Affleck: Argo (2012)

Ben Affleck's third film as director is a recreation of the events surrounding the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis, specifically the strategy used by CIA operative Tony Mendez (Affleck) to extract the six Americans sheltering within the Canadian embassy in Tehran. With the help of producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) and prosthetic artist John Chambers (John Goodman), Mendez managed to extract the Americans by disguising them as Canadians working on Argo, a fake science fiction film set in the Middle East. As that might suggest, Affleck’s film is very much a period piece, and while there's a great deal of nostalgia for both 70s cinema and culture, it moves beyond that to register something like nostalgia for a time when cinema was commensurate to terrorism. At one level, that means nostalgia for the language of B-cinema in representing terrorism: science fiction, and Star Wars in particular, is a continual touchstone. However, it also means nostalgia for a time when terrorism took place in a world driven by the logic of classical editing, continuity of space and time. To that end, Affleck absolutely fetishises the remoteness of Tehran, until it becomes nothing less than an affirmation that space and time exist in a discrete, quantifiable way, even or especially when we're forced to register their most infinitesimal increments. That makes for a film with some extraordinary, suspenseful set-pieces, but it also produces nostalgia for suspense itself as an outdated terrorist affect, perhaps because suspense is exceptional by definition, and so quite unlike the quotidian, low-level dread of post-9/11 America. It also makes for a film that's not really driven by narrative or character - the charisma of Goodman, Arkin and Bryan Cranston is entirely out of place - so much as Affleck's skill at logistically traversing thresholds, boundaries and borders, if only to affirm their existence in the process. From that perspective, it's very much of a piece with Gone Baby Gone and The Town, especially in the siege and airport sequences, and if it has any really distinctive signature, it's in the way it pays homage to airports and air travel. Apart from the uncanniness of witnessing Americans interrogated and bullied by Middle Eastern airport officials - something that never happened to Mendez, incidentally - there's an incredible evocation of the airport itself as a science-fiction canvas, suffused with the galactic overtones of the later years of the space race. And it's when planes take off or land that Affleck moves from making a film about Argo to simply making Argo, which is also when his direction tends to be most spectacular, since he still works better as a genre craftsman than a political commentator, for all that he might end by appointing himself as the latest initiative in counter-terrorism.

Soderbergh: Side Effects (2013)

The last film in Steven Soderbergh's retirement trilogy, following Magic Mike and Haywire, Side Effects has been noted as a minor, if entertaining, work to go out on. However, Soderbergh has always been a self-consciously minor auteur: if he has a directorial signature, it consists in always embracing the informational excess of the screen at the precise moment at which he finds it. In Side Effects, that excess is more mysterious than ever before, as Soderbergh crafts a slippery, elusive narrative around a stockbroker (Channing Tatum), his wife (Rooney Mara), her two psychiatrists (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jude Law) and a crime committed while sleepwalking under the influence of medication. That begs the question – what does it mean to have intentions, or to be conscious, while experiencing acute parasomnia? And, for the most part, Soderbergh’s answer is affective, or experiential, as he suffuses the film with a studied sombience that divorces action from intentionality: awareness, for these characters, is not necessarily awareness of anything. Instead, we’re presented with a free-floating awareness that’s not unlike Hitchcock’s free-floating thought patterns, producing an odd, perceptual claustrophobia – all the spaces in the film feel more constrained than they actually are, just because of the way that Soderbergh limits how much we can be aware of them. In fact, virtually everything about the film seems curiously unregistered, unprocessed - or already processed by something that exceeds human perception – to the point where watching it is like being heavily medicated, not only experiencing medicine acting through you, but medicine actually perceiving through you, putting you to sleep to perceive through you. Perhaps that’s why the whole film feels so warm: Soderbergh is always adept at capturing the pulse of information overload, but here it's positively circadian, conflating shooting and sheeting, turning the whole world into a pair of sheets. And it’s this attention to “material non-public information” that migrates the film into an insider trading drama, as the market itself becomes something that can only be apprehended in a heightened state of sleep-watching. Certainly, there is a more conventional, discernible return to intention towards the end – not unlike the devolution of some David Mamet thrillers – but, to Soderbergh’s credit, some ambiguity still lingers, some information remains both material and non-public: if the film emerges from the deepest recesses of sleep, it still never quite wakes up.

Scardino: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013)

