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The Revenant

Leonardo DiCaprio wants you to know that he ate an elk heart, raw. DiCaprio is a vegetarian, but he ate that raw elk heart because Alejandro Iñárritu asked him to. DiCaprio was ACTING.

Last weekend, the Hollywood Foreign Press awarded DiCaprio their Best Actor award, and The Revenant Best Picture. Given that Iñárritu’s last film, Birdman, won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, the Golden Globe wins makes The Revenant the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar. But is it the best film of 2015?

The short answer is no, but that’s mostly because 2015 was a banner year that included the stone-cold masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road. But the longer, more interesting answer is that The Revenant is a monumental work from a filmic genius given free reign at the height of his power. And given that the film’s budget ended up ballooning from $60 million to $135 million, “free reign” seems like an accurate description.

Hardy slays as Iñárritu’s villain.

Iñárritu’s got his Oscar, but DiCaprio does not, despite working with Steven Spielberg in Catch Me If You Can; Martin Scorsese for six films, including Gangs of New York and The Aviator; and, of course, James “King of the World!” Cameron for Best Picture winner Titanic. DiCaprio thinks it’s time he took home some hardware of his own, which brings us back to the elk heart. DiCaprio wants you to know that he will do literally anything to get that statue. So DiCaprio teamed with Iñárritu at exactly the right time.

Or possibly, from the point of view of DiCaprio’s health and well-being, exactly the wrong time. The Revenant is based on the story of Hugh Glass, a trapper and frontiersman who, during an 1823 expedition to what is now Montana, was mauled by a bear and left for dead by his comrades. But when he awoke to find himself not dead, he dragged himself more than 200 miles across the hostile, frozen wilderness to the nearest American settlement. In the course of Iñárritu’s epic retelling of Glass’ story, DiCaprio repeatedly dunks himself in freezing water, eats unspeakable offal, and spends at least 30 minutes of the almost three-hour movie foaming at the mouth while tied to a makeshift stretcher and being thrown through the forest by a gang of grumpy mountain men. It’s a ballsy, committed performance, and DiCaprio knows it. Occasionally, in one of his many close-ups, he stares into the camera with a look that screams “Are you not entertained?”

The film The Revenant reminds me of the most is Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, the 1980 Western epic that was such a disaster that its director is blamed for ending the American auteur period of the 1970s, when the director’s vision was paramount. There are some people who, to this day, defend Heaven’s Gate as a misunderstood masterpiece. Those people are mostly French, and they’re wrong. But imagine a world in which Cimino was right, and Heaven’s Gate actually worked. Accompanied, as in Birdman, by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Iñárritu captures mind-destroyingly beautiful images of the West. The young crescent moon and Venus make frequent appearances in the sky, as do the shimmering red Northern Lights. At one point, they mix a giant avalanche with a normal reaction shot, and DiCaprio doesn’t even flinch. That’s how committed DiCaprio is: avalanche committed.

Somewhere along the way of this oversized adventure, the nonstop spectacle of inhuman endurance and existential questioning becomes overwhelming. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, The Revenant is like being beaten in the head with a gold brick. It’s actually an hour shorter than Heaven’s Gate, but still about 30 minutes too long. I do not envy the editor who had to decide what to cut from the constant cavalcade of beautiful shots, but that’s why they call editing “killing your babies,” and there needed to be more of that. I admit to having a love-hate relationship with Iñárritu, but I respect his skill and passion while still believing Birdman was a better distillation of his wild aesthetic than The Revenant. But yes, let’s give Leo his Oscar, please, so he can go back to eating healthy food, and maybe get warm.

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World Of Tomorrow

World of Tomorrow (2015; dir. Don Herzfeldt)—It’s always fun to think up off-the-wall year-in-review argument-starters like “The best movie of 2015 is a 16-minute sci-fi animated short starring two stick figures.” It’s even more fun when such assertions turn out to be true.

It’s difficult to express my ever-expanding, ever-deepening love for Herzfeldt’s lovely and melancholy threnody to the future. I can tell you that it compares favorably with the quietly devastating final scenes of Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. I can also tell you that its Klee/Rothko/Chuck Jones imagery reminds me of Herzfeldt’s description of the digital animation process—“Animating this way at first seemed a bit like trying to read a children’s book in a foreign language: it all seemed vaguely familiar somehow, but was sort of weirdly scrambled.” And I can tell you that its main character falls in love with a rock, a fuel pump and an alien.

