Remembering and recounting: one story in one city becomes a universal experience in Innocence of Memories, which turns the art of storytelling into a story in itself. The film is an exquisite collage of sound and image, each interwoven in several strands whose precise combination triggers a precise, yet infinitely variable, response in the viewer; it is the very definition of 'multi-layered'. Grant Gee is assembling his interpretation with those of his fellow storytellers - we hear a man's account of his experiences in love told to a writer, that writer's account absorbed and reacted to by a related party, her opinions filtered through a filmmaker's vision. Intense, empathetic connections are established within these accounts, and suggested by the specificity of Gee's mise-en-scene, meandering through the streets of Istanbul, collecting sights and sounds of tangible intimacy. The process of taking in these different viewpoints on the same matters, each referring directly to another account on said matters, is not as reductive as it might easily have been - as one interpretation is superimposed onto another, it becomes an expansive process, one whose reach is limitless in the supposition that the viewer too will contribute to it. As such, Gee recognises his position as a secondary subject within the narrative of his film, and Innocence of Memories becomes a work about itself, and all other works of art. An author, a photographer, an actor: all creators, and all reactors. Their subject is their inspiration, their work is their tribute, their produce helps to define its identity. Innocence of Memories is Istanbul as it is remembered, and, in the recounting, it is Istanbul as it will be remembered.
Amy Berg finds time for fun in a filmography otherwise scant on the subject; Janis: Little Girl Blue might best be described as bittersweet, though joyously unconcerned with courting this aspect of its nature, which is much too raucous to wallow in its woes. As Janis Joplin herself was so keenly in touch with her emotions, and as Berg's portrait of her presents one exhibit of proof after another, she never discovered a healthy outlet for this hyper-sensitivity, instead pouring it out in her astonishing performances, and holding it in the rest of the time, restraining it with readily-available vices. Janis: Little Girl Blue is not the tortured soul its subject was, though Berg's dispassionate presentation of Joplin does permit a thorough and perceptive appreciation of her spirit; we learn all we need from archive footage of this inimitable artist on stage, in the studio and speaking candidly, only ever candidly, in interviews and in letters, read aloud in voiceover from Cat Power - perfectly cast. It's poignant and portentous, but also pleasurable, watching so bright a star explode in such a dazzling display of inspiration, and burn out with horrifying haste. There's an early suggestion of similar artistry from the filmmakers, a bold, rhythmic choice of editing that occurs once more later in the film, but only once more; the rest of Janis: Little Girl Blue is disappointingly banal as a work of art in itself. Possessing none of the inherent urgency and importance of its director's other documentary works, this is a fun but functional summation of a short but spectacular life.
In spite of all its missteps and melodramatics, Atom Egoyan's Remember maintains a straightforward simplicity from its very first frame to its very last. It is a film about memory, whether regarding the effects of remembering, or of not remembering, or the effects upon memory of old age, and of a long life revisited in a short space of time. In these regards, it is a thoughtful, thorough and profound film, no less exhaustive of its subject due to its narrative directness and its lean runtime, since this subject is such an integral component of that narrative, and since Christopher Plummer delivers such a deeply-felt performance, one of his very best. An elderly man crippled by dementia, he searches for truths in the world around him that he can barely even search for in his own mind. He seeks revenge for the most heinous historic crimes, but can barely even find the clarity to comprehend the true purpose and the real significance behind his search. Benjamin August's screenplay stumbles gracelessly through several contrivances to achieve its own purpose, yet does so with consistent effectiveness - our protagonist's recollective insecurity demonstrates the damage that memory loss has done to him, whilst also inflicting further damages, of varying degrees, on his external environment. Equally, Remember displays to us the importance of remembering, our duty to ourselves and to others to never forget; the film's final scene carries the tone of a schloky shocker, but its thematic weight only increases the more one ruminates upon it. Egoyan fashions his film like the B-movie you never knew you wanted, turning Paul Sarossy's pallidly-lit interiors into blank canvases of horrible banality, made fit for even the most unimaginable of horror, with Mychael Danna's ominous score providing invaluable assistance. He turns it into an exploitation flick, a genre product that you weren't expecting, but that he handles with typical verve.
