Category: Reviews

Trumbo

Bryan Cranston plays Blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in Jay Roach’s biopic.

TrumboPosterDid the injustice of the Hollywood Blacklist have to do with Americans’ Cold War fears, how we suppressed the First Amendment rights of thousands, or how we wrongly persecuted and led a witch hunt against innocents and those just expressing political beliefs? Or was it all because Dalton Trumbo was just too good?

“Trumbo”, the biopic on the life of the Oscar winning, yet blacklisted screenwriter, is filled with some stirring sentiments and American values. As Trumbo, Bryan Cranston delivers winning speeches with impeccable diction, all while maintaining his position as a contentious, even disagreeable figure. Jay Roach’s film though may just be a little too fun for its lofty ambitions. The screenplay touts values of Free Speech, but the story itself suggests the motto, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”

Trumbo was brought up in the Golden Age of Hollywood, so the film is fascinated with that Old Hollywood charm, playing off campy fun biopic beats as it checks off the list of stars who made their way through Trumbo’s life: Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Otto Preminger. The cast all gets their moments to do their mini-impressions of some of Hollywood’s most iconic and eccentric figures. “Trumbo” even opens with a montage of some of Trumbo’s many credits and takes us through his work on “Roman Holiday,” “Spartacus”, “The Brave One”, and “Exodus”, and Roach peppers the score with slinky jazz and a light, breezy tone. Much early on is even told through news reels rather than personal moments.

And yet “Trumbo” can be questionably chipper when dealing with the severity of The Blacklist and The Hollywood 10. Trumbo was one of the first waves of Communists brought in front of HUAC, or the House Un-American Activities Committee, to testify and name names about his involvement with the Communist Party. Many Hollywood insiders, including his liberal friend Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg), sold him and his colleagues out. In turn, Trumbo and the other nine spent up to a year in prison despite not committing a crime, and they were barred from ever working in Hollywood again.

Trumbo instead took up aliases and fixed up bad B-movie scripts for producer Frank King (John Goodman), and Roach has a lot of fun with this concept. The behind-the-scenes dealings and a money-grubbing John Goodman brandishing a baseball bat at those threatening to boycott him are hugely entertaining, and often more of interest to Roach than the pain and suffering brought on by the Blacklist.

Roach illustrates the hatred of Communists through plainspoken bigots throwing drinks at Trumbo at a movie theater or the big talk threats of Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren). But it overlooks the Trumbo family retreat to Mexico, or the deaths that even took place during the period. Instead he zones in on the family drama and how Trumbo’s shadow screenplay work took a toll on his wife Cleo (Diane Lane) and his equally political and outspoken daughter Nikola (Elle Fanning in Nikola’s teenage years).

Cranston though is largely the catalyst behind “Trumbo’s” added weight, political significance and modern relevance. His Hollywood 10 colleague Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) asks, “Do you have to say everything like it’s going to be chiseled onto a rock?” Cranston’s hitched up pants, his hunched posture as he marches about the room, and the way he chomps on a cigarette or cigar certainly smack of a “performance”, but he’s modest enough in his speech to make it convincing. Where everyone else is clear-cut about their politics, Cranston plays Trumbo as largely articulate and argumentative of principles over strict ideas. In one scene he stands up to John Wayne and challenges Duke’s non-existent war record, despite how he invokes the war to condemn people like Trumbo. The wit and words behind Cranston’s performance help elevate Trumbo as an artist and thinker but also show how he might be difficult at parties.

Roach’s film may be too entrenched in Hollywood history and royalty to not somewhat diminish the Cold War era hardships of the Blacklist, but Trumbo’s name was suppressed for years, and now this film proudly adorns it as a fitting title and story.

3 stars

Bridge of Spies

Steven Spielberg casts Tom Hanks as an insurance lawyer negotiating prisoner exchanges during the Cold War in “Bridge of Spies”

BridgeofSpiesPosterIn Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”, the President worked nobly to free the slaves through the passage of the 13th Amendment, but in the context of the film his work was a thankless task, controversial and even reviled. What’s more, the film’s signature set piece, the Congressional vote, was a simple re-enactment of political theater but played for the biggest suspense on the grandest stage.

Spielberg’s follow up “Bridge of Spies” is a Cold War drama that follows a character with a similar plight. James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) is a pariah, a man without a country despite working on behalf of it, and his job is equally simple and thankless: defend the rights of a Soviet Spy and negotiate his exchange. As he did with “Lincoln”, Spielberg is taking the small-scale conflicts and telling them writ large, with all the style and Hollywood storytelling of any of his more ambitious action or sci-fi films. “Bridge of Spies” may be the story of a humble, average American insurance lawyer, but it isn’t modest, and the film’s simplicity is exactly the point.