At the beginning of “World of Tomorrow” a little girl named Emily (Winona Mae) meets her eponymous third-generation adult clone (Julia Pott). After some brief introductory remarks, the synthetic Emily takes her younger self on a tour of the world to come. It’s a world where poor people pay to experience the nightmare of digital consciousness, botched time travel leads to disastrous cosmic mix-ups, and nobody seems to care because “Our more recent history is often just comprised of images of other people watching viewscreens.”

In a brilliant touch, the younger Emily (her clone dubs her “Emily Prime”) is old enough to understand what’s going on, yet far too young to grasp the ominous significance of her future self’s visit. When her clone describes her own birth and says, “Through this process you will hope to live forever,” Emily Prime chirps, “I had lunch today.” When her clone says, “Now is the envy of all the dead,” Emily Prime says, “OK.” And when her clone says, “The advice I give you now is the advice I remember receiving from myself at your age in this moment, so I cannot be certain where it actually originated from,” Emily Prime remains silent. (Read that line again and try to get to the bottom of it; you’d fall silent, too.)

When the cloned Emily starts talking about meteors and saying things like “I am very proud of my sadness because it means I am more alive,” the future—and, as with all great sci-fi, our future—starts to look dark indeed. The movie ends perfectly anyway.

Grade: A+

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Rejoice! It’s good!

Star Wars fans have spent more than a decade in the wilderness. Sure, there were some great moments in the prequels, but over all, but there’s no denying that the twenty-first century has not been kind to George Lucas’ vision. But our time in the wilderness is over, and we have returned to the promised galaxy.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is not a perfect film. Parts of the second act are muddled. The galaxy now seems a little less vast, and the political details are undercooked. There are times when the cast are shuffled around unnaturally to feed the needs of the plot. J. J. Abrams simply does not understand how hyperspace works.

John Boyega as Finn

But you know what? The prequels gave us complex galactic politics as Lucas tried to transform Flash Gordon into Issac Asimov’s Foundation. Truth to be told, that’s what the fans who had obsessed over every detail in the Orig Trig thought we wanted, but we were wrong. I will forgive Abrams for playing fast and loose with the details of a fictional FTL drive cobbled from A Wrinkle In Time, because the tear-stained faces of the faithful streaming out of the 7 PM Paradiso screening last night attested to what he got right.

From Abrams history in TV and film, particularly in his butchering of the Star Trek universe, it’s clear that he’s better at character than plot. That made producer Kathleen Kennedy’s choice of Abrams to helm the reintroduction of Han and Leia a wise one, and her decision to have The Empire Strikes Back writer Lawrence Kasdan riding herd on him one worthy of Yoda. Gone is the unspeakable mishmash of dialog from the prequels. Kasdan’s screenplay is weighed down with an unwieldy cast, but pair of leads emerge in the persons of Harrison Ford and Daisy Ridley.

Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca and Harrison Ford as Han Solo

At this point, the only thing that could draw Ford out of a comfortable retirement of recreational aviation and bopping Calista Flockhart is the prospect of taking the controls of the Millennium Falcon one last time. Ford phoned it in for years in one big budget paycheck movie after another, which makes the sight of a fully armed and operational Han Solo something to behold. In the 30 years since the Battle of Endor, Solo has seen personal tragedy. He’s not the happy go lucky rogue any more, even if he’s returned to the pirate lifestyle, but neither is he a broken man. Chewbacca is still at his side, but he’s more than just a furry sidekick this time around. Kasdan and Abrams have made him a full fledged hero in his own right. Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia is now General Organa, charged with defending the weak and fragmented Republic against the First Order, a fascist movement built from the fragments of the Empire. Leia’s not in the center of the action any more, but when Fisher and Ford share a screen for the first time in 32 years, this reviewer’s tears flowed freely.

Carrie Fisher as Leia Organa

Taking Leia’s place is Daisy Ridley as Rey, an orphaned scavenger on the planet Jakku living off the scraps of the final battle that broke both the New Republic and the Empire’s militaries twenty years earlier. Ridley proved to be the project’s best casting choice, as she easily holds the screen with both legends and talented newcomers. She has the air of a bona fide movie star in the making. Her chemistry with John Boyega, who plays fugitive Stormtrooper Finn as a Cowardly Lion, bodes well for the future films.