A giant leap for Werner Herzog, disguised as a small step. Exotic historical epics are the kind of project his career was built upon, yet they always possessed a fierce, angular, unhinged contrariness, as if born out of the fires of blazing creation, new and unformed. Queen of the Desert is calm and smooth, born out of a simmering smoulder, contrary only to one's expectations of what Herzog might concoct out of such a promising premise. It's an exercise in cultural excavation, though whereas our protagonist Gertrude Bell sought to understand the cultures of the Middle East's native tribes, Herzog seeks to understand that of a landscape equally foreign to him - Hollywood. This is a straight-up recreation of a classic Hollywood epic, albeit shot through with an occasional jolt of Herzogian weirdness, weirdly sporadic. In this, one senses our director's inquisitiveness, inspired and informed by Bell's inquisitiveness; it's buried beneath layers of glossy period design, and it's intellectually shallow, but it exists all the same, and does so to give Queen of the Desert an identifiable purpose. Alas, otherwise this film is in rather desperate need of depth, struck down by too many technical distractions. Herzog is still seeking to understand by the end, I feel, never truly settling on his subject to display any real insight. The dialogue leaves much to be desired - ditto performances from James Franco and Robert Pattinson - though excerpts from Bell's diaries read in voiceover by Nicole Kidman provide poetic relief, and contribute notably toward the timbre of this undeniably artful period piece. Between the expansive visuals and the immersive sound, one appreciates the detail which has been put into this recreation, in its partially successful attempt at meaningful, memorable cultural excavation.
A wry character drama from Iceland, as gnarly as its terrain, and as warm as its weather is not. This is true situational comedy, in that its physical situation informs almost every aspect of its narrative content, including a generous supply of droll humour. Rams is a gentle film, keen on evoking a sense of familiarity in its dim, close interiors and richly picturesque landscape shots; it's a fundamentally tactile film, with a close bond with its climate, and Grimur Hakonarson deploys all of his artistic acumen to indelible effect. Most persuasive about Rams is the lack of overt persuasion: Hakonarson stresses little in his efforts to express a lot - a smart ploy, as his film's main thematic thrust is of repressed emotional intimacy, unspoken thoughts and feelings in close quarters, the stuff of silence and slight gestures. Perhaps he is even too liberal in this regard, as certain minor plot developments are dealt with in an unnecessarily opaque manner, and Hakonarson's strong sense of humour has already diluted the austerity of his form as director, and to welcome ends; Rams is best when it openly embraces its audience, rather than abandoning it in the blizzard. Speaking of which: the closing passage may be formulaic, but it ends this film on a note of real, earnest intimacy, an act of upending only achievable through a series of apparent contrivances, but one that places the entire film before it in a new, altogether more affecting light. You'll forgive it its few flaws - it's just too effective at what it aspires towards not to.
America almost eats itself alive in Welcome to Leith - America as a microcosm, its vast swathes of unoccupied land whose purpose and character are somehow dictated, and occupied, by the influence and control of so few. Europe destroyed America, an act of destruction that is, as yet, unfinished; it's in the power lines bisecting once-beautiful landscapes, and it's in the bigotry whose effect leaves even larger scars. Evil turns up in Leith, North Dakota, that much is clear; less clear is what was there before, and what was left there after. Welcome to Leith unwittingly makes you look closer, to uncover something even more frightening - this isn't a battle between good and bad, it's a battle between bad and worse. So this isn't the most thorough, nor incisive documentary, but it is enlightening, and wholly riveting. Its barren landscapes and brutish architecture are the ideal stage for a horror show, and when one shows up, the film willingly succumbs to its potential to invoke terror upon its audience. Directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker eventually relent, permitting a welcome amount of measured objectivity to permeate their portrait of Craig Cobb, the white supremacist who invades this minuscule city and draws out the very worst in its residents with his very best. It's an ugly portrait, as it should be, but not an ignorant one, though once again Welcome to Leith suffers from a slight lack of depth - as with the other inhabitants of Leith, much of what we glean about Cobb is due to the viewer's own investigations and assumptions, not the filmmakers'. By no means is it their duty to spell everything out for us, but an acknowledgement that they're at least capable of it wouldn't have gone unappreciated. What I gleaned was a dumbfounding degree of irony, in the neo-Nazis' embrace of Northern European culture they couldn't be less aligned to, and in the Leith townspeople's warped interpretation of tolerance. Welcome to Leith is, in the end, only as deep a film as you make of it.
