foxcatcher. That's mostly deliberate on the part of Bennett Miller, stretching out the tension in this quietly beautiful drama until we feel as if the movie itself might snap. As soon as John Du Pont (Steve Carrell) enters the story, we watch and wait for him to explode. He is a billionaire scion of an old American dynasty, and an obsession with Greco-Roman Wrestling leads him to establish his own training facility in the grounds of his huge estate. The first wrestler he recruits is Olympic Gold Medalist Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), and their relationship grows needy and complex even before DuPont recruits Dave (Mark Ruffalo), Mark's charismatic older brother and mentor. Eventually, the dynamic between the three becomes so difficult that somebody has to leave...or die...
For all the remarkable precision in Miller's filmmaking and the air of serious thematic import, Foxcatcher is a little silly in it's use of a fascinating true story to say some vague things about America, and its relationship with competitors and heroes. The good stuff is in the intimate close-up relationship material; the delicate familiarity of the relationship between the Schultz brothers, the way Du Pont never ever seems comfortable in his own skin and can barely have a normal conversation with another human being, the rush and complexities of wrestling and the athletes who live with it daily. The performances match the control of the direction. Ruffalo is brilliant, his body language alone a miraculous piece of acting. Tatum is a little more one-dimensional as the sulking ape, while Carrell does magnetic work as Du Pont. Magnetic but baffling - this film never once makes his actions explicable. Du Pont remains a mysterious enigma, bizarre and unknowable. Foxcatcher feels like it barely knows its subject.

BEGIN AGAIN

(John Carney, 2013)

Carney returns - sort of - to the winning formula he chanced upon in the modern classic that is Once, creating another not-quite-romance of two lost characters who find and save one another through the healing power of music.
Ruffalo is a down-on-his-luck A&R man and producer who, on the day when he has been fired from the label he co-founded, drunkenly chances upon singer-songwriter Knightly in a Greenwich village bar, falls in love with her song and suggests she sign with him. She is there after being dumped by her long-term boyfriend (Adam Levine) who has been propelled to sudden rock stardom by the inclusion of a song in a hit movie, leaving her behind as he changes and sells out. Rejected by his old label, Ruffalo suggests they make an album live in a variety of famous Manhattan locations, allowing Carney to shoot the city in all its summertime glory, while Knightly and band run through a series of catchy Gregg Alexander tunes on rooftops, subway platforms and in central Park..
Along the way, of course, there is growth, and healing, and a few good gags (James Corden responsible for many of them). It is poppy and light, and yet Carney insures that there is some consideration of the issues central to art; self-expression, authenticity, the impact of success.  Knightly remains true to her music throughout and ultimately rejects the chance of romantic rapprochement after realising that her ex feels differently about the importance of songs, and a coda suggests that her way will ultimately prove successful too. Meanwhile Ruffalo is redeemed by finding new music to love (the original title of the film was the fitting Can a Song Save Your Life?) which unites him with his estranged wife and daughter.
It is nicely shot to make a pin-sharp New York look fantastic, the cast are perhaps a bit classier than it deserves, and it is strangely resonant in its low-key tackling of some of the ideas and issues central to most everyday lives. Most importantly, it understands music, how we feel and feel about and experience music, how important it is, how musicians live surrounded by it.

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.

THE AVENGERS

(Joss Whedon, 2012)

I've long wondered how they could possibly make an Avengers movie work. How to contain all those big, mythic icons? How to give each character enough room and time to do them justice? How could any blockbuster possibly be Epic enough, huge enough to replicate the storylines the Avengers characters feature in in their Marvel comics adventures? And beyond that, how to stop it looking just a little bit silly when Thor, Captain America, the Hulk and Iron Man are all onscreen at the same time?
Joss Whedon has found answers to all those questions, and in doing so, he's fashioned one of the best summer blockbusters of the last few years, a massive spectacle shot through with wit, lots of action and the fun that should be present in any good Super-Hero film.
Part of the miracle of The Avengers is that it exists at all. Marvel Studios' ambitious long-range planning - using the Iron Man films, Thor, the Incredible Hulk and Captain America as prequels, each containing elements that linked in to the overall tapestry of the Marvel Universe - looked like folly from a distance, but it pays off handsomely here, as fans of those films will find deeper resonances in this one, with character arcs maintaining consistency with each of the stories of these heroes.
The plot involves Loki (Tom Hiddleston), vengeful brother of Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his plan to use the Tesseract (last seen in Captain America) an ancient energy source, to bring an Alien Army to Earth in order to take over the planet. Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) Director of Super Intelligence-Espionage organisation SHIELD, reactivates an old plan to gather together various super-powered "freaks" to form a Strike Force in defence. Only these heroes are a volatile mixture; from the tension between man-out-of-time Captain America (Chris Evans) and flippant playboy Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) to the very existence of Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and Thor's links with Loki, they are, as Hulks human form Banner puts it, "A time bomb".
A film this big, with so many important characters and plot elements to line-up, needs a strong hand orchestrating it, and Whedon proves to be just that. He keeps the exposition short and snappy, sprinkles the first hour with solid action beats which also function as character development - the first meeting between Thor, Captain America and Iron Man establishes their differing approaches nicely - and gives everybody something to do. Nobody is lost in this ensemble. Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye and Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow may be the only two Avengers without powers, but they each get big scenes and moments to shine.
Hiddleston has a great time as Loki, playing him as a ripe old pantomime villain, fond of the sound of his own voice, in love with his own arrogance and so blinded by a vividly-suggested hatred he will stop at nothing to get what he thinks he wants. His explosions of brattish temper are nicely played.
Evans, Hemsworth and Downey Jr all have confident handles on their characters, giving their scenes - especially together - a pleasingly natural spark. Downey Jr gets most of the gags, and delivers them with aplomb, while Evans' Captain America is all about principal and old-fashioned heroism. He has one action beat at the climax which is beautifully done, giving some sense of what his character is meant to mean. Hemsworth's scenes play a little like scenes from Thor, but he communicates his character's bemused affection for humans and his horror at his brothers actions. Ruffalo is the only newcomer, and his Banner is subtly wary of everything, especially himself, but also dryly funny and fearful of nothing.
Team dynamics has long been a Whedon specialty, present in his work for tv on Buffy and Firefly, and that means that the scenes of all these characters standing around together, bickering and wise-cracking are justnas entertaining as the big action sequences. This may be the funniest action film vie seen in a while, with some beautifully timed one-liners to alleviate the mounting tension as the colossal finale looms.
And it is colossal; the final half hour or so shows alien army invading and their fight with the Avengers in the streets and skies and on the rooftops of Manhattan. This is everything a little boy or girl reading super-hero comics wants from a super-hero film. It is Epic, absolutely immense in scale and yet filled with character detail and brilliantly satisfying action beats. Super-hero films often struggle with endings, many devolving into vague, incoherent lightshows, others resorting to simple, brutal fisticuffs. Whedon seems to understand this, and his approach - treating this like a War film - really works. Seamus McGarvey's cinematography is key here; visceral and immersive, it ensures that this story is grittily human throughout, no matter how fantastic its treatment of gods and monsters may be. The sense of peril and involvement makes it more rousing than the climax of any other Marvel movie, and it contains so many rich geekbait moments it's dizzying. This is the Hulk done right, cutting loose in some awesome scenes of destruction while all the other heroes do too. The mix of tremendous spectacle and comedy - those gags never stop - is exhilarating.
There are weaknesses here; it is too long, the first hour slightly disjointed, the soundtrack is utterly forgettable, the cosmic stuff rings badly against the rest, and its all patently ludicrous. And yet, against all odds, it works. It really works.

