Chandor: A Most Violent Year (2014)

On the face of it, A Most Violent Year is yet another period piece about the 70s and late 80s, taking its title from the notorious crime spree that hit New York City in 1981. For the most part, however, J.C. Chandor refrains from period detail, opting instead for stretches of light and air that always seem to leave the city at a distance, or make it feel like a dream along one of the many trucking routes that hold the narrative together. Buried in there is a story about an entrepreneur (Oscar Isaac), his wife (Jessica Chastain) and the shadowy forces threatening their freight business, but the film feels as remote from them as it does from the city itself, unfolding across one exurban satellite and ring road after another, and abstracting itself as it proceeds, until the cinematography starts to feel more like light sculpture, especially during the interior sequences. That’s not exactly to say that it’s devoid of narrative but that it continues J.C. Chandor’s project of recrafting the information thriller for an era in which it’s simply taken for granted that we’re surrounded by an inchoate, imperceptible stream of data flow all the time. Key to Chandor’s vision is simply continuing to take that for granted, overwhelming us with how much we might be expected to take for granted in turn, and approaching genre cinema much like A Most Violent Year approaches New York, from the outside, from the perspective of everything we’re expected to exlude about what we take for granted. As a result, there’s a kind of perpetual obscurity to Chandor’s genre exercises, a sense that all his films are shot and paced as nocturnes, beholden to an all-night data-trickle that’s further intensified here, congealing the city to a glare on the horizon that polishes the surface of the film even as it sinks beneath its sensory threshold. Of course, digital complexity and cinematography is peculiarly disinterested in distinctions between night and day, or between natural and artificial light, which makes a digital nocturne sound a bit like a contradiction in terms. But Chandor reinvents nocturne so that the very moment at which darkness falls is the darkest moment, even as that also makes it the brightest moment, the moment at which complexity comes closest to visibility, or the membrane between waking and digital life becomes most permeable. As in David Fincher and Jeff Cronenweth’s collaborations, light suddenly feels tidal rather than diurnal, except that here it’s not a tide that’s endlessly receding but a tide that’s perpetually turning, caught in the slack water between day and night, and stressed out as only slack water can be fully stressed.

Anderson: Inherent Vice (2014)

Inherent Vice marks Paul Thomas Anderson’s return to ensemble film-making, but this time around it’s an ensemble that proceeds sequentially rather than simultaneously, in an effort to capture Thomas Pynchon’s elusive novel, and prose style, on the big screen. Like most noirs or neo-noirs, the plot is too convoluted to do justice in a short description, except to say that it revolves around Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquim Phoenix), a hippy PI whose investigation into his ex-girlfriend’s disappearance leads him into the jaws of a conspiracy that ripples out across 1970 Los Angeles and into the present day. While Doc moves through an ensemble cast that includes Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Benicio del Toro, Katherine Waterston, Reese Witherspoon, Martin Short and Jena Malone among many others, he never spends enough time with anyone for them to settle or stabilise into a character, instead rotating among so many different brands of obliqueness, patterns of non-sequitur and impediments to the truth – or, alternatively, mouthpieces for the truth that are so horrific that Doc has to erect his own impediments, converse with them out of the corner of his eye. As a result, the film is something of a study in how to impede and fragment conversation with free indirect speech in the manner that Pynchon has made his own, with virtually every encounter interrupted, mediated, redirected, warped or distracted in some way, and dialogue gradually dissociated from reaction shots until it plays like some late refracted tribute to the great Zucker comedies. Even when Anderson occasionally chooses to include both participants in the frame, it still feels as if the camera is gradually zooming in on Doc, just as Doc always seems at the edge of the shot when he’s not in it, grunting, mumbling or making some kind of other noise or movement that sets everything awry. In the process, Anderson doesn’t recreate so much as relax into the 70s, poising the onset of the new decade at that pre-hallucintaory state he does so well, those first few moments when you start to wonder whether or not you might be on the verge of seeing things, until it feels like getting high is simply a matter of relaxing enough, while having a bad trip is simply a matter of relaxing too much. As with Pynchon's novel, the more languorous and laid-back the film becomes, the more open and receptive it feels to the paranoia that gathers around the dialogue, building towards some inconceivable vision even as we slip further and further into a state of total relaxation, too much relaxation – a vision that feels as if it might come closest to disclosing itself on the few occasions when Doc ventures out into the blinding SoCal sun, whose soft haze floods the screen like a drug that’s about to psychoactivate. But it never really does, or never fully does, and while that might feel anticlimactic, it’s astonishingly true to Pynchon’s most lyrical moments, which by their very definition tend to be anticlimactic – moments when the conspiracy fails to come full circle, when even the most sublime paratactic edifices collapse and crumble into single sentences under the weight of their own yearning “for the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.”

