Tag: Cillian Murphy

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Southeastern Film Critics Association Names Best Films of 2023

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

The 89 members of the Southeastern Film Critics Association (SEFCA) have named Oppenheimer as the best film of 2024 in their annual poll.

“2023 will be remembered by many as the year that featured the commercial, critical, and cultural phenomenon known as Barbenheimer,” says SEFCA Vice President Jim Farmer. But it was also a season that offered a stunning amount of high-quality films, with master filmmakers near the top of their games, fresher faces making strong impressions, and performers showing new dimensions. It was a pleasure to take in all that 2023 had to offer.”

Oppenheimer proved to be an overwhelming favorite with the critics, who awarded Christopher Nolan Best Director laurels. The entire acting ensemble was honored, Cillian Murphy earned Best Actor for his portrayal of the father of the atomic bomb, and Robert Downey Jr. won Best Supporting Actor. Hoyt Van Hoytema was recognized for Best Cinematography, and Ludwig Goransson for Best Score.

“This fall featured three big films from three grandmasters of cinema,” says SEFCA President Scott Phillips. “Martin Scorsese released Killers of the Flower Moon. Ridley Scott brought
Napoleon to the big screen and Michael Mann hits theaters next week with Ferrari. Despite this bumper crop from heavy-hitting auteurs, Christopher Nolan’s film from six months ago is walking away with eight SEFCA awards. Oppenheimer is a stunning cinematic achievement. Our members recognized that in July, and they are rewarding it in December.”

Here is the complete slate of 2023 awards from SEFCA:

Top 10 Films of 2023

  1. Oppenheimer
  2. Killers of the Flower Moon
  3. The Holdovers
  4. Past Lives
  5. Barbie
  6. Poor Things
  7. American Fiction
  8. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
  9. Anatomy of a Fall
  10. The Zone of Interest

Best Actor

Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer

Best Actress
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Supporting Actor
Robert Downey, Jr., Oppenheimer

Best Supporting Actress
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

Best Ensemble
Oppenheimer

Best Director

Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

Best Original Screenplay
David Hemingson, The Holdovers

Best Adapted Screenplay
Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

Best Animated Film

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best Documentary
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Best Foreign-Language Film
Anatomy of a Fall

Best Cinematography
Hoyt Van Hoytema, Oppenheimer

Best Score
Ludwig Goransson, Oppenheimer

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Barbenheimer

Why pick Barbie or Oppenheimer when you can do both?

It began as an internet joke. Barbie and Oppenheimer were both scheduled to open on July 21st. Wouldn’t it be weird to watch both of them back-to-back?

Counter-programming is a long tradition among film distributors. Whenever there’s a big “boy” movie, like The Dark Knight, someone with a “girl” movie, like Mamma Mia!, will schedule it for release the same weekend. The theory behind “Dark Mamma” (which really happened in 2008) is that maybe girlfriends and grandmas who are not into Batman can be scraped off of a family outing by the promise of something they would actually like.

By that logic, the hot pink good cheer of Barbie is the perfect foil for the dark, brooding Oppenheimer. No one expected the audience reaction to be “Let’s do both!” Maybe that’s because the studio execs’ conception of who their audiences are and what they want is deeply flawed and out-of-date.

On the surface, the two films couldn’t be more different. But there are a lot of parallels. Both Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig are writer/directors with exceptional track records. Both got essentially free rein to do what they wanted. In Nolan’s case, it was because Universal wanted to lure him away from Warner Bros. In Gerwig’s case, the film was greenlit just before the pandemic and Warner Bros.’ takeover by Discovery. In the chaos, executives focused on rescuing The Flash, and no one cared enough about “the girl movie” to interfere with Gerwig’s vision.

Both films are, relatively speaking, mid-budget. Nolan kept the ship tight at $100 million; Gerwig ended up spending $145 million. For comparison, Marvel films can’t even roll camera for less than $200 million, and Warner Bros. will lose $200 million on The Flash alone. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny cost an eye-watering $295 million after Covid delays.