Donovan is tasked with defending Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) in court after he’s captured and outed as a spy for the Soviet Union. Hanks plays Donovan with the same spark as James Stewart in “Anatomy of a Murder,” a man with principles and values but not without an attitude and the ability to tell off a CIA agent who demands to know what Abel has been telling him. Twice Donovan invokes people as cowardly for shirking their responsibility to the American justice system. He’s a boy scout, but he’s often on the offensive.

Abel on the other hand is without emotion, soft-spoken and displaying no fear or worry in his conversations with Donovan, and the two have an awkward chemistry that Spielberg feeds off of. Everything in “Bridge of Spies” is simple and straight-forward in its discussion of politics, and Spielberg hones in on the awkward silence that drives their understanding of one another.

Abel is inevitably convicted, but Donovan successfully helps him avoid the death penalty by hinting at the possibility of a trade of spies between the Russians and the Americans. After a spy pilot goes down in Russian territory, Donovan is whisked away to the far side of the Berlin Wall, which we see actually being constructed, in order to negotiate the exchange.

For all its Cold War theatrics, including one thrilling action sequence involving the crash landing of the American spy pilot, “Bridge of Spies” is for the most part a courtroom drama, the stuff of conversation, negotiation and debate. Spielberg, working from a screenplay by the Coen Brothers and Matt Charman, never incorporates elaborate chases or thriller set pieces to complicate the core tension of whether this one man will win his freedom. Spielberg finds the most drama in how Donovan can talk his way out of tight spots, like when his German counterpart parks him in front of border patrol agents as a negotiating tactic. And when “Bridge of Spies” reaches its climax of the actual exchange, the simple act of just walking across the bridge has all the suspense of the voting sequence in “Lincoln”.

Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is calm and more classical in its lengthier shot lengths and composition. But it has a lush look full of deep blues and gets more ragged and handheld as Donovan navigates his way through East Berlin. Thankfully his work here is more understated than the “Gone with the Wind” artificiality of “War Horse” (still a gorgeous film in its own right), but “Bridge of Spies” still has that Old Hollywood quality that can make it timeless.

At the film’s close, Donovan looks out the train window into Brooklyn and sees a specter of the demons he witnessed in East Berlin of children clambering over a fence in desperation. At that moment we learn his hardships are just beginning. The real Donovan went on to negotiate the exchange of countless more spies that could arguably cement his contribution as an American hero, but with “Bridge of Spies” Spielberg has the audacity to tell the story of just one.

3 ½ stars

Room

Brie Larson stars in “Room” alongside 5-year-old Jacob Tremblay in Lenny Abrahamson’s second film.

Jack is a precocious 5-year-old boy. He has an imaginary dog named Lucky, he loves “Dora the Explorer”, and he says he gets his “strong” from his long, never-cut mane of hair. Jack is happy. But Jack cannot safely use the stairs. He’s terrified of playing with his mound of toys. He has no friends. His mom Joy, only in her 20s, has done all she can and pleads, “I just want him to connect with something.”

“Room” is Director Lenny Abrahamson and screenwriter and novelist Emma Donoghue’s moving story of motherhood and adapting to life in new circumstances. But it begins with Joy and Jack confined as prisoners in a small room housed in a garden shed. For Jack, Room (never “a room” or “the room” or “our room”) is the only world he knows. Escaping it means a radical change in Jack’s ability to grapple with what is real and what isn’t. “Room” is such an emotionally affecting story because, regardless of the circumstances, it concerns the walls and spaces we build inside our minds and how we seek solace within them.

Brie Larson is brilliant as Joy, or Ma, since “Room” is seen entirely through Jack’s (Jacob Tremblay) eyes. Despite their captivity, Joy carries on life as usual. She taunts Jack with games of racing from wall to wall, him hardly constrained for movement. Without candles to put on Jack’s birthday cake, she faces the same struggles of any mother trying to do their best for their child. She even protects Jack from her captor Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), keeping him in a closet away from sight while Old Nick has his way with her. 50 creaks on the bed, Jack counts, growing ever more aware of Old Nick despite his mother’s sheltering.

