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. 
Update 2018: How I do love this movie. If Altman’s oneiric fluctuations and clouded, evasive truths are as wonderfully resistant to crystallization as always at the beginning of 3 Women, they eventually sour into full-on psychotropic nightmare by the conclusion. By the film’s end, Altman holds life in a Janus-faced state of simultaneous free-fall and resting haunt. It won’t be for everyone, but catching this film’s wave-length is uniquely rewarding precisely because it is so slippery, its mind so hauntingly unquiet, ever-still but always subtly shifting with a frightening lack of clarification.
It is not a new or interesting argument to rain down laurels upon silent cinema for its vigorous, transformative sense of cinematic self-exploration. No time in cinema history matches the medium’s earliest years for pure ecstatic inventiveness and unbridled, unhinged storytelling experimentation. No time has seen directors and cinematographers and editors, and even producers for that matter, ever so consistently transfixed by the potential of exposing the cinematic mind by pushing it to its breaking point and moving beyond the grip of narrative storytelling to look for new and exciting ways to freshly portray the limits of fiction on screen. No time has ever been as hungry, or as invested in film for the sake of film itself.
In honor of their seventy-fifth anniversary in 2015, I present a pair of reviews for my two favorite Disney animated releases, both released in the same year, 1940, and both far more challenging and transformative than any feature film the company has yet released since. The two introductory paragraphs of the reviews are identical or nearly identical, but the meat of the reviews are film-specific.
In honor of their seventy-fifth anniversary in 2015, I present a pair of reviews for my two favorite Disney animated releases, both released in the same year, 1940, and both far more challenging and transformative than any feature film the company has yet released since. The two introductory paragraphs of the reviews are identical or nearly identical, but the meat of the reviews are film-specific.
Update upon another viewing in 2017:
David Lynch knows his way around a controversy, and if he is often contrarian for contrarian’s sake, knocking him for this does a huge disservice to the simple beauty of the act of being contrarian. It denies the cantankerous danger and dreamy nightmare-like quality of something that is so elementally arbitrary, so devoid of meaning, so ruthlessly anti-sensical. It does a disservice to the idea that something can simply exist for itself and the joy of being itself. It is in this region, despite all his other narrative pretensions and the very real sense of specific, pointed, subversive purpose to each and every shot in each of his films, where David Lynch skulks about. His films do not really exist purely for their own sake – there is a clear through-line and object of critique in each of his films, but they come closer to pure lunacy, to pure invention for invention’s sake, than almost any director since the era of silent film. In the world of today, if we limit ourselves to American directors, he has more to say about how film is made, and how images and sounds move beyond theme and story and into pure effect, than any other director. He’s having a hell of a lot more fun than anyone else while he’s at it too.
The Long Take 