More unexpected parallels emerge on screen. Both main characters face a reckoning for what they brought into the world. In J. Robert Oppenheimer’s case, it’s the atomic bomb. In Barbie’s case, it’s unrealistic expectations of female perfection.

In her Memphis Flyer review of Barbie, Kailynn Johnson writes, “The idea of a doll visiting the real world and learning to adjust to a life that’s not so fantastic was always in the cards for Barbie — the 2000 movie Life-Size starring Tyra Banks walked so Gerwig could run with Barbie. As she is catcalled by construction workers in Venice Beach, Barbie realizes misogyny did not end with Supreme Court Barbie. She suffers an existential crisis when she realizes that her very brand is determined by an all-male team led by Mr. Mattel (Will Ferrell). … Gerwig uses Barbie to explore the nuances of feminism, but the film never feels too heavy or takes itself too seriously. She carefully sandwiches some of the deeper moments with satire. It helps that Mattel isn’t afraid to laugh at itself.”

Barbie may have benefitted from low expectations from those who were unfamiliar with Gerwig’s near-perfect filmography, but expectations couldn’t have been higher for Nolan, the inheritor of Stanley Kubrick’s “Very Serious Filmmaker” mantle. Big, complex, and messy, Oppenheimer doesn’t lack for ambition. I wrote in my review, “The Trinity bomb test, which comes about two hours into this three-hour epic, is a near-silent tour de force of fire and portent. The scientists’ queasy victory party, held in a cramped Los Alamos gymnasium, may be the best single scene Nolan has ever done. … If only the whole movie were that great.”

The weekend box office results exceeded everyone’s expectations. Barbie raked in $162 million domestically — the biggest opening haul of the year, and the biggest ever by a female director. Oppenheimer did $82 million, a stunning result for a talky three-hour movie about nuclear physics. Overall, it was the fourth-largest grossing weekend in film history.

Viewers who rolled their own Barbenheimer double feature on some internet dare to experience the most intense psychic whiplash possible found two well-made movies, each with their own voice and something to say. Instead of competition, these two films have lifted each other up and inspired real conversation. The tribal question of “which one is better?” has, so far, been secondary. (It’s Barbie, FWIW.)

In Hollywood, unexpected success is more upsetting than unexpected failure. The public’s embrace of original, creative, filmmaker-driven pictures over legacy franchises systematically drained of originality by cowardly executives is now undeniable. As the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes grind on, and the studios plot to break the creatives’ will, audiences have sent a clear message about who is necessary and who is expendable.

Barbenheimer (Barbie + Oppenheimer)
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Oppenheimer

Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.

Geologists divide time into epochs, which can last tens of millions of years. The end of one epoch and the beginning of another is marked by clearly definable features in the geological record, such as the layer of extraterrestrial iridium laid down at the end of the Cretaceous by the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs. All of human history has taken place in the Holocene epoch, but recently, the effects of climate change and industrial society have led scientists to the conclusion that we are living in a new epoch. The Anthropocene is defined as the time when human actions became more important to the state of planet Earth than natural activity. The Anthropocene’s beginning is represented by a layer of radioactive fallout from Cold War atomic bomb tests which will remain visible in the soil and rocks for millions of years. 

The first atomic bomb was detonated in New Mexico in July, 1945, and the man history calls its father is J. Robert Oppenheimer. He was a brilliant physicist who had led a titanic effort to win a war by harnessing the very essence of the universe. Twenty years later, as the growing nuclear arsenals of the United States and the USSR threatened humanity with mass extinction, Oppenheimer was interviewed on television about what it was like when his bomb went off. He said he remembered a quote from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” 

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is about how a person can go from the pinnacle of scientific achievement to a hollowed-out husk of a man trying to atone for the evil he unleashed on the world. The three-hour epic, shot on IMAX film stock specially formulated for the task, is ostensibly based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But Nolan owes a conceptual debt to Michael Frayn’s Tony-award-winning drama Copenhagen. Frayn used repetition and multiple points of view to tell the story of a fateful conversation between physicist Werner Heisenberg, head of the Nazi nuclear program, and his mentor Niels Bohr, who was about to flee to the United States.