Daisy Ridley as Rey

Rey’s opposite is Kylo Ren, played to the hilt by Adam Driver, who attracted attention on HBO as Lena Dunham’s boyfriend on Girls. Driver’s background in post-mumblcore naturalism serves him extremely well, as he paints Kylo Ren not as a cold force of evil nature like Darth Vader, but as a petulant, wannabe punk, prone to fits of rage and delusions of grandeur. To the audience, it’s clear that he’s just a pawn in a larger game being played by the Emperor’s successor, Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), but he hasn’t figured it out yet.

Adam Driver as Kylo Ren

I won’t be responsible for spoiling the ending for you, except to say that the emotional climax is devastating.
There are many callbacks to moments in the Orig Trig, but it would be wrong to say that The Force Awakens is a mere rehash of A New Hope. Sure, there’s a formula to these things, but Kasdan and Abrams are doing more than just walking us through the Stations of the Force. It makes perfect sense, for example, for the First Order to pursue the Tarkin Doctrine and construct its own superweapon. In the case of the good guys, no less an authority than Foreign Policy magazine weighed in this morning with this: “In hindsight, it’s clear that, for the Rebel Alliance the Imperial defeat at the Battle of Endor was a classic example of a catastrophic victory: a sudden collapse of a seemingly unbeatable foe that produced opportunities it was unprepared to exploit.”

Like a Chuck Jones Looney Tunes cartoon, The Force Awakens speaks on multiple levels. The kids will respond—strongly—to the swashbuckling and derring do, and the vibrant new stars in the making. For older fans like myself, there is a poignance in seeing how things turned out for our old heroes who won the Star Wars but botched the peace, leaving the next generation to clean up their mess. So it always goes.

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Youth

About three-quarters of the way through Italian writer/director Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) and his best friend Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) watch a totally nude Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea) slowly enter a hot tub. “Who is THAT?” Fred says.

“God,” Mick says.

Waiting to meet God is the primary theme of Youth, which recently took home Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor for Caine at the European Film Awards. When we meet Fred, the retired composer is meeting with a representative of Queen Elizabeth, who is offering him knighthood if he will only agree to come out of retirement and conduct his composition “Simple Songs” in a command performance. He refuses, citing “personal reasons.” He and Mick are staying at an ultra posh resort in the Swiss Alps that cinematographer Luca Bigazzi has a grand old time filming. But the constantly excellent food, happy-ending massages, and mediocre entertainment somehow only add to the funereal atmosphere. The name of the sculpture in the hotel lobby says it all: Alpine Prison. Fred has lost his hunger for creation, and thus his will to live.

Harvey Keitel, and Michael Caine in Youth

Mick, on the other hand, is at the hotel with a staff of writers creating his next film, which he calls “my testament.” His love of creation is intact, and that keeps his mind young, even if he can’t get it up for the fetching young prostitute who haunts the lobby.

Beside the ace cinematography, Caine and Keitel’s buddy routine is the best thing about Youth. Mick tries to puncture Fred’s growing cynicism and apathy, while Fred works hard at doing absolutely nothing. Sorrentino’s screenplay bounces the pair off of an unlikely group of well-heeled hotel guests, none of whom seem to be having any fun whatsoever. Fred’s daughter, Lena (Rachel Weisz), endures the dissolution of her marriage. Actor Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano) is sullenly preparing for a role in a historical drama that, when revealed, gets the film’s biggest laugh. The once-youthful superstar footballer Maradona (Roly Serrano) is now morbidly obese, but still mobbed by fans. Veteran actress Brenda Morel (Jane Fonda) arrives late in the action to drop some plot bombshells and throw the most epic fit of the 2015 film season.

Caine glides through the loose collection of vignettes like some kind of ghost who hasn’t gotten around to dying yet. The slow revelation of the source of his pain is masterful and depends almost entirely on Caine’s facial control. Some of Sorrentino’s digressions work, and some of them don’t. The dialogue is occasionally clunky in an English-as-a-second-language kind of way. But as long as Caine and Keitel are around, ogling the young women and antagonizing the bored rich, Youth remains compelling.

