Evans: Serbuan Maut (The Raid) (2011)

The second collaboration between Welsh director Gareth Evans and Indonesian martial arts expert Iko Uwei is disarmingly simple in its premise: an elite SWAT team attempts to take down an apartment complex run by an arch-criminal, only to find themselves trapped on the sixth floor, at which point they have to fight their way out. For the most part, the film’s synonymous with the fact of the building itself – there’s hardly any character, dialogue or exposition – giving it the intense material presence of certain video game environments and backdrops. However, whereas contemporary films often take their cues from contemporary games – especially sandbox and open-world games – Evans’ interminable, confined spaces reach back to the earliest first-person shooters. Released at the cusp between third and fourth console generations, these games charted 3D spaces that were still suffused with the 2D claustrophobia of previous platformers – and the film feels particularly indebted to such monochromatic trailblazers as Doom and Quake in its endless recession of corridors, stairwells and lift shafts, with tension building around doorways and corners. As with those titles, it takes suspense to differentiate space, which all looks similar from a distance, but starts to register minor, local contours under the unbearable, crushing imperative to find an exit. And, just as those games were quite classically cinematic in their sense of space and time – it’s no coincidence that this was the great age of game ‘sequels’ to film franchises – so there’s something quaint about the film’s sense of suspense; it’s like playing a video game based on a film rather than watching a film based on a video game. In that sense, it reaches back to a brief moment when it felt as if video games might merely complete films, rather than eclipsing them – it’s how, say, Alien: Resurrection might have looked if it had taken the various Alien games as serious filmic precedents. And by incorporating that moment, Evans creates a live action film that plays to a digital, gaming-oriented mileu without sacrificing one scrap of its blistering heat: although the fighting’s real, and conducted by professional martial artists, all the bodies feel generated by the camera in a way that fighters such as Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and even Tony Jaa are not. Perhaps that’s why the violence dissolves into the texture of the film even as it approaches ever greater pitches of extremity and ingenuity, until every object quivers to be repurposed as a weapon, and every surface shimmers with corrosive, liquid violence.

Harris: Pollock (2000)

Ed Harris’ Pollock is a biopic of the artist from 1941, when he met Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden), to his death in 1956. It’s the period during which Pollock, played by Harris, moved from abstraction to drip painting – or, in the words of Pollock himself, from abstracting from life to abstracting from nothing. That’s quite a daunting trajectory for a biopic, and Harris responds by turning Pollock himself into something of an abstraction. For the most part, he’s given as little depth or content as his greatest paintings - a collection of tics and jumps, always trying to achieve just the right surface tension, he barely emerges from the foetal position, swathed in an amniotic alcoholism that places the burden of characterisation and charisma squarely on Harden, who puts in one of her most memorable performances. However, if the film’s not especially interested in Pollock’s personality, it’s fascinated with his process – time and again, Harris presents situations that suggest that Pollock lost a vital connection with his paintings the moment that they were exhibited. In that sense, the film sets itself the task of rexhibiting his paintings as processes – not just the literal process of repainting them (and Harris does all the painting in the film), but by recreating the first makeshift spaces and provisional conversations within which they were staged. It makes sense, then, that Pollock’s Long Island studio floor is reimagined as the first of his great drip-paintings: it’s only when he turns his attention to this by-product of the artistic process, hitherto invisible, that he “discovers” his distinctive style. And one of the surprising things about this attention to process is that it frames Pollock as an abstract lyricist as much as an abstract expressionist, as Harris folds his stylistic development into the rhythms of his Long Island home. Among other things, it’s only after he tills the ground that Pollock thinks to place his canvas on the floor – and it’s at this point that his canvases become large enough to frame Pollock in a similar way to Harris’ lyrical establishing shots, as he walks around on them, inhabits them. In fact, one of the most powerful things about the film is the way Harris discovers a connection between the abstract expressionist canvas, blank or otherwise, and the cinematic screen, as well as between drip-painting and directing. As both himself and Pollock, Harris produces surfaces that he never directly touches – he preserves surfaces - until the film feels more tactile than visual, a record of Harris’ own process, best exhibited on the cutting-room floor. 

Moyle: Times Square (1980)

