Year: 2017

Fearless is an exceptional film. I was blown away by this shattering piece of work as a 13 year old theatergoer, and over the years, I’ve easily seen this remarkable study of the human condition at least a dozen times. I probably saw this more than a dozen times, actually, as it was on HBO seemingly every day for a few years. Peter Weir’s career is a unique one; I can think of few other filmmakers who have made as many great films as he has to then just become forgotten about by the studios. Granted, he’s not likely interested in the CGI-driven idiocy that has come to dominate the mass movie market, but it’s sad to think that he’s not getting gigs because his intelligence and compassion were always massive strengths to his work. And while Fearless explores a story that many might find hard to enjoy (survivor’s guilt after a traffic plane crash), lead actor Jeff Bridges was wholly stunning, meeting the emotionally harrowing material head on, and delivering a tour de force performance of cinematic dramatics which was spawned from the pages of Rafael Yglesias’s novel of the same name (he handled the screenplay adaptation).

Rosie Perez breaks your heart in this film; I love her and it’s a crime that she’s basically disappeared in recent years except for her small but pivotal turn in Ridley Scott’s diamond-cut gem The Counselor. In Fearless, she delivers an atomic bomb of on-screen emotion; only the most jaded person wouldn’t be touched by her character. Isabella Rossellini did her usual scene stealing, Tom Hulce and John Turturro, and John de Lancie were all very strong, and you also get to see a very young Benicio del Toro. Maurice Jarre’s reflective musical score hits both high and low notes of personal introspection, and Allen Daviau’s gleaming cinematography casts a visual spell over the viewer. The film contains one of the most surreal and expressive plane crash sequences that I can think of, and the scene with the strawberries is something I’ve never forgotten. Despite excellent reviews, an October release date, and Oscar buzz (Perez was nominated for Best Supporting Actress), Fearless died a quick commercial death, before becoming an audience favorite in the home video market. This is the sort of film I could watch any day of the week. Warner Archive released the Blu-ray in 2013.

The Palestinian film Omar, which was released in 2013, is an incredibly lean and disciplined political thriller that ticks like a fine-tuned clock on a narrative level, and offers up riveting thrills when it comes to its action bits. Director Hany Abu-Assad packs a serious punch into his film, which mixes romance and sociopolitical observations into a potent mix. From the startling opening moments all the way to the film’s absolutely ferocious final shot, Abu-Assad engrosses the viewer in a dangerous and authentic-feeling landscape filled with betrayal and ultimate tests of friendship. The plot centers on a baker who braves the West Bank barrier in order to spend time with the woman he loves; after a fight breaks out with Israeli troops, he’s forced into working as a double agent with consequences that appear to be deadly.

The Bride With White Hair (1993) dir. Ronny Yu

Once when I was in high school I picked up a cult Asian movie magazine from Barnes N’ Noble. This was before a lot of this stuff was available on video and the DVD cult revolution was still years away. Many of these films were only available through underground catalogues. They were expensive and the quality was often dubious. This magazine in particular covered mainly sexploitation roughies. However, a section of it covered more mainstream Asian fare and included was a review of Ronny Yu’s ‘The Bride With White Hair’ that was over the rainbow in its praise of the film. I never forgot the film and years later when I got a DVD player it was one of the first DVDs I bought. While not a masterpiece rivaling ‘Citizen Kane’ as the review had claimed, it is certainly a classic of Chinese cinema and in my opinion, one of the best fantasy films ever made.

An evil cult has been terrorizing the land and a famed warrior falls in love with the cult’s chief enforcer. This is a dark fantasy ‘Romeo & Juliet’ story. Brigitte Lin and Leslie Cheung are perfectly cast and their chemistry is uncanny. They hold the tragedy of their characters’ destinies in the palms of their hands with the weight it deserves. This is forbidden love at its most fierce.