Eventually Joy realizes that after seven years they can’t live this way much longer, and she begins to tear down the lies and stories she has told that compose his understanding of the world. Slowly he starts to pick it up, that there are real people and things that exist outside of Room. Old Nick doesn’t bring things with magic. Dora the Explorer isn’t real, but other people on TV are, or at least playing “dress-up.” In the film’s second half, these new rules and discoveries about the world come in a whirl, five years of child development and exploration rolled into a few brief moments of being outside Room for the first time.

What’s remarkable about “Room” is how Abrahamson can take these dour stakes and make something poetic, even hopeful and amazing when looking at the world. We see Jack lying on his back in a truck bed, the blue sky racing by above him, and it’s a beautiful, mesmerizing moment as much as it is a shock. Inside that room, he’s got a sense of optimism, discovery and playfulness befitting any boy. “Room’s” score is equipped with either tender acoustic guitar strumming or delicate flights of whimsy and curiosity, and it expertly strikes that balance of fear and fantasy.

But “Room’s” themes emerge most prominently in its second half. Escaping Room has not solved their problems. They’re no happier or even less of prisoners, confined to Joy’s parents’ home due to the obsessive media attention. Happiness is not determined by your location but the state of mind you’ve built for yourself. Room contained stability and a healthy relationship for mother and son, and building that again in a new world, even one where Joy and Jack are now “free”, takes time.

Larson is by far the film’s heart and soul. She’s still young, but in front of Jack she’s a rock, stern and firm with the perfect blend of reassuring motherly affection. She can be irritable and sarcastic in the face of her own mother (Joan Allen) and bursting at the seams as she tries to juggle her own acclimation back to normalcy while helping her son. Larson joins the ranks of some of the finest movie moms and does so with maturity beyond her age.

At the same time, Larson has a bundle of joy to care for. Jacob Tremblay is just as special here. As an actor, he has perfect timing and chemistry with his movie mom. Some of his questions alone allow him to get a laugh even when Joy is at her most desperate.

When Joy asks how she’ll get Jack to connect with others, her question isn’t limited to kids or to survivors of abduction. “Room” gets inside the small room in our own head, and through its heart-rending story allows us to find solace through the connections in our own lives.

4 stars

Crimson Peak

“Crimson Peak” is a Gothic Horror film starring Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain

CrimsonPeakPosterGuillermo del Toro is one of the few mainstream filmmakers with the vision and foresight to take craft, visuals and artistry into mind in his filmmaking. But since “Pan’s Labyrinth” he has yet to live up to his auteur reputation. “Crimson Peak” is del Toro taking a stab at more modest genre filmmaking, and while the film is bursting with colors, special effects and the finest in set design, Del Toro’s embodiment of them ranges from at best superfluous to at worst meaninglessly pastiche. “Crimson Peak” is horror and the macabre often for its own sake, and it plays more like two hours of concept art rather than a fully fleshed out film.

“It’s not a ghost story; it’s more like a story with a ghost in it,” says the film’s protagonist Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska). She echoes the first misnomer about “Crimson Peak”, which has been advertised not as a horror film but Gothic Horror. Yet del Toro is no stranger to traditional horror jump scares or shrieking attacks of strings on the film’s score. It only strives for Gothic horror in that it plasters old-fashioned kitsch everywhere.

The film’s color scheme of reds, yellows and blues seems constantly in conflict with itself. Allerdale Mansion, an English estate where Edith is swept away to by her new husband and sister in law Thomas and Lucille Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain), is an impossible structure of pure malevolence. It has ominous cracks in the ceiling, endless corridors, and massive walls and staircases headed nowhere and only made to impose. Short of writing on the walls, “This house is evil” (wait! we’ve got ominous Latin inscriptions and looming portraits of their vicious mother), it even seeps a red clay ooze from the floor. Points if you can guess that symbolism.

Del Toro’s attention to detail doesn’t stop at his sets. He employs classical editing techniques like a pinhole shot to remind you this is old fashioned, quaint and thus even more sinister. The film opens with a fairy tale warning from Edith’s dead mother and is even bookended with a literal book opening its pages at the film’s open.

And yet del Toro’s style is all superficial. The camera doesn’t particularly move with grace and the set design does all the heavy lifting rather than the framing. Without this, del Toro’s technique and visual references smack of pastiche. The same style without substance claims have been saddled on other movie buff directors like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson in the past, but “Crimson Peak’s” visuals don’t so much set a mood as remind you of one.

“Crimson Peak” concerns how Edith falls in love with Thomas, the mysterious entrepreneur from across the pond. Her father disapproves, but when he’s brutally killed in what is inexplicably thought to be an accident, Edith and Thomas marry and return to England. His intentions though may only be to fleece Edith of her wealth, and Thomas’s sister Lucille seems itching to dispose of her sooner.

