THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS

There is such a great pleasure to be had in being surprised by artists you already expect to be impressed by, and this is a pleasure that A Most Violent Year offers in abundance. It combines the talents of the three of the most interesting new voices in cinema of the 2010s: writer-director J.C. Chandor, leading actor Oscar Isaac, and cinematographer Bradford Young. I hope by now that we're all aware that these are names which should perk up our ears...

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JANUARY 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

Good movies here and there, as will always happen, but let us not mince words: the ending months of 2014 pretty well sucked for cinema. A new year now spreads before us, and it brings with us the promise that things will be better.Not right away, of course. I mean, January. It's the dead zone.2.1.2015So speaking of death, the first movie of the year is a horror picture, as tends to be the case. The pretty much not bad at all The Woman in Black finds itself with a sequel in The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, which is, for one thing, too much...

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HOUSE OF PAINT

One doesn't get to use the word "exquisite" enough to describe movies, so it gives me great pleasure to declare that Mr. Turner is exactly that. It is, to begin with, stupefyingly beautiful: not another movie in 2014, not another movie since The Tree of Life, in fact, has made me literally stop breathing because I was so flabbergasted by the sheer gorgeousness of so many individual frames - basically every single establishing shot, of which the film...

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IT TAKES TWO OF US

We take Stephen Sondheim very, very seriously around these parts. One doesn't become objectively the best creator of stage musicals in history without earning the right to have one's work treated with the gravest respect and unbridled love. This has not, to date, been the attitude shared by Hollywood, which has largely manhandled and mistreated Sondheim's musicals in adapting them to cinema. There haven't been very many attempts, of course, but when...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2014: In which our study of one hundred years of Hollywood filmmaking ends as it began, with a well-heeled amateur directing a dubiously effective adaptation of a hot literary property

The life story of Louis Zamperini is fascinating and wide-ranging, and it shouldn't even be possible to condense it into a movie as all-around misguided as Unbroken. But that's what happens when you throw an enormous non-fiction bestseller at talentless check-cashing hacks like Joel & Ethan Coen. Or something. I suspect that the story of the screenwriting process and WGA arbitration that led to a title card proclaiming this adaptation of Laura...

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: IN THE JAILHOUSE NOW

Whatever else can be said, surely Starred Up is the year's rawest English-language film. Merciless shorn of everything that minutely resembles dross, it's a lean, muscly film about lean, muscly psychologies, eschewing needlessly embellishing details or even any reasonable exposition in its goal to present the tension and physical of life inside prison. The film's great sin is its lack of originality - it's the kind of movie that one almost inevitably...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2013: In which, oh my God you guys, women like movies

There's a nifty piece of advice for screenwriters trying to solve the apparently intractable problem of Strong Female Characters; I think it was originally said by Geena Davis. In a nutshell, the trick to writing a Strong Female Character is thus: write a Strong Male Character. Then give him a girl's name and make him a woman. Done.Obviously, in the best of all possible worlds, there's a bit more nuance to it than that. But it has the benefit of...

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ANTS, ANTS, OTHERWISE WE ARE LOST

My journey through animated movies that most of you will never have a chance to see continues at the Film Experience with a look at the Franco-Belgian Minuscule: Valley of the Lost Ants. It's a real dilly, as they say, assuming they are as fond of 90-year-old slang as I ...

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WALK THIS WAY

I'll tell you what, there's a lot of pleasure to be had in watching a real movie-movie. The kind that's totally drunk on the expressive potential of cinema and does not give a shit about what it's saying, as long as it says it with visual fervor. That's the spirit that animated the French New Wave, encouraged its generations of imitators, and finds excellent embodiment in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the first and I pray not the last feature...

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THE NOT SO GREAT DICTATOR

It's kind of fascinating to know in advance that The Interview is going to be one of the most historically important movies of 2014. Who knows what happens in the future? Could be that everybody's enthusiasm for The Grand Budapest Hotel evaporates the instant that it gets a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. Five years from now, Guardians of the Galaxy might look like the beginning of the end for Marvel. In a decade, Boyhood may well be regarded...

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NIGHT MUST FALL

Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, the third and final chapter in the second most beloved series of children’s movies starring Ben Stiller and involving African mammals running wild, is better than 2009’s Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Let’s allow it to have that. God knows it doesn’t have anything else, and God knows as well that Battle of the Smithsonian represents a pretty eminently surmountable peak of quality. You know...

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ON THE JOB

It's solely a reflection of the kind of films that Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne usually make that the obvious first response to Two Days, One Night, their newest film of suffocating poverty and human disconnection, made in a viscerally anti-beautiful style with a cast made up almost entirely of shabby-looking unknowns, is that it's their sell-out, mainstream, "Hollyood" film. Which means, in this case, almost nothing beyond "it has...

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