Nolan takes us through Oppenheimer’s rise and fall from two different points of view: One POV, titled “Fission,” is Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) defending his life choices to a committee which would ultimately revoke his security clearances and end his career. The other POV, titled “Fusion” is Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the first Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, as he faces a Senate confirmation hearing to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. Fission, which covers Oppenhimer’s chaotic personal life and the development of the bomb, is in color, while Fusion, which details the anti-Communist witch hunt which destroyed him, is in black and white. 

In the color memories, Murphy embodies the quiet, enigmatic charisma described by those who followed Oppenheimer into the darkness of Los Alamos. In the creamy black and white of Fusion, he becomes the skeletal embodiment of the industrial death machine. Downey is unrecognizable as the duplicitous social climber Strauss. Matt Damon is outstanding as Gen. Leslie Groves, the back-slapping Army Corps of Engineers officer who is in way over his head overseeing the Manhattan Project. Jason Clarke gives the performance of his life as Roger Robb, the attack dog prosecutor who exposes Oppenheimer’s darkest secrets. 

Nolan’s always had problems writing female characters, so the women don’t have much to work with. Emily Blunt is all drunken hysterics as Kitty Oppenheimer. Florence Pugh puts up a good fight as Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s doomed Communist mistress. 

The Trinity bomb test, which comes about two hours into this three-hour epic, is a near-silent tour de force of fire and portent. The scientist’s queasy victory party, held in a cramped Los Alamos gymnasium, may be the best single scene Nolan has ever done.  

If only the whole movie were that great. Oppenheimer is both too long and has too many cuts—a cinematic quantum paradox! At times, Nolan seems acutely aware that he’s making a movie about a bunch of weirdos writing equations on blackboards for years on end. He tries to spice things up by editing dense conversations about physics, philosophy, and politics like frenetic action sequences. In one gorgeous shot, we see Oppenheimer finally alone with The Gadget that will define a new geological epoch. It should be the tense calm before the storm, but Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame bury that gold in a blizzard of mediocre images. I found myself wishing Ludwig Göransson’s relentless, pounding score would just chill for a minute. The nonlinear structure that works so well in Copenhagen hobbles the forward momentum, and makes the complex story even more confusing.

Oppenhiemer is a return to form for Nolan after the fiasco of Tenet. There’s a great movie hiding amidst all of the formal pyrotechnics. But I guess it’s too much to ask for a lighter touch from a director who is about as subtle as an atomic bomb.

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Dunkirk

At this point, Christopher Nolan is a lot like Led Zeppelin. Both the English director of brainy blockbusters and the deans of English classic rock had a talent for big, crowd-pleasing riffs. Nolan dominated the multiplex box office of the aughts and early teens the same way Led Zeppelin dominated album-oriented rock radio in the 1970s. And both Nolan and Zep are taken very seriously by both their fans and themselves.

Nolan and Zeppelin’s technical mastery of their respective forms turned out to be mixed blessings. Jimmy Page had an idiosyncratic style that worked extremely well for him, but as the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, the audience was bombarded by mediocre imitators. Zep was great, but those who came after were not so great, and there were so many of them. Nolan likewise constructed a unique style combining classical technique with modern digital technology. It was great in Inception but not so great when it was regurgitated in The Maze Runner.

Nolan-itis hit the superhero genre especially hard. Somewhere on the backside of the two-hour mark in The Dark Knight Rises, watching a hyper-realistic depiction of a guy dressed like a bat punching out masked terrorists started to get old. But the grimdark wouldn’t die. From Hunger Games to Man of Steel, assaultive mirthlessness was the order of the day. After Nolan hung up the batarang, Warner Brothers wouldn’t make another watchable superhero movie until this year’s Wonder Woman, and even Patty Jenkins’ instant classic lifts the ending from The Dark Knight Rises.

newest feature film, the WWII-era Dunkirk.

Rather than weeping because he had no more worlds to conquer after Interstellar, Nolan decided to go small — only small for Nolan means recreating the Battle of Dunkirk, IMAX-size, with as little CGI as possible. Artistically, it was a good decision. By bringing Dunkirk in at a brisk (for him) 106 minutes, Nolan rediscovers his gift for concision that made his early gems like Memento so pleasing.

