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.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION

(Christopher McQuarrie, 2015)

I love how much of a cinematic classicist McQuarrie evidently is - the coherent way he puts together action scenes, low on cuts but high on nicely-blocked and framed compositions; his use of anamorphic cameras; his partnership with composer Joe Kraemer, whose score here is a beautifully inventive and evocative treatment of contemporary 1960s scores; the way he makes references to classic Hollywood movies (Rebecca Ferguson, who does bear some resemblance to Ingrid Bergman, here plays a character called Ilsa, and is encountered at one point in Casablanca), in this film obviously playing with nourish motifs and ideas including that of the femme fatale; and his ability to stick to some basic principles of action and character even in the midst of a chaotic modern blockbuster like this one.
If each instalment in the Misson Impossible franchise so far has been dominated by it's directors style, well then McQuarrie's classical storytelling allows him to pay a sort of tribute to the series as a whole, with scenes in London (DePalma), the Middle East (Bird), a motorcycle chase (Woo) and Cruise's Hunt set on saving a woman he clearly has strong feelings for (Abrams). The plot finds Hunt on the run (again) as he tries to track down the head of the Syndicate (Sean Harris, lending just a fragment of his creepy intensity to an underwritten part), an "anti-IMF" made up of supposedly deceased foreign agents.
Hunt is aided by his old pal Benjy (Simon Pegg, decent comic relief and given a bit more to do this time), new boss Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and even older laptop-toting buddy Luther (Ving Rhames). The new blood is British agent Ilsa (Ferguson,  beyond the set-pieces, easily the best reason to see the film), who McQuarrie uses as a recurrent force for plot progression - she drives events, while Hunt is constantly playing catch-up, trying to figure out exactly what is going on. The classiness of the cast helps keep all the exposition and character beats a pleasure to watch, and, as a screenwriter, McQuarrie retains the ability to come up with the odd zinger. But mainly he is concerned here with ways to keep his leading man active.
This is Cruise at his best as a physical performer - jumping, hanging, sprinting, swimming, punching and kicking, he is a hyperactive force of nature who hurls himself through a series of gruelling, often-hilarious set-pieces with vigour, selling us the plot as he does so.
That plot bears the obvious scars of late rewrites and reshoots, especially in the third act, but the energy and efficient style on show means it is always nicely escapist fun.

'71

(Yann Demange, 2014)

Finding the sweet spot between a visually poetic art house drama and an adrenalised action thriller, '71 is a beautiful, gripping, supremely pared-down experience.
It's first 20 minutes or so may be the most impressive passage in the film. With little dialogue we are introduced to Hook (Jack O'Connell, as good as ever), training with the British army in 1971 in scenes captured with a beautiful feel for tone and texture by Demange and cinematographer Tat Radcliffe. Hook and his comrades spar, run, attempt obstacle courses and bond in the bleakness of Northern England. Here David Holmes' sublime, atmospheric score rises up on the soundtrack, while we have the bland conformity and uniformity of our protagonist made evident as we struggle to distinguish him from all of the other young squaddies, young men in green with shaven heads.
Sent to Belfast in 1971, just as the Troubles began to get truly nasty, these young men, led as they are by an equally youthful, clueless rookie Officer (a later line of dialogue defines the army as "Posh cunts, telling thick cunts to shoot poor cunts") are thrust into a hideously complex situation.
In their first operation, Hook is separated from his unit and his weapon and soon finds himself on the run from everybody - IRA, undercover British agents - on the nocturnal streets of West Belfast.
'71 is therefore a quite unrelenting action-thriller, filled with suspense and a couple of riveting, visceral set-pieces, but it manages a few surprisingly articulate comments of the subject of Northern Ireland too. It never simplifies its portrayal of the politics of the region or the era, instead depicting, well, everyone as diabolical and scheming. The IRA is split between the old-school organisation and a younger, more aggressive generation (who are the main predators hunting for Hook), while the UVF and the RUC are just as anti-Catholic as one another, and the undercover agents seem to play everybody off against each other for their own unfathomable reasons.
Hook stumbles from one situation and character to another, always vulnerable, never quite in control of what is happening to him, generally uncomprehending of who anybody is. The two branches of the IRA play out a power struggle while the undercover men, lead by the terrific Sean Harris in another of his long line of terrifying sociopath roles, do deals on each side and work their long-term schemes.
All of this fills in the world Hook moves through, but it is the way he moves that keeps this film so electrifying. With nighttime scenes shot digitally - its rare to see a film that captures so well what the light looks life like beneath halogen streetlamps, all deep shadows and sickly yellows - Demange maintains an almost queasy sense of tension as Hook tries to make his way back to barracks.
The action scenes are fantastic, but what works best of all are those first minutes on the streets of Belfast. We can feel the bewilderment and dislocation of these young men to see streets that look so familiar littered with destroyed cars, to encounter young boys who throw bottles of urine at them.
This world has never been captured quite so vividly before.