BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

(Zack Snyder, 2016)

Forced to try to make super-hero movies in a different way to Marvel, Warner Bothers and DC have gone all-in on grim and gritty. That might be in part an attempt to duplicate the success Christopher Nolan experienced with his Dark Knight trilogy, which embraced the darker aspects of Batman mythology, largely eschewing any humour, campness or fun along the way.
Snyder already aped that approach with Man of Steel, and here he brings in his own interpretation of the "Bat of Gotham" to set up the extended Universe DC presumably feels is their right, looking at the industry-altering success Marvel has enjoyed with its unending flow of Marvel Universe product.            
And that approach has its strengths. Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (explicitly nodding to the hints of the coming Justice League in a few scenes here) is positively stuffed to the gills with stuff. With easter eggs, characters, gadgets, dialogue, cgi, mythology, action, exposition, technobabble, ephemera, spectacle: just stuff. It also has more ideas than any Marvel film, which may be another of the legacies left by Christopher Nolan.
It's just that in his films, the ideas are foregrounded. Indeed, if his Batman trilogy has a major flaw, it is an inability to balance the demands of an action spectacle with his own desire to engage with big themes. Well, Zack Snyder can do the action spectacle in his sleep. But the big themes are a different story. He allows his characters to expound upon the nature of heroism and power, but that's it. The film doesn't pursue these ideas in any meaningful way. Instead, Snyder flicks through them en route to another big slugfest action sequence. And so the tone isn't earned by the story it frames, and it just seems slightly, unnecessarily grim.
But then perhaps this is the perfect superhero film for the modern world; teetering on the edge of anarchy (glimpsed in a Batman nightmare filled with more Darkseid-shaped easter eggs), split between those who worship powerful figures (Snyder conjures one lovely scene where revellers at a Mexican Day of the Dead festival bow and stretch to touch the Kryptonian) and those who despise them (Batman is feared and seen as a myth), mired in bureaucracy (a surprising amount of plot is spent dealing with import permission) and secretly run by the powerful mega-rich.
Snyder is as visually assured as ever. This is perhaps best seen in the way he shoots Batman - an early encounter with two beat cops treats him like a horror character; seen in blurred background and shadow. The later take-down of a warehouse full of armed thugs is the closest approximation of the Batman I grew up reading I have ever seen. Mixing tech and fighting acumen, it is easily the best action scene in the film; thrillingly shot and cut without resorting to slo-mo, Snyder's personal visual tic.
The cast is strong, which helps carry some of the more shockingly badly written scenes. Ben Affleck makes for an appealingly tired and sombre Bruce Wayne, (a somewhat underused) Cavill is more confident as Clark/Superman, and Amy Adams makes Lois more vulnerable than she was in Man of Steel. Jeremy Irons is a nicely sardonic Alfred, while Gal Gadot is magnetic and does well with no real part in her handful of scenes as Wonder Woman. Jesse Eisenberg plays Lex Luthor as a damaged manchild, a super villain in word and gesture before ever becoming one in deed, all titters, furies and whimsically murderous asides and impulses.
The plot is an awkward thing. It shows that this was a movie conceived in a panic just days before it was announced as a way to combat the empire-building of Marvel. The narrative hoops screenwriters Chris Terrio and David S Goyer jump through in order to get the two titular heroes face-to-face feel formidable, and the first act is a wonder of fleet exposition and character introduction. After that though it starts to grind a little. Too much going on, too little of it as interesting as it should be. Affleck is good in all of his scenes, but then he has the best character to play. The climactic confrontation is impressive, but instantly gazzumped by the arrival of the cgi Doomsday and Wonder Woman to complete the "trinity" at the heart of the DC Universe.
The cosmetic debt to Frank Miller's the Dark Knight Returns is outweighed by the debt to the (terrible) Death of Superman by Dan Jurgens, which may just sum up the issues with Snyder's film.
But its issues, such as they are, are interesting. This film is a fascinating mess.