Nolan sets up the situation swiftly and nearly wordlessly. It’s May 1940, and Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) is a British soldier retreating from the Nazis in northern France. When his squad is attacked while looting for food and water in the abandoned French port town, he is left as the only survivor. Looking to find a place to relieve himself, he stumbles onto the vast beach where tens of thousands of British troops are waiting for rescue from the German blitzkrieg. For a moment, the assembled might of an army waiting to go home looks imposing, but once the German dive bombers arrive, their true vulnerability is revealed.

In real life, 400,000 British and French soldiers were trapped on the beach until an ad hoc flotilla comprised of practically every seaworthy vessel in the British Isles sailed to the rescue. Nolan’s cast isn’t quite that big, but I don’t envy the extras wranglers who had to find places for everyone to relieve themselves on the French beach. Like Spielberg, Nolan has an almost Soviet talent for visualizing great movements of people. There is no lead actor, per se, in this film. Nolan’s screenplay follows three groups: Tommy and his mysterious comrade Gibson, who repeatedly try and fail to get off the beach; the crew of the Moonstone, a modest pleasure vessel captained by Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) who volunteers to ferry soldiers across the channel; and a flight of Spitfires, led by Tom Hardy, whose numbers dwindle as they try to keep the Luftwaffe busy while the evacuation proceeds. The three storylines proceed linearly but at radically different paces until they all come together for a finale above, on, and below the English Channel.

Aside from Rylance’s warm humanity and Cillian Murphy as a shivering PTSD case, the characterization is paper thin, but the plotting and editing is as tight as is expected from Nolan. From balletic dogfight sequences shot with IMAX cameras and real airplanes, to the horror inside a capsizing troop ship, the images he conjures are among the best of his career. There are also moments of almost accidental political relevance, such as when a squad of soldiers in a leaky boat has a miniature version of the Brexit debate, only with guns. Nolan’s vision of war is not sweeping, heroic action and sacrifice. It’s fear, foggy goggles, and ratty comms. The victors are the ones who make it home alive.

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Film Features Film/TV

Free Fire

The only time I ever fired a gun, I did so at the behest of coworkers on a lunch break. Terrified of holding something that could accidentally kill, I immediately pointed in the direction of the target, fired until it was empty so I could hand it back, and took no joy. Guns are primarily a filmic thing for me. They are how a character declares dominance over another or mastery over the plot. They deliver tragedy, finality, and twists.

Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump’s Free Fire is squarely in the canon of purely cinematic bulletry. In a rundown 1970s American warehouse, gun dealers and IRA members meet to facilitate a sale of M16s. The deal goes bad, and all parties become trapped in the warehouse shooting at each other. They’re character actors (Sharlto Copley, Noah Taylor), at first expressive in outdated slang and hair and then, as everyone is nicked and becomes woozy from loss of blood, through increasingly odd pronouncements. They tease each other across the way, laugh, call timeouts, forget which side they’re on, and generally behave like little kids at play. The gunfight is the entire film. Like other action movies, it doesn’t lead to much more than murder, but Wheatley and Jump’s art-film care is evident. The fun is in how intricately far gone the situation can become. Each person gets pinned down in his own little corner of the warehouse. Geography-wise, we often can’t tell who is aiming at whom, but the lack of clarity adds to the tension. I worried every talking head onscreen would explode.

Free Fire is an improvement over the couple’s previous High-Rise, which also concerned slow entropy toward murder in a ramshackle space. Adapting J.G. Ballard’s novel about a societal collapse occurring only within one 1970s apartment building, they never found a way to make its absurdity more than clinical and detached, full of beautiful images but airless. Here there is mood and momentum, but the visuals are less intricate. The warehouse starts as a color-corrected swath of yellow and black, but as the fight goes on, the colors open up: the red of a van, the brown of Armie Hammer’s scruff, the various liquids and solids that come out of and fall onto everyone.