The first of many films that Allan Moyle would intersect with the music industry, Times Square is about the unlikely bond that ensues when an itinerant punk (Robin Johnson) and politician’s daughter (Trini Alvarado) break out of a psychiatric ward, and attempt to live hand to mouth on the mean streets of 1980s New York. Shot on location and structured episodically, it’s awash with an almost unbelievable abundance of period details and ambience - the same hyperreal, luminiscent minutiae that characterises the most memorable music clips. And, set on the eve of the MTV revolution, it feels like a tentative experiment to think through where music clips might go in the near future. At one level, that makes many of its sequences feel like prototypes for now-classic music clips, or as if they could simply be excerpted to form ready-made music clips. But it also feels as if Moyle is gesturing towards a more organic fusion of music clip and narrative film: it’s very much a manifesto for music cinema rather than music video. In part, that’s evident in his fascination with technologies and devices that blur the boundaries between non-diegetic and diegetic music: there are many moments in the film where a song starts playing as if non-diegetically, only for us to realise that it’s coming from a boombox or other similar device. Not only does that work to bleed us into the cityscape, but it produces an extraordinary wonder at the newfound ability to match actual places and spaces with songs, as the characters create their own musical mise-en-scenes that Moyle just happens to capture (all monitored by an omniscient, panoptic radio presenter, played by Tim Curry, who’s less a video jockey than a cinema jockey, some new weird fusion of DJ and director). And that works to liberate the song itself too, as details and nuances – often bridges, riffs and incidental flourishes – are suddenly freed from their musical context and set loose in a city populated by autonomous montage sequences, shimmering and cascading into a new decade.

Scott: The Counselor (2013)

The Counselor is Cormac McCarthy’s first original screenplay and it’s an unusual one. Alternately expository and elliptical, it revolves around an unnamed El Paso counselor (Michael Fassbender) who attempts to capitalise on the drug trade, with dire consequences. For the most part,  it’s driven by ambience and décor, as Scott floods his mise-en-scenes with wealthy, gilded light,  purifying, rather than illuminating, the enormous amount of product placement and conspicuous consumption that drives the film. Early in the narrative, a jeweller tells the counselor that the ideal diamond would be pure light, and that feels like what Scott has tried to achieve here - even the most precious objects are flawed by the cinematography, which exudes a seething, threatening ambience that’s not constricted to the homes and environs of the wealthy. Instead, the instability, danger and strangeness of bordertown has been transplanted vertically: it’s no longer Ciudad Juarez that’s exotic or threatening, but the lives of the wealthy who move across the actual border with ease. And that creates an extraordinary series of class cusps: every movement from one class experience to another takes on the majesty and terror of the many crossings that dot McCarthy’s literary career. For all Scott’s tendency to displace the characters into the illict networks surrounding them, then, this isn’t exactly a network critique in the manner of, say, Traffic or The Wire, just as the cast isn’t quite large or elastic enough to be an ensemble cast. Instead, McCarthy’s sense of class is so drastic and so primal that there are worlds in the film that remain forever unknowable to other worlds, crossings that can never be made. And that unknowability is what moves the film towards horror: unlike other pundits, McCarthy seems to have no understanding, and no real interest in understanding, what could motivate the counselor to migrate from the 1% to the 0.1%. By conventional standards, that makes for quite a superficial, skin-deep critique, but the film’s power lies in showing how easily wealth registers as horror when it precedes rationalisation, when it is all there on the surface – and it's a film that fervently believes in the seething sentience of surfaces, the power of high camp to recover the horrors that hide in plain sight.

Curtis: About Time (2013)

As a veritable elder statesman of the British romantic comedy, Richard Curtis perhaps knows better than anybody that one of the most comforting things about the genre is its confidence in futurity. When a romantic comedy ends, and the couple get together, their future may not be ours – it may feel a long way from ours – but they still embody some assurance that the future, as a category, exists. Curtis’ latest film, About Time, complicates this somewhat – like most of his efforts, it’s about a bumbling introvert who wishes he had a second chance at nearly every romantic conversation or encounter. The difference here is that he does – on his twenty-first birthday, Tim (Domhall Gleason, channelling Hugh Grant) finds out from his father (Bill Nighy) that all the men in his family have the ability to time travel. As a result, Tim manages to seal the deal with his love interest Mary (Rachel McAdams) fairly quickly – he’s awkward and provincial, she’s beautiful and urbane, but by halfway through they’re married with children. In other words, the future promised by countless romantic comedies arrives – or seems to arrive. In order to preserve that future, however, Tim finds himself compelled to make more and more trips into the past, even as the past contracts, since one of the stipulations of this family brand of time travel is that it’s unwise to go back beyond the most recent birth, death or marriage. As Tim tries to preserve the future from an ever-shrinking past, he realises that it’s perhaps best to treat the future as the past, finally jettisoning time travel altogether to greet every morning as if he’s travelled back to it for a second time. And, in the process, the tender precarity that opens most romantic comedies, and the sense of déjà vu that accompanies most romantic meetings, lasts beyond the end, even or especially as Tim and Mary’s relationship seems ever more secure, tedious and banal. That makes for quite an unusual and disorienting experience, and if there’s any weakness, it’s that Curtis’ direction isn’t quite up to his screenwriting. Yet that also feels appropriate – if the role of the director is to prove that the future of the screenplay is somehow unwritten, then Curtis refuses to do that here: the future is written, has already been written, meaning that the film can sometimes feel both spontaneous and overdetermined, elusive and heavy-handed, but in combinations and constellations that are all its own.