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Heart Of A Dog

Heart of A Dog (2015; dir. Laurie Anderson)—I own two dogs. Stanley, an 11-year old lab/Great Dane/blue heeler mix, is still loud and spry. He’s also tumorous and gray-haired and has kidney problems. He could go any time within the next year. Lucy is a cute but neurotic 9-year old mini pit-bull who’ll probably expire from despair when Stanley goes. Some days their eventual partings from this world weigh on me more than most of my human problems.

So yes, Anderson’s latest provides wise, humane advice about end-of-life pet care, and I’m grateful for that. But Heart of A Dog does a lot of other things, too. What it doesn’t do is behave like a traditional film. The handful of people who bolted the theater midway through the screening I attended last week could probably attest to this—clearly they weren’t expecting something so plotless (and smart and digressive and profound). It doesn’t behave as a museum installation or a long-form music video, either, even though the soundtrack album is literally the soundtrack to the whole movie. On her website, Anderson calls Heart of A Dog a “piece.” That sounds about right. Something to hold in your hand, turn over, put back on the shelf, and stuff in your pocket absent-mindedly one afternoon only to rediscover hours or months later.

The late, great essay-film specialist Chris Marker, whom Anderson thanks in the closing credits, is one obvious inspiration; the whispering narrator from Godard films like Two or Three Things I Know About Her is another. But Anderson is a kinder, gentler, funnier and less theory-sodden guide. If you can approach her speculations, jokes and mysticism with the same smiling awe you can hear in her voice, then you’ll have a real cool time together. In little more than an hour, Anderson links up global surveillance, her loving relationship with her rat terrier Lolabelle, sorrowful nights spent in the children’s burn unit, her prickly relationship with her mom and the inherently “creepy” nature of storytelling. She talks a lot about death, too, which lingers in the background like the smell of a previous tenant. Her ground- and eye-level re-enactments and re-imaginings of past events are often veiled by sleet, snow and rain, as though she’s observing them from a safe distance behind glass. She heeds The Tibetan Book of The Dead’s instructions and refuses to cry. By doing so, she makes you “feel sad without being sad.”

Heart of A Dog is a mellow little mongrel bred from words, pictures and ideas. It includes at least two pieces of quotable wisdom—“Death is the release of love” and “Most adults have no idea what they’re talking about”—and one worthwhile existential question: “Are you perhaps made of glass?” It saves its best music for last, too; one of Anderson’s final images is a photo of Lolabelle and her late husband Lou Reed, whose “Turning Time Around” provides an appropriate postlude.

Grade: A

Heart Of A Dog plays tonight, Wednesday, December 16 at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. 

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Spotlight

2015 has been a big year for movies about journalism. We’ve had a journalist try to get inside the mind of novelist David Foster Wallace in The End Of The Tour, a journalist get snookered by a manipulative psychopath in True Story, and superstar journalists fall for black propaganda in Truth. Director Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight is the best of the batch.

The Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team consisted of four investigative reporters: Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James), Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), and Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams). We first meet the team in 2001, as new editor Martin Baron (Liev Schreiber) takes over at the paper. Baron pushes the team of reporters, whose specialty is in-depth, long-form stories, to look into the long-simmering reports of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy in the Boston area. As Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery) says, Baron is from out of town and Jewish and so has no preconceived notions about the church’s oversized role in Boston civic affairs. But once he gets Robinson and his team rolling, they methodically uncover a much bigger story than they set out to write: thousands of children, both boys and girls, who had been molested by Catholic priests all over the world, and the church’s sophisticated and pervasive efforts to bury the story and pressure the kids and their parents into lowball settlements and nondisclosure agreements.

Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton, and Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight

Journalists used to be common heroes of films. Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, is a newspaper man, for example. But after hitting its peak in the 1970s with All The President’s Men, the stereotype of the crusading journalist slowly soured onscreen into the rumor-grubbing, ethically challenged hack. Spotlight is very much in the tradition of All The President’s Men, using the tricks of the police procedural to dramatize the often tedious job of the investigative reporter. Like a good episode of Law and Order, it’s the bit parts that make it work, such as Neal Huff as the manic advocate Phil Saviano. Michael Cyril Creighton is especially good as recovering victim Joe Crowley, who sums up the awful effect the predatory pedophiles had on the children’s long-term mental health: “It was the first time in my life anyone had told me it was OK to be gay. And it was a priest.”