But again, everything here is bleak and devilish from the onset. It’s a movie of secrets and ghosts with haunted pasts, but there are no real secrets to be had. The Sharpes’ intentions are so clear that we care little about what they’re hiding in their past. Chastain plays Lucille as so immediately cold and vicious to remove all doubt. She’s dressed out of place in blood red when we first see her, and after playing piano her fingers are crippled and vampiric. Every line of her dialogue is whispered and made to be an idiom with a hidden double meaning. Chastain isn’t bad, but she’s being directed to chew the scenery and play broad.

It’s because Lucille announces her intentions as in it for the money, but also the horror of it. del Toro is invested in “Crimson Peak” for the same reason, not to tell a story of love, ghosts or secrets, or “a story with a ghost in it” as Edith suggests, but to pay an overwrought ode to horror itself.

2 stars

Suffragette

Sarah Gavron directs the period drama of women in 1912 London campaigning for the right to vote.

suffragette-2015-movie-posterSarah Gavron’s “Suffragette” is most relevant today as a piece of historical fiction because issues of women’s rights are in 2015 as prevalent and significant as they were in 1912 London. It’s the slightly fictionalized story of English working women who took up civil disobedience in order to pressure the government to give women the vote.

Should women be allowed to vote? Of course. The answer is so obvious that even the film provides scant arguments against it. “Suffragette” could better advance the discussion of women’s rights in 2015 if it had more to say regarding the debate and nuances of women’s rights issues in 1912. “Suffragette” is more a soapbox than a profound piece of modern feminism. And while it has strong performances and competent filmmaking, it’s even lacking as a stirring piece of dramatic historical fiction.

Carey Mulligan is excellent (although what else is new) as Maud Watts, an uneducated mother working in the laundry trade in London. She happens across her colleague Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff) smashing West End windows while calling for the vote for women, and she’s reluctantly pulled into the fray. Maud testifies at a parliamentary hearing in place of Violet regarding the pitiful working conditions at the laundry, and the police associate Maud with the other suffragettes (including Helena Bonham Carter and a rapid cameo from Meryl Streep), which is a different term from the non-violent suffragists.

It isn’t long before Maud comes around to the cause, despite how it estranges her from her husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) and her young son. Sonny is a character who isn’t as monstrous as some of the other male figures in the film, who range from having severe male-gaze/ownership issues to being flat out sexual abusers, but Sonny isn’t quite sympathetic to the cause either. The only meaningful male character with principles of any sort is the police officer played by Brendan Gleeson. He unblinkingly and calmly reasons with Maud that no one cares for her or her activism, and that she’s only being used as a pawn. From Gleeson, the scene hits heavy, and he passively upholds the law without politics in mind and even calls attention to the barbaric treatment of female prisoners later in the film.

“Suffragette” stands out from the crop of most Hollywood movies simply as an example of fiction, historical or otherwise, that allow this many women on screen at once. We see them plotting attacks and even running away from explosions. “Suffragette” even takes on something of a caper vibe, but it lacks a strong sense of suspense to carry along the action. Gavron resorts instead to a lot of shaky cam, naturalistic filmmaking that doesn’t go the distance in terms of creating mood.

During the closing credits, Gavron closes “Suffragette” with a roll of major countries and the year in which they gave women the right to vote, ending with Saudi Arabia promising women the right this year. There is still work to be done, and if nothing else, “Suffragette” is still a rousing story capable of getting more and more women to speak up.

3 stars

Beasts of No Nation

Idris Elba and newcomer Abraham Attah star in the first Netflix original feature ‘Beasts of No Nation’

Beasts_of_No_Nation_posterOur first look at the kids of “Beasts of No Nation” is through the hull of a broken old box TV. With no screen inside, the camera peers at a distance through the empty frame at these African children playing soccer. We’ve seen these children from the safety of our computers and know little else (ironically, “Beasts” is Netflix’s first original feature and will be consumed almost entirely on smaller screens). We don’t always know exactly where they’re from, and “Beasts” in turn is set in an unspecified West African nation. What are invisible to us are the directions and futures of these kids. Director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film illuminates through war torn violence and brutality just how without a nation these young people are.

The film tells the story of Agu (Abraham Atta), a young boy living in a poor refugee village in West Africa. When the military arrives, his mother escapes but is forced to leave her son behind in a rough, immediate coming of age. “You’re with the men now,” his father and brother say. When the soldiers kill his family, Agu escapes into the forest and comes upon the Commandant (Idris Elba) and his army of rebel warlords.

