Riggs: Tongues Untied (1989)

A groundbreaking vision of queer African-Americana, Marlon Riggs’ 1989 documentary revolves around his thwarted efforts to find acceptance in both the African-American and gay communities of the 1970s and 1980s. As Riggs paints them, gay black men occupy something like the lagging end of the civil rights movement, the dispersed, diasporic rearguard of the 1960s, as well as the epicentre of internalised African-American racism. Forced up against that “threatening universe of whiteness,” Riggs’ wanderings open up a panoply of street corners, half-glimpsed encounters and prehensile gazes; a drifting, floating world of melancholy attraction and repulsion, waterfronts and curbsides, that harks back to the great African-American memoirs of the late nineteenth-century, and their discomfort with newly-minted liberation: “In this great gay mecca, I was an invisible man, an alien, seen and unseen…a nigger, still.” As that might suggest, it’s profoundly cinephilic – as cruising segues into propriocruising, a sensory threshold below even the subliminal micro-cues of cruising, it feels as if Riggs is sketching out a series of agonies and raptures that are too fleeting for the camera to capture properly, the perspective of total invisibility, the passage of the AIDS virus. That, in turn, makes the spoken word interludes that parse the narrative positively revelatory – they seem to call a new world into being, or to speak from a parallel universe where hip-hop became a weapon against homophobia rather than settling into the gangsta groove it’s been riding for the last twenty years. And that new world is sensual, burnished with an almost unbearable romanticism – early in the film, Riggs points out that it’s not worth fighting to be gay if you can’t enjoy it, and he holds good to that, lingering over the sensuality of solidarity, the exquisite promiscuity of protest, with smouldering abandon. Not unlike the small-press, underground gay anthologies that emerged in the 1980s – it’s a compilation of queer African-American poets as much as anything else – it seems to glow with all the other hands and eyes that might have encountered it, passed it on, took solace from it, in one of the late, great works of the civil rights movement; a natural sequel to What’s Going On in its call and response from picket to afterparty, demonstration to dive bar, brother to brother.

Cassavetes: The Other Woman (2014)

Over the last few years, the romantic comedy has slackened somewhat as a genre – it’s become harder and harder to find its fantasies of the good life plausible, reassuring or even romantic. Like so many romantic comedies seeking to survive that slump, The Other Woman opens in a cynical, brittle, corporate mode – it’s set against a high-end, denuded, washed-out New York that makes you realise, with a start, just how uncharismatic this city has become over the last cinematic decade. Within that milieu, we’re presented with a ruthless lawyer, played by Cameron Diaz, who finds out that her lover, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, is married. The last thing she wants to do is spend time with his wife, played by Leslie Mann – but that’s just what happens, as the two are thrown into an unlikely alliance that gradually expands to include Kate Upton, the third lover in the picture. And it’s at this point that the film changes tack for a warmer, more inclusive comedy about female friendship – unlike the opening scenes, the remainder plays out as a series of montage sequences, or music videos, often in slow motion, as Cassavetes draws out the gestures and micro-gestures of female friendship in ways that quite startlingly betray his father’s influence, perhaps for the first time in his career. Time and again, he nails the choreography and blocking of female closeness, using it as the foundation for a screwball zaniness that offers Mann and Diaz quite unprecedented and unusual opportunities for eccentric physical comedy; they are nearly always clinging, climbing or clambering over each other, like a miscued conga line, or a syncopated conversation, forever awkward and awry. By the end, it’s more like an oddball reimagination of 9 To 5 than anything promised by the opening scenes, especially since the women all turned out to have been financially as well as romantically duped by the same man. And, like 9 To 5, it’s restless with its own tropes, anxious to eviscerate itself from the inside, which works perfectly with Coster-Waldau’s migration from Game of Thrones – the violent ending is more than worthy of Westeros, while still comically commensurate with the women’s fears, fantasies and friendships, and it’s in that flexibility that the film’s restless charm resides. 

Reitman: Draft Day (2014)