Director Ronny Yu has razor sharp instincts. He knows you can’t confuse action with soul when it comes to these types of films. The action sequences can only be as good as their emotional content. The way he blends the two here is nothing short of remarkable. Many of the images her are iconic as well. No way around it. You won’t be able to shake some of these shots. Peter Pau sealed his reputation as a cinematographer with this one. The work of a master.

This film is mounted on an epic scale though it is only 92 minutes long. Not many films that go for that scope with such a short running time can pull it off. Usually, something feels missing or seems off. But not here. It all feels deserved and earned. Though the same can’t be said for the cheesy song that plays over the end credits sequence. Woof! No offense to all you early 90s Asian synth pop fans out there but…

Ronny Yu would later have to flee China for political reasons and washed up on Hollywood’s gold encrusted shores to make movies like ‘Bride Of Chucky’ and ‘Freddy Vs. Jason’. He would not come close to making another film of this caliber until ‘Fearless’ starring Jet Li in 2006.

A Monster Calls is easily one of the more upsetting films I’ve seen in a long while. I knew what the narrative entailed before viewing it, but I wasn’t prepared for how much this movie would explore death and its consequences and how children cope with staggering loss. I’m typically wary of CGI-dominated storytelling, but here, the absolutely striking visual effects were in COMPLETE service to the emotionally harrowing material; the sound and fury on display means something, and therefore, as a viewer, my eyes didn’t gloss over when the aesthetic got rambunctious. Director J.A. Bayona, who previously helmed the immensely underrated tsunami drama The Impossible, has crafted a thrillingly artistic film that is both dark in theme and in palette; this is a nearly unrelentingly grim and sad piece of work that never softens any of its rough edges, with dark hued, edgy handheld cinematography employed by ace shooter Oscar Faura that feeds into Fernando Velázquez’s robust musical score.

Set in the U.K. and based on the novel by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd, A Monster Calls revolves around 12 year old Conor O’Malley, brilliantly portrayed by the young actor Lewis MacDougall, whose mother (Felicity Jones) is losing her battle with terminal cancer. Conor isn’t interested in living with his grandmother (Sigourney Weaver) and he’s got a father (Toby Kebbell) living in America who has various reasons for not stepping up. And he also must contend with some rather cruel school yard bullying; this film really hits some mature notes that will need to be smartly processed by younger viewers. Conor then starts to imagine a humongous tree monster (wonderfully voiced by Liam Neeson) living outside of his house who aims to tell him three stories, and demands one final story in return. The baroque visual design of the tree and his surroundings is startling and unique, with the surreal images meshing beautifully with Eugenio Caballero’s vivid production design.

I’m not exactly sure who this film was geared towards, as it’s a piece designed way more for adults, and yet is told through the POV of a child, and the material is way too intense and layered for tykes to find involving (if they’re not scared shitless by the tree monster). It’s got a Joe Dante/Amblin feel at times, but it’s never playful or ironic or wink-wink. But in today’s Pixar-happy marketplace, a film like this seemed destined to get lost, which is exactly what happened. Produced for a reported $50 million, this film grossed less than $5 million in America, with international ticket sales preforming only modestly despite very favorable critical notices. Films like this are too smart for the room, and too challenging for mass audience attachment. A Monster Calls is definitely one of the more distinctive “family” offerings in quite some time, and a film I’m not likely to forget anytime soon for a variety of reasons.

The horror genre is my least traveled and I’m certainly no big fan of zombie narratives (my favorite is easily Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead) but WOW and WOW, the South Korean film Train to Busan is completely insane and amazing and unrelenting in its awesomeness. What’s also excellent about the film is that I cared about the characters and became immediately invested in them, so by the time the harrowing finale was taking center stage, I had a lump in my throat and sweaty palms of nervous excitement. Certainly inspired by Marc Forster’s visually stunning but super silly World War Z, director Yeon Sang-ho most notably borrowed the zombie-topple visual motif from the Brad Pitt blockbuster, but because this film cost roughly what the craft services bill was on WWZ, the filmmakers were able to go all out with the gore (something WWZ painfully lacked) and as a result fashioned a far more effective piece of nightmarish horror. Part of my enthusiasm for Train to Busan stems from not knowing much about it, never seeing a trailer beforehand, and having a generally low opinion and set of expectations for these sorts of items. This was a fabulous surprise. After premiering in the Midnight Screenings section of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, Train to Busan became one of the biggest films in the history of the South Korean box office. It’s now available to stream on Netflix and well worth your time if you’re looking for a riveting and bloody piece of cinema that goes for the jugular while still respecting your brain and playing with your emotions.

