"The Imitation Game"

The primary risk posed by biographic films about persecuted people – aside from the usual quibbles I have previously expressed about the genre – is to make sententious hagiographies so concerned with making heroic martyrs of their subjects that the naturally complicated human beings behind them vanish altogether. Given how gay characters in mainstream cinema have risen from one-dimensional supporting players to eulogized victims, Alan Turing’s status as the greatest martyr of Britain’s old homophobic laws next to Oscar Wilde made The Imitation Game particularly susceptible to such childish trivialization. If one were to compare it with a trap, one might say that screenwriter Graham Moore (basing himself on a biography by Andrew Hodges) narrowly avoids it with a few scrapes to the leg, only to get nastily grazed by another one in the same gesture, resulting in a bloodied but steady film that hobbles its way into our hearts and minds looking a little worse for wear but still presentable.

Based on articles I have read on the matter, the most important thing to know about The Imitation Game is that the Alan Turing played so masterfully by Benedict Cumberbatch only resembles the real Turing in broad strokes: Both were shy mathematical geniuses who led a team of Britain’s top cryptographers on a successful top secret mission to crack the Nazi encryption device known as Enigma– thus allowing the Allied forces to anticipate their strikes and win the Second World War – only to later find themselves arrested and chemically castrated for the crime of having consensual sex with another adult male, and subsequently die of a presumed suicide in 1954. The greatest difference between the two lies in Graham Moore’s treatment of Turing’s eccentricity, shyness and workaholism, which some have speculated to be symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome: Following the rather popular trend of retroactively diagnosing famous scientific geniuses as being on the autistic spectrum in order to make them role models, Moore amplifies these traits to the point of turning Turing into a severely autistic man who is unable to understand humour or nuance, takes every sentence literally and displays neither awareness nor consideration for social etiquette – a particularly grave misstep in an institution so reliant on class as the British Armed Forces.

It’s a choice that provides Moore with easy dramatic conflict; the fictionalized Turing’s colleagues initially despise him for his perceived cold arrogance (in complete contradiction with the fairly pleasant individual described by their real-life equivalents) but rush to his defense when Commander Alastair Denniston (played by Charles Dance as an impatient obstructive bully) attempts to shut his project down and fire him (both this event and his hostility to Turing are entirely fabricated). More importantly and problematically, Moore’s exaggeration of Turing’s possible autism allows him to make both a correlative link with his homosexuality and a causal link of both with his genius. As he reminds the audience through dialogue three times, “Sometimes, it’s the people no-one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine”. Hence my earlier trap analogy: In his attempt to avoid reducing Turing to a mere gay martyr, Moore uses his possible autism to make him an insufferable nerd all while combining it with his homosexuality to make him a martyr for all outsiders. It’s an interesting proposition, but written in a way that explicitly connects lack of conformity with social and/or societal norms with genius, and thus reinforces the growing notion that “different” necessarily means “special”.

Such simplifications could easily have turned The Imitation Game into a British equivalent to A Beautiful Mind. Fortunately, Morten Tyldum, despite being Norwegian, directs his film with the kind of BBC-learned British classicism that revolves around the actors’ performances without using them as a crutch, constructed in a manner that connects every line, every glance, and every body movement directly with the mind of the viewer. It can prove a little too mechanical at times, but Tyldum never spells things out to the point of condescension. His direction is unprovocative but it accords itself seamlessly with Benedict Cumberbatch’s acting. Cumberbatch looks nothing like Turing but his casting proves to be the film’s greatest advantage in two ways: His unusual physique – particularly the contrast between his small blue eyes and the long thin face they ornate – combines a certain classical elegance with lizard-like features, making him simultaneously strange and appealing. In that sense, he not only perfectly suits Moore and Tyldum’s intent to transform Turing into a symbol of oppressed otherness, he lays it bare. But he also redeems the more questionable aspects of that approach by way of a devastatingly accurate representation of autism that, far from being a showy display of tics and mannerisms, is integrated as part of a greater whole; namely a representation of what it’s like to feel as though you’re living in a world that wasn’t made for you, populated by confusing people with an infuriating habit of using words without meaning exactly what they say, and whose contempt for you would only worsen if they knew that you preferred your own gender. This comes from an entirely biased perspective, but as a person with Asperger’s, I recognized a lot of myself in Cumberbatch’s Turing; particularly his eyes, always refusing to meet other people’s and always intently focused on either the task at hand or his own thought, and his habit of pausing to catch his breath mid-sentence before laboriously blurting out the word he was about to stumble on.

As soon as you accept the true nature of The Imitation Game’s Alan Turing, and connect it with Benedict Cumberbatch’s magnificent performance, the point of most historical liberties taken with both Turing’s personality and his work becomes clear. As such, the completely fictitious depiction of him being blackmailed into silence by Soviet spy John Cairncross (whom the real-life Turing almost certainly never met) for fear of being exposed as a homosexual, while still ethically questionable, finds a certain dramatic justification (and is later downplayed when both men are revealed to have been manipulated by MI6). Much less justified, however, are Tyldum and Moore’s more uninspired storytelling choices: Montages of British troops fighting and London’s civilian population in bomb shelters just to remind us of the war that’s going on (though to Tyldum’s credit, most of his transitory montages are composed of archive footage, which isn’t particularly original but is at least much less on-the-nose); the repeated use of the previously-mentioned phrase as a forced “inspirational” quote you expect to see on a Facebook post; the simplified dramatization of Turing’s final breakthrough as a “Eureka!” moment brought on by an unrelated offhand remark from an external party…

The Imitation Game’s many imperfections result from a common and rather preoccupying need to reduce life’s many mysteries and intricacies to easily-identifiable dramatic schemes. As a portrait of Alan Turing’s personality and work, the film’s inaccuracies go hand-in-hand with its safe and inoffensive choices (whereas the real Turing was comfortable enough with his sexuality to flirt and make passes at men, the film Turing seems so petrified at the idea of sex that his later conviction is almost shocking). As a dramatic period thriller, it is made entertaining by its cast and Morten Tyldum’s solid direction of them. As an illustration of the feeling of otherness, it isn’t nearly in the same league as Under The Skin but is nevertheless vivid and, in large part thanks to Benedict Cumberbatch, emotionally spot-on.

"Foxcatcher"

Foxcatcher aspires to a somber grandness that it only achieves sporadically, like solar flares temporarily bursting out of their star before being sucked back into its gravitational pull.¹ Through the true story of the nebulous relationship between wrestling champion brothers Mark and David Schultz and their billionaire patron John E. DuPont, Bennett Miller and screenwriters E. Max Frye & Dan Futterman try to make an allegory about the illusion of American exceptionalism and the entertaining of that illusion through sport for the masses but their portentous attitude towards their subject and the overt calculation in Miller’s stylistic choices ultimately backfire and twist their film into a distorted counterfeit that, under the pretense of revealing unpleasant hidden truths about American culture, displays the same artificiality and hollowness it purports to denounce.

