THE REVENANT

(Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu, 2015)

The Revenant starts with a sudden, brutally violent attack upon a trapper camp by a war party of Arikara Indians in 1823. Arrows abruptly appear in throats, blood spurts, and all of a sudden a pitched battle of horrific violence and chaos is underway. Obviously inspired by his work on Birdman, Inarittu shoots all of this in what appears to be a single, awesome take, as the men fight, die and begin a panicked retreat towards their boat on the river, the Indians in pursuit.
Shot by the genius cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, this scene reminded me of nothing so much as the work of Terrence Malick. His masterful The New World, also shot by "Chivu" created an utterly immersive, 360 degree world upon the American Frontier, and Lubezki's camera patrolled it incessantly, as it does here. Only the world summoned up by Inarittu has a lot of Sam Peckinpah in it too - it is tough and masculine, filled with big and peculiar characters and terrible deaths, a sense of relish for the violence and suffering on screen.
This focus upon action is new for Inarittu. It is also quite refreshing. His earlier work was often weighed down by a pompous sense of seriousness, of a director with an undergraduate understanding of the world filled with conviction that he had important things to say. Babel is perhaps the nadir of his work, a trite and simplistic thesis on communication, interconnectedness and the modern world.
The Revenant too strains for seriousness, but it is taciturn film, entirely wordless for long stretches, and Inarittu reduced to images is a much more impressive director than the man who relied on vacuous screenplays to communicate his themes. On one level, this film is an absolutely incredible action film, with its plot concerning a man struggling to survive in an unbelievably harsh environment and his quest for revenge after he is left for dead, and watches his son murdered. Only Inarittu fills it with long, slow scenes glorying in his sensational landscapes, and sequences revealing the state of mind of his protagonist, Glass (Leo DiCaprio), as he is haunted by memories of a massacre in an Indian village, the death of his wife and his own actions to save his son.
The action scenes are outstanding: both that stunning early battle, a later pursuit across a plain, an extended and terrifying bear attack, and the final confrontation each contains a few genuinely jaw-dropping moments, and they help make this an entirely gripping experience, for all that its director has greater pretensions.
The ferociously committed performances are a great boon, too. DiCaprio does most of his work without dialogue, and still manages to convey his agony and fierce will to survive with just his face and body language. Tom Hardy, as the man who betrays him, unveils another funny voice and accent, but creates a weak, believably complex antagonist in his Fitzgerald.
The likes of Will Poulter and Domhnall Gleeson match them in smaller parts.
For all that, Lubezki is undeniably the film's true star; his work here is sensational, and this is truly an every-frame-a-painting movie. For all the effort that Inarittu devotes to creating a strong thematic content here - his suggestions that Tarkovsky as an influence say it all - this film is amazing. Powerful, beautiful and riveting, it is hard to shake off.

THE MAZE RUNNER

(Wes Ball, 2014)

For the first two acts, this is quite a taut and brutal little genre film. That is if you can forgive the way it fulfils every Y.A. consideration to an almost parodic degree, and the way its violence is toned down to allow its target audience to see it on a big screen.
Teenagers forced to play a bloody game, a chosen one protagonist who doesn't really understand what is going on, enemies and allies among his peer group that echo nothing so much as high school, mysterious, cruel adults; a hint of romance, nature vs technology as a motif, a young innocent sacrificed...it's all there, ticked off. But those first two acts are quite pacy, embed the exposition well, and feature a few decently effective spills and thrills.
This is more solidly a sci-fi action film than the likes of The Hunger Games and Divergent (it may be relevant that this film, with its hero rather than heroine, is aimed squarely at a boy rather than girl demographic), and it has moments of horror in the scenes of the Greavers, genetically engineered cyborg-spiders that patrol the maze. It is nice to look at, the effects are fine, and the young cast do quite well with the material.
But then the final act begins to solve some of the mysteries, and it all gets quite tedious and wearyingly predictable, from who dies to how to that final ambiguous scene. And the promise of the sequel just ruins everything.

GLASSLAND

(Gerard Barrett, 2014)

You need to have directorial chops to find the visual poetry in a place as un-lovely as the nothing suburbs on the edge of Dublin. But Gerard Barrett does it in Glassland, finding beauty and lyricism in what looks like an autumnal Tallaght. That goes some way to lightening the experience of watching Glassland, for this is an unapologetically, at times almost unbearably intense drama.
The elliptical storytelling allows the mood to settle in before we really appreciate what the story is about. John (Jack Reynor) is a young taxi driver, who lives at home with his mother (Toni Collette), an alcoholic close to liver failure. He has a younger brother, Kit, who has Downs Syndrome and seems to live in a home. His best friend, Shane (Will Poulter) is struggling with paying child support and feeling as if his life is going nowhere, and has booked flights to travel or work abroad.
That isn't much of a story, really. And yet: our first encounter with John's Mam finds her unconscious in a pool of her own vomit and we watch him struggle to get her to hospital, where a doctor tells him either she quits drinking, or she dies. That acts as a clock under the rest of the action. John lives his life - doing his job, seeing his mate - and tries to figure out how to help somebody who doesn't want to be helped.
That seems to be his thing. An almost saintly presence, John helps everyone around him, and the film is really a quiet, slow, extraordinarily subtle character study of a little boy in the body of a man. Being a good boy, doing the right thing, John often looks lost. Most scenes find him gazing soulfully into the middle distance. He supports Shane, visits and obviously loves Kit, cleans up his Mam. He resists Shane's offer to leave with him. His emotional explosion in the car with his mother outside a clinic is all about him, and reveals the needy, frightened child inside him: he can't do it anymore, he wants his Mam back.
Reynor is exceptional here, his sensitive eyes and hunched, tight body language showing us John's real feelings through the smile he often wears. Collette matches him. Her accent is wobbly (though she always sounds Irish, it moves from county to county throughout) but emotionally she is frighteningly raw and honest, and her long monologue to John on how she got to be where she is is absolutely hypnotic. Poulter and Smiley are great in support.
All of them are nicely directed by Barrett, who looks a young director with a big future. His work here is precise and nuanced, with a fine, sensual feel for texture and atmosphere. Few films have captured Dublin suburbia in the milky light of autumn as well as this one does, and to combine that with a grip on storytelling like the one shown here is no small achievement.