James Gray’s 2013 melodrama The Immigrant is not much of a story, but then, the same can be said of so many of the very best films ever made. How many of the classically-ornamented melodramas The Immigrant so obviously recalls boil down to one or two now-cliches (and tropes that were, rest assured, cliches in the 1940s as well) hammered home with worldly, elegant filmmaking? Many, quite a bit more than we may think, but here, as it is true there, the factor so often missing from plot summary reviews is that a plot summary is not a film, and that magisterial filmmaking makes a film, not its plot outline. We do not need another story about a prostitute with a heart, one of the most well-worn tropes in film history (and a sexist one, for it implies that a normal prostitute does not have a heart). But we have one, and if it isn’t a magisterial work of storytelling, its solid, and that, in the end, is all that matters.
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Review: The Immigrant
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JC Chandor’s third film in four years, and possibly his best, firmly establishes him as a leading voice for a new generation of gifted filmmakers taking up the history of classic cinema and creating the future out of the past. His three films, a dialogue-heavy corporate thriller, a dialogue-free survival parable knowing desperation as well as quiet agony, and now a tone poem to a city in the guise of a ’70s-styled crime thriller, all owe an equal amount to the nervy, alert grit of ’70s cinema and add on a modernist, even impressionist edge to focus more on space and abstract mood to go with the concrete grime of his films’ physicality.
Kevin Macdonald more often dons the cap of documentarian than fiction filmmaker, and his Black Sea shows it. He brings a grimy, festering, “you are there” realism to this lean, efficient work. This story of a deep, dark sea revealing mankind’s darker heart puts Jude Law in the position of a beleaguered, disgruntled, Scottish workaday ship captain unceremoniously fired from his day job. He takes it upon himself to seek a personal form of revenge and get rich quick in a damp, deep excursion into the crumpled, blistered quarters of a worn out submarine, surrounding himself with a crew of unsavory, functional types and the hopes and dreams of a treasure of gold deep within the hard-lost depths of the Black Sea. Troubles abound, from tension within the men, to physical difficulties in actually procuring the gold, to corporate lies and deceit, but all of them filter through and debate with the darkest secret of all: man’s worst enemy in his own unquiet self. If it sounds like a story out of the rough-and-tumble mid-’60s, a Sam (Fuller or Peckinpah, take your pick) or John Sturges dude-picaresque “picture” (as opposed to a film or a movie), you’d be right. It’s an ode to a style of film lost today, a sort of rivetingly adult, high-concept entertainment as scruffy and chiseled as a machine after a hard day’s work, and, for what its worth, it earns the comparison. 
I am not supposed to like Blackhat, or so I am told. I am told it has a poorly focused narrative, that it is messy, and that it is reckless. I am told that it is emotionally inert. If this is so, then my conception of emotion is very different from the majority of the modern viewing public. It seems as though people have forgotten that most Michael Mann films boast questionable screenplays and know not emotion in their narrative. It seems viewers have misplaced their understanding of who Michael Mann is, for Blackhat boasts the same strengths and weaknesses of any Mann film, and in some ways its successes are even greater than anything he has made since the turn of the century. Blackhat is, at the level of narrative, poorly focused, messy, reckless, and perhaps emotionally inert, but it is not artistically anything of these, and the same can arguably be said of any of Mann’s films. 
The Long Take 