Experience has shown that a film’s lead performance will often reflect its identity and, by extension, its primary qualities and/or failings. In few other 2014 film has this been truer than in Steve Carell’s portrayal of John E. DuPont, a performance whose very concerted efforts to cause unease while simultaneously personifying American capitalist aristocracy prove to be its undoing. Saddled with a distractingly large prosthetic nose and a falsetto voice, Carell’s DuPont is telegraphed as bad news from his very first appearance and, try as he might, his performance and Miller’s direction offer precious little to tone down or complexify that impression. Wide shots showcase his stiff and awkward movements as if they were proudly displaying results of intensive research; his first conversation with Mark is filmed in a ping-pong game of shot/countershots that seem to actively hunt for any expression of recognizable human emotion on DuPont’s face but can only find a hawk evaluating his prey. Rarely do Carell’s eyes ever express anything that he isn’t making plain to see. It’s a far cry from the hazy between-the-lines ambiguity that made Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom so unpredictable, and an even further one from the rich contradictions that made Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd and Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell (whose relationship in The Master has often been compared to DuPont and Mark’s) two of the most fascinating characters to grace cinema screens in the past twenty years. Proportionally to the film, most of Carell’s performance is overly-mannered mimicry and rings as hollow as the manufactured patriotism DuPont surrounds himself with. When Miller forgoes the low-key drabness that permeated Capote’s atmosphere in favour of heavy-handed scenes such as DuPont’s awakening of Mark for some nighttime wrestling that is staged, framed and edited to evoke anal sex, the combined results become almost farcical.

This artificiality renders Foxcatcher’s moments of genuine intuition and cinematic vision both all the more appreciable for their scarcity and all the sadder for the untapped potential they represent. Scenes where Carell temporarily turns his affectations to his advantage – such as a post-victory celebration scene in the trophy room, where DuPont attempts to wrap up the festivities in his usual stiff awkward manner before starting a mock-wrestling match in a clumsy attempt to be “one of the boys” made all the more touching by its success – offer glimpses of a much better performance. In his best scene, DuPont and Mark are both in a helicopter on its way to a gala in Washington D. C., where Mark is to read a speech (penned by DuPont himself) praising his benefactor for being a great “ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist”. In order to help him articulate those words, DuPont introduces Mark to the cocaine he’s been snorting and another ping-pong game, much more efficient than the previous one, operates as each party repeats the words to the other until Mark is effectively trapped in a verbal whirlwind that almost merges him with his owner. Not as richly complex as The Master’s “processing” scene, it is nonetheless notable for being one of the few moments where the dynamic between the two characters is captured effectively.

Steve Carell may have been given the undeserved Oscar nomination, but it’s Channing Tatum’s Mark who provides Bennett Miller with his best working material. His college jock good looks, which earned him an unfair reputation as an inexpressive slab of meat due to their exploitation in bad action films such as G. I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra, are put to extremely good use here. Walking with his arms hanging by his sides like a teenaged gorilla, he never seems to be comfortable in any other space than a gym or a stadium, as if his body was simply not built to navigate the halls and corridors of a comfortable home, let alone a manor. Miller is at his best when he films that body in its natural habitat, reacting to DuPont’s presentation of his specially-designed gymnasium by rolling forward in a wide long shot or, in the first wrestling scene with his brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo) where Miller lingers on every major movement before and during its accomplishment, and in doing so transcribes the sibling’s complicated and understated mixture of rivalry and love with little dialogue and indisputable cinematic prowess. But the best employment of Tatum’s physicality – not coincidentally the best shot in the film – comes after DuPont’s vampiric presence breaks Mark’s concentration and self-confidence during a trial match that ends with his defeat. Having quietly internalized DuPont’s belittlements (with the help of drugs) for so long, Mark lets his anger and self-disgust explode in a long handheld shot of varying angles that follows him around his apartment as he repeatedly smashes his head against a mirror and wrecks his furniture.

If Miller, Frye, Futterman and Carell had handled DuPont’s closeted homosexual lust for Mark with the same subtlety and empathy with which they treated Mark’s low self-esteem and confused ambition, Foxcatcher might have had a chance at being the serious human drama it deserves to be. It may even have given it a chance at becoming the great American fresco it clearly wants to be, but that would require an additional dose of humility and political acuity of which the filmmakers seem singularly bereft. Beyond DuPont’s self-proclaimed desire to bring hope back to America (a curious statement coming from a political conservative in the apotheosis of the Reagan-Bush Sr. years), his empty patriotic speeches and the military tank he orders then has sent back like a spoilt child after noticing its lack of a machine gun, Miller and co. do little more than rehash the tired old habit of connecting sexual repression to conservative politics without further study. As DuPont does to himself and his audience, Bennett Miller simply contents himself with flattering the political instincts of the left-leaning critical elite in lieu of having anything of substance to say about his country’s culture. Who would have thought an underseen film belonging to a mostly-dead genre would be more culturally relevant and insightful than a contender for four of the Oscars’ major categories?

¹Apologies to Dr. Stephen Hawking and astronomers everywhere for what I am sure is an analogy of doubtful accuracy.

"The Homesman"

After having witnessed the existential tale of immigration and redemption that was The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada, the most appropriate response to the prospect of Tommy Lee Jones directing another western was probably the same mixture of apprehension and hope that I felt. While Jones’s homegrown Texan sensibility and lyrical realism effectively turned the American-Mexican border into a strange inhospitable land where no human seems in their place, this sense of unease clashed badly with Guillermo Arriaga’s self-righteous ham-fisted screenplay, which martyrized the titular dead Mexican worker, lionized Jones’s noble ranchman intent on honouring his memory and cheered on his punishment of the selfish irresponsible patrolman who accidentally killed him – and in doing so treated all these characters as political caricatures rather than people.