Agu becomes a reluctant member of the band of warlords, but finds direction and guidance in the Commandant’s leadership and fatherly wisdom. He speaks of young boys’ ability to be just as dangerous as the men, and he swiftly slits the throats of any who fail an initiation beating ritual. Through something of a spiritual transformation as Fukunaga stages it, Agu becomes part of a travelling family. They leave no trace or shelter as they march toward the country’s capitol.

To further deepen Agu’s isolationism, “Beasts” abandons the use of an African native language in favor of English once Agu joins the Commandant’s ranks. Like the famous long tracking shot during Fukunaga’s first season of “True Detective”, several set pieces here chase Agu’s abuse and blind, war torn rage. In one scene, Fukunaga makes us endure Agu being forced by the Commandant to take a machete to a prisoner’s skull. It’s a moment without much nuance, only brutality and Agu’s loss of innocence.

Fukunaga is an expert at capturing the bleak naturalism of whatever setting he’s in, be it the Central American slums in his first feature “Sin Nombre,” the Victorian period of his “Jane Eyre” adaptation or deep in rural Texas in “True Detective.” His work here (Fukunaga served as his own DP) captures a beautifully horrific shot of helicopter hellfire from the perspective of the foot soldiers on the ground. We see golden, fiery rain and shooting stars peppering the sky, a relief amid many of the film’s earthy tones.

But as in “True Detective”, Fukunaga is at his best walking the line of the naturalistic and the surreal. Fukunaga takes Agu through blood red soaked trenches, with the camera seemingly crawling to attain domineering low angles even at Agu’s short height. In another, the lush greens of the forest change to a hellish pink, with the world seemingly moving faster in the background.

“Beasts of No Nation” goes above and beyond that of a coming-of-age story in which a child is pushed into depravity. The film takes a left turn when the Commandant is summoned to see his politician leader, an uncharacteristic scene that further complicates the bunch’s goals and pursuit for survival. “Beasts of No Nation” is a film about the strength of the young and their uncertain future, and while Elba is powerful in a role that immediately commands respect, it’s first time actor Attah who shows the most range, notably in “Beasts’s” chilling closing scene.

Fukunaga’s first film “Sin Nombre” was a movie also about poor refugees desperate for survival as they tried to ride the rails out of Central America to life in the States. They faced terrors and senseless violence along the way, but they at least had a clear direction and destination in mind. For Agu and the other kids of “Beasts of No Nation”, they don’t even know what war they’re fighting for.

3 ½ stars

Steve Jobs

Aaron Sorkin’s biopic of the Apple founder is directed by Danny Boyle and stars Michael Fassbender

steve-jobs-movie-poster-800px-800x1259Steve Jobs and Apple didn’t invent the personal computer. They didn’t invent the portable music player, or the smart phone, or the tablet, or most recently wearable tech. What Steve Jobs did was make technology inviting, accessible and fashionable. That was his innovation and his genius. And it’s something of a paradox that the most successful tech giant is not the one with the newest or the best technology, but the one that reaches its users personally.

“Steve Jobs”, the new biopic directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin, expertly plays on the conflict within Jobs’s embattled ideologies. Like Sorkin’s “The Social Network” before it, “Steve Jobs” goes beyond the notion that many great men have to step on others to get to the top. It reckons with the idea of being great and being a good person as two sides of the same coin. It enlists Apple veterans Steve Wozniak, John Sculley and Andy Hertzfeld to take up arms against Jobs’s deceptively flowery rhetoric and his vision of democratization. And yet the film’s style and staging presents a man still in the right, not just an asshole but the only asshole who saw the world in the right way.

Sorkin breaks “Steve Jobs” up into three chapters, each staged in real-time just minutes before the product launch of the Macintosh in 1984, the NeXT launch in the late ‘80s after Jobs was ousted from Apple, and finally in 1998 when he was brought back to unveil the iMac. Not only does the screenplay have an identical setting structure, Sorkin layers the narrative structure in a way that’s rife with narrative callbacks and payoffs. It’s excellent dramatizing, even if it largely stretches the truth of the 30-odd minutes between Jobs taking the stage.

One of the first things we hear Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) say is “Fuck You” when his programmer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) says they can’t get the voice demo of the Macintosh speaking “Hello” to work. Boyle shoots the scene in a hazy, docu-realistic filter, and in this first moment looking down on Jobs from the fish eye of the projection screen above, it places Jobs at odds with the world. Immediately Sorkin makes the observation that though the Macintosh was made for “everybody”, the computer can only be opened up by special tools nowhere to be found in the building.