Stephen Fingleton assembles what little he can on an evidently scant budget into an engaging, convincing thriller that's too aware of what it aspires to be to notice what it already is. There's fine technique on display in The Survivalist - ostensibly mere technique for technique's sake, but it's keenly atmospheric in Fingleton's astute use of sound and the correspondence he forms between his film and its few locations. The trouble arises when The Survivalist nods its head toward some grander sense of societal significance. You get what you're given, naturally, and there's an inevitability to this thread of the film, its essentiality as an element of staple post-apocalyptic stories. A chilling opening image aside, however, Fingleton betrays his film's neatly calibrated insularity not by the necessary intrusions, but by a narrative extrusion, the formation of an ugly, unseemly context at the very end that upsets one's interpretations of what has gone before. If Fingleton borrows 99% of what he showcases in The Survivalist, he at least puts much of it to good use in his execution of his overall scheme; it's that scheme where these borrowed materials are of shoddy origin, shoddily exploited for shoddy purpose. Your recollection of the rest of the film deserves better than this, better than the confirmation that this isn't just another post-apocalyptic thriller - it's yet another post-apocalyptic thriller. In case of apocalypse, might I suggest we make every effort to save Mia Goth? She bungles the accent, but nails every other element of her character, and boasts a dramatic range you'd hardly have expected to emerge from such a humdrum role. Literally, she's all that survives.
Measure a movie by what it gets right, not by what it doesn't get at all. But measure it too by what it gets wrong, the challenges it sets itself and fails to meet. Dissonance is a perceptive short, made with genuine artistic endeavour and psychological insight; made also with shortcomings in both fields that undermine its good intentions. Till Nowak's film has aspirations toward beauty and profundity in equal measure - in aspiring to marry these together too, it achieves a level of conceptual consonance that ought to have been served by greater precision in its execution, finer development and, alas, a more generous time frame. Nowak harbours ambitions too grand for a mere quarter of an hour, and technical resources that shortchange the integrity of his impressive designs, which often display a promising accord between his film's message and its method. Would that Dissonance's focus were more acutely drawn, its features less formulaic, its dialogue less didactic, its tone a tad more grounded. There's a real fantasy in the delusions depicted herein, and it's an emotionally resonant one - too many quirks spoil the picture, and Dissonance acquires the unfortunate tone of a silly student project. The beauty and the profundity to which Nowak aspires remain, nevertheless, tainted but intact, and thus so too does his promise. A grander scale to match his grand ambitions ought to serve this filmmaker well. From inwards to onwards and upwards from here!
A group of egotistical environmentalists travels the world on a quest to... I don't know, become one with it or something? They travel by plane, helicopter, boat, truck, motorcycle, whatever they require in order to fulfill their self-fulfilling objectives, but also to return something to this world, like planting a tree. Much like many dumb action blockbusters are movies for stupid conservatives, Point Break is a movie for stupid liberals, which to me seems glaringly oxymoronic, though not nearly as much as traversing half the planet simply to honour and replenish it. But when your characters spout dialogue like they do in Point Break, you realise there'd be little point in alerting them to the error of their ways, cos would they even understand it? For the rest of us, this film is tricky enough to understand. The first hurdle is the challenge to care, when confronted with stock characters doing silly things. The second challenge is to keep caring, as those characters suddenly begin behaving in baffling ways that seem to betray their very nature, but also as you begin to realise that Point Break's supposed liberalism (one of the few things holding its head above the water at all) is only skin deep, and it's actually yet another sexist, racist piece of Hollywood-produced shit. Extraordinary feats are presented with ordinary bombast - stylistically, this mitigates their power, though Point Break is successful at least at presenting a catalogue of awe-inspiring, terrifying stunts. In this, it's a passable display of more-than-passable work, and the first movie in a long time to make me yell startled profanities at the screen, in public. Eschewing the homoeroticism of Kathryn Bigelow's original turns out to be counter-productive - it's just about the only element that could have rendered this film's story convincing, and anyway, it'd be a much better movie for it. The main thing it's missing? An extreme sports gay sex scene.