Ridden of Arriaga’s well-meaning heavy-handed posturing, Tommy Lee Jones corrects his aim with an adaptation of a novel by Glendon Swarthout – a prolific author of the western genre – that effectively de-mythicizes western pioneer life and its romantic appeal but goes much deeper than solemn lecturing about a long-gone time period. Rather, it paints a complex and harshly beautiful picture of womanhood and personal identity by taking the fundamentally American values of self-reliance and independence rightly extolled by classical westerns, applying them to a woman in a specific time, place and situation, and demonstrating their cost and limits. A devout puritan Christian who is also the only female freeholder in a strictly patriarchal settlement and still single despite being on the verge of middle age, Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank, surpassing her Oscar-winning performance in Million Dollar Baby) is a self-contradicting anomaly and she knows it. As men repeatedly reminded her, she is “bossy” and “plain as old tin pail”. Yet, unlike Arriaga, Jones and co-screenwriters Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley A. Oliver do not turn her into a martyr of systemic injustice and prejudice; they make her a person who struggles as much against herself as she does against society. She is proud of her independence and makes no apologies for her imposing temperament or her looks, but she cannot repress her sexual urges nor deny her loneliness. This is demonstrated in her first scene, where Mary Bee has dinner with a male neighbor, after which she proceeds to serenade him with an imaginary cloth piano and clumsily propose to him in a way that comes across more as a desperate business offer than a genuine declaration of affection. Tommy Lee Jones builds their interactions up with a patient delicacy that gently peels off each side’s niceties without patronizing them or stereotyping them, even in situations that readily offer opportunities to do so.

Such situations are commonplace in the film’s first act, where the audience is introduced to the three insane women whom Mary Bee volunteers to escort to Iowa. All of them are married mothers and each is in some way a dark reflection of Mary Bee’s desires: Two have lost children – one to diphtheria and the other by her own hand – and the third is repeatedly raped by her husband. These women and their husbands – even the abusive ones – are all played by their actors with understanding and empathy. The monstrosities of which they are either victims or perpetrators, while neither excused nor justified, come across as both translations and consequences of a hyper-patriarchal way of life as applied to settlers in a brutal and isolated land. In other words, they are sacrifices required for the conquest and “civilization” of the West.

In light of how Mary Bee’s journey brings her uncomfortably close to these three women in more ways than one, it is a little disappointing to see their development give way to her coerced partnership with irresponsible outlaw George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones, in a wonderfully deceptive performance that ranks among his best). Indeed, the fact that we consequently get very little of these women’s perspective on what is happening to them can be justly cited as the film’s foremost failing. That being said, Jones does a superb job of visualizing Mary Bee’s decaying psychological state by turning the wide open spaces that John Ford captured so perfectly into endless half-decorated voids. As the troupe moves further and further into their journey, the characters and situation attain a strange, almost mythological quality to them (Briggs’ punishment of a vain and greedy hotelier could pass for a 19^th-century transposition of a forgotten passage from the Old Testament) that give the film the feeling of a slow-burning oppressive nightmare from which there is little hope of respite. It is that semi-fantastical dimension that allows Jones to achieve what he failed to do in his directorial debut: A sociopolitical parable that uses western tropes and settings to comment on issues that affect America’s historical and cultural identity but in such a way that the commentary informs the characters’ actions and emotions without dictating them.

"The Theory Of Everything"

 

Film biographies, as my review of Get On Up established, constitute a category of films that I am quite wary of, due to their tendency to turn into catalogues of the famous person’s life and consequently travel that life’s highway in broad steps, only pausing to photograph the roses in pretty colours that will hit the viewer in all the right emotional spots without taking the risk of never making them look at roses the same way again.¹ This unwillingness to take risks often translates in an overreliance upon the virtuoso performances of the actors and actresses playing these people, which in worst cases (The Iron Lady comes to mind) places these performances at the center of a vacuum where life itself should be.

 

The Theory Of Everything, sadly, will not go down in history as one of the biopics that reversed the trend. Like most of them, it benefits tremendously from its central performance (a transformative Eddie Redmayne) but is too enamored with the subject of that performance to extract anything truly deep or meaningful out of it. Certainly, the life of Stephen Hawking is nothing if not an inspirational one – a man who, despite having been given two years to live after his Motor Neurone Disease diagnosis, went on to become one of the most celebrated scientific minds in human history – and if the film brings hope to fellow suffers (which it most certainly will, if only as an additional reminder of Dr. Hawking’s bravery and resilience) then that should already be more than enough to justify its existence. It will not, however, be enough for it to be considered a good work of film art. Basing himself on the memoirs of Hawking’s first wife Jane (very well played by Felicity Jones), screenwriter & playwright Anthony McCarten portrays their relationship with old-fashioned British classicism that suits their environment but tackles the effects of both Hawking’s work and his MND on that relationship with great timidity in the former case and overt sentimentalism in the latter. Screenplay beats – support after diagnosis, marriage, good times, deterioration, new ideas induced by mundane elements – are duly followed without leaving much time for the characters to have an existence outside the constraints of what their scenes require them to do in order to advance the plot and force viewers to be moved. An approach that director James Marsh’s safe stylistic choices only confirm: Yellow lighting and color correction for most Cambridge and indoor scenes, green filters for a sad scene, and narrative ellipses in the form of montages of Hawking and his family in grainy soundless pictures meant to resemble Super 8 home videos. These ellipses are particularly irritating as they only serve to remind the viewer of the plot’s imperative above all other things and of his exclusion from any moments – factual or fictional – of Hawking or his wife’s lives that would exist purely for itself and thus allow the possibility of a fresh perspective on the man. These choices do not necessarily make for unentertaining viewing – though Jóhann Jóhannsson’s intrusive and cloyingly manipulative score certainly works to that effect – but they further restrain the characters’ ability to move beyond Hollywood-inspired paradigms, something all the more problematic considering their firmly-held basis in reality. At their worst, they expose the film’s transparent exploitation of the inspirational nature of Hawking’s story by excessive visual underlining: Hawking’s speech in front of students towards the end of the film, played over shots of their captivated faces in a way that’s practically instructing the viewer to emulate them; the first presentation of his theory on black holes, initially greeted with condescending dismissal by traditional academics who promptly leave the room until a Russian scientist stands up to congratulate him, which somehow seems enough to encourage everyone else in the room to follow suit. These are just two such examples of scenes whose writing and staging make Marsh and McMarten’s desire of how the viewer is expected to react all too clear.

 

The Theory Of Everything’s best scenes are those that properly address the separate battles fought by the Hawkings against Stephen’s disease, battles that went beyond the obvious physical challenges. Most of these scenes involve Jonathan Hellyer Jones (Charlie Cox), a kind and faithful Christian choir conductor to whom Jane is introduced after her mother (Emily Watson, shamefully wasted) advises her to take up choir singing to take her mind off the difficulties of coping with Stephen’s illness. Their attraction to each other is immediate, mutual and not lost on Stephen; this loads his first meeting with Jonathan with ambivalence that Redmayne conveys sublimely using only his eyes and eyebrows. However, he recognizes a good soul and admits that he can provide Jane with the kind of “normalcy” and stability that he cannot. Thus he allows the creation of a very chaste ménage à trois to take form, and Jonathan becomes an extended member of their family. The bittersweet romantic tension between these people is genuinely moving, and more such authenticity would have greatly serviced the film as a whole.