Keaton, Ruffalo, and McAdams are all extremely good as the core of the reporting team, but the entire ensemble is strong, especially Schreiber, whose low-key portrayal of the editor Baron keeps you guessing right up until the story is published. McCarthy, who co-wrote the script with Josh Singer, manages to tell a dense story with a triple-digit cast of characters while maintaining tension and keeping the pace lively. There are a few missteps, like a late Christmas montage set to a children’s choir singing “Silent Night,” but the overall effect is tight and occasionally moving. For journalists and people who care about democracy and the value of open society, Spotlight is a master class on how things should be done.

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Trumbo

As a writer, I’m always suspicious of movies about writers. The protagonist is always hailed as being exceptionally talented but probably troubled. But when our hero is called upon to read his writing that everyone in the film says is so great, it turns out to not be very impressive, because the film’s writer is not as much of a genius as his character is supposed to be. And let’s face it: The life of the writer is not very interesting. It mainly consists of sitting still in front of a laptop and fretting.

But Dalton Trumbo was interesting. He didn’t just sit still in front of a typewriter — he sat in a tub surrounded by booze, ashtrays, and a typewriter. Trumbo won the National Book Award in 1939, got nominated for a screenwriting Academy Award in 1940, joined the Army after Pearl Harbor, and, after the war, became the highest paid writer in Hollywood. He was also, for five years, a member of the Communist Party of the United States, which would come to cost him dearly when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) called him to testify in 1948. Trumbo considered himself a patriot, and thought that HUAC had no legal or ethical right to persecute an American citizen for his political beliefs, so he and his compatriots refused to answer the committee’s questions and were convicted of contempt of Congress. Trumbo became known as the leader of the “Hollywood 10” who were blacklisted and no longer allowed to work with the major Hollywood studios.

Helen Mirren and Brian Cranston in Trumbo

Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo in Jay Roach’s adaptation of the writer’s life, and as you would probably expect, he does a tremendous job. Cranston’s work as Walter White on Breaking Bad has cemented him as one of the best actors working today, and he fully inhabits the role of the too-smart-for-his-own-good leftist with a big mouth and a precision-guided pen. Trumbo wrote scripts the old-fashioned way, buoyed by a heroic intake of scotch, nicotine, and amphetamines, and there is rarely a shot in Trumbo where Cranston is without a lit cigarette curling smoke from a long filter. There’s so much smoking going on that when Trumbo’s fellow traveller Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) tells Trumbo he has lung cancer, it’s completely unsurprising. There are a lot of acting heavy hitters in Trumbo, but the scenes between Cranston and C.K. are by far the sharpest. Hird sees through Trumbo’s prodigious bullshit, but he plays along because he both agrees with and respects the older man. Cranston also gets to match wits with Helen Mirren as Hedda Hopper, the arch anti-communist gossip columnist whose column in the Hollywood Reporter reinforced the blacklist. Diane Lane plays Trumbo’s wife Cleo, and Elle Fanning his daughter Niki, both of whom feel the negative effects of Trumbo’s crusade. Other welcome actors include the underutilized Alan Tudyk as Ian McLellan Hunter, Trumbo’s friend who served as a front writer for the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Roman Holiday; John Goodman as hack studio head Frank King; and Dean O’Gorman, last seen as the dwarf Fili in The Hobbit trilogy, does an absolutely uncanny impression of Kirk Douglas

The actors are having such a good time that Trumbo‘s weaknesses in the story department are mostly papered over. Cranston’s huge, humane portrayal is great fun to watch, but he may come on too strong for the overall good of the picture. His confidence never wavers, even when he’s being strip-searched in prison, which means his character never changes. This is a common malady of biopics and historical dramas shared by, among others, Selma. Like Ava DuVernay in that film and F. Gary Gray in Straight Outta Compton, director Jay Roach plays it pretty safe, style-wise, choosing to focus on the characterization. Writer John McNamara’s dialogue gives the actors plenty of material to work with, but he lacks his subject’s talent for structural clarity. It would probably please Trumbo to hear a critic say Trumbo would have been better had Trumbo written it himself.

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Room

A lot of things happen when you grow up, but one of the most important is a widening of your point of view. That’s the major theme of Room, the remarkable new film by Irish director Lenny Abrahamson — although at first glance, it might not be obvious. But the pleasures of Room (not to be confused with The Room, the so-bad-it’s-good cult hit by Tommy Wiseau) aren’t dependent on immediately grasping the deeper meaning. It’s an extraordinarily well-crafted indie film that shows what is possible with a limited budget, a good screenplay, and a clear vision.