MARGARET

(Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)

Alongside all of its other qualities and its flaws, Kenneth Lonergan's second film, the contemporary drama Margaret, does something few films even attempt. It tries to portray a consciousness on film, in the form of a character study so deep and searching that it addresses the very concept of "the self" in all its contradictory and bewildering complexity. Anna Paquin's Lisa is a self-conscious, precocious teenager from the Upper West Side of Manhattan who is very slightly responsible for the death of a woman in a traffic accident. Traumatised by this incident - the accident and it's aftermath are portrayed with vividly brutal impact by Lonergan - Lisa sets about trying to shed some of the guilt she feels, and in the process, almost casually damages the lives of various people around her.
Margaret is much more than this, however. It is also a song of the city, a polyphonic study of bourgeois Manhattan in the years after 9/11, a study of moral equivalency, and a consistently high-minded piece of work which makes explicit reference to Shakespeare, Opera and poetry (the title comes from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem) while beautifully specialising in long scenes where hyper-articulate, particularly literate characters struggle to express themselves, pointing up the fact that another theme here is the inability of people to connect and relate to one another in the modern world.
All of that might sound a little indigestible or pretentious, but it never plays that way. Lonergan is such a gifted, skillful dramatist that his scenes and characters are almost intrinsically arresting and true, and he consistently creates interesting scenarios which play out in surprising and intriguing ways. This is so obvious because the material and setting are familiar from dozens of films and novels, but Lonergan's approach is never remotely generic, even when dealing with story lines as cliched as some of the many that unfold during Margaret's near two and a half hour running time. For example, Lisa's relationships with two young men - the stuff of a hundred teen comedies and indie dramas - play out as confused, selfish collisions full of confusion and misunderstanding on both sides, casually heartbreaking, funny and silly expressions of her solipsism and selfishness on one hand, but authentically replicate the mixture of casual and earth-shatteringly important crucial to adolescent romance. It helps that the film is elliptical, somewhat enigmatic (though how much of that is down to the film's long history of difficulty in the editing room may be a worthwhile debate) and given to flights of visual poetry when it surveys the city's streets and skyline, sometimes in slow motion.
Visually, Lonergan generally sticks to an unobtrusive classical style, but his storytelling is strong, and he trusts his estimable cast to do his fine script justice. They more than deliver, with Paquin magnificent in the lead, making us care about a character who is often thoroughly unlikable. With stars like Mark Ruffalo and Matt Damon solid in smaller roles , it's less celebrated actresses like Jeannie Berlin and J. Smith Cameron who excel alongside Paquin. Lonergan seems to write nothing but great characters, though, with most every role of substance given shades, depth, a personality, one of the qualities which really elevates Margaret above other dramas. Lisa's mother, for instance, is given enough scenes to be regarded as a lead in her own right, as Lonergan records her new relationship with a Colombian man (Jean Reno, slightly miscast in an odd mis-step), her nervousness about the opening of her new play, and her difficulties as a single mother. Even the briefest character moments are perfectly weighted by Lonergan; with Damon's despairing self-criticism following an encounter with Lisa humanising his character in a way nothing else had. So many voices crowd the canvas here, and the breadth of the films scope is echoed by the sound design, which often allows the conversations of strangers and passers-by to bleed into the mix and emphasise the press of humanity in the city.
There are flaws here, and some may find it overlong and a little too obvious at times, but I think Lonergan is a major artist, with ambition, vision and a uniquely-defined voice, and nobody else is making films quite like this one at present. This is American cinema as art, yet there is great entertainment to be had here, in a film which is accessible, complex, provocative and finally, quite stunning.