 

¹My sincere apologies to Confucius for that particularly forced joke.

"Begin Again"

John Carney tries to make lightning strike twice, but his new urban musical romance fails to recapture the simple authenticity that made Once such a charming experience. Considering how much the film purports to promote independence vis-à-vis of commercial labels and popular appeal, authenticity was where Begin Again had the strongest imperative to succeed, particularly in the musical department, and its responses to that imperative are inconsistent. Take the protagonists’ idea to make an outdoors album in different parts of New York to compensate for their lack of offices: This could have been a terrific tribute to the city’s vibrant diversity of people and places, the sounds of which could be integrated into the music. Carney teases the possibility but ultimately opts to revert to more trivial matters, like showing Mark Ruffalo winning his daughter’s respect and affection by making her play the electric guitar for one of their songs in spite of her mother’s reservations. The idea is never truly exploited and becomes instead just a simple string for the plot to follow, illustrated mostly by montages and two musical performance scenes.

More subtly problematic is the fact that, although the songs are recorded outdoors in-universe, the performances we hear on the soundtrack appear to have been recorded in-studio, which both contradicts the film’s repeated denunciations of overproduced pop music and moots the artistic concept behind the protagonists’ idea. Keira Knightley has received well-earned praise for both her acting performance and her previously-unsuspected singing skills, and one pivotal scene gives her the opportunity to combine both for what should be a potent, cathartic moment for her character: After getting drunk with her presumably straight male platonic friend (how rare is that in movies?), she pens a song about her cheating popstar ex-boyfriend and – in another brilliant setup idea – chooses to record it on the spot in a voice message to him, complete with guitar and piano. The song itself, “Like A Fool”, has the simple heartfelt power of Once’s best numbers, helped by Carney’s gentle, attentive close shots on Knightley’s face.

Unfortunately, as if in doubt of Knightley’s capacity to stand on her own two feet or of the audience’s responsiveness to her, he and editor Andrew Marcus choose to intercut the scene with shots of the ex in question (Adam Levine) receiving, listening and reacting to the song. This excessive underlining muffles the scene’s impact and its emotional weight. It sums up Begin Again in a nutshell: For every step John Carney takes towards the implementation of a good idea, he takes another one back.

"Nightcrawler"

The best scene in Nightcrawler is really the metatextual continuation of an earlier one. After having arrived at the scene of a home invasion just in time to witness its perpetrators leaving, and subsequently filmed his way into the corpse-ridden home, unscrupulous freelance reporter Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) sells his gruesome footage to desperate local TV boss Nina Romina (Rene Russo), who subsequently has it played live on evening news. As Nina sends sharp instructions to her anchors via earpieces, the viewer sees Lou's footage again through a screen in front of her, this time with additional shots that dwell longer on the bloodied corpse of a woman in her bra lying face-down on her bed. Another notable addition is the pixellation of both the corpses’ faces and injuries, a move that would normally come across as an ostensible attempt at showing respect for both the deceased’s identities and their audience's sensibilities but which has the chilling effect of depersonalizing them and makes the footage seem all the more unreal. When the images the viewer is (re)discovering aren’t occupying the entire frame, they’re shown on the aforementioned screen, coexisting next to another screen in which the anchors comment on them in real time. The scene’s provocative nature reaches its climax when a baby’s crib appears in the shot: Quickly evacuated after a brief moment of suspense in the original scene, the revelation of its emptiness is built up with anxious comments from the anchors, pressed by Nina’s insistent demands for them to emphasize the horror of the situation. As the viewers know the crib is empty and know Nina knows, they perceive her instructions and the reactions from her anchors as redundant. Through Nina’s blatant act of manipulation, it’s the very concept of suspense and direction that are being exposed and questioned by writer/director Dan Gilroy.

As originally filmed and edited, the crime scene’s point-of-view shots showed just enough blood and corpses to get the horror across and would either pan away or cut to wider shots of Lou filming and moving just in time to avoid complacency with him. Here, the framing and overt attempts at censorship expose his gory close-ups for the obscene voyeurism that they are. It’s an important scene in a film that constantly walks a delicate line between demonstration and exploitation. Sensationalist tabloid journalism appeals to us for the same reasons thrillers do, to the point where they frequently inspire each other: They both tap into a part of our brain that wants to be frightened and excited, to be shocked out of contentment and be reminded how horrible people can be to each other and how dangerous the world can be. The best thrillers use these sensations and settings as a framework within which human psychology and/or socio-political issues as well as artistic ones may be studied.

Nightcrawler is one such thriller, though the term thriller does not accurately represent its richness. It would be perhaps best described as a social horror film in which spectatorial habits are affirmed before being slyly challenged, almost sucker-punch-like, without seeming to break away from the film’s general tone. At the very least Gilroy does not lose sight of the risks he is permanently taking, as evidenced by a climactic car chase involving Lou’s car, a criminal’s car and several police cars he has set against it. Alternating between exterior shots, interior shots from Lou’s car and subjective shots representing the point of view of his unfortunate assistant Rick (a self-effacingly wonderful Riz Ahmed) and his camera, Gilroy and his brother/editor John Gilroy compose a primer on how to make an action scene exciting and readable with short and often tight shots, while at the same time reminding us of the difference between the excitement of a passive distant spectator and that of an active present one.

As played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Lou is as monstrous as people come without blatantly telegraphing their nature. Though his constantly alert and rarely-blinking eyes seem at times too large to fit his thin face, it’s his excessively well-spoken politeness that gets under your skin; whenever faced with opposition or an opportunity to get something he wants out of someone, he tends to go into lengthy and verbose speeches that could have been lifted straight out of a manual but whose delivery balances earnestness and conviction with too much precision for them to sound blatantly rehearsed. Given Lou’s absence of social life outside his “work” and own admission of spending most of his free time on his computer, one could easily imagine he lifted much of his dialogue from online self-help articles. What Jake Gyllenhaal pulls off is an exceptional mise en abyme of acting itself that manages to make Lou’s general intentions quite plain, yet make the more subtle underlying feelings and desires so hard to detect that it’s not even clear whether or not he has any. It’s as ambiguous as a portrayal of an unambiguously evil character can get.

Sensationalist television reporting being most of the plot’s motor, many critics and viewers were prompt to compare Nightcrawler to Sidney Lumet’s prophetic-yet-overrated 1976 screamfest Network. The comparison is misguided; it is not the world of television itself that is under critical examination here but rather the myth of the American self-made man – particularly when applied in these economically difficult times – and the human desire for entertainment that gives such bad television (and cinema) popular in the first place. In that respect, it is perhaps closer to Rear Window. The shot of Lou pointing his camera at an armed criminal just after having used him to get juicy murder footage may not be as profound as the many shot/countershots in Alfred Hitchcock’s landmark work, but it’s a singularly striking visual evocation of the potent power of the camera.