We're all fucked! If that's the message that Louie Psihoyos would like you to derive from Racing Extinction, he certainly goes a long way toward denouncing it. There's a corny cheerfulness about this film that embeds itself into the justifiable terror and tragedy at its core early, but becomes particularly potent in its final stretches. Extinction has never looked so cosy, nor should it, as platitudes masquerading as inspirational slogans adorn the exterior walls of the U.N. Headquarters in New York, and a city full of armchair liberals gawps with glee. The only changes worth making will be inspired not by the pithy pandering that closes out Racing Extinction (set to a Sia song, no less), but by a genuine response to the genuine horror that Psihoyos presents prior to it. The world around us is dying, and we're responsible - this message is clear, if familiar, but the urgency with which it is made adds a distressing timbre to that clarity. We really are all fucked, and Racing Extinction is a colourful, memorable, slightly too comfortable declaration of despair, capped off with hope that one wonders maybe we'd be better off - less complacent - without. Artistically, there's no question that this film would be better off without it: alternately a twee TV wildlife documentary and a skin-deep expose, Psihoyos' passion is practically all there is going for his film, ensuring that the most salient points get put across even as the film around them settles for soft-peddled banality. There's nothing banal about the end of the world! Take what you will from Racing Extinction, but if you don't take that crucial sense of urgency from it, then please: since we're all fucked anyway, you can go fuck yourself.
Journalists, historians and real people: their memories, their stories, up close and upfront. David Evans - the filmmaker, the artist - yields to the inherent simplicity of this everyday, analytical approach, content in the complexity of what it abundantly reveals. My Nazi Legacy is clear and comprehensive, yet characterised by a disarming intimacy and depth of thought that resonate far longer than any potential artistic interpretation - smartly eschewed by Evans. It could have run on for over twice its length, or been snipped to a mere scene or two, and it'd have fulfilled its mandate to inquire, to seek out truths about today that can only be uncovered through delving into the past. In that, My Nazi Legacy is the ideal length: however long it happens to be. There is more basic intelligence in this film than in almost every other, acquired via Philippe Sands' astute co-ordination of dispassionate objectivity and informed, emotional subjectivity, though also via the candour of his subjects, Niklas Frank and Horst von Wachter, lifelong friends and children of high-ranking Nazis. As a plain old rumination on the past - indeed, on a period of the past already ruminated on countless times before - My Nazi Legacy is incisive, if somewhat dry and lacking in revelation. As a rumination on the endurance of evil, and the peculiar relationship between family, character and principle, it's a banner work of documentary filmmaking. In fact, it functions less as a film as we have come to understand that concept, and more as a work of historical journalism - memories and stories, up close and upfront.
I admire Daniel Dencik. I think he's a decent director. He knows where to place his camera. He knows how to elicit strong performances from his entire cast of actors. He knows how to instill a palpable sense of place and atmosphere in his films. But I don't admire Gold Coast. It both undermines his skill and draws attention to the deficiencies therein. It provides obvious opportunities for technical excellence, and a wealth of meaty characters for select members of its ensemble, but stops far short of providing similar opportunities for greatness - the kind of greatness to which surely all historical epics aspire. On these grounds, Gold Coast is a tolerable effort, neither as good as it wants to be nor as bad as it could have been. On broader grounds, however, it transpires that it is only said technical excellence, and said strong performances from the cast that keep Gold Coast afloat - its most damning deficiency resides in the very core of its conceit. Alas, this is yet another cinematic paean to white triumph, a film that exalts its Caucasian hero above all others, only praising its native African characters for exceeding what lowly expectations we're primed to have of them. The white man struggles and we're supposed to feel for him, he becomes enlightened and we're supposed to respect him, he only doesn't abuse the slaves he nevertheless maintains and we're supposed to applaud him; is there not something fundamentally awry when a majority of a film's ensemble is black and yet we're only supposed to even notice them when its white leads do? The intentions in Dencik and Sara Isabella Jonsson Vedde's screenplay are as respectful as they are reductive, and plainly ignorant. Only for the adequacy of Daniel Dencik's technique and the commitment of Jakob Oftebro (pants literally clinging to peen) in the lead, does Gold Coast survive the impossible challenge it sets itself: how to be a good movie when you're also racist as fuck?
