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What a gleefully macabre noir masquerading as neo-realist drama this is. From Bong Joon-ho, the director of The Host and the astoundingly underrated Memories of Murder, comes a film that manages to both swaggeringly eviscerate expectations by shifting gears every thirty minutes while also remaining so confident and thoroughly quiet about its gusto that it flows like butter. This film is dark and dreary, with a wonderfully droll sense of humor, and it brings new life to detective conventions by casting a middle-aged mother (Hye-Ja played by Kim Hye-Ja) as a detective with a personal stake in the crime. It’s a true pitch-black pleasure. Continue reading
As we keep on barreling forward toward Marvel’s Phase Three films and pretending it will be meaningfully different from Phase Two or Phase One, Marvel continues to pass the time along the way by merrily trucking along with more of the same. Well, I should be generous – each film is ever-so-slightly different while still managing to lie easily within the series’ collective less-than-notable ambitions. For this 2014 sequel to the competent 2011 cheer-fest, things get a little bit darker and more socially confused as the filmmakers choose to mash-up their consummate action-stravaganza with a political thriller that aims to reshape the Marvel Cinematic Universe (that the filmmakers are under the impression the Marvel Cinematic Universe is well-defined enough to be meaningfully “reshaped” speaks more to the egos at play than anything else, as well as the film’s self-conscious bid for serious-film status). Unfortunately, and as is becoming a common problem for this series, the film’s ambitions are somewhat undone by the all-encompassing fact that it just had to go and be a Marvel film. That it is one of the better ones while still being essentially an also-ran should tell you all you need to know about how you’ll come down in the end. But either way, solid filmmaking in the name of a somewhat tepid goal continues to be the name of the game, for better or for worse.
It’s a thing of wonder that filmmaker JC Chandor made the mostly silent All is Lost, his second film, directly after the dialogue-stricken Margin Call, a corporate thriller (perhaps the most dialogue-heavy genre in existence), his feature debut. Of course, the difference between the two is more one of taste, but this second film, which knows not the realism of dialogue and must rely on the more affectingly filmic lens of pure imagery, is more satisfying as an elemental wonder and a parable of human loneliness. The narrative is archly straightforward, uninterested in fussy complication or false villains. We have an old man (Robert Redford) and we have a sea (well, the Indian Ocean), and these old friends find themselves for once on the opposite sides of an argument. We follow them as they resolve it. 
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Where-as most film series tend to decline in quality with age, time has been kind to Tom Cruise and his chosen cash-cow, the Mission Impossible films. While this 2011 entry lacks Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s deliciously bored villain, no small part of why III was the best entry in the series up to that point, it’s an improvement in just about every other way. Above all, and most surprisingly, it has a sense of humility. In its treatment of its characters less as too-kewl-for-school icons and more as confused, kinda-wacky cartoon personalities defined less by their self-serious gloom than much smaller, much more affecting and endearing character moments, it finally approaches a sense of identity for a series that often seemed happy-go-lucky to ape other franchises. This is a “big” film, but it doesn’t feel “big” in the way other blockbusters do – it has a lived-in quality, less about one man doing stunts than a team struggling to get along and admit they’re enjoying themselves while doing it (although it certainly has plenty of the former as well). At times, it even mocks the self-seriousness of other blockbuster franchises, and implicitly, itself in the process. It would appear what they say about looking back on your misfortune with a smirk is true. At the least, MIIV believes it is true, and it wants us to know it too. 
The significant resurgence of the Western genre since about 2005 (for reasons I’m not entirely sure of) is one of the few truly surprisingly revelations from the cinematic world to be found this past decade. It’s all the more notable particularly because the Westerns themselves have taken so many different forms, from pure, effervescent myth-making, to black-hearted heaving gasps of grimy moral decay, to slowly gliding, almost Impressionist location tapestries where characters serve merely as extensions of the environment, to plain ol’ rootin-tootin shoot em’ up character studies.
Star Trek is so light on its feet and cheerfully reckless it is almost impossible to dislike. Except that it does a whole lot worthy of disliking. This is a film wholly dedicated to lean, mean, efficient summer-blockbuster filmmaking. And if it is a decent entertainment for this reason, it sure isn’t interested in doing away with many of the flaws found in modern mainstream blockbusters. Yes, when it came out in 2009 it was the perfect fix for weary summer movie goers tired of sequels and superhero films, and, as the icing on the cake, it filled a void for Star Wars fanboys who couldn’t get over George Lucas’ recent efforts. Except…apparently what they wanted was a rather competent blockbuster so concerned with action it fails to concern itself with anything else. This achieves the rather depressing goal of creating a fairly solid and sturdy action extravaganza, while also somewhat sapping the film of most of its heart and soul. 
The Long Take 