It would be perhaps more accurate to call Nightcrawler the flipside to Gus Van Sant’s To Die For. Whereas Suzanne Stone Maretto firmly believed that “you’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV”, Lou performs off-screen and under the radar, and makes his intention to stay behind the camera quite plain. What he wants is professional success, and the unmitigated accomplishment of all his immediate and distant desires, as he expresses quite explicitly during a pressured dinner date with Nina in the film’s most terrifying scene. Faced with sexual coercion and extortion the forthrightness of which is made all the more disturbing by the insistently relaxed and affable tone that carries it, Nina’s composure becomes like that of a cornered lioness looking for a way to turn the situation back to her advantage without betraying too much fear. It’s a role in which Rene Russo reveals unexpected depth and multivalence that put the otherwise great Faye Dunaway’s hammy histrionics in Network to shame.

Nightcrawler is certainly not the first film to cast a critical and self-reflexive eye on the lethality of visual media – Peeping Tom, Lost Highway, Caché and Shadow Of The Vampire are but some of its most illustrious predecessors – but it is rare to see a film put its genre and associated moods and tones to such effective and intelligent use in doing so. It is even rarer to see performances within such a film as complex as those delivered by Riz Ahmed, Rene Russo and Jake Gyllenhaal.

"The Rover"

As the zombie craze extends its media empire from film and television to video games, and the ever-growing list of one-size-fits-all “young adult” dystopian novels and subsequent film adaptations shows no sign of shrinking, you’d be forgiven for greeting The Rover with the same weariness and disillusionment that permeates the majority of the post-apocalyptic genre: Is this going to be another dark and nihilistic film populated by selfish, greedy weirdoes who communicate through violence rather than dialogue? The Rover would answer your question affirmatively, all while making a substantial case for itself. What it lacks in the sharp satire and poignancy that made the best of George A. Romero or the soul-searching that typified John Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road, it makes up for in terms of mood, atmosphere and acting.

While David Michôd, whose 2010 debut Animal Kingdom was one of that year’s best films, occasionally relies a little too much on auteurist practices learned from other films – long still shots of landscapes and corpses, sound design that emphasizes movement noises, long tracking shots following the main character (Guy Pearce) from the back as he walks from one place to another – he nonetheless displays an indisputable talent for breathing strange life and beauty in his dirty deserted wasteland, helped by Antony Partos’s otherworldly and at times semi-atonal score. Skirting a fine line between characterization and caricature, he and actor/co-storywriter Joel Edgerton populate their film with figures whose visual and behavioral otherness (including a dwarf, two skinny East Asian men and a soft-spoken old woman who prostitutes her own grandson) is noted but never used against them, and semi-competent crooks whose bickering and clumsiness wouldn’t be out of place in Pulp Fiction.

Standing prominently amongst this gallery of oddballs is Robert Pattinson, whose twitchy slack-jawed southern-accented performance as mentally retarded criminal Rey could easily collapse into histrionic parody but ends up as one of the film’s strongest points. Avoiding condescending pathos and scenery-chewing, Pattinson plays Rey like a lost boy in search of manhood and finding in Guy Pearce’s rugged bearded stoic protagonist an unlikely father figure. Nothing exceptionally original of course but David Michôd’s strong command of his material and actors helps The Rover transcend its lacunas to reach, in its best scenes, the kind of macabre wit it aspires to.

"The Babadook"

Touted by none other than The Exorcist director William Friedkin as the most terrifying film he’d ever seen and crowned with an unusually high number of film festival prizes for a horror film, The Babadook rode in theatres with great expectations weighing on its shoulders. Given its seemingly trite premise – a child’s imaginary friend/monster turns out to be true and terrorizes him and his mother – that had already produced last year’s dull Mamá, I was initially quite skeptical about its ability to live up to these expectations. Happily, my skepticism was misplaced. Not only does The Babadook succeed in frightening you without a single jump-scare (a rarity in contemporary Hollywood horror), it understands the roots of what make stories of our mind’s demons coming to life so frightening and that the true point of interest is not whether the monster is real or a product of the protagonist’s imagination – it is both – but what the monster represents.

The titular Babadook is born from the very existence of Amelia’s son Samuel, whose father died taking his pregnant wife to hospital (an interesting gender-switch on traditional fairytale tales of orphanage, as it is usually the mother who dies giving birth to the child) and the devastating psychological scars that result from so paradoxical a tragedy. The Babadook is many things: A widow’s grief, the resentment she dares not admit she feels towards her son for his perceived responsibility in his death, the resentment he feels in turn for the feelings he perceives within her that she denies, and the violent fantasies that he takes refuge in. Writer/Director Jennifer Kent shows a keen grasp of what it is like to both be a troubled “special” child and the mother of that troubled child; it is not surprising that the film’s most frightening scenes are not the night terrors but the scenes between mother and son that build up to them – Samuel’s knocking of a cousin out of her treehouse at her birthday party and the subsequent tantrum in the car come to mind.

As the Babadook’s grip on Amelia’s mind tightens, her house is gradually defragmented into semi-autonomous rooms that seem to exist parallel to the corridors and hall that connect them. Using mid-to-long focal lenses and dark lighting, Kent and cinematographer Radek Ladczuk contribute to the progressive sense of despatialization by repeatedly placing Amelia in the center of shots and framing her in a way that blocks out most of the outside world. This is particularly evident in scenes where she watches television: Scenes from silent Georges Méliès fantasies and Mario Bava horrors are assembled next to long-focal close-ups of Amelia’s tired staring face, integrating them within her mental space as much as her physical one.

All very simple, even basic stuff. Yet Jennifer Kent manages to renew familiar tropes and situations by making them the icing on the cake rather than its pastry, and subverting expectations induced by their appearance – such as the threatened interference of an external party who, in most horror films, would be either killed off by the monster or contribute to its defeat. Composed like a symphony, the film builds its scares on unsettling yet little-magnified behaviour from its characters and occasional unusually fast framerates, reserving the bigger scare chords for its climax. As such, most of the fuel backing up these stylistic tools is provided by the intense Medean duel between Essie Davis and newcomer Noah Wiseman – each of whom at different times gives the impression of turning into a screeching, grimacing beast. Their performances don’t just make the pop-up book monster come to life, they also manifest the fears contained within all scary fairy tales for children; fears that, beneath the simple plots and structure, are treated with a very adult maturity. And while its themes of depression and grief are more overt than the underlying subtext of most tales – perhaps a little too much at times from a horror aficionado’s point of view – The Babadook keeps in with the Perraultian tradition with beauty and intelligence that put the mainstream horror film industry to shame.