Both the operating system and the computer itself are closed off, incompatible with other products and unable to be customized, perhaps not unlike Jobs himself. And yet Jobs speaks with a vision of the computer’s personality and its ability to be a computer built around how people actually think. Fassbender has a way of delivering every line with a charismatic, uplifting and reassuring demeanor, even as he’s threatening and condescending. Always the PR mastermind, he expertly deflects his ex-wife’s (Katherine Waterston) question about how he feels about his daughter’s financial state of affairs by saying he believes Apple stock is undervalued. He promises to ruin Hertzfeld’s career if he doesn’t get the voice demo working, and he justifies it by saying with a wry snarl, “God sent his only son on a suicide mission, but we like him because he made trees!”

Each of the three segments involves Jobs coordinating with his weary and overworked micro-manager Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), politely acknowledging the journalist Joel Pforzheimer (John Ortiz) and sparring and talking shop with his colleagues Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) and John Sculley (Jeff Daniels). In each segment he’s running late to the stage, he confuses the names of two Andys who work for him, and he argues with his family before conceding to offer them whatever money they need. Jobs is of the sort who has to argue and get his perspective across, even if he decides to give in anyway.

You can see how “Steve Jobs” could function as a recurring Aaron Sorkin series, with repeating jokes and lines and enough walking and talking to fill an entire season of “The West Wing,” but Boyle places a certain rhythm to everything that allows each segment to flow fluidly.

Like Jobs, Danny Boyle is a showman. Rather than the tight, digital aesthetic that the previously attached David Fincher would’ve surely brought to the film, each of the three time periods looks aesthetically evolved from the next. The first is the gritty documentary-realism look, followed by a more operatic, artistic and colorful flavor, to finally the clean, luminous and familiar look of Apple’s brand today.

Boyle and Sorkin also have a good way of bringing the same gravity to early discussions about corporate and tech jargon to later conversations involving Jobs’s family melodrama. It eventually ups the stakes by taking the backstage conflict and putting it in the forefront, with Jobs and Wozniak screaming over the Apple 2 team right in front of the crowded hall of Apple employees. And for all of Jobs’s ability to quote Bob Dylan or speak the praises of Alan Turing, the film is at its best when a character like Jobs’s daughter can reduce his big ideas to the simplest of metaphors, like that the iMac really just looks like Judy Jetson’s Easy Bake Oven.

“Steve Jobs” is Sorkinesque beyond measure, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with Sorkin sticking to something that works, especially when the ensemble performances are as strong as they are here. Fassbender spars with everyone, and even when he loses his cool he never drops the air of greatness he carries on his shoulders, constantly defending his own greatness to anyone who would question it. Rogen graduates Woz from a playful pushover to a solemn and seasoned accomplice who has put up with Jobs’s insistence too many times. Winslet is another powerhouse, seeing through Jobs’s ideologies even as she looks tired and defeated by loyally and slavishly managing Jobs’s life. And Daniels is perfectly at home in Sorkin’s dialogue, with both he and Fassbender so wonderfully combative and fiery.

Steve Jobs has become such a revered fixture of the 21st Century that “Steve Jobs” has reignited discussions about the nature of accuracy in a biopic. It seemed easier to accept that Mark Zuckerberg might be an asshole, but is now harder to imagine that Jobs was anything of a contentious figure. Wozniak says near the end of the film that being a genius and being a good person is not binary. By bending the truth of Jobs’s personality and heightening a discussion around his ideologies, Sorkin’s script contends that in some ways it is.

4 stars

The Walk

Robert Zemeckis uses 3-D to tell the story of Philippe Petit and how he tight-rope walked across the World Trade Center Towers

thewalkposterThere have been reports that people have vomited after witnessing the tight rope sequence across the World Trade Center towers in Robert Zemeckis’s film “The Walk”. The fact is it’s a bad trigger for Vertigo sufferers, but the scene itself is not made to be a thrilling stunt. It actually slows the film, away from the madcap whimsy of Zemeckis’s biopic and to something a little more peaceful, tranquil and spiritual.

And yet for all the CGI wizardry and IMAX, 3D spectacle for which “The Walk” is earning its buzz, Zemeckis never manages a moment as beautifully weightless as James Marsh does with just still images and Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1” in the Oscar winning documentary “Man on Wire”. “The Walk” is weighed down not only by its storytelling building up to the walk but in its spectacle.