The truth of the matter: before the spin, beyond the hyperbole, beneath the bias. Believe what you want, but the truth exists still - unchanged, undeterred, unheard of by those who insist on believing only what they want. The truth of James Vanderbilt's Truth: before the misinterpretations, beyond the misinformation, beneath the mismanagement of a story founded upon the principle of truth - this is a good movie, with a good heart, besieged by bad handling. Vanderbilt leans too heavily on what we can glean for ourselves, layering the heroism on thick and hard, spinning a story that was already spoilt by spin. He buries the truth his film seeks, discovers and otherwise delineates effectively, and almost buries the entire film as a result. The Spielbergian touch is present, there in the inquisitive (male) youth, and the dogged, integrity-driven (male) journo; the acting meets the low standard set by the writing, save the mighty Cate Blanchett. She takes a leaf from her character's book, struggling against the weight of a system determined to destroy her, propelled through each scene by sheer drive to overcome, to allow Truth to truly get to that truth it wishes to tell. The first half of Truth is all trailer-ready soundbites and cute, insincere edits; the second half settles somewhat, fuelled less by the desire to ignite the box office, more by the desire to ignite fury in the viewer. It's no artistic triumph, but it's at least worth the wait. And here, James Vanderbilt genuinely does get to the truth of the matter. It's a good movie, but you'd be forgiven for missing that.
Art through the eyes of an artist: an experience of education and enlightenment, and also an exercise in solipsistic indulgence. Aleksandr Sokurov has forever traded in bedazzlement and befuddlement, but while the purpose of Francofonia feels sound, the intentions behind it naturally evident in this wondrous catalogue of sumptuous artworks, its delivery is fundamentally wrong. Truly, the last thing that any of Sokurov's films needs is a sensation of triviality; Francofonia is as restless, as ephemeral, as innately indistinct as anything he's done before, but it's all undercut by a jarring inconsequentiality. The director's rambling narration neither illuminates nor compliments, blighted by insights that feel alternately obvious and irrelevant, and musings on art and history that come across far more narcissistic than they ought to, coming from one of cinema's most singular artists himself. The flippancy that this inspires in the film only encourages distance on the viewer's part, rendering Francofonia less the immersive experience it was surely intended to be, more of an unfocused essay piece. Dips into modern abstraction don't work well; better are the scripted scenes, where Sokurov's inimitable appreciation of how to link the complexity of human thought and emotion with a legitimate, unintrusive artistic scheme is allowed to flourish. And the film is sprinkled with moments of genuine inspiration and dramatic pull - it's far from a write-off. But perhaps so direct a focus on something much more easily distinguishable than human psychology has proved too simplistic, too distinct for this filmmaker, whose idiosyncratic indistinction does little to flatter it.