"Guardians Of The Galaxy"

If Super indicated that James Gunn doesn’t understand satire, Guardians Of The Galaxy proves that he at least understands nostalgia. With its “ragtag band of adventurers” premise, its pivotal stop at a lawless den of crooks and its conclusive spaceship battle, along with its tease of a greater evil lurking behind its foremost villain, Guardians Of The Galaxy’s plot beats, structure and setting echo those of the original Star Wars almost perfectly all while having a distinctly different plot. What it sorely lacks that Star Wars possessed by nature, however, is the timeless call to adventure and sense of wonder common to all great epic adventures.  If Star Wars has often been used as the quintessential example of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, it’s because it tapped into something deep within the heart of great stories and fairytales that stimulate our collective imagination, helped by a fairly modest budget by contemporary standards and George Lucas’s Kurosawan influences.

In today’s cooler, more knowing and ironic world, such sincerity is rare and it sadly isn’t present here, because this isn’t the vision of a young auteur but rather that of the same commercially-driven corporate forces that later corrupted him. Where George Lucas made Star Wars mostly for himself, James Gunn here is in the service of a multi-franchise media empire. It explains part of the film’s calculated appeal to nostalgia, playful tone and quasi-slavish adherence Star Wars’s plot beats: The same kids who grew up with Star Wars are now running Hollywood and constitute much of its audience.

That isn’t to say Guardians Of The Galaxy is a bad film at all. The nostalgia and playfulness work at their best when combined together, usually in the form of lead protagonist Peter “Starlord” Quill (Chris Pratt), a character whose very conception – a boy from the 1980s abducted by aliens – flatters a specific target audience. What could have been a generic charming rogue becomes the very incarnation of wish-fulfillment, dancing and joking along to fantastical situations with a mixtape of 70s-80s pop music that fills most of the soundtrack to considerably better effect than Tyler Bates’ derivative score. Much like the inventively designed worlds they evolve in (certainly a step above the blandness of the Thor films), the chemistry he shares with his colourful co-stars compensates for a certain excessive sense of familiarity. No doubt taking cues from geekmeister Joss Whedon, Gunn draws most of his film’s strengths from the comical bickering and verbal jousting between his characters. A pity that, like the story they’re inscribed in, this self-made family cannot help but call back to its superior models. In Whedon’s short-lived TV series classic Firefly as well as Bioware’s wonderful Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic and Mass Effect video games, the disparate crew reflected a multiplicity of cultures and points of view that Guardians Of The Galaxy, too busy with the plot imperatives, doesn’t give itself time to build.

"Whiplash"

The world of Whiplash seems to exist solely within the confines of protagonist Andrew Neiman’s fevered mind. A world of close-ups of blood-soaked cymbals and drums, blistered fingers, and sweaty pained faces; a world soaked in hot yellow-to-orange lighting that counterbalances dark interior sets whose existence is only truly perceptible in the occasional wider shots; a world of pain, anger and undiluted, unrestrained testosterone-fueled passion, in all its grace and ugliness. In both its visual style and themes of pushing oneself to the very limits of sanity and well-being to reach artistic perfection, Whiplash echoes Black Swan. And while he doesn’t reach the dizzying heights of Aronofsky’s best film, director Damien Chazelle still cuts through the archetypal American story of success earned through hard work and sacrifice, and draws out conclusions made all the more troubling by his relatively ambiguous attitude towards them.

As noted previously, there is very little world outside of the studios, concert halls and classrooms Andrew (Miles Teller) practices; so much so that scenes with exterior characters such as his mild-mannered single father and his would-be girlfriend almost seem like temporary distractions from what really matters – which is indeed how Andrew comes to see them. Bombarded with misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic insults and threats by his feared instructor Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons), Andrew finds his very identity challenged as well as his talent. From the moment Fletcher sweet-talks him with an anecdote about Charlie Parker that will be repeated at least twice throughout the film (and that jazz experts and critics were quick to point out as false), he is implicitly comparing the two and suggesting that he may have the same potential for greatness. Thus, much like Kevin Spacey’s Buddy Ackerman in Swimming With Sharks or, more appropriately, R. Lee Ermey’s Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann in Full Metal Jacket, Fletcher’s sadistic psychological and physical torture is justified as a Darwinian tool for natural selection of the fittest for the job. Any outside elements that could get in the way of perfection are to be discarded, for nothing must exist in the musician’s world but himself and his music. Before he knows it, Andrew has both adopted Fletcher’s consequentialist philosophy and even started aping a little of his bullying behaviour as a defense mechanism, notably using it to snark at college athlete relatives of his during a dinner where his drumming career is measured against their more worldly successes. Yet Miles Teller’s underplayed demeanour in both this scene and the breakup scene suggest Andrew is acting less out of conviction than out of fear.

Chazelle and editor Tom Cross’s near-constant espousal of Andrew’s sensations blurs the audience’s perspective on the matter. In uncomfortably tight shots and skewed angles, we feel Fletcher’s slaps and violent barking of orders, but we also feel the unstoppable pulse of life that only grows stronger every time his sticks hit the drums, the channeling of every injury and humiliation into their corresponding beat. It all reaches a pinnacle in the film’s climactic concert where Fletcher’s final attempt at humiliating Andrew is answered with a long defiant, masterly improvisation during which he and his drum kit are so compactly glued together by the framing and editing to the music that they appear to become one single entity. Liberation and greatness are thus achieved less for their own sake than for that of petty revenge and one-upmanship. The price for producing great art, Chazelle suggests, is the very soul it comes from. Whether or not that price is worth paying is left for the viewer to decide.

Whiplash looks and feels both as exhilarating as the titular Hank Levy composition and as unrelentingly brutal as that title suggests. Like many Jazz drum performances, it often repeats variations on the same theme; each new development forces you to pay attention and carefully evaluate what you have just heard and seen and what you are currently hearing and seeing. As perhaps the most sadistic teacher this side of Miss Trunchbull, J. K. Simmons’s performance matches that tempo perfectly. Just when you think you’ve got his rotation between fatherly mentoring and explosive abuse figured out, he modifies his game just enough for you to reconsider your opinion of him for at least long enough until the next outburst, and then it’s back to square one again. Like a lean, athletic black panther, he is always on the prowl, never giving away more than what he wants you to see. Faced with such a controlled and controlling presence, it would be easy for a director to lean on it and let it take over the rest of the film but Chazelle wisely keeps the focus on Andrew’s absorption of Fletcher’s lessons, leading Teller and Simmons in a perilous and ever-changing duel whose outcome remains uncertain, because it was never meant to end.