Hammer’s Ord (probable surname Nance) stands out for his goofy self-regard. As bullets weaken him, he goes from broad-shouldered alpha male to chummy raconteur using a crowbar for a cane. Lounge lizard Vern (Copley) is also memorable, a more insecure showboat. Blood loss leads him to dress in cardboard armor to protect against sepsis, and the various substances that coat him eventually make him look like a gray-headed werewolf. As their arms and legs start failing, I took it as metaphor for old age felling cocks of the walk.

Brie Larson and Cillian Murphy, the prettiest and with the least disagreeable traits, play the nominal audience-identification figures. Wheatley and Jump care about the plot a little in regard to Larson’s femininity versus all the boys, who forego shooting at her for a while out of gentlemanly courtesy. But the bro-hood that develops among the shooters, the sense of comradeship and childlike play, is the film’s best note.

Free Fire is more successful than the recent Belko Experiment, which used a Battle Royale template to satirize the workplace and rang hollow. Here we have Reservoir Dogs crossed with the comedic fights from Pineapple Express. What the tone does is undermine action like the lionized shootout in Heat, where the accurate, deafening gunfire sounds and military precision of the bank robbers subconsciously celebrate their form and machismo. Free Fire brings to mind a nice moment in The Assassination of Jesse James, when an 1800s gun behaves accurately for the period and misfires, costing its owner his life.

Cinema is love of image, and a man with a gun is a conductor with a baton, calling the world to his will. It is important to be able to call him a buffoon. The men dying in this fictional warehouse are venal, squabbling, and manic. Their anthem is an ironic John Denver eight-track left playing in a van. There is nothing ennobling about their violence. But there is humanity in the mistakes that bump them off, and black comedy in the stupid, small ways life can drain from us all.

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Aloft

In Aloft, Jennifer Connelly plays Nana Kunning, an apparent veterinarian living in the frozen wastes of Northern Canada.

I say “apparent” veterinarian because, like everything else in this trainwreck of a film, what she does for a living is not really clear. There’s a scene about fifteen minutes into the movie where we see her sticking her hand into the vagina of a pig, which is when I formulated my veterinarian hypothesis, but in hindsight, she could just be a farmer. That would be more consistent with the poverty implied when we meet her hitchhiking with her two young sons, Ivan (Zen McGrath) and Gully (Winta McGrath). They are on their way to see Hans (Ian Tracy), a performance artist/faith healer known as The Architect, in the hope that he can cure the unnamed disease that the apparently healthy Gully is said to be dying of. Once at the site of “The Act”, as The Architect’s tree shelter sculpture is called by his acolytes, the pilgrims draw lots to determine who gets to partake in the healing ritual. But young Ivan’s pet falcon, who gives the best performance in the film, disrupts the ceremony and is subsequently shot by an angry cultist.

Cillian Murphy being upstaged by a falcon in Aloft.

Then we flash forward twenty years, when Adult Ivan (played now by Cillian Murphy), is visited by a reporter named Jannia Ressmore. Nana, I was eventually able to deduce, has taken up the faith healing mantle of The Architect and now performs her own “Acts”, the next one of which will take place north of the Arctic circle, and Jennia wants Adult Ivan to accompany her to the latest one. The film then alternates between the past and present, although it’s hard to tell which is which at any given time.

When you talk about “indie film”, some people immediately complain about incomprehensible, self-indulgent, pretentious crap. For the most part, they’re wrong. There’s no shortage of worthwhile indies that just require a little more thought to tease out the meaning. Terrance Malik, for example, follows his own vision and executes it beautifully enough that meaning unfolds anew with each viewing. But there’s a difference between pursuing a personal vision and wallowing in your own fetishes, as writer/director Claudia Llosa has done here. She likes long, still closeups of people with pained expressions on their faces, and she delivers so many of those in this monochrome nightmare that they lose all meaning. Dialog is either ominous whispers or babies crying. What plot exists is buried under layers of useless shots, like the close up of Gully idly playing with a keychain that seems to go on forever. It’s all incomprehensible to the point of tedium, and this is coming from a guy who bought the Inherent Vice Blu-Ray. Projects like Aloft are what give indie films a bad name.