Miller: Foxcatcher (2014)

Carved out of dull gloom, Bennett Miller’s extraordinary third film is based on the true story of John DuPont (Steve Carell), heir to the DuPont fortune, and his relationship with Olympic wrestlers Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo), whom he invited to his wrestling facility at Foxcatcher Farms in the early 80s to provide them with the support that he felt they weren't receiving from the American government. For the most part, the film revolves around what, exactly, DuPont feels this support entails, and the way in which he offers it, impressing upon Mark in particular that athletes need to be trained and honoured as soldiers, and that sport, especially international sport, needs to be recognised and remunerated as combat. That might sound like quite an extroverted premise, but Carell’s incredible performance plays more like an extension of the gloomy recesses of Foxcatcher than a character in itself, which resemble Miller's own atmospheric architecture in their elegant functionality, radiating a stately industrial opulence that is irreducibly American, the ambience of a self-made mansion with a gymnasium at its core. Even at his most present and embodied moments, you never shake the sense that DuPont is somehow channelling the shadowy American capital lurking behind him - he was the richest man in the country at this time - into a kind of dark doppelganger to American philanthropy, collecting Olympic medals and specimens of American manhood in the same way that he collects ammunition and artillery, while desperately hoping that the upcoming Seoul Olympics will offer a Cold War battlefield where some kind of real combat will occur, even as the film freezes the Cold War tighter and tighter with each scene, dissociating Mark's militaristic preparations from anything other than DuPont's remote, insulating gaze. Against that incredible performance, or presence, Tatum acts with his body as never before, never quite unclenching or relaxing it, and extrapolating everything from his wrestling and warmup sequences, even or especially his quietest and most intimate moments with DuPont. As might be expected, that creates a strong homoerotic vibe in a film otherwise entirely devoid of romance, but it’s not exactly that Bennett shoots wrestling as sex so much as that he parches and denudes the film with the kind of austere oblivion that comes from wilfully ignoring that wrestling could have anything to do with sex, to the point where it often feels as if we’re witnessing the emergence of a new Republican ideal of sport, a new muscular artillery that’s prepared to do the most outrageously and transparently homosexual things just to prove how categorically it’s excluded that very possibility. By the time the American Wrestling Association agrees to make Foxcatcher its base, it's clear that DuPont's managed to extend his family's monopoly on munitions into the flesh trade, grooming the future of American manhood with a quiet, eerie confidence that he's going to succeed - and the film insulates and cushions even his most unhinged and insane moments in that confidence, until it feels as if Miller is finally tracing out the contours of his privacy rather than his character itself, impervious to everything posterity might attempt to puncture or penetrate it.

Iñárritu: Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (2014)