"Belle"

Knowing that Belle was inspired by a painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of Royal Navy Captain Sir John Lindsay and niece of Lord Chief Justice William Murray, may not necessarily influence one’s judgment of it as a whole. However, Amma Asante’s rather pointed use of the depiction of black people in Western art as a synchronized marker of their place within Western society inevitably invites comparison between the two works of art that Dido inspired. Or rather more accurately, it begs the question as to what degree Asante’s film draws from painting in general with regards to communicating feelings and atmosphere, as well as examining the relationship between art and politics. The answer to the first question is, regrettably, “to a rather limited one”. Amma Asante and cinematographer Ben Smithard certainly know how to elegantly frame and compose scenes of rural upper-class England, but their vision seems less inspired by 18^th century painting than the British tradition of period dramas it follows, with its bright and lukewarm colours that flatter the actors as well as the scenery.

The answer to the second question is more nuanced, as Amma Asante does make some good observations on how one is affected by the image of oneself or one’s fellows, but they are almost divorced from painting aesthetics. The racist portrayals of blacks in subservient spatial or physical positions as well as attitudes is repeatedly emphasized via tight close-ups, and the unveiling of the painting showing Belle and her adoptive sister/cousin playing together on equal footing is narratively framed to precede – and thus, it is implied, participate in – William Murray’s decision to rule against a powerful slave trading syndicate, but this reduces the paintings themselves to a thematic background rather than a subject. The issue of representation and self-image is explored more substantially and subtly in individual scenes. The most powerfully evocative of these has Dido (an outstanding Gugu Mbatha-Raw) looking at herself in a mirror and repeatedly hitting her chest and face in frustration and despair, as if hoping that would somehow whiten the skin that prevents her from dining with her own family in the presence of guests.

It’s in scenes like these that Amma Asante deploys the crux of her talent. Classical but not pedantic, she diligently sets the stage for her characters’ emotions in order to better magnify them at the right moments. And in Gugu Mbatha-Raw she finds a very expressive partner indeed, one who speaks with eloquence typical of British television where she cut her teeth but who moves and gazes at her costars with purely cinematic earnestness and eyes that could burn through concrete. So efficient is Asante at bringing out the many conflicts travailing Dido and her family and recognizing their paradoxical source – a desire to shelter her from societal injustice and elevate her above it all while preventing her from causing any upsets – that her occasional inclination toward unnecessary and commonplace dramatic underscoring (shots of a character giving an inspiring speech intercut with zooms on the face of another man listening in the distance being the most obvious) are easily forgiven.

While Belle could have benefited from a form that more closely reproduced the style and worldview articulated by 18^th century British art and perhaps a closer look at the effects of artistic representation on self-image, it nonetheless stands on its own as a handsome and mature study of the complexities of racism and sexism and how they intersect.

"Noah"

As hit-or-miss as Darren Aronofsky’s output has been, one thing has been consistently clear with every film: He lacks neither ambition nor brazenness, and both of these qualities are on abundant display in Noah’s best and worst moments. Its continuous battle between majesty and outlandishness is a natural consequence of the heroic fantasy sensibility which Aronofsky chose to infuse in his adaptation of the biblical tale, something that makes perfect sense in light of the many mythological tropes and themes born from such stories – prophetic heroes bearing humanity’s weight on their shoulders being just one of them. Unafraid of risking silliness, Aronofsky turns fallen angels into giant shambling rock monsters, Cain’s descendant Tubal-Cain (mentioned only once in the Bible) into a demonically-inspired quasi-objectivist villain and Noah himself into a dangerously obsessed fanatic willing to sacrifice his own newborn grandchildren in order to fulfill what he believes to be God’s will (God hear being referred to as “the Creator”).

Some of his creative decisions are misjudged – particularly the aesthetic clash caused by the unnecessary substitution of real animals for largely computer-generated ones, unintentionally highlighting the incongruous presence of blatant modern technology in a prehistoric pre-apocalyptic setting – but all are made in the service of a take on Genesis that reconciles modern rationalism with genuine appreciation of – if not identification with – spiritual power. This approach is best exemplified when Noah narrates the birth of the universe and the fall of man in a stunning sequence that combines time-lapse photography, CGI, silhouetted figures and the rapid assembly of different still shots to give the impression of movements. It’s an extravagant polygamous marriage of images from different categories not usually known to coexist harmoniously, held together by Aronofsky’s unrestrained megalomaniacal vision. While they lack the weight and reverence of a controversial similar sequence from Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life, the conveyed impression is that of creation in motion both from a spectator and a creator’s point of view, one that evokes as much a sense of power as it does awe. In that sense, it sums up Aronofsky as a filmmaker: One whose grandiose visions at times contradict his desired proximity with the human soul even as he claims them as consequences of it, yet who reunites them homogenously in scenes such as this.

Indeed, Noah contains almost every trait of Aronofsky’s past films – handheld tracking shots, unsteady close-ups of the human face, close-ups of symbolic details put together in a short rapid-fire montage – but they are all used somewhat sparingly and with more measure and caution than most of his previous efforts. His consistently tight framing is most useful here in representing Noah’s position as both the executor of the Creator’s will and the witness to his incomprehensible power. Correcting the mistakes from his disastrous The Fountain, Aronofsky only allows his grandiloquent imagery to submerge him just enough so that he may pull back in time to readjust his attention on more earthly (and important) matters. His indisputable skill at getting the best out of his actors proves, as always, invaluable to his success in doing so. While watching Russell Crowe’s Noah engulf himself in the muddy waters of faith isn’t as fascinating as the constant physical and psychological mutation of Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers from Black Swan, the dedication in his eyes and voice can only generate respect – enough to forgive a few early lines of dialogue too stilted to be enunciated convincingly. Creator by his preservation of life, destroyer by his refusal to shelter fellow humans, basking in mass destruction all while impressing on its tragedy, both visionary prophet and delusional madman, Noah matches Darren Aronofsky in enough ways for the film to be considered a success on the basis of its effective illustration of their equivalently conflictual nature.

"A Most Wanted Man"

With paunchy cheeks, pale skin and watery eyes that look like they’ve been injected with washing liquid, Philip Seymour Hoffman lumbers across Anton Corbijn’s yellow-lit Hamburg with the brave resignation of a man who knows his time is counted. Even if the film were not haunted by the specter of Hoffman’s tragic untimely death, the low weary rumble of his German-accented voice expresses the disillusionment of a moribund Europe whose ideals have been dissolved in a pool of political machinations and growing Islamic supremacism. As disillusioned German counterterrorism agent Gunther Bachmann, he bears the guilt of both his profession’s failure to prevent 9/11 in his very city (mirrored by another, personal failure of his own in Beirut) and questionable western counterterrorism policies that find themselves all directed towards Issa Karpov, a Muslim Chechen illegal immigrant whom Bachmann intends to use as a pawn in his campaign against a popular Tariq Ramadan-esque Muslim intellectual who may not be as peaceful and tolerant as he presents himself.