The thrill of watching a completed work that's also a work-in-progress. Sherpa is practically produced before our eyes, ostensibly one out-of-the-ordinary true story transformed into an extraordinary true story by tragedy and turmoil. Jennifer Peedom is uncovering a deeper, more resonant truth than the ephemeral relationship between obnoxious Westerners and their magnificent subject, Mt. Everest; her subjects are the Sherpas, and the truth she relays of their relationship with Chomolungma is, too, transformed by tragedy and turmoil, and in an infinitely more profound manner. The final side to the triangle completes Sherpa in a most satisfactory way, chronicling the interaction between these two groups of people, uncovering deeper truths still about humanity, confirming suggestions and suspicions and transforming this film into a psychological study that's even more unexpected than the avalanche that engenders it. Jennifer Peedom's film is, by turns, horrifying, terrifying and triumphant, not merely by virtue of a smart choice of subject in a remarkable, accidental circumstance, but by a genuine respect for the Sherpa people. She enters into this project with clarity, humility and respect; in depicting Sherpa culture with simplicity, honesty, a lack of ambiguity yet an appreciation that this depiction could never fully capture every last essence of its subject, she forms an understanding of it that is far greater than that of this film's arrogant foreign invaders. By and large, they cannot appreciate the legitimacy of this culture, too entrenched are they in their entitlement - Peedom is as perceptive here as elsewhere, and her unintrusive empathy as a filmmaker allows her to allow others to hang themselves, or to save themselves, as they see fit. It's the unexpected thrill of the unexpected, so much so that even Sherpa's real-life characters don't truly see any of it coming.
A silly satire that's easier to admire from afar, once its formal cheekiness has resounded longer in one's memory than its narrative laziness. Jerzy Skolimowski pokes fun at the self-seriousness of so many sprawling ensemble pieces with a fun feature that intertwines these disparate stories in an openly mocking manner, but though the stories are seemingly mandated to be dull and derivative, 11 Minutes is rather less fun for that fact. You're actually rooting for the film to fuck itself up, to switch storyline with the brisk brutality that it does, if only to witness a moment of genuine invention. And 11 Minutes is full of this stylistic invention - editing and sound design emphasise the meaninglessness of everyday life, the futility in placing any stock in any of this banality, with playful, deflating cuts of equal portentousness and pointlessness. A semi-supernatural element has a pretty extraneous part to play - it's ill-advised, only acquiring some moderate significance in the film's final, memorable image. Skolimowski and editor Agnieszka Glinska have a handle on the technique; would that they could find more to do with it, or even without it. In essence, as a story about stories, 11 Minutes is essentially uninteresting, and only ever otherwise when it acknowledges this detail (attempts at increasing the interest level within the narrative itself actually come off feeling forced). It's an excellent conceit marred by simplistic scripting, uneven acting, and a pervasive familiarity - necessary evils, perhaps, given the raison d'etre of the film, yet unignorable ones too. A good movie has been crafted out of a mediocre one; a little more care, and it could have been great. As it is, the mediocre movie remains.
You get what you're given with a boxing movie. So give in to it, surrender to its cliches and its charms, where they exist; in my case, to the knowledge that I'm likely never going to completely enjoy what I'm given, when what I'm given is a boxing movie. But what I'm given in Creed is a pretty good boxing movie, one made with equal amounts of vigour and insight, some attractive respite from the requisite scenes of men trading blows for sport. Ryan Coogler is a damn good filmmaker - he's better than he realises, as evidenced in the moments in Creed where he finds true inspiration and indulges in some thrillingly expressive flair. He has fun with the tropes of the genre, eliciting exciting sequences of technical virtuosity in the fight scenes and the training montages, but Creed's most memorable, valuable moments are its softer ones. Michael B. Jordan's Adonis Creed is a figure fuelled by the perception of others, and his perception of that perception - it's a film not about people but about the relationships between people, whether alive or deceased, and Coogler is excellent at intimating the emotional effects on his characters of their relationships. Creed feels true to life, because it's drawn from real life, not just from experiences of reality but from outlooks on those experiences which we can relate to. Maryse Alberti's cinematography is richly palpable, lending the film a further, sensory element of relatability. But no matter how good this boxing movie is, it remains a boxing movie - the charms are present, and so are the cliches. I've given in, and enjoyed it, but only so far as I can. Sorry, but sports are simply not my thing.