Over the last couple of years, superhero films have ballooned to contain pretty much every mainstream blockbuster genre, to the point where it feels as if their apocalyptic horizons have somehow become syonymous with the future of cinema itself – or, perhaps more accurately, the post-cinematic future, the future of digital media, a future that perhaps only a superhero could save us from now. No film has tapped into that tendency as beautifully and incredibly as Birdman, which looks back past the post-9/11 flowering of superheroes to the post-Batman revival in the late 80s and early 90s, casting Michael Keaton as a washed-up superhero actor – resposible for the Birdman cycle – who’s trying to make a comeback with an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love on Broadway. Collapsing this antiquated superhero sensibility back into an even older theatrical sense of spectacle, the entire film takes place in and around the theatre as opening night approaches, and is shot – or gives the impression of being shot – in a single, unbroken take, as Inarritu builds an ensemble drama about an ensemble drama whose cast branches out to include Edward Norton, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Ryan, Andrea Riseborough, Naomi Watts, Emma Stone and Lindsay Duncan. Scored to a near-continuous drum arrangement by Antonio Sanchez, every encounter feels a little too plosive to be quite realistic – a slap or a punch is only ever a moment away – while the entire film has a percussive, dissonant quality, a cracked-up Carveresque sense of pace, that makes it feel chiselled, hammered and beaten out of celluloid, sculptural in the same way that theatre can be sculptural. Of course, that produces a certain nostalgia for analog bravura, for the theatricality of cinema, but the continuity of this single unbroken shot is so total that there can be no real doubt that it’s digital, as Inarritu obsessively traces out the lateral sightlines of the theatre, as well as creating new ones that don’t exist, until the whole film feels caught in the tensile space between onstage and backstage, just as the camera feels perpetually caught between what’s behind and in front of it. In fact, there is no real sense of anything “behind” the camera anymore, no real sense of any directorial agency, just a generalised telekinetic presence that makes the camera feel like an emanation of each character’s thought and gaze. Poised in the wings of celebrity and publicity we all seem to inhabit now, in a loop between stage and audience that gets wilder and more anarchic as the film proceeds but always comes full circle, it’s a camera that's alternately hyporeal and "super-real," conceding and rehearsing its limitations only to finally leave even Twitter and Facebook behind, just as the cluttered, media-crazed cityscape the theatre is always holding at bay also feels peculiarly open to the sky, converges on whatever Birdman might still bring from above, whether it's salvation or just another tweet.

Gluck: Annie (2014)

In an era when Christmas films tend to be aggressively feelgood, it can be easy to forget how much the genre is bound up with hard times, specifically with the legacy and ongoing memory of the Great Depression throughout much of the twentieth century. In fact, before being adapted into the 1977 musical, and the 1982 film version by John Huston, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie was adapted as two Depression-era Christmas films, released in 1932 and 1938 respectively. Will Gluck’s 2014 film version is the first adaptation of the comic strip since then to frame it as a specifically Christmas message, and while various Depression-era references have been excluded – specifically songs relating to Roosevelt and the New Deal – it’s clear this this millennial version is also anxious to speak to our own Depression, and the lingering and ongoing ambience of the Global Financial Crisis. What’s unusual, then, is that for every insistent observation on the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States today, the original story is almost sanitised out of recognition, starting with the teenpop arrangements of Charles Strouse and Martin Chamin’s classic score, which tend to remove any real sense of longing, making “Tomorrow” feel like a fait accompli, something that’s already always here, rather than something to yearn and aspire for. Without that longing, there’s not a great deal to Annie herself – for all her bounciness, she’s a bit of a brat, really – and while Quvenzhane Wallis gives it her all, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Gluck’s poppy, upbeat vision actually forecloses real hope more than any of its precedessors, taking us on a tour of ultra-gentrified New York that’s obsessed with aerial status, the perspectives of penthouse suites and helicopter rides, sightlines that feel oddly distasteful and vulgar for what’s supposed to be a family film. As might be expected, Daddy Warbucks (Jamie Foxx) doesn’t have much scope to puncture that, especially since the racial element is immediately dissolved into a putatively post-racial cityscape in which race is even more clinically excluded from the big picture than in the earlier film. Even Miss Hannigan’s negativity might have suffered the same fate were it not for the fact that Cameron Diaz throws herself into the role with a lurid, over-the-top intensity and cruelty  - she’s the only actor who doesn’t feel as if she’s continually sanitising her hands, or squeamish about touching stuff - that’s so at odds with the rest of the film that it has to be a cult performance in the making, especially since Diaz almost seems to be in on the joke, dismantling each scene like she knows that it’s what the audience really wants to do as well.