The point of view that gets expanded in Room belongs to Jack (Jacob Tremblay), a 5-year-old boy who starts the film with a long, luxurious head of hair that would be the envy of a L’Oréal model. His hair is so long because he has been trapped in a single room with his mother Joy Newsome (Brie Larson) for the entirety of his short life. It is also, like Samson, the source of his “strong.”

The room Joy and Jack share is tiny and squalid, with an open toilet set next to a sink, and only a tiny TV for entertainment. But mother and son have carved out a simple existence that is, if not happy, at least content in each other’s company. Despite their isolation, Jack has learned to speak and evolved a fairly consistent worldview. Because there is only one of everything, there is not much need for articles such as “the” and “a,” so “door” refers to the only door he’s ever known, the thick, steel one with the number pad-operated lock that keeps him from finding out about the outside world. He knows that “TV people are flat and made of colors,” a little Zen koan containing hidden wisdom if ever I heard one. But he’s not too clear on just what goes on beyond the sole skylight in Room‘s ceiling, or what happens when Joy’s captor Old Nick comes to visit, and he is forced to spend the night in the tiny closet. But from the sounds his mother makes, it’s not good.

Jacob Tremblay and Brie Larson in Room

I went into Room knowing basically nothing about it — a strategy I find increases my engagement with the many movies I review — and I found the slow revelation of the facts of Joy and Jack’s imprisonment in Room extremely rewarding. Knowing how to dole out information at exactly the right pace is one of the hardest skills to learn for a director. Hitchcock was a master at it, as you can tell from watching Strangers on a Train, to cite just one example. Abrahamson’s clearly been studying Hitch, and I don’t want to spoil his hard work by revealing too much plot detail here. Suffice it to say that Jack and Joy do finally find their way into the outside world, where they find much greater challenges than mere survival.

Given the hermetic nature of the first hour or so of Room, its success depends solely on the performances of its two leads. Larson is more than up to the challenge. She was most recently seen as Amy Schumer’s uptight, judgmental sister in Trainwreck, but the depth of her performance here has only been hinted at in her previous work, including her starmaking turn in Short Term 12. We follow Joy from maternal happiness to grim determination to exultant freedom and on into existential despair, and it all plays out on Larson’s subtle, expressive face. Equally impressive is Jacob Tremblay, who gives the kind of unself-aware performance as Jack that most older actors can only dream of. I can only imagine the depth of the collaboration between Larson and director Abrahamson that put this 9-year-old into the proper headspace to create such a rich character. I expect to see Academy Award nominations for both actors. Superbly constructed and passionately made, Room is the kind of rare indie jewel that only comes around once every few years.

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Film Review: Bridge Of Spies

I’m not sure I’m qualified to critique a Steven Spielberg film. Large parts of my definition of how to make a good film come from Spielberg, who, in turn, distilled the ideas of old masters such as Hitchcock, Kubrick, Harryhausen, and Capra into wildly popular entertainments. Of all of the extremely talented directors to come out of the 1970s — Lucas, Coppola, De Palma, etc. — Spielberg is the most prolific and populist. Only Martin Scorsese rivals his artistic batting average. Sure, Spielberg can be cheesy, but Scorsese never really tried to make a big-tent spectacle picture, while Spielberg has occasionally elevated simple monster movies to the realm of high art. Since Spielberg’s been copied six ways to Sunday, it’s easy to take him for granted. That is, until he drops an atomic bomb of greatness like Bridge of Spies.

Like Saving Private Ryan, Bridge of Spies opens with a huge, bravado sequence that sets the realm of the film’s conflict. But it’s 1957, and the Cold War is in full effect, so instead of storming the beaches at Normandy, we’re treated to an interlocking series of tracking shots of FBI agents stalking Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) through Brooklyn.

There are no dinosaurs or sharks or aliens in Bridge of Spies, but there is a giant monster looming just off-screen: nuclear war. I think it’s hard for people who didn’t spend their childhood in abstract fear of Soviet missiles raining atomic death to understand people’s motivations in spy movies of the period. Directors didn’t have to explain the stakes, because everybody knew that a tiny slipup could lead to the destruction of civilization. But Spielberg, ever the effective communicator, conveys the mood of the times perfectly with a single scene where his everyman hero James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) comforts his young son Roger (Noah Schnapp) who has been traumatized by a “duck and cover” instructional film.