Mark my words: some decades from now - and, indeed, it'll likely take decades - we will look back at this period of Spike Lee's career as one of such importance and inspiration, it's matched only by that period 20 years ago, back when he was hailed as the talent we soon forgot he was. Nobody else could have made a movie like Chi-Raq; I doubt anybody else will ever try, but as much as this movie is a lesson in community politics, it's equally a lesson in moviemaking. Dialogue spoken in verse, movement choreographed in dance, and every sofa or sidewalk a stage - artifice amplified to draw attention to itself, as these most attention-seeking figures turn theirs to the things that matter most, at long last. Lee choreographs his whole film, crafting strong, unsubtle statements with every deliberate gesture and elaborate line, emphasising his statements with the force of his delivery and the purity of its application. You can't miss what he says in Chi-Raq, as the film is designed to refuse one's mind the opportunity to miss. That such blatant, brilliant polemicising is achieved with such artistry is testament to Lee's faith in its very validity, his assertion that the right sentiments will engender the right approach, and thereby the right response. And no-one fails to meet these lofty standards: Teyonah Parris is dazzling in the lead role and ably backed by a fantastic ensemble, Angela Bassett another (expected) standout; Ruth E. Carter's costumes are as stylish and as thematically resonant as ever; the soundtrack, featuring several excellent original songs and a great score by Terence Blanchard, is an invaluable component to this emotive, intelligent modern political masterpiece.
Jay Roach's Trumbo plays like a cheat sheet for a pub quiz on its subject - it's all soundbites and shortcuts, a portrait of a man that defines him not by his character, nor even by his achievements, but by whatever quantifiable data it can shoehorn into its unrelentingly expositional dialogue. It's little wonder this biopic is so impersonal, since its concerns lie largely with pithy statements on its subject's Oscar wins, or the specifics of his work process, or the titles of his screenplays. Dalton Trumbo was one of the most interesting figures of his era in the film industry; this film acknowledges this detail almost as a moot point, essentially aspiring to get by on sheer virtue of that interest, rather than examining the reasons behind it. Trumbo is the kind of product that the man himself would likely (or, at least, hopefully) have derided. It's a banal work of self-congratulation, not an endorsement of Trumbo's ideals but of the liberal Hollywood machine. The pristine period recreation, the ebullient tone - foremost, Trumbo wants you to appreciate how great Hollywood is, and only thus to appreciate the integrity of its characters and the laudable audacity of their actions. Like most puff pieces, it's distinctly (and unnecessarily) actor-driven; similarly, like most puff pieces, these actors are as much responsible for its best qualities as they are for its worst. Bryan Cranston develops an identifiable character for Trumbo, though a believable one it certainly is not; better are Diane Lane as Cleo Trumbo, and the winning nonchalance of a typically flaw-free turn by Louis C. K. as Arlen Hird. You'll remember them, if only for the purpose of the pub quiz.
An apolitical political film. Bless these dear Northern Europeans and their level-headed erudition - it makes a movie, for sure, but does it make a movie work? A War is a movie about the mind, and the war that rages within it, much more than the war that exists outside it in simmering spurts. The toll of this real, tangible violence is taken mainly upon the mind, where healing and redemption seem as mutually exclusive as truth and fiction, right and wrong, under such political pressure. Lindholm's flat, insipid visuals are the perfect signposts for his cerebral musings - they invite you to think, rather than to see. It's a rather pathetic perversion of this art form, of all that cinema can achieve, but it's successful in its aspirations. You do think throughout A War, initially about familiar, identifiable emotions, eventually about knottier, scarier, deep-seated truths about ourselves, our priorities and our insecurities. It's intellectual and it's intelligent, but A War is not always worthy of itself. The meat of this movie is truncated by Lindholm's impulse to fully flesh his characters out, when they're largely not especially fleshy to begin with. They're average, bland, real people, and Lindholm's humanism draws him deeper into describing their average, bland personae with unnecessary dedication. The result is that A War's more promising second half is blighted by strange shortcuts - a curious occurrence here, a silly soundbite there, all to streamline a narrative that had once been quite satisfactorily sloppy. These mildly aggravating dichotomies may befit a movie that thrives upon depicting situations of a similar nature, but they don't help make this movie work.
