Linklater: Boyhood (2014)

It’s hard to say whether Boyhood is Richard Linklater’s latest film, since he’s been shooting it since 2002, meeting up with a small cast every year to film a vignette in the life of a young boy, played by Ellar Coltrane, as he gradually reaches adulthood – in its completed version, it shows his progression from 12^th grade to his first year at university. Part of what makes the film so powerful is that the transition from one vignette to another is not especially marked – although it abounds in period-specific references, it’s often quite difficult to tell where one year ends and another year begins. That produces something like a  textural or gestural history of the last decade, since the film tends to be most compelling when Linklater shies away from narrative, or when the recurring, rhythmic partings and departings extend beyond the narrative, to the point where it feels that every greeting and goodbye contains the peculiar pressures of an entire period in its gesture. Linklater has long been fascinated in the way that moments can balloon out into history, but never paired it with such a perfect object – whether because it’s so recent, or because it marks the end of a certain sense of history, the 00s abides for many people as a collection of moments that don’t quite add up to an epoch, a collection of period commodities that don’t quite constitute a period. There’s a kind of reflexive impotence, then, to Linkater’s hyperactive period references – they’re clearly speculative, but their speculation and curiosity often seems to be as directed at their own eventual impotence, or irrelevance, as much as anything else. Perhaps that’s what distinguishes it from the Before Sunset series, which it often recalls, especially given Ethan Hawke’s presence – whereas you sensed that Hawke and Delpy stood outside history, here there’s more of a sense that history has exceeded any of the characters, even or especially whenever they try to intervene in it in some way. And that means that it’s often most powerful in the earlier sections, when it’s clear that Linklater wasn’t sure where he was going, or if the film would ever come to fruition – at its most beautiful moments, his camera simply passes his characters by, like the scent of history, that strange perfume of the present that you detect, occasionally and achingly, in some of the quietest backroads and corners of your life.

Thomson: Out In The Line-Up (2014)

Over the last few years, there’s been a push towards greater LGBT visibility in the sporting world. Some sports have been at the vanguard of that movement, while others have lagged behind – and not always the sports you might expect. Surfing, as Out in the Line-Up makes clear, is an arena in which it’s been particularly difficult to counteract homophobia. It’s about a pair of gay Australian surfers, Thomas Castets and David Wakefield, who travel around the world to see if they can find any other surfers who are willing to be open about their sexuality. Although they do eventually discover a large number of surfers willing to tell their stories, the film opens with them contemplating themselves as the only two gay surfers who are out, or at least the only two that they know of – and that gives the film quite an epic, momentous sweep, not least because the surfing world is already highly diasporic, clustered around remote micro-communities that feel light years away from the cosmpolitan urban cores that have traditionally served as beacons for gay liberation. Within that sweep, the gay global surfing community is even more diasporic and scattered, to the point where it feels like it can only really be conceptualised digitally, perhaps explaining why the film also traces Castets’ effort to create a site for gay surfers to meet and chat and surf each other. Structured somewhere between a travelogue and talking heads session, it’s pretty much just a series of interviews intercut with spectacular surfing footage – it’s won accolades for its sports photography – but that candour is also what allows director Ian Thomson to let these incredible personalities speak for themselves. And it is incredible to see LGBT people who so thoroughly defy any stereotypes perpetuated by the mainstream media – an act of protest in itself, really – not least in their commitment to a solidarity and friendship that goes beyond any single romatic or sexual attachment. Perhaps that’s why it’s most potent when it converges sex and surfing into a medium that anyone can simply plunge into, and share with everyone else - it feels as if all these surfers, even the straight ones, are rehearsing their way out of the closet with each tube that they navigate, each shoulder that they climb.

Glazer: Under The Skin (2014)

Jonathan Glazer’s long-awaited third film is an adaptation of Michael Faber’s 2000 novel, Under The Skin, which revolves around an alien disguised as an alluring young woman who stalks the highways of exurban Scotland, preying on unsuspecting hitchhikers and wanderers. For the most part, though, Glazer takes a more minimal approach, simply following the alien, played by Scarlet Johannson, as she cruises her prey, whom she entraps in a series of hallucinatory sequences. Stylistically, the film alternates quite vertiginously between these meticulously composed segments and the cruising sequences which, while anchored and intercut with crystalline compositions, were mostly shot kamikaze-style, as a host of hidden cameras follow Johannson through a variety of fleeting encounters with men she picks up between streetlights, most of whom didn’t know they were being filmed. In the process, Glazer captures something truly cosmic about the proportions of outer suburbia and exurbia – distant pockets of light in the midst of crushing darkness – as well as evoking something inherently alien about the availability of every streetscape and vista on the global navigation systems that Johanssen seems to have internalised and perceptualised, to the point where it’s like watching a navigational device gradually realising it has become sentient. At least, Glazer shoots Edinburgh with a prescience that every single vantage point has already been captured, framed and processed by cameras that exceed any individual directorial agency, drifting the film into weird shots that don’t feel quite omniscient or point-of-view, somewhere between the perspectives of Google Street View and the windscreens of an automatic car. Perhaps that’s why the unstaged encounters aren’t as titillating as you might expect – there’s a sense these people have already been captured, somewhere in the back of another, earlier, automated image. Still, the film isn’t reconciled to that – the exurban vistas positively yearn to give themselves over to Glazer’s camera as if for the first time, even if that means removing themselves to the remoteness of the most distant cosmos, the remoteness of Johannson's exquisitely surreal prey-spaces, which seem to exist in some different dimension, devoid of space and time. And, as the blind spots in the film, the images that haven’t already been colonised by new cartographic media, they’re the closest we get to places that still feel as if they can be captured by Glazer's camera, placeholders for all the places that film can no longer hold.