James Gray makes films that are now considered “throwbacks” which is part of the reason why he’s yet to have a true break-out box-office hit with general audiences. It also doesn’t help that distribution problems have plagued more than one of his efforts, and let’s be honest, in this lowest common denominator movie marketplace that we find ourselves in, CGI-free pieces of filmmaking that skew towards adults and not infants like The Immigrant, Two Lovers, and his newest and by far most expansive achievement, The Lost City of Z, aren’t exactly what the studios have in mind. Which is a shame, because film after film, Gray has impressed me with his ability to tell morally complex stories with a true sense of filmic beauty, and he’s become one of my favorite filmmakers over the last 20 years. His debut was the ridiculously confident Little Odessa in 1994, which he followed up with the one-two crime-movie punch of The Yards (tragically underrated) and the 80’s policier We Own The Night. But with The Lost City of Z, Gray has stepped outside of his NYC milieu, and has crafted a visually bold and ultimately haunting story of exploration, family, and potential madness. I was in complete awe of this film, and I could have watched another hour of material had Gray been inclined to present it.

Charlie Hunnam is very commanding as Percy Fawcett, a British artillery officer in the early 1900’s who was drafted by the Royal Geographical Society to trek into the Amazon in order to create a map that would establish the border between Brazil and Bolivia. Once there, he became obsessed with finding an ancient city described to him by local indigenous tribes, which would later in time be named as El Dorado. With piqued personal interest and strong support from his wife, superbly played by the now invaluable Sienna Miller, Fawcett would return to the jungle on seven separate occasions (the film condenses to three), and would famously not return home after his final journey. These events were chronicled in the book The Lost City of Z by journalist David Grann, and Gray, in adapting the material for the screen, has fashioned an old-timey adventure picture in the vein of a David Lean epic, with shades of Herzog and Coppola thrown in for contemporary flavor. The supporting cast includes a plethora of strong performances from a bearded Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Edward Ashely, the great Angus MacFayden (despicably sloppy!), Ian McDiarmid, Clive Francis, and a smartly cast Franco Nero as a pivotal character in the film’s narrative.

The photography in The Lost City of Z is undeniably astonishing. Shot on 35mm film in 2.35:1 widescreen by master cinematographer Dariusz Khondji, re-teaming with Gray after The Immigrant and with previous credits including Seven, Evita, and Stealing Beauty, there’s a glorious richness to every single image in this movie that left me slack-jawed in numerous spots. Blacks are super-inky, the jungle’s natural light is captured in a casually graceful manner, and sequences shot in Europe have a just-rained freshness that feels tangible, with a bold yet ornate sense of color on display all throughout. Christopher Spellman’s riveting musical score hits so many phenomenal sonic notes that it’s tough to list them in a review; this is easily one of the more memorable and impressionistic film scores I’ve heard in years. The evocative and impressively varied production design by Jean-Vincent Puzos is the stuff that awards are made of; everything feels real in this movie. The two hour and twenty minute run time was perfectly paced by Gray and editors John Axelrad and Lee Haugen, allowing for a more layered experience by fleshing out Miller’s character, instead of just giving us the rote wife role. It’s wild to think that this super-expensive looking film was financially cobbled together by multiple independent investors, with Amazon Studios doing a low-key theatrical release in the head-scratching month of late April. I was overwhelmed by this epic yet intimate tale and as a relatively new father, I found the final stretches to be singularly creepy and emotionally disturbing. This is easily my favorite film of the year out of the eight movies I’ve seen, and I wish I could see it again on the big screen.