THE GUNMAN

(Pierre Morel, 2015)

So hilariously generic in its particulars that it plays almost like a parody, The Gunman is a pretty waste of an awful lot of acting talent.
Sean Penn plays the action lead here, but he is not really fully committing to a Liam Neeson career revival which this was obviously envisioned as. Instead, he co-wrote the screenplay and presumably ensured that this otherwise stock Euro-spy action thriller has some worthy stuff about mining in the Congo and multinational culpability. He's in good shape for a middle-aged man and does well with the action stuff, but director Morel seems more concerned with making everything look painterly than mounting effective action sequences.
Then there's the fact that the characters are all flat and underwritten. And no matter how charismatic Idris Elba, Javier Bardem and Ray Winstone are, they can't make puppets any more realistic. Only Mark Rylance really animates his role. The love triangle is awful - pointless and desultory.
The locations look great, Morel has a fine eye and a nose for ambience, and there are a few divertingly well-done action beats, but overall, and considering it is based on Manchette's The Prone Gunman,  this feels like a major missed opportunity.

TRIPLE 9

(John Hillcoat, 2016)

A Cops and Robbers movie!
Hillcoat gathers a really impressive cast here, and embeds them in a world thick with macho atmosphere and sticky Atlanta, Georgia authenticity. Matt Cook's screenplay was on the Black List a few years ago, and it's easy to see why: it's full of great pulp characters and moments, and ripe for muscular action treatment. Hillcoat delivers in that department, opening the film with a heist carried out by Michael Belmont (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Russell Welch (Norman Reedus), two ex-military contractors now working for hire for the Russian Mob in the sinister form of Kate Winslet's cold gang boss. Russell and Michael enlist Russell's junkie ex-cop brother (Aaron Paul in another loser role) and he in turn calls in dirty cops Marcus (Anthony Mackie) and Rodriguez (Clifton Collins Jr) for the heist on a downtown bank, focused on recovering a single safety deposit box. The heist goes wrong and attracts the attention of burned out detective Allen (Woody Harrelson). Meanwhile, the gang have to perform another job, and the decision is made to kill a cop as a massive distraction - the police band code for this is a 999 - and the chosen victim is Chris (Casey Affleck), an Iraq-war veteran and nephew of Allen, recently transferred from a cushy suburb to the gangs unit, where he and Marcus make for uneasy partners.
Along the way, Hillcoat throws in an extended police raid on a projects gang den, the second heist and a handful of tense confrontations in great urban neo-noir locations. He plays with colour and composition. Lost of reds, lots of reflections, visually portraying the bloodiness and duplicity of this world.
The whole thing is more or less ludicrously macho, all shape charges and assault rifles, but the characters are surprisingly rich and convincing for a world as pulpy as the one, and the excellent cast (Ejiofor, Affleck and Winslet in particular) make it extremely compelling.
It's grim - but then isn't every Hillcoat film - but always entertaining.

THE SURVIVALIST

(Stephen Fingleton, 2015)

The Survivalist aims to depict a post-apocalyptic world without any of the iconography or mythology of the Road Warrior school of post-apocalyptic action. It focuses on one man living alone on a tiny farm hidden in Northern Irish woodland. When we first encounter him he is disposing of the corpse of an intruder, and we sense this is not the first time. He tends to his crops, sleeps, eats, masturbates. He is twitchy and paranoid about more intruders, and as we learn, he is right to be. This is - as it always is after an apocalypse in fiction - a world of Darwinian principles. Only the very strongest survive. Two women arrive. Mother and daughter, they say. They want food, perhaps a nights shelter. They trade sex with the younger woman for both. Meanwhile they plot to take the man's gun and his home away from him.
Fingleton carefully observes the shifting dynamics between these three people. The watchful, cunning older woman. The man's wariness soften as he develops feelings for the girl. The girl realise who she may be better off siding with. Eventually, other intruders come. They are armed. Loyalties are tested, realities faced. There is little dialogue, no non-diagetic music. We hear the characters breathe, the wind in the trees. We watch their eyes watch one another.
The space is precisely mapped out by Fingleton, the arena of the shed the three share, the clearing where the man confronts an intruder, the stream nearby. The pacing is deliberate, controlled. This is a slow world. No need to rush it. It acquires a mesmeric quality.
Martin McCann is excellent as the man, so stoic that any flicker of feeling in his eyes has a seismic effect. Mia Goth is just as mysterious as the young woman, while Olwen Fouere seems to have stepped from some medieval myth; wise and frightening, she possesses an unforgettable face.
This is tense, beautiful, though-provoking. Its quality makes a virtue of a small budget and modest ambition.