Donovan is a lawyer who distinguished himself at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals, but is now living a comfortable life practicing insurance law. Because of his experience and integrity, he is chosen by the New York State Bar Association to be Abel’s attorney. His job, he is told, is to demonstrate the superiority of the American legal system by mounting a defense of the accused spy. He earns the ire of the press and his colleagues when he saves Abel from the electric chair. After an American U-2 spy plane is shot down over Russia and its pilot Francis Gary Powers is captured, Donovan is called on to defuse the potentially explosive situation by negotiating a prisoner swap in East Berlin.

Working from an excellent screenplay by Matt Charman that was rewritten by Joel and Ethan Coen, both Hanks and Spielberg are at the top of their game. Hanks is unmannered and charming, able to summon a laugh or a gasp with a raised eyebrow or tense gulp. Spielberg can convey in one perfect composition what it takes most contemporary directors three or four quick cuts to get across. Even his scene transitions are things of beauty.

The most important thing about Bridge of Spies is its vision of America. Early on, Donovan sums up his philosophy by saying “It can’t look like our justice system tosses people on the ash heap.” To fearful 21st-century America, Bridge of Spies is a rebuke that reverberates from Ferguson to Guantanamo Bay. Too many contemporary stories, from 24 to San Andreas, put sociopathic jerks in the protagonist role and all but order you to accept them as heroes. But Hanks and Spielberg understand that heroes need to behave heroically. Here, they’re putting forth a real-life lawyer devoted to upholding America’s highest ideals, even for its enemies, as a hero to be emulated. As Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Donovan might like Scotch in his Nescafé, but he represents an America that at least pretends to be good.

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Horrortober: The House Of The Devil (2009)

The House of the Devil (2009; dir. Ti West)—The ‘00s were a terrific decade for horror fans because goodies arrived from every part of the world in all shapes and sizes. Visionary remakes like Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, foreign monster movies like Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host, grimy Southern Gothic trash like Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, claustrophobic ersatz regionalism like Neil Marshall’s The Descent, and classy modern ghost stories like J.A. Bayona’s The Orphanage were just a few of the films from the past decade that offered cold-blooded, skillfully-timed shocks for newbies and connoisseurs alike. Throw in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, David Lynch’s pair of psyche-strafing 21st-century dream labyrinths, and the decade’s finest horror movies look even stronger.

Jocelin Donohue

But don’t’ forget about The House of The Devil, Ti West’s slow-burning, highly effective period-piece about Satanic cults, full moons and the terrifying subtext of The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads To Another.” Devil was initially released in both DVD and VHS formats; the VHS tape came in a clamshell case that paid homage to all those cheap, long-forgotten, straight-to-video 1980s horror flicks that once lined the bottoms of countless shabby video store shelves. West’s film, about Samantha (Jocelin Donohue), a cash-strapped college girl who takes a sketchy baby-sitting job at an ominous country house, is a spare, nearly perfect attempt to convey what it might feel like for someone to discover that they’re inside a 1980s horror movie. The bloody, messy revelations of its final third matter much less than the luxurious sense of dread West cultivates like a crazed botanist who’s just discovered a strain of poisonous fungus long thought extinct.

Greta Gerwig

West’s film inhabits a grayish, stick-crackling late-autumn dryness that combines with his eye for telling, funny period details to revive universal horror imagery; when he zooms out to show Samantha alone in a mysterious upstairs room, or cuts in to show her clutching a kitchen knife in front of a heavy wooden door, it’s like he’s gone back in time to those precious moments just before Michael Myers burst onto the screen and sent everyone running for their lives. And with Greta Gerwig and Tom Noonan, West casts a pair of aggressive, twitchy, businesslike scene-stealers to play Samantha’s best friend and the guy who gets her to stay the night by quadrupling his initial offer. The double voyeurism throughout the film’s middle section goes on and on, its voluptuous dread punctuated by nonsense phrases like “Hello, fish” and the final words of the damned everywhere: “It’s OK. Everything’s fine. She’s fine.”

Grade: A-

Horrortober: The House Of The Devil (2009)