Year: 2017

Released in 1960, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment stands as one of the filmmaker’s greatest works, a motion picture written with intelligence, directed with style, and preformed with vitality by its splendid cast, which included Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, David Lewis, Willard Waterman, David White, Edie Adams, Hope Holiday, and Jack Kruschen. Few modern romantic comedies have ever reached the heights of this film, which despite being over 50 years old, doesn’t feel dated; there’s a truthful sense of humor and life running all throughout this film’s narrative bones with the sexually thematic underpinnings never losing their bite.

Wilder and co-screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond struck a superb combination of drama and laughs, while never forgetting to ground the story in something emotionally substantial. The idea that Wilder followed up Some Like It Hot with The Apartment is sort of mind-boggling; a director would be lucky to make a film that’s half as good as either of those, let alone release them back to back. The excellent musical score by Adolph Deutsch perfectly matched the on-screen action which was captured in a studious manner by cinematographer Joseph LaShelle; the patient but never slack editing was handled by Daniel Mandell.

And then there’s the titular location itself, beautifully designed by Alexandre Trauner and Edward Boyle, which certainly becomes its own character as a result of the various people occupying the space. This film really has it all; the aesthetics were in line with the themes, Lemmon was in full swing, and the end result is intoxicating. Grossing $25 million back when money was real, The Apartment garnered 10 Academy Award nominations, and won five, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Art/Set Decoration. In 1968, the film received a Broadway spin-off called Promises, with Neil Simon, Burt Bacharach, and Hal David collaborating on the stage project.

Stephen Gaghan’s Gold is a wild if familiar, sort-of-true-story saga about modern gold prospectors who risk it all in the Indonesian jungle for the pursuit of extreme fortune. Matthew McConaguhey’s over-sized and maybe-too-method performance is the big reason to see this film; if you’re a fan of him as an actor then his oily, greasy, bloodshot, and nearly constantly cocked performance will be a big hoot. Edgar Ramirez gives his usual fine support, and there’s a bunch of familiar faces in the background. But this is the McConaguhey show all the way, with the actor gesticulating like a mad-man while rocking a tragic receding hairline, his puffy face covered in flop sweat in almost every scene, and looking thoroughly toxic and grotesque in nearly every instance; he’s a personal pigsty and I thought it was priceless to observe. Robert Elswit’s fantastic widescreen cinematography is the other big standout in Gold; he’s one of the best, most varied shooters in the business and Elswit gives every sequence of this film a really cool visual atmosphere with some really thoughtful camera angles.

Patrick Massett and John Zinman’s zig-zagging and incident-packed script feels at times borrowed from other “process” narratives and there’s certainly a whiff of cliché running throughout the film’s narrative bones, but I thought this was a raggedly stylish movie that had a certain boozy bravado that kept in interesting if never truly special. It reminds of The Wolf of Wall Street and Blow but lacking some of the pizzazz and amoral laughs those films provided. And when you go and read about the real scandal involving the Canadian mining company Bre-X, you can see how some of the more outlandish moments that happen in the film actually occurred in real life, and how other bits of insanity were jettisoned maybe out of fear of being perceived as too over the top. Daniel Pemberton’s blustery score certainly added some oomph; ditto the tunes on the 80’s-centric soundtrack. Various director and star combos were attached at various stages, while the finished film elicited mixed critical reviews and tepid theatrical box office returns. Gold is now available on Blu-ray/DVD and streamable through various providers.

One of the only CGI-dominated franchises that I personal care about at the moment, the recent rebooting of Planet of the Apes has been spectacular, with both films delivering supreme, photo-real visual effects and narratives that feel topical and human and never anything more than they have to be. This summer’s upcoming War for the Planet of the Apes looks truly epic and is one of the few movies that I’ll actually spend $6 to see in a theater. And while not as emotionally affecting as Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Matt Reeves’s 2014 sequel Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, is an aesthetically robust, smarter-than-normal summer blockbuster that considerably upped the ante in the visual effects department. Completely and flawlessly realized in each and every shot (minus the opening with the antelopes and the phony-looking bear), the apes are startling in their movement and fur patterns, wholly consuming in the face (especially in the eyes), while conveying true weight and scale when compared to the humans.

Andy Serkis as Caesar and Tobby Kebbell as Koba were the clear standouts of this film, with their motion-capture work taking on magnificent shape and scope, with intimate details to match the bigger moments. And because of their prowess as actors underneath their digital monkey suits, I’m able to stay completely invested and engrossed in the story and the action, as the screenwriters wisely decided to spend far more time with the apes than with the humans. Jason Clarke and Keri Russell were solid but sadly Gary Oldman was mostly wasted after a few effective scenes in the beginning; why cast him if you aren’t going to take full advantage? Small quibbles aside, Dawn of the Apes is an excitingly dark and grim popcorn flick with some great rain-drenched cinematography from Michael Seresin, and features more than one “how’d-they-do-that” stedicam shot, and some positively surreal action when the shit hits the fan in the final act. And besides, this film has apes riding horses while firing machine guns, which is always something one should see.

Tough, gritty, stark, sad, and all-too-believable, the hard-hitting 2013 Israeli political thriller Bethlehem takes zero prisoners. Yuval Adler’s film explores the volatile relationship between an Israeli secret service officer (the fantastic Tsahi Halevi) and his potentially dubious teenage Palestinian informant (Shadi Mar’i). The film possesses some absolutely devastating final moments which are similar to the pessimistic but inevitable finale of the Palestinian film Omar.  Adler, along with co-writer Ali Wakad, crafted an extremely engaging story rooted in genre thrills, but also managed to explore everyone’s quest of navigating both sides of the socio-political divide within the dense and propulsive narrative. Yaron Scharf’s point blank cinematography was in perfect tandem with Ron Omer’s razor-sharp editing, while Ishai Adar’s minimalist yet suspenseful score sweetens the pot. Bethlehem was the recipient of six Ophir Awards, and screened at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the top prize. It was the official Israeli entry for Best Foreign Language Film, but it was shockingly not nominated. This is a riveting piece of cinema with terrific performances and a downbeat but truthful denouement.