Philippe Petit managed a daring stunt upon the completion of the World Trade Center towers in New York by dangling a wire across the 140 feet of the two buildings and walking across, 110 stories off the ground. The performance was a coup, a beautiful demonstration against the law, and the movie charts not only Petit’s madness but the pain and struggle it took to sneak past the guards to make his art.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Petit, and although he’s not French and doesn’t quite look the part, he’s a spunky song and dance man capable of embodying Petit’s goofy, circus charms and showmanship. He’s also perfectly insufferable, narrating his life story from atop the Statue of Liberty no less, the towers idling in the background as though 9/11 never happened.

It’s the laziest sort of storytelling, in which not only does Zemeckis opt to tell us Petit’s story rather than show us, Gordon-Levitt seems all too eager to do so and lays the whimsy of becoming a wire walker on thick. Gordon-Levitt butts up against the equally galling accent of Ben Kingsley as Petit’s Czech mentor, and the early chapters of the film range from cheesy to grating.

“You’re doing too much,” Kingsley’s character says to Petit about how to be sincere in performance. “Do nothing!” Zemeckis would’ve been good to heed this advice, for as we wait for the 3-D to make itself useful during the walk sequence, Zemeckis throws juggling pins and balls at the camera and has Petit showboat or spin a globe to keep things alive.

Things liven up a bit when Zemeckis switches to caper mode, diving into how Petit spies on the Twin Tower construction crews, builds his team of accomplices, and tries to rig his equipment while avoiding detection. “Man on Wire” did this wonderfully, donning a style that borrowed from Errol Morris but had energy all its own. “The Walk” suffers from a few stock characters like a flaky stoner and some negative nellies constantly telling Petit it’s impossible.

“The Walk” also doesn’t get inside Petit’s art as strongly as “Man on Wire” does. Marsh knew that the artistry of Petit’s act was in the coup, defying the law but in a peaceful, beautiful way. “The Walk” is all about the thrill and spiritual sensation of its major set piece. The camera throughout the movie teases the sensation of staring downward until finally it cranes overhead and sees to infinity. Its movements around Petit are slow and feel treacherous, but only to the extent that we sense each of Petit’s steps and feel comfortable in his shoes.

As James Marsh accepted his Oscar, Petit joined him on stage and said, “Thank you to the Academy for continuing to believe in magic,” performing a slight of hand trick and then balancing Marsh’s Oscar upside down on his chin. It was an unexpected moment of levity that immediately deflated the stuffy airiness from the Oscar ceremony. “The Walk” is a movie that aims to be full of those moments, whimsical and endearing to the point of being insufferable. At least up on that wire he shuts up for a moment.

2 ½ stars

Sicario

Denis Villeneuve’s slow-burn thriller about Mexican drug cartels stars Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro

sicarioposterFBI Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is recruited by the CIA’s Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) to help infiltrate a Mexican drug cartel. She feels lost and out of bounds, outside of her comfort zone and jurisdiction, and she asks the DoD “consultant” Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) what exactly is their objective. “You’re asking me how a watch works,” Alejandro implies, intricate and detailed yes, but more importantly difficult and near impossible to understand.

“Sicario” is a film about frustration. Like “Zero Dark Thirty” before it, Kate Macer is a woman trying to see in the dark and coming up empty. Denis Villeneuve’s tightly wound thriller binds its main character in confusion, ambiguity and a lack of information. The audience finds only a little more clarity but can feel the slow-burn tension sink in as Kate continues to go deeper, unsure of what she’ll find.

Kate’s most recent raid uncovered a house filled with bodies lining the inside of the drywall, each bound and wrapped in a plastic bag around their head. Despite the gruesome failure of the operation, she’s whisked away by the CIA’s Matt Graver, his flip flops and casual demeanor in stark contrast to her worn and by-the-book dedication to her job.

Matt’s details are scant, and instead of taking her to El Paso, she’s brought along on a job in Mexico. She’s part of a massive convoy that rolls into the country to pick up a cartel prisoner, then crosses back over the border to interrogate him. Villeneuve makes us helpless passengers and reluctant spectators, with the convoy calling complete attention to itself and with sinister looking gang bangers itching their trigger fingers in between rows of civilian traffic at the Mexican-American border. The musical score in this scene has a wonderful low droning of horns and the dragging of chains or stones as a chopper flies by.

The intention of this and several of the film’s operations are never completely clear, but in Benicio Del Toro we get a brilliant character who stands apart from the other agents and strikes fear into everyone on screen. Villeneuve and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan carefully tap into the idea that Kate and everyone else involved are really playing toward his agenda. His ruthless, yet incredibly subdued performance is one of the finer supporting jobs of the year.