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone makes a refreshing break from the gravitas of Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi's recent roles. As Vegas magicians Burt Wonderstone and Anton Marvelton, they put in two of their most plastic performances in years - there's as much singing and dancing as acting here, while the film's driven by set pieces as much as by scenes. On top of that, Jim Carrey completes the trio, as Steve Gray, an up-and-coming street magician who threatens to draw crowds away from Wonderstone and Marvelton's act. What makes the film so striking is that Gray isn't a magician in any conventional sense - although he does perform the occasional trick, most of his routines involve acts of terrifying endurance, drawn from the extreme stuntwork popularised by Jackass. While Wonderstone and Marvelton have built an entire spectacular infrastructure around themselves - they don't just have their own show, they have their own theatre – Gray’s magic stems from an earlier exploitative matrix, as if to suggest that people seek out Jackass in the same way that they might have sought out an older kind of magic. That’s not to say that Gray’s old-fashioned – if anything, he’s more cutting-edge than Wonderstone and Marvelton, framing endurance in terms of a corporate attention economy that’s turned the very act of focusing, or concentrating, into a kind of magic. Not only does one of his most gruesome routines involve going for several days without blinking, but he actually one-ups Tony Robbins’ corporate magic – he doesn’t just walk on hot coals, he spends a whole night sleeping on them. It feels right, then, that Wonderstone and Marvelton respond with a supposedly unperformable trick - "the Disappearing Audience" - that pushes each member of the audience to their absolute limits of endurance and attentiveness, but without any of them being aware of it. Without revealing exactly how it works, it ends up reminding us that dexterity - real dexterity, the dexterity that Wonderstone and Marvelton have to learn anew - is still the most refined form of endurance. And, much like The Office, which it often recalls, the film is an elegant tribute to dexterous endurance, the enormous, invisible pressure placed on a pair of fingers to make a card trick just right.

Bigelow: Zero Dark Thirty (2013)

In some ways, the capture and execution of Osama bin Laden was the most overdetermined event in recent American history, so it’s quite striking that Kathryn Bigelow’s account of the ten-year manhunt is shorn of any direct commentary or interpretation. Instead, everything is subsumed into procedure – although the film’s nominally a character study of Maya Lambert (Jessica Chastain), the CIA operative who (in this version at least) single-handedly took down bin Laden, Maya doesn’t have much of an existence outside the procedures she follows, just as the impressive ensemble cast only really exists as a kind of elongation of the endless, impenetrable flow of data that she pursues. Far from being a heroic ideologue, Maya’s mantra is that “procedures only work if you follow them every time” – and the only time that the film approaches anything like an affective crisis is when she doesn’t follow procedure, leading to the infamous Camp Chapman attack. By the same token, Maya’s strategy involves following chains of communication, supposedly minor or merely connective nodes in information networks, rather than resorting to bribery, or torture – which is not to say that she doesn’t engage in torture, but that, once again, it’s treated procedurally. That makes complaints about whether the film endorses torture a little beside the point – it feels more like a critique of a system in which torture has been proceduralised, in which the very ideological tools for critiquing torture have been co-opted in the name of bureaucratic protocol, collapsing ethics into expediency. In that sense, the horror of the film is that there is no horror, or that horror has been disavowed and distributed evenly across the entire procedurescape, as Maya combs each "disappeared one” for a catharsis that’s never going to come. That makes for a stunning vision of the informational fronts and fringes of the US empire, the new datasphere of millennial warfare. And that, in turn, is perfectly attuned to the way Bigelow’s camera becomes a collector of data almost despite itself, imperceptibly converging with all the devices that Maya uses to attain her target, from shaky aerial photographs to the lurid green of night goggles, fluorescent and grainy at the same time. Bigelow’s films often work best when the camera is immersed in its own informational, forensic excess in just this way – and that’s a perfect fit with the manifold black sites and stealthscapes evoked here, by a director acting and astounding at the very height of her powers. 

Kechiche: La Vie d'Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2 (Blue Is The Warmest Colour) (2013)

Based on Julie Maroh’s graphic novel, Abdellatif Kechiche’s fourth film revolves around the relationship between Adèle (Adèle Exarchopolous) and Emma (Lea Seydoux), two young women living in Lille, over a period of about five years. Poised somewhere between a coming-out story and a coming-of-age story, nearly all of it is shot in close-up, allowing Kechiche to recover something so naked and obscene about the face that it quickly comes to feel like a sexual organ, or even a collection of sexual organs, as Emma, who's slightly older and more experienced, teaches Adèle is that skin isn’t nearly as homogenous, uniform or undifferentiated as she previously thought. That breaks down any distinction between kissing and oral sex, making the whole film feel poised at the moment just before lips lock, or skin locks, even when Adèle and Emma are actually kissing, or having what in any other context would be considered explicit sex. In other words, and unlike so many other romantic dramas, it is erotic – and like all real eroticism, there’s something about Adèle and Emma’s romance that can never be satisfied, never be satiated, least of all by the film, which makes no effort to contain or control it. From the moment they first glimpse each other, it feels as if their relationship is somehow already over, just as it’s also destined to outlive any kind of official breakup – and in the fleeting instants when they can bear to face that fact, there’s nothing for Adèle and Emma to do but just look at each other, admit the disjunction between everything they can see and everything they could do, with that peculiarly prehensile gaze that’s so common in stories of LGBT self-discovery. And insofar as the film is about coming-out, it’s fixated with discovering how erotically charged it is just to look at someone, or something, perhaps explaining why it never really feels exploitative; Kechiche doesn’t simply want us to look at these women, he wants us to learn from them how to look at things anew, as if LGBT were a perceptual orientation as much as a sexual orientation. Certainly, as some critics have noted, it’s very long (three hours), and often shot in a fairly drab, unadorned, quotidian manner, but that just makes the breathless bits more breathless – like discovering a new colour, or even colour itself, the erotic epiphanies always take you by surprise, surpass anything you could imagine or project onto them, making for the worst kind of pornography, but the best kind of eroticism.