Winterbottom: The Trip To Italy (2014)

The Trip To Italy is the follow-up to the enormously successful The Trip, which redacted a five-part BBC series that followed a lightly fictionalised Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on a fine dining tour of the Lake District. This time around, they’re in Italy, following on the heels of Byron and Shelley instead of Wordsworth and Coleridge, although there’s the same Romantic drive towards conversation as a poetic act. If anything, it’s more heightened in this film, which is positively beatific in its tribute to the second-generation Romantic poets, as Coogan and Brydon visit a whole host of sites associated with their lives, and spend at least half of their conversations quoting and contemplating them. The rest of their trip is spent on movie trivia and history, and a great deal of the film’s beauty resides in the way in which it bridges these two worlds, attaching a Romantic sense of place to film locations, or the remains of filming locations, to the point where revisiting the shooting sites of, say, Roman Holiday, or Voyage To Italy, becomes infused with the same sense of presence, the same sense of pilgrimage, as returning to the fabled sites of Romantic poetry. Just as a Romantic reader might feel as if they had only truly read “Mont Blanc” once they had visited it, so there’s a sense that Coogan and Brydon only fully see their favourite films by visiting the sites where they were filmed. And, in this film, impersonation is heightened into a kind of visitation – Coogan’s impression of, say, Bogart feels totally continuous with visiting the most spectacular backdrop for Beat The Devil; both envisage the film as something incantatory, participatory, an experience that demands to be enacted in the same way that a Romantic poem demands to be read aloud. That makes language feel extraordinarily embodied, enunciated, flavorful – eating and speaking amount to the same thing, the mouthfeel of conversation – while the few moments where language is relayed remotely tend to be unutterably melancholy, especially when Coogan and Brydon repair to their hotel rooms each night for mobile and Skype conversations. That fixation with location also elevates Winterbottom’s landscapes to an even more breathtaking pitch than The Trip - as in Genoa, one of his most beautiful films, they don’t merely recreate the Italy of the Romantics, but enliven every location with the films that might have been shot upon it, or might one day be shot upon it. That creates a considerably more open-ended film than The Trip, albeit more open to melancholy at the same time – for all that Coogan and Brydon commiserate with Byron and Shelley, it’s only to assuage a middle-aged ennui that Byron and Shelley never experienced, the peculiar agony of artists who never had the capacity or the opportunity to die too young.

McFarlane: A Million Ways To Die In The West (2014)

A Million Ways To Die In The West may not be Seth McFarlane’s first film, but it is his first film as lead actor, which makes it feel like more of a transition from Family Guy and American Dad. In essence, it’s a parody Western, in which McFarlane plays a luckless sheep farmer who discovers his inner courage when a mysterious stranger, played by Charlize Theron, rides into town. However, parody is perhaps not quite the right word, since it’s clear that McFarlane wants to recreate the classic Technicolor Western as much as send it up – it’s full of lavish cinematography and breathtaking establishing shots, fulfilling the widescreen ambitions that Family Guy sometimes harbors at its most indulgent. For the most part, that doesn’t quite gel into fond parody so much as interpolate McFarlane’s incredulous manner and personality into a straight genre piece, to the point that he’s almost a voiceover, as redolent of his cult commentaries on the Family Guy DVDs as of the series itself. And although that produces long lags that aren’t really played for laughs, it means that the laughs are particularly sharp, when they finally do come - Family Guy’s taste for a certain kind of blithe historical anachronism is perfected here, partly because McFarlane plays as a rotation of the best Family Guy characters, moving almost subliminally between Peter and Brian in particular. Not only that, it’s clear from his first words that he simply is that unique Family Guy enunciation, that peculiar way of over-articulating everything, even incredulity, until it’s parched of anything but the most bureaucratic, domestic banality. For that reason, most of his best moments aren’t jokes or one-liners but endless, paratactic inanities that take more and more away from language each time, anticlimaxing with comic abandon. To sustain a feature-length film, rather than a twenty-minute episode peppered with cutaways, that register requires a pretty sympathetic foil, but Theron works perfectly – she and McFarlane might not have much romantic chemistry, but they have great buddy-chemistry; she’s a perfect bridge between his cartoony appearance and the real world, and the film often works best when they feel like an animated-real world odd couple, or composite, parrying Family Guy-style repartee against the bluffs and peaks of Monument Valley.