This fear of uncertainty of an agenda and of a direction manifests itself brilliantly in a night-vision sequence that recalls and perhaps surpasses “Zero Dark Thirty”. Villeneuve has a different approach to tension and suspense than Kathryn Bigelow. As in “Prisoners” the tension is heavy but it’s a constant, slow burn simmer rather than a gradual build-up and eruption. When Kate and the team put down cartel gunmen at the border, they do so not in a chaotic firefight but in a terse and emotionless takedown.

“Sicario” never finds as compelling of a feminist role for Kate as one might hope, and yet the film is not trying to be a “Silence of the Lambs” story of a woman in a man’s world. Sheridan also tries to build sympathy for a Mexican cop and his family who get caught up in the action, but Villeneuve never earns the real pathos Sheridan is looking for.

Still, “Sicario” is a knockout, a riveting, art house action thriller that’s complex and ambiguous. It’s a film about seeing in the dark, and it’s no wonder the results come out just a little murky.

3 ½ stars

He Named Me Malala

Davis Guggenheim tells the life story of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.

HeNamedMeMalalaPosterI first knew of Malala Yousafzai when she appeared on “The Daily Show” in 2013 and completely humbled Jon Stewart. She talked of what she would do if the Taliban did in fact come for her, saying she would opt for peace instead of hitting the man with her shoe. She got a laugh from the line, but she admitted if she had done that she’d be no better than the Taliban. Stewart leaned back, put his hands over his mouth in stunned disbelief at the person he was talking to and the story he was hearing. He exhaled deeply and asked if he could adopt her. “You sure are swell”.

Malala is swell, not only an inspirational survivor but a young, adorable charmer capable of doing a magic trick on a late night talk show and then bringing the audience to their knees with her thoughts on women’s rights for education. Getting an intimate look at her would be ideal in a documentary, not least in a Davis Guggenheim documentary. Guggenheim’s docs are the best at being entertaining and heartwarming, and his last feature documentary “Waiting for Superman” even tackled the failing American education system.

“He Named Me Malala” however is only interested in just how swell Malala can be. Guggenheim is more interested in seeing what she got on her high school physics test than in seeing what she believes. His film is plenty cute and crowd pleasing, but also horribly cloying and hardly worthy of the substance Malala has brought to the global stage.

When Malala was just 14 she began speaking out against the Taliban in her hometown of Swat in Pakistan. The Taliban blew up schools in the name of Islam and denied women basic privileges to shop, to dance, to educate themselves. Malala took a stand and was shot for her words. She barely survived but has since left Pakistan and taken her story and her message abroad. Malala became the youngest Noble Peace Prize nominee in 2013 and won it the following year.

Guggenheim takes us step by step through how Malala was shot and how she recovered. We see X-rays of her skull, we see a diagram of the bus she was riding on, and we see graphic photos of blood on the seat where she sat. Is this even remotely necessary?

Guggenheim’s obsession with these tear jerking details show how misplaced his priorities are, not to mention his film’s tone. He can go from a light-hearted scene of wondering if Malala would ever ask out a boy to talking about a beheading. It spends so much time vilifying the Taliban, as if American audiences needed to be anymore convinced.

“He Named Me Malala” takes us through Malala’s childhood, what she thinks of her classes in London, her fame, her polarizing stature back home, and most of all her endearing family life. Malala’s two brothers are perfectly cute, and they speak of their older sister like any boy would. Guggenheim even shows Malala and her brothers arm wrestling, as if to say that Malala is strong mentally and physically.

These moments however dominate a film that would be better suited revolving around her passion for education. Watch her “Daily Show” interview again and you’ll get a powerfully clear reason why she believes education will be the thing to stop a third World War. Guggenheim believes it has all to do with her tragic past, asking her at one point, “You don’t like to talk about your suffering?” There are a few fleeting moments where Guggenheim follows Malala into a classroom in Kenya, and suddenly we see that she has an effortless gift for teaching.

More of these scenes would appropriately visualize why Malala is such an inspiring figure. Guggenheim though cheapens Malala’s achievements through another one of his frustrating cinematic quirks: animation. Malala becomes a small stick figure, and her words are literally written in gold, floating through the wind over the airwaves to the people of the world.

If “He Named Me Malala” finds a lot to love about Malala, that’s easy enough. What’s difficult is realizing that Malala is more than her age, her survival story and her name.

2 ½ stars