Kevin Costner’s first sports film in over a decade sees him as Sonny Weaver, Jr., the general manager of the Cleveland Browns, who finds himself in the surprising position of getting the top drafted pick for the 2014 NFL season, University of Wisconsin quarterback Bo Callahan. Most of the film follows Costner as he profiles Bo, trying to pin down a “secret” that seems to be following him around – a secret it’s hard not to read in the light of Michael Sam's recent disclosure, even if the film doesn’t eventually head in that direction. As part of his research, Costner devotes himself to watching and rewatching reel upon reel of college football footage, allowing the film to really capture the peculiar cinephilic drive of a football manager, the compulsion to find that one frame, that one tic, that will reveal a football player in their entirety. Part of what’s nice about the film is that it provides a kind of historical overview of these moments, the canon of football cinephilia, culminating with the famed victory of the 49ers over the Bengals in 1985, when Joe Montana looked up from the huddle and glimpsed John Candy in the crowd, pointing him out to his team mates before leading them to victory. In some ways, those moments turn NFL into quite a contemplative sport, not unlike Costner’s baseball films, but only as a counterpoint to the main drive of the film, which is overwhelmingly visceral, compulsive and anxious. No NFL team has as storied or precarious a history as the Browns, and Reitman builds on that to envisage Draft Day as something like futures trading, or a way of making the full import of futures trading more visible and visceral – we’re reminded, time and again, that what’s at stake in Draft Day is securing a future, not just for a team but for an entire city, especially as the time frame tightens and tension mounts. As Sonny keeps reminding everyone, “the world we live in is not the same as the world we inhabited thirty seconds ago,” and if the film doesn’t strictly take place in real time, that’s because it aspires to something even more realistic – as the proliferation of split screens start to bleed into each other, it’s like experiencing the collapse of real time that occurs under conditions of unimaginable pressure, the way great footballers slow down the clock, as if the split-second intensity and precarity of NFL had simply become a feature of everyday life. At times, that can be a little claustrophobic – it tends to simply collapse the film into the 2014 NFL season, or pre-season, leaving little room for anything else. And it’s clear that the NFL has gone over the film with a fine-toothed comb, occasionally forcing Reitman to forsake his trademark ability to bring sentimentality just to the cusp of saccharine without slipping into it. But, then again, Costner shines in just this kind of sports environment – he’s got a dry, earthy pragmatism that tends to cut against whatever jingoism is wrapped around it, which he does here with aplomb, in one of the most gripping and compulsive sports dramas in recent years.

Mendes: Skyfall (2012)

Daniel Craig has transformed Bond more than any Bond to date. For the most part, he’s entirely eschewed Bond’s camp, aristocratic leanings and moved more in the direction of a traditional action hero, with a bit of Bourne-like opacity thrown in for good measure. There was always something delightfully improbable about previous Bonds being modern action heroes, or about Bond’s good old-fashioned field action coming up against Q’s technological wizardry – you sensed his canny know-how survived despite all the gadgets that were thrust at him, rather than because of them. In many ways, Skyfall summarises everything about Craig’s Bond, and his world, that makes this untenable – it’s the first Bond film to feature a digital nemesis (a hacker modelled on Julian Assange), as well as the first Bond film in which Q seems genuinely disinterested in Bond, offering him a couple of comically perfunctory devices before getting back to monitoring the M16 firewall; their job descriptions have irreversibly changed, and the film struggles to change with them. For the first two thirds, Mendes opts for futurism, as Bond pursues Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva through a cyberspatial China straight out of William Gibson, moving almost imperceptibly from action hero to stealth, subsumed into great walls of neon and digital glitch, swathes of semi-sentient space-time. Yet the film collapses under the weight of all that futurity into a nostalgic third act, as Bond returns to his family home of Skyfall, and the reassuring spatio-temporal co-ordinates of the earlier films, in an effort to renew what it means to be a field agent, if only by literalising it. That abrupt movement from an unimaginable future to a calcified past – an abrupt shift in palette and cinematography as much as anything else – gives the film an extraordinary, reflexive impotence, reminding us that Craig is also the most vulnerable Bond to date; for all he’s jettisoned their aristocratic affectations, he has to work much harder to stay in the present than his forbears. For that very reason, though, his performance is more relaxed and comic than in his previous two films – he at home in Skyfall’s tensile discomfort, which means that his humourlessness is less grating, less self-serious than in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, which feel warmer, more charismatic, in retrospect. From that retrospective perspective, then, it’s something of a paradox – like Never Say Never Again, it sets out to crystallise our love for a particular Bond by placing him in a world in which he can no longer properly exist.

Gervasi: Hitchcock (2013)

Starring Anthony Hopkins in the lead role, Hitchcock revolves around Alfred Hitchcock's personal and professional life during the production of Psycho, especially his relationships with Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johannson) and his wife, Alma (Helen Mirren). Given Hitchcock's canonisation and sedimentation as a director of psychological thrillers, there's something refreshing about the way the film recovers him as not only a director but a pioneer of horror, as well as the way it ascribes his horror impulses to his televisual career as much his film career: according to the film’s logic, Psycho allowed Hitchcock to give himself over to horror because it arrived at the beginning of the decade in which he finally gave himself over to television. Perhaps that’s why Gervasi groups Psycho with Alfred Hitchcock Presents rather than with his cinematic filmography, giving Hitchcock itself something of the flavor of a telemovie, much like the HBO telemovie The Girl, which came out around the same time, and examines the same broad period in Hitch's career. Among other things, that makes it a loving tribute to the prosthetic creakiness of televisual horror – alternately comforting and alarming, just as interested in grotesquerie as in suspense. And Hopkins goes out of his way to make Hitch as grotesque as possible, putting in his most prosthetic, artificial performance since The Silence of the Lambs, until it’s more like attending a waxworks exhibition than watching an actor, part of a pervasive plasticity that makes every face feel made up, balloons every utterance into bloated, baroque excess. This is the Hitchcock of monstrous publicity stills and staged silhouettes, ballooning as the film proceeds, absorbing more and more duties into his directorial role, including writing, editing, calming censors and, finally, funding the project out of his own pocket. At one level, that creates a certain nostalgia for Hitch’s gung-ho, entrepreneurial auteurism, but it also feels like a reflection on the current revival of auteurist television, and how Hitch might have handled it – what the director of Psycho might have done with his own HBO show.