SAN ANDREAS

(Brad Peyton, 2015)

As a fully-fledged disaster movie made in the era where cgi makes more or less anything possible in cinema, San Andreas seems to take much of its narrative dynamic from gaming.
The dull family dynamics and relationships come from the disaster movies of yore alright - Dwayne Johnson's Rescue Helicopter Pilot is forced to search for his daughter (Alexandra Daddario) with the wife (Carla Gugino) he lost as a result of his inability to deal with the death of another daughter some years before, just as a series of massive quakes rocks California, largely destroying Los Angeles and San Francisco. Daddario is trying to escape the city with a couple of British brothers, injecting a cynical note of teen romance into the story.
Meanwhile, the Seismologist (Paul Giamatti) who has been predicting the Quake is stuck in his CalTech lab, trying to get the word out about the coming disaster through a reporter (Archie Panjabi).
But the way the set-pieces are put together feels like it has come from a computer game. Each scene features a series of ridiculous escalations. Johnson can't just save Gugino from a rooftop L.A. restaurant. The roof has to have collapsed. Flame has to explode through piles of the rubble. A nearby skyscraper has to collapse. A dust cloud must shoot up, almost enveloping them. The flight out must be around a series of skyscrapers, wobbling and shedding concrete like trees shed leaves in autumn.
A later escape out of the San Francisco bay over the oncoming tsunami can't just be as simple and dramatic as just an enormous tsunami. No. It has to involve a cargo liner appearing directly in their path atop that tsunami at just the wrong moment. Escaping the liner can't be enough. Metal shipping containers have to start toppling off the liner all around their tiny boat.
And so on.
Johnson and Gugino are fine - though they say "Oh my God" an awful lot - but it is overlong, under-dramatic and never all that interesting.

THE PROGRAM

(Stephen Frears, 2015)

The first act here strikes an odd balance. It portrays Lance Armstrong (Ben Foster)

as a sympathetic protagonist, forced into doping because if he wanted to win, well then that was the only way. Everybody else was doing it, so why shouldn’t he? Especially when he has had to fight off cancer, a time in his life depicted as an awful battle  in grim, shadowed hospital rooms.

Lance’s return sees him convinced that doping is the only way, and he embraces the work of his Doctor Michele Ferarri (Guillaume Canet) and is rewarded with seven consecutive tour de France victories.

He is friend to Presidents and celebrities, adored for his charity which raises millions for cancer research, happily married with children, and one of the greatest athletes on Earth.

Only David Walsh (Chris O’Dowd) is disgusted. If everybody can see there is something wrong within cycling, then everybody is happy to stay silent. But Walsh cannot. He rants and asks questions, and it is then, when he is backed into a corner, that we see another side of Lance. He bullies, threatens, sues. He uses cancer and his charity as a shield. He gets away with it. Until he doesn’t anymore.

The procedural aspects of this story are its most interesting element.

How Armstrong and his team doped, how he escaped detection for so long. But director Frears and screenwriter John Hodge want this to be something of a character study, and that is where the film comes somewhat unstuck.

Armstrong loves winning, loves a battle. But that doesn’t explain him, explain his controlling aggression, explain the way he destroys those who oppose him. Ben Foster does his best, but when his Armstrong looks into a mirror he seems like an empty puppet. These filmmakers don’t understand this man. And that leaves the film curiously hollow.

TUMBLEDOWN

(Sean Mewshaw, 2015)

So say Bon Iver had died after that one (good) record. Or say Elliott Smith had only made that early acoustic record. And then died, leaving a small body of work and a wife (Rebecca Hall, good as ever) behind to guard his legacy. And she’s trying to write a book about him but shes too close and too involved and still mourning, and she can’t do him justice, alone as she is in her rural house with the ghosts of their life together and his home-made recording studio. Then this New York intellectual professor of pop culture (Jason Sudekis) shows up, writing some arty-farty tenure application academic book, and they hate one another straight away, but she relents and asks him to write the biography for her. And he agrees, eager for a scoop and needing the money, and moves in, and of course, of course, slowly, but not too slowly, they fall for one another.

Only there’s still the ghost of that dead, seemingly perfect genius singer-songwriter, and he has his theories and her memories and the oddball eccentrics of her small town life, including her family and his life in New York, and so so many hurdles before they can be together.

Oh and it’s a gentle comedy-drama. Most of the drama coming from his one-liner responses to those small-town eccentricities and her withering contempt for his big city ways. Most of the drama from her continued grief for her dead soul mate.

The leads are appealing and believable and they make a cute couple. It’s nice. Agreeable. You could watch it on a plane. The songs – by Damien Jurado – are pretty.