Based on the novel of the same name by John Le Carré, A Most Wanted Man does not succeed as well as Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in transcribing the “Land Of Confusion” so well described in the Genesis song and of which the espionage world is something of a microcosm. Anton Corbijn films his situations and characters with a studious diligence specific to European thrillers, directing most of his efforts towards capturing Bachmann’s determination to see through a job whose moral uncertainties he is all too familiar with. Every scene in which he appears is emblazoned with the iciest variations of the colour wheel, making the pervasive yellow lighting of street and interior lamps feel at times like a depressed person’s smile. If it’s an effective way to transmit Bachmann’s state of mind, it also belies Corbijn and screenwriter Andrew Bovell’s lack of inspiration and courage in tackling what should be the film’s other most important character – Issa himself. A more audacious European directing-screenwriting team would have cast aside most of the spy intrigue to concentrate on the opposition between the two main characters, one a man dedicating his life and well-being to serving a country for reasons that are no longer clear to him and the other a man of no land, parentage or definite affiliation. Orphaned by a mother he has no memory of but a gold bracelet and a war criminal father whom he despises for conceiving him through rape, tortured by the Russian police into admitting acts of terrorism he most likely did not commit, present in Germany through illegal means and having found some possibility of peace in a possibly fundamentalist brand of Islam that makes him suspect, Issa doesn’t seem to belong anywhere. Sadly, in spite of Grigoriy Dobrygin’s traumatized eyes and almost ghostly presence, he never quite comes into his own as a character. Instead of treating him as a man with a story to tell, Corbijn simplifies his suffering with absurdly reverent scenes of him praying that, along with the rather pointed reference to the meaning of his name and the scraggly beard he sports in his earliest scenes, turn him into some sort of Christ figure for all the victims of Western counterterrorism policies.

This ideological pandering, along with the miscasting of Rachel McAdams as Issa’s left-wing lawyer and tentative chaste lover (and just what was Daniel Brühl doing as one of Bachmann’s many interchangeable subordinates?), limits A Most Wanted Man’s potential to survey its very relevant subject with the veracity it deserves. As such, it functions as a capable thriller that depends largely on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s inestimable talent to reach a little higher, and only gets so far without him.

"The Amazing Spider-Man 2"

After a highly entertaining and auspicious first installment that delved deeper into building Peter Parker’s background and universe, Marc Webb delivers a Frankenstein’s Monster of a film whose production and post-production troubles are as visible and unpleasant to look at as the scars of a botched surgical operation. It is obvious that greedy Sony executives seized control of the film and had it heavily tweaked in order to open possibilities of an expanded cinematic universe the same way Marvel films do, making this regrettable mess another symptom of their business model’s poisonous influence on Hollywood filmmaking.

Oh to be sure, there have always been films harmed by their executives’ hands-on management, but rarely has it been so blatant and widespread than nowadays and rarely has a film become so bloated and incoherent as a result. Plot threads are woven and tangled together with little regard towards pacing or homogeneity; characters are abruptly introduced, forgotten then brought up again without having had time to justify their existence; the haste and unevenness of the film’s pacing and editing severely damage both the characters’ capacity to breathe on their own and that of their actors to bring them to life. Although Jamie Foxx, Emma Stone and Sally Field come out fairly well, Andrew Garfield and Dane DeHaan’s uneven performances give the same impression as most of the film does – that they have been pieced together from two different films crammed into one. Garfield seems to be in a constant struggle to find the right tone for the right persona in the right scene and DeHaan spends the first half of the film sounding like a stoner trying to do a Patrick Bateman impression only to slowly improve as Harry Osborn’s descent into despair and evil progresses – however unconvincingly put together that descent may be.

Perhaps the core of the film’s problems can find its summary in the film’s opening and closing scenes in which Spider-Man fights Paul Giamatti’s Rhino: Everything about them, from their staging to their editing, marks them as an advertisement for spin-offs and sequels, rather than an invitation towards the possibility of such things existing. Paul Giamatti’s embarrassing performance in particular recalls that of live-action actors playing the roles of cartoon villains from tie-in toy commercials. Yet beneath the rubble left by the narrative chaos, hums a faint sound that could be that of a good, salvageable film. Perhaps it might one day surface in the form of a Director’s Cut DVD/Blu-Ray that could fill in the gaps, extend certain scenes and replace weak takes by better ones. But I won’t hold my breath.

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier"

Is there a glimmer of hope for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to escape the clutches of the mass marketing values that have defined most of its films and that the Lego Movie unintentionally denounced? Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 and this continuation of Captain America’s adventures seem to suggest there is. After subjugating audiences to a mediocre bargain-basement Indiana Jones movie in Captain America: The First Avenger, Marvel Studios replaced Joe Johnston (a bargain-basement Steven Spielberg) with brothers Anthony & Joe Russo, previously best known for the passable caper comedy Welcome To Collinwood. As this is their first foray into the superhero genre, it is not too surprising that the Russo Brothers show some weakness in the staging of their action scenes – particularly car chases – but though these problems eventually subside, they are nonetheless a noticeable nuisance.

Fortunately, these flaws are redeemed by a surprisingly smart screenplay, courtesy of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (with Ed Brubaker providing the story), that addresses the political implications raised by the existence of a multitude of American superheroes in a post-9/11 world; issues that had remained mostly dormant within the franchise (with the much-lamented exception of Iron Man 2) but that Captain America: The Winter Soldier examines by revisiting the worn-out conspiracy thriller genre that reached its apex in the Nixon-Ford era with Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy” and Sydney Pollack’s The Three Days Of The Condor but whose attempted return in the Bush era took the guise of a collection of crudely-edited “action scenes” known as the Jason Bourne trilogy. By taking the familiar plot of a patriotic idealist’s discovery of corruption and wrongdoing within his government agency and making that idealist a superhero – by definition a symbol of America’s values as well as the power it wields to promote these values, the screenwriters not only draw attention and question The Avengers’ use of superheroes as unaccountable agents in the service of a secret international agency apparently run by unelected government bureaucrats, they point out an apparent dichotomy between the values American superheroes are supposed to represent – self-reliance, freedom, justice, security – and the actions undertaken in their name.

While not as psychologically complex or compelling as some of the films it indirectly critiques (The Dark Knight trilogy obviously comes to mind), Captain America: The Winter Soldier offers an interesting if incomplete questioning of the cultural mindset that enabled the NSA global surveillance program and the replacement of on-field soldiers by remote drones. If these ideas are further explored in future Marvel productions, I just might be willing to endure more hours of an uncharismatic Thor punching bland villains